Most philosophers writing about personal identity in recent years claim that what it takes for us to persist through time is a matter of psychology. In this groundbreaking new book, Eric Olson argues that such approaches face daunting problems, and he defends in their place a radically non-psychological account of personal identity. He defines human beings as biological organisms, and claims that no psychological relation is either sufficient or necessary for an organism to persist. Olson rejects several famous thought-experiments (...) dealing with personal identity. He argues, instead, that one could survive the destruction of all of one's psychological contents and capabilities as long as the human organism remains alive--as long as its vital functions, such as breathing, circulation, and metabolism, continue. (shrink)

Most epistemologists hold that knowledge entails belief. However, proponents of this claim rarely offer a positive argument in support of it. Rather, they tend to treat the view as obvious and assert that there are no convincing counterexamples. We find this strategy to be problematic. We do not find the standard view obvious, and moreover, we think there are cases in which it is intuitively plausible that a subject knows some proposition P without—or at least without determinately—believing that P. Accordingly, (...) we present five plausible examples of knowledge without (determinate) belief, and we present empirical evidence suggesting that our intuitions about these scenarios are not atypical. (shrink)

Rather than focusing on political and legal debates surrounding attempts to determine if and when genocidal rape has taken place in a particular setting, this essay turns instead to a crucial, yet neglected area of inquiry: the moral significance of genocidal rape, and more specifically, the nature of the harms that constitute the culpable wrongdoing that genocidal rape represents. In contrast to standard philosophical accounts, which tend to employ an individualistic framework, this essay offers a situated understanding of harm that (...) features the importance of interdependence and relationality and that conceptualizes harms as embodied and contextual. The paper ultimately reveals what is distinctive about this particular crime of sexual violence by exploring the logic of genocidal rape: genocidal rape involves the harm of forced self-betrayal unleashed relationally, causing victims as representatives of their group to participate inadvertently in the destruction of that group. (shrink)

In many countries, the COVID-19 pandemic led to a period of lockdown that impacted individuals’ lifestyles, in both professional and personal spheres. New problems and challenges arose, as well as opportunities. Numerous studies have examined the negative effects of lockdown measures, but few have attempted to shine light on the potential positive effects that may come out of these measures. We focused on one particular positive outcome that might have emerged from lockdown: creativity. To this end, this paper compared self-reported (...) professional creativity and everyday creativity before and during lockdown, using a questionnaire-based study conducted on a French sample. We expected participants to be more creative during than prior to lockdown, in both professional and everyday spheres. Regarding Pro-C, we did not see any significant differences between the two comparison points, before and during lockdown. Regarding everyday creativity, we observed a significant increase during lockdown. Furthermore, our results suggest that participants with a lower baseline creativity benefited more from the situation than those with a higher initial baseline creativity. Our results provide new insights on the impact of lockdown and its positive outcomes. These measures may have inarguably negative consequences on the physical and mental health of many, but their positive impact exists as well. (shrink)

Canonical, system-building philosophers often have a characteristic “way of looking at things,” that is, a specific method for doing philosophy that they apply to a wide array of topics, and which they view as rooted in some basic propositions about, for example, rationality, human nature, or the nature of reality. This is part of what makes them compelling. For contemporary interpreters, however, it raises questions about how much these foundational claims need to impact our ability to understand or learn from (...) other aspects of their thought—especially if we are leery of the foundational claims. Such interpretive vexations are especially urgent with Hegel: Hegel certainly has a characteristic way of looking at.. (shrink)

The field of cognitive modeling has progressed beyond modeling cognition in the context of simple laboratory tasks and begun to attack the problem of modeling it in more complex, realistic environments, such as those studied by researchers in the field of human factors. The problems that the cognitive modeling community is tackling focus on modeling certain problems of communication and control that arise when integrating with the external environment factors such as implicit and explicit knowledge, emotion, cognition, and the cognitive (...) system. These problems must be solved in order to produce integrated cognitive models of moderately complex tasks. Architectures of cognition in these tasks focus on the control of a central system, which includes control of the central processor itself, initiation of functional processes, such as visual search and memory retrieval, and harvesting the results of these functional processes. Because the control of the central system is conceptually different from the internal control required by individual functional processes, a complete architecture of cognition must incorporate two types of theories of control: Type 1 theories of the structure, functionality, and operation of the controller, and type 2 theories of the internal control of functional processes, including how and what they communicate to the controller. This book presents the current state of the art for both types of theories, as well as contrasts among current approaches to human-performance models. It will be an important resource for professional and student researchers in cognitive science, cognitive-engineering, and human-factors.Contributors: Kevin A. Gluck, Jerry T. Ball, Michael A. Krusmark, Richard W. Pew, Chris R. Sims, Vladislav D. Veksler, John R. Anderson, Ron Sun, Nicholas L. Cassimatis, Randy J. Brou, Andrew D. Egerton, Stephanie M. Doane, Christopher W. Myers, Hansjorg Neth, Jeremy M Wolfe, Marc Pomplun, Ronald A. Rensink, Hansjorg Neth, Chris R. Sims, Peter M. Todd, Lael J. Schooler, Wai-Tat Fu, Michael C. Mozer, Sachiko Kinoshita, Michael Shettel, Alex Kirlik, Vladislav D. Veksler, Michael J. Schoelles, Jerome R. Busemeyer, Eric Dimperio, Ryan K. Jessup, Jonathan Gratch, Stacy Marsella, Glenn Gunzelmann, Kevin A. Gluck, Scott Price, Hans P. A. Van Dongen, David F. Dinges, Frank E. Ritter, Andrew L. Reifers, Laura Cousino Klein, Michael J. Schoelles, Eva Hudlicka, Hansjorg Neth, Christopher W. Myers, Dana Ballard, Nathan Sprague, Laurence T. Maloney, Julia Trommershauser, Michael S. Landy, A. Hornof, Michael J. Schoelles, David Kieras, Dario D. Salvucci, Niels Taatgen, Erik M. Altmann, Richard A. Carlson, Andrew Howes, Richard L. Lewis, Alonso Vera, Richard P. Cooper, and Michael D. Byrne. (shrink)

Claire Katz & Lara Trout, Emmanuel Levinas. Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers ; Thomas Bedorf, Andreas Cremonini, Verfehlte Begegnung. Levinas und Sartre als philosophische Zeitgenossen ; Samuel Moyn, Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas between Revelation and Ethics ; Pascal Delhom & Alfred Hirsch, Im Angesicht der Anderen. Levinas’ Philosophie des Politischen ; Sharon Todd, Learning from the other: Levinas, psychoanalysis and ethical possibilities in education ; Michel Henry, Le bonheur de Spinoza, suivi de: Etude sur le spinozisme de (...) Michel Henry, par Jean-Michel Longneaux ; Jean-François Lavigne, Husserl et la naissance de la phénoménologie. Des Recherches logiques aux Ideen: la genèse de l’idéalisme transcendantal phénoménologique ; Denis Seron, Objet et signification ; Dan Zahavi, Sara Heinämaa and Hans Ruin, Metaphysics, Facticity, Interpretation. Phenomenology in The Nordic Countries ; Dimitri Ginev, Entre anthropologie et herméneutique ; Magdalena Mărculescu-Cojocea, Critica metafizicii la Kant şi Heidegger. Problema subiectivităţii: raţiunea între autonomie şi deconstrucţie. (shrink)

The theory and practice of history and its relevance to the modern world, by Britains greatest radical historian.

Contents: 1) Peter Kung, Why We Need Something Like Imagery; 2) Derek Lam, An Imaginative Person’s Guide to Objective Modality; 3) Rebecca Hanrahan, Crossing Rivers: Imagination and Real Possibilities; 4) Michael Omoge, Imagination, Metaphysical Modality, and Modal Psychology; 5) Joshua Myers, Reasoning with Imagination; 6) Franz Berto, Equivalence in Imagination; 7) Christopher Badura, How Imagination Can Justify; 8) Antonella Mallozzi, Imagination, Inference, and Apriority; 9) Margherita Arcangeli, Narratives and Thought Experiments: Restoring the Role of Imagination; 10) Margot Strohminger, Two (...) Ways of Imagining Galileo’s Experiment; 11) Eric Peterson, Attention to Details: Imagination, Attention, and Epistemic Significance; 12) Amy Kind, Bridging the Divide: Imagining Across Experiential Perspectives; 13) Julia Langkau, On Imagining Being Someone Else; 14) Luke Roelofs, “Imagine If They Did That to You!”: The Complexity of Empathy; 15) Nick Wiltsher and Bence Nanay, Imagination, Selves, and Knowledge of Self: Pessoa’s Dreams in The Book of Disquiet . (shrink)

Recently, Doolittle and Inkpen formulated a thought provoking theory, asserting that evolution by natural selection was responsible for the sideways evolution of two radically different kinds of selective units (also called Domains). The former entities, termed singers, correspond to the usual objects studied by evolutionary biologists (gene, genomes, individuals, species, etc.), whereas the later, termed songs, correspond to re‐produced biological and ecosystemic functions, processes, information, and memes. Singers perform songs through selected patterns of interactions, meaning that a wealth of critical (...) phenomena might receive novel evolutionary explanations. However, this theory did not provide an empirical approach to study evolution in such a broadened context. Here, we show that analyzing songs and singers, using patterns of interaction networks as a common ontology for both, offers a novel, actionable, inclusive and mathematical way to analyze not only the re‐production but also the evolution and fitness of biological and ecosystemic interconnected processes. (shrink)

Carroll Izard completed his dissertation in 1952, beginning a career spanning more than six decades that coincided with clinical psychology maturing as a profession, and the birth of clinical science and cognitive neuroscience. Izard’s focus on discrete emotions as evolved systems that organize information, prepare responses, and shape the development of personality and relationships persisted through his career, despite “emotions” often being overshadowed by psychodynamic, behavioral, or cognitive perspectives. His theoretical work anticipated and now integrates contemporary neuroscience and relational perspectives. (...) Exploration of discrete emotions has kept lines of inquiry open that enrich our understanding of psychopathology. Izard also embraced clinical science, combining basic research with effectiveness studies addressing the unmet need for mental health services via emotion-focused interventions. (shrink)

This paper proposes a solution to David Miller's Minnesotan-Arizonan demonstration of the language dependence of truthlikeness (Miller 1974), along with Miller's first-order demonstration of the same (Miller 1978). It is assumed, with Peter Urbach, that the implication of these demonstrations is that the very notion of truthlikeness is intrinsically language dependent and thus non-objective. As such, truthlikeness cannot supply a basis for an objective account of scientific progress. I argue that, while Miller is correct in arguing that the number of (...) true atomic sentences of a false theory is language dependent, the number of known sentences (under certain straightforward assumptions) is conserved by translation; degree of knowledge, unlike truthlikeness, is thus a linguistically invariant notion. It is concluded that the objectivity of scientific progress must be grounded on the fact (noted in Cohen 1980) that knowledge, not mere truth, is the aim of science. (shrink)

This paper explains Sophie de Grouchy’s philosophical debts to Adam Smith. I have three main reasons for this: first, it should explain why eighteenth-century philosophical feminists found Smith, who has—to put it mildly—not been a focus of much recent feminist admiration, a congenial starting point for their own thinking; second, it illuminates De Grouchy’s considerable philosophical originality, especially her important, overlooked contributions to political theory; third, it is designed to remove some unfortunate misconceptions that have found their way into Karin (...) Brown’s ‘Introduction’ to the recent and much-to-be-welcomed translation of Sophie de Grouchy’s Lettres Sur La Sympathie. While Brown claims that there are major ‘differences’ in their programs of ‘social reform’, I argue there are important commonalities between Smith and De Grouchy. In particular, I highlight how they share a common understanding of how human sensibilities are shaped by social institutions and I show that De Grouchy’s path-breaking analysis of negative and positive liberty is grounded in her extension of Smith’s political theory and moral psychology. (shrink)

Online deliberation is one important instance of civic tech that is both for and by the citizens, through engaging citizens in Internet-supported deliberative discussions on public issues. This article explains the origins of a set of symposium articles in this journal issue based on the 2017 'International Conference on Deliberation and Decision Making: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Civic Tech' held in Singapore. Symposium articles are presented in a sequence that flows from designing decision making systems to platforms to specific technological nudges.

The prosaic content of these sayings is that events change from future to present and from present to past. Your next birthday is in the future, but with the passage of time it draws nearer and nearer until it is present. 24 hours later it will be in the past, and then lapse forever deeper into history. And things get older: even if they don’t wear out or lose their hair or change in any other way, their chronological age is (...) always increasing. These changes are universal and inescapable: no event could ever fail to be first future, then present, then past, and no persisting thing can avoid growing older. We call this process time’s passage. (shrink)

This paper summarizes paired courses, a technique that is being used to incorporate the benefits of liberal arts into the business curriculum. This technique pairs a required business course with a liberal arts course that students take concurrently during a semester. The courses have overlapping themes and activities to build specific competencies that are desired by organizations, such as communication, critical thinking and problem solving, emotional intelligence, and organizational professionalism. These competencies are identified by exploring national surveys and conducting a (...) local survey of business professionals. The paired courses utilize a variety of exercises with the ultimate goals of building desired workplace-related skills in students and improving their practical reasoning ability. The exercises do this by strengthening students’ analytical thinking, understanding of multiple framing, and reflective exploration of meaning through various techniques. Many of the activities are explained in detail with some additional resources provided. Teachers can utilize the same activities or adapt them to their classroom. (shrink)

Earp and colleagues make a strong case for the complete decriminalization and even the legalization of recreational drug use based on the negative impact of the “War on drugs” on racialized...

Proves Completeness for the Evidential Conditional.

E. J. Lowe and others argue that there can be 'uncountable' things admitting of no numerical description. This implies that there can be something without there being at least one such thing, and that things can be identical without being one or nonidentical without being two. The clearest putative example of uncountable things is portions of homogeneous stuff or 'gunk'. The paper argues that there is a number of portions of gunk if there is any gunk at all, and that (...) the possibility of uncountable things is inadequately supported. (shrink)

Some realists claim that theoretical entities like numbers and electrons are indispensable for describing the empirical world. Motivated by the meta-ontology of Quine, I take this claim to imply that, for some first-order theory T and formula δ(x) such that T ⊢ ∃xδ ∧ ∃x¬δ, where δ(x) is intended to apply to all and only empirical entities, there is no first-order theory T′ such that (a) T and T′ describe the δ:s in the same way, (b) T′ ⊢ ∀xδ, and (...) (c) T′ is at least as attractive as T in terms of other theoretical virtues. In an attempt to refute the realist claim, I try to solve the general problem of nominalizing T (with respect to δ), namely to find a theory T′ satisfying conditions (a)–(c) under various precisifications thereof. In particular, I note that condition (a) can be understood either in terms of syntactic or semantic equivalence, where the latter is strictly stronger than the former. The results are somewhat mixed. On the positive side, even under the stronger precisification of (a), I establish that (1) if the vocabulary of T is finite, a nominalizing theory can always be found that is recursive if T is, and (2) if T postulates infinitely many δ:s, a nominalizing theory can always be found that is no more computationally complex than T. On the negative side, even under the weaker precisification of (a), I establish that (3) certain finite theories cannot be nominalized by a finite theory. (shrink)

Eric Lonergan explores our complex relationship with money. In a provocative and insightful analysis, he argues that few things seem to matter more to us, but few things are as poorly understood. Economists have long worked with the theory that our relationship to money is rational, but not all our reactions to it make sense. Lonergan shows that many of our views about money, credit and saving are little better than prejudices. The same social and emotional forces that affect (...) quant traders in the world’s financial markets can be seen in the mania of Pokémon card trading in the school playground. This fascinating book reveals the tension between money’s capacity to assist us in our lives and its propensity to cause instability and to distort our values. We are limited in our ability to control money’s power, says Lonergan, but only by understanding money better, and thinking about it less, may we get on with enjoying what we have. (shrink)

This book reconsiders the Aristotelian analogy. Focusing primarily on Aristotle’s Physics Alpha, a structure of analogy emerges within Aristotle’s discussion of the principles of “becoming.” Eric Schumacher argues that logos, the first of these principles, is rooted in analogy and entails a type of mobility fit to reflect the be-coming of nature.

Two proofs are given which show that if some set of truths fall under finitely many concepts (so-called Collectivity), then they all fall under at least one of them even if we do not know which one. Examples are given in which the result seems paradoxical. The first proof crucially involves Moorean propositions while the second is a reconstruction and generalization of a proof due to Humberstone free from any reference to such propositions. We survey a few solution routes including (...) Tennant-style restriction strategies. It is concluded that accepting Collectivity for some set of truths while also denying that any of the involved concepts in isolation capture all of them requires that one of these concepts cannot be closed under conjunction elimination. This is surprising since the paper surveys several applications in which Collectivity and the latter closure condition seemed jointly satisfiable for concepts of actual philosophical interest. (shrink)

It seems that we can know moral truths. We are also rather reluctant to defer to moral testimony. But it’s not obvious how moral cognitivism is compatible with pessimism about moral testimony. If moral truths are knowable, shouldn’t it be possible for others to know moral truths you don’t know, so that it is wise for you to defer to what they say? Or, alternatively, if it’s always reasonable to refuse to defer to the wisest among us, doesn’t this show (...) that morality is not genuinely cognitive? There is a tension in our commonsense moral epistemology. In this chapter I (a) explicate this tension, (b) criticize how others have attempted to resolve it, and finally (c) explain how Rossian deontology helps us see that the tension is only apparent: morality is indeed knowable, despite the fact that it is usually wise to refuse to defer to moral testimony. (shrink)

Un examen de la division quasi officielle du monde philosophique en deux blocs : phénoménologique et analytique. Bilan de ses prolongements en France ces vingt dernières années.

Armed reprisals are the limited use of military force in response to unlawful actions perpetrated against states. Historically, reprisals provided a military remedy for states that had been wronged by another state without having to resort to all-out war in order to counter or deter such wrongful actions. While reprisals are broadly believed to have been outlawed by the UN Charter, states continue to routinely undertake such self-help measures. As part of the roundtable, “The Ethics of Limited Strikes,” this essay (...) examines the doctrine of armed reprisals in light of recent instances of states using force “short of war” in this manner. We argue that the ban on reprisals has been largely ignored by states, and that recent attempts to apply the laws of armed conflict to the cyber domain are further weakening this prohibition. We conclude that this is a potentially dangerous development that lowers the bar for resorting to military force, risking escalation and thereby further destabilizing the international system. (shrink)

This paper examines a recent attempt at updating Anselm’s ontological argument by employing the notion of mediated and unmediated causal powers. After presenting the updated argument and the underlying metaphysical framework of causal powers that is utilized in the argument, I show that some of the key assumptions can be rejected. Once we closely examine some of the assumptions, it will also be evident that the updated version in some ways collapses back to Anselm’s original version and so is subject (...) to some of the same worries. (shrink)

Recent work in the cognitive sciences has argued that beliefs sometimes acquire signaling functions in virtue of their ability to reveal information that manipulates “mindreaders.” This paper sketches some of the evolutionary and design considerations that could take agents from solipsistic goal pursuit to beliefs that serve as social signals. Such beliefs will be governed by norms besides just the traditional norms of epistemology. As agents become better at detecting the agency of others, either through evolutionary history or individual learning, (...) the candidate pool for signaling expands. This logic holds for natural and artificial agents that find themselves in recurring social situations that reward the sharing of one’s thoughts. (shrink)