_ Source: _Volume 40, Issue 1, pp 104 - 115 It is intended in this study to present initial reliability and validity data for the Russian adaptation of the Multidimensional Inventory of Religious/Spiritual Well-being, as being related to personality factors and psychopathology. Therefore, the first version of the MI-RSWB-R was applied to a sample of 192 non-clinical subjects, together with the NEO Five Factor Inventory and the Symptom-Check-List. The original six-factor structure of the scale could be replicated for the MI-RSWB-R, (...) which also provides satisfying psychometric properties. In accordance with previous research the RSWB total score was linked to more favorable personality traits such as Extraversion, Openness to Experience, and Agreeableness, which was paralleled by substantial negative correlations with increased psychopathology. Our findings support the reliability and structural validity of the MI-RSWB-R as a standardized instrument for addressing the spiritual dimension in Russian populations. Further research in clinical surroundings is now recommended. (shrink)

We suggest an approach to studying consciousness that focuses on its evolutionary origins. The proposed framework is inspired by the study of the transition from inanimate matter to life, which proved extremely useful for understanding what 'life' entails. We follow the theoretical and methodological scheme put forward by Tibor Ganti, who suggested a marker for the transition to life -- an evolved feature that is sufficient for ascribing dynamic persistence to a minimal living system and that can serve as a (...) point of departure for reconstructing it. We apply this approach to consciousness and suggest an overt behavioural trait -- unlimited associative learning -- as a candidate transition marker. We show that the enabling system of UAL instantiates the set of properties that are considered jointly sufficient for minimal consciousness, and discuss the experimental predictions and the implications of our approach for the taxonomic distribution of consciousness in the animal world. (shrink)

ART and, in particular, IVF and ICSI, are essentially a laboratory experiment, but which, due to its specificity, goes beyond the disciplinary boundaries, explicitly acquiring an ethical-axiological dimension in the interaction zone of the members of a particular community involved in child-bearing. At the same time, it is noted that the activity and choice of a way to solve problems with childbirth has a characteristic severity, due to the traditions and level of civil and social maturity of a country, due, (...) among other things, to the level and achievements of technical equipment in this industry of knowledge and practice. According to foreign studies, about half of all subfertile people in developed countries are trying to overcome their infertility with the help of medicine, and research data indicate that the proportion of such individuals is growing. The most difficult problems of reproduction are associated with low quality of oocytes or low ovarian reserve ; aspermia and deep teratozoospermia, can not give hope to a couple to have genetically related offspring. However, donor programs create additional opportunities for social motherhood / paternity. Donation of oocytes is found in ART programs at least 3 times more often than donation of spermatozoa. At the moment, donation of gametes and embryos raises a number of ethical, legal, medical and socio-psychological issues that require competent support from experts of a wide range of specialists, as well as competent, non-commercial, primarily due to the interaction between donors and recipients. The analysis of possible modifications of family and kinship ties is based on the idea of transforming social relations, in which assisted reproductive technologies play a fundamental role, building a system of “new kinship and new family.” By entering into the intimate process of the birth of life and acting as a regulator of the composition of participants in this process through the stimulation of responsibility to present and future relatives, reproductive technologies affect the initial moral requirements in the community, redefining universal values based on the specific situation. Scenarios of childbearing through ART with the involvement of additional participants are possible in the context of the legal field, but legally fixed anonymity of the donor leaves many unresolved issues related to the problems of hereditary diseases, genetic abnormalities and epigenetic changes; in addition, there is a problem associated with the possibility of unintentional incest, as well as the difficulties of the child’s self-identification and the closeness of his genealogy. Solutions to these issues are postponed until later, thereby initiating future dramatic situations, ethical conflicts and dilemmas with a poorly predictable positive outcome. (shrink)

Bayesian Conditionalization is a widely used proposal for how to update one’s beliefs upon the receipt of new evidence. This is in part because of its attention to the totality of one’s evidence, which often includes facts about what one’s new evidence is and how one has come to have it. However, an increasingly popular position in epistemology holds that one may gain new evidence, construed as knowledge, without being in a position to know that one has gained this evidence. (...) These are cases of KK-Failure, cases where one knows p but is not in a position to know that one knows p. This paper assumes that certain KK-Failures are possible and argues that Conditionalization goes wrong in those cases. (shrink)

Andrew Cullison There is one final worry about bringing emotions into a theory of moral perception that might be best drawn out with an analogy to nonmoral perception. Suppose we were beings with a slightly different nonmoral perceptual apparatus. Suppose phenomenal qualia that we typically experience when we observe objects also showed up in our cognitive life when we weren’t experiencing the presence of an object. Basically, we would periodically have apparent perceptions of objects when there were no objects. Furthermore, (...) suppose we could know that this was sometimes the case. I suspect we would feel rational pressure to be a bit more skeptical about our nonmoral judgments based on perception. One might argue that we’re kind of in that situation if our moral perception apparatus includes an emotional component. We often experience emotions when there is nothing moral about the situation we’re in, and so by analogy to the perception case, we might think that we should be a bit more skeptical about moral judgments. A possible virtue of a moral perception view that didn’t make emotions a component of the view might not have to address this worry, but if emotions are indeed an important part of Audi’s moral perception theory, then it is worth asking why we shouldn’t take ourselves to have some defeaters for moral beliefs. Aaron Bronfman The official topic of John Broome’s Rationality through Reasoning is the “motivation question”: How does the belief that you ought to do something cause you to intend to do that thing? And indeed, the parts of the book do combine to offer an answer to that question. But, as Broome himself suggests, much of the interest comes from the steps along the way. The book greatly expands and develops Broome’s earlier work, drawing rich connections throughout ðaddressing how ought figures in requirements of rationality, how reasons may be defined in terms of ought, whether there is reason to be rational, how rationality is connected to the process of reasoning, etc.Þ. This review considers Broome’s account of four main concepts in turn: ought, reasons, rationality, and reasoning. (shrink)

Consider someone whom you know to be an expert about some issue. She knows at least as much as you do and reasons impeccably. The issue is a straightforward case of statistical inference that raises no deep problems of epistemology. You happen to know the expert’s opinion on this issue. Should you defer to her by adopting her opinion as your own? An affirmative answer may appear mandatory. But this paper argues that a crucial factor in answering this question is (...) the description under which you identify the expert. Experts may be identified under various descriptions (e.g., “the expert appearing on Channel 7 at 5 pm”). Section 2 provides cases that illustrate how deference to a known expert may be appropriate under some descriptions, but not others. Section 3 proposes that, in these cases, the differentiating factor is self-identification: deference to an expert under a given description is appropriate when the expert self-identifies under that description. Section 4 presents a formal framework that demonstrates the sufficiency of self-identification for appropriate deference within a significant class of cases. Section 5 notes a way in which this phenomenon allows for a form of “agreeing to disagree” in Robert Aumann’s sense. Section 6 illustrates the practical application of these results to the case of testimonials. (shrink)

Here we focus on two questions: What is the proper semantics for deontic modal expressions in English? And what is the connection between true deontic modal statements and normative reasons? Our contribution towards thinking about the first, which makes up the bulk of our paper, considers a representative sample of recent challenges to a Kratzer-style formal semantics for modal expressions, as well as the rival views—Fabrizio Cariani’s contrastivism, John MacFarlane’s relativism, and Mark Schroeder’s ambiguity theory—those challenges are thought to motivate. (...) These include the Professor Procrastinate challenge to Inheritance (the principle that ‘If ought p and p entails q, then ought q), as well as Parfit’s miners puzzle regarding information-sensitive deontic modals. Here we argue that a Kratzer-style view is able to meet all of the challenges we’ll consider. In addition, we’ll identify challenges for each of those rival views. Our overall conclusion is that a Kratzer-style semantics remains the one to beat. With this assumption in place, we then ask how we should understand the relationship between true deontic modal statements and normative reasons. Should, for example, we hold that the truth of such a statement entails the existence of a normative reason for some agent to comply? Here we argue that, in many cases, acceptance of Kratzer’s semantics for deontic modals leaves open for substantive normative theorizing the question of whether an agent has a normative reason to comply with what she ought to do. (shrink)

Our goal here is to help identify the contextualist’s most worthy competitor to relativism. Recently, some philosophers of language and linguists have argued that, while there are contextualist-friendly semantic theories of deontic modals that fit with the relativist’s challenge data, the best such theories are not Lewis-Kratzer-style semantic theories. If correct, this would be important: It would show that the theory that has for many years enjoyed the status of the default view of modals in English and other languages is (...) in need of revision. Here we defend the default view by showing how a Kratzer-style semantics is able to make available readings of the relevant utterances that fit with the pretheoretical judgments opponents purport it cannot fully capture. Having established this, we turn to considering the more theoretical grounds proponents have offered for preferring their rival contextualist views. Here the question is to what extent such grounds favor semantic over what Korta and Perry call “near-side pragmatic” explanations of our judgments. In particular, we argue that our favored readings figure in near-side pragmatic explanations of those judgments that possess the methodological and theoretical advantages of systematicity and unity at least as well as, if not to a greater extent than, those of opponents who argue for their revised semantic theories on the basis of these advantages. (shrink)

The Reflection principle expresses a kind of epistemic deference to one's future self. There is a plausible intuitive argument to the effect that, if one believes one will reason well and gain information over time, then one ought to satisfy Reflection. There are also associated formal arguments that show that, if one's beliefs about one's current and future selves meet certain criteria, then one is committed by the axioms of probability to satisfy Reflection. The formal arguments, however, rely on an (...) assumption that has no apparent relevance to the intuitive argument: the assumption that one has perfect access to one's beliefs. This paper explains why it is advantageous to replace the perfect access assumption with a self-trust assumption. The self-trust assumption is superior from a formal point of view, since it is formally weaker than the perfect access assumption, and from an intuitive point of view, since it leads to an improved formulation of the intuitive argument. (shrink)

This dissertation develops the theory of imperfect rationality in the practical and theoretical domains. I characterize imperfect rationality in terms of the quality of reasoning on which an agent's actions and beliefs are based, which I call their rational worth. Perfectly rational actions and beliefs are based on the best reasoning available to the agent: they are based on all the agent's evidence, on an appropriate weighting of all the relevant values, and on the right inductive and deductive principles. Imperfectly (...) rational actions and beliefs are based on good reasoning that falls short of the best reasoning: they are based on a portion of the agent's evidence, on a subset of the relevant values, and on approximate or heuristic reasoning. The idea of rational worth, I argue, helps both to describe and to improve upon the tools that imperfectly rational agents use to think about what to do and what to believe. These tools include a plurality of deliberative questions that imperfectly rational agents use to guide themselves toward better ways of falling short of the ideal of perfect rationality. They also include a practical normative verdict available to agents who can assess a few possible rationales for acting one way or another but who cannot say what an ideal evaluation of all their evidence would support doing. Finally, they include substantive heuristics that result in beliefs and actions that are more, but still not perfectly, rational; for example, I argue that imperfectly rational agents can legitimately engage in a form of hindsight bias as a reasonable second-best strategy. I aim primarily at understanding how imperfectly rational agents can and should cope with their distinctive predicament, but in each case, I also draw lessons for our understanding of the ideal of perfect rationality. (shrink)

Concept of Avidyā in the Vedānta philosophy of Śaṅkarācārya; a study.

Commentary with supercommentaries on Brahmasūtra of Bādarāyaṇa, aphoristic work on Vedanta philosophy; critical edition.

Purpose. The paper is aimed at analyzing in a comparative way the philosophical conceptions of the human, proposed by Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger as the main representatives of the analytic and continental tradition of philosophizing in the XXth century. The theoretical basis of the study is determined by Wittgenstein’s legacy in the field of logical and linguistic analysis, as well as Heidegger’s existential, hermeneutical, and phenomenological ideas. Originality. Based on the analysis of the philosophical works of Wittgenstein and Heidegger, (...) the initial principles of their anthropological concepts in the unity of transcendental preconditions, essential foundations, and correlations to the world in the technosphere are reconstructed. It is demonstrated that, despite the difference in the explanation of the peculiarities in the interpretation of the realm of the transcendental and basic characteristic of the inner world of human, both philosophers emphasized the understanding of the human being through the prism of language and the need for anthropologization of science and technology. Conclusions. Wittgenstein and Heidegger developed their own original considerations on the nature of human being, which fully conform to the basic theoretico-methodological principles of their philosophical conceptions. The former focused on how language reflects a human’s world and serves as a means of expressing their knowledge and aspirations. The latter, on the contrary, interpreted the world as a reflection of language that expresses itself through human. As a supporter of analytic methodology and, accordingly, of accuracy in formulations, Wittgenstein came to the concept of the unspeakable in the process of reflection on the being of human over the language. But in Heidegger’s existential discourse, which is full of metaphors and neologisms, being of human is limited by the concept of Nothing. As a consequence, it is noted that the ontological status of values is transcendental to the world according to Wittgenstein, but it is immanent to the world, according to Heidegger. It is argued that the Austrian thinker developed a linguo-psychological approach to the study of human through the prism of the mental, but the German philosopher comprehended the human on the basis of the concept of self in the ontological sphere. It has been demonstrated that both thinkers have pointed to the challenges faced by humans in the development of science and technology while emphasizing the importance of substantiating their anthropological foundations. (shrink)

Study of Suddhadvaita philosophy with reference to other system of Hindu philosophy.

S. A. Lloyd proposes a radically new interpretation of Hobbes's Leviathan that shows transcendent interests - interests that override the fear of death - to be crucial to both Hobbes's analysis of social disorder and his proposed remedy to it. Most previous commentators in the analytic philosophical tradition have argued that Hobbes thought that credible threats of physical force could be sufficient to deter people from political insurrection. Professor Lloyd convincingly shows that because Hobbes took the transcendence of religious and (...) moral interests seriously, he never believed that mere physical force could ensure social order. Lloyd's interpretation demonstrates the ineliminability of that half of Leviathan devoted to religion, and attributes to Hobbes a much more plausible conception of human nature than the narrow psychological egoism traditionally attributed to Hobbes. (shrink)

Stylometry can be defined as the use of numerical methods for the solution of literary problems, most often problems of authorship, integrity, and chronology. As stylometry has been described it seems hardly more than the application of common sense to a literary situation. For example: It consists in collecting as many peculiarities of style and grammar as possible from these works [the dialogues of Plato], particularly the Laws, which are known, or for good reasons supposed to belong to the author's (...) latest period, and observing the frequency with which these occur in other dialogues. If it is then found, e.g., that one dialogue uses commonly 100 of these, another but 60, it is reasonable to suppose the former to be nearer in time to the Laws, i.e. later. (shrink)

Purpose. The paper is aimed at studying the peculiarities of the Oleksandr Kulchytskyi’s doctrine of human, taking into account the context of European philosophy and especially in comparison with the paradigm of philosophizing in the Lviv-Warsaw school. The theoretical basis of the study is determined by Kulchytskyi’s scholarly works in the field of philosophy and philosophical anthropology, as well as the latest researches that reinterpret the influence of Twardowski’s theoretico-methodological ideas on the formation of the philosophical worldview of the Ukrainian (...) thinker. Originality. Based on the appeal to primary sources, Kulchytskyi’s philosophical doctrine of human in the unity of its basic principles and theoretico-practical results is reconstructed. The ways of forming the key ideas of his philosophical anthropology are determined, their originality is substantiated, despite the cooperation with Twardowski’s school, as well as despite numerous discussions and researches of Western European philosophico-anthropological, existentio-ideological and socio-psychological issues. Conclusions. It is found out how the philosophical worldview of Oleksandr Kulchytskyi was formed and how he gradually came from the research of the human psyche within the framework of anthropological structural psychology to the realization of the need to study philosophical anthropology. The personalistic features of his philosophical doctrine of human are characterized; in particular, attention is paid to the distinction between the concepts of person and personality, determining the importance of the social factor for the formation of human worldview, didactic aims of anthropological studies. It is shown how in Kulchytskyi’s philosophical anthropology the analysis of the existentio-worldview dimension of human existence, manifested in different spiritual situations and socio-cultural conditions that influence the specifics of thinking and the nature of the personality mentality, acquires special importance. The originality of Kulchytskyi’s arguments about human in the context of both Ukrainian philosophy and in general European philosophical thought is stated. (shrink)

T. 1. Ot antichnoĭ fiziki do Mendeleeva.

Commentary on Brahmasūtra of Bādarāyaṇa, classical work on Vedanta philosophy.

Morals of 13th-20th century Mongolian Moral Doctrines.

t. 1. Raboty po istoriosofii -- t. 2. Raboty po bogoslovii︠u︡.

Articles on Hindu religion, society, and philosophy.