Accompanied by an introductory monograph and a full critical apparatus, this English-language edition of Karel van Mander’s _Grondt der edel, vry schilderconst_ (Foundation of the Noble, Free Art of Painting) provides unprecedented access to this crucially important art treatise on _schilderconst_ (the art of painting / picturing).

(2001). Disability and Bioethics: Removing Barriers to Understanding and Setting the Agenda for a New Conversation. The American Journal of Bioethics: Vol. 1, No. 3, pp. 64-65.

Wright & Liley contrast their theory that the global dynamics of the EEG are linear with that of Freeman, who hypothesizes an EEG governed by (nonlinear) deterministic-chaotic dynamics. A “call for further discussion” on the part of the authors is made as to how either theory fits with experimental findings indicating that EEG dynamics are non-linear but stochastic.

What are the possibilities for art to provide non-reactionary, productive spaces for pedagogical endeavors? How can culture function pedagogically and critically beyond the continuing constraints of positivism on the one hand and fixed systems on the other? In what ways can art’s impasse open spaces, its weakness move beyond the teleological, and its exit provide pedagogical possibilities beyond its current horizons? These and other such questions about the limitations and potential for pedagogy and culture through the lens of art lie (...) at the core of Baldacchino’s Art’s Way Out: Exit Pedagogy and the Cultural Condition. This review of his work is divided into two overarching sections, a summary of his work and questions that his arguments have raised for this reader, and questions that address the ideas presented in Art’s Way Out and the philosophical tools utilized to make them.Summary, Questions, and ArgumentsAt one level, this work asserts that art is central to pedagogy and p .. (shrink)

How and why did the notion of philosophy as a system evolve in Germany at the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries? Otto Casmann’s Modesta Assertio provides new answers to this question. Casmann, Clemens Timpler’s predecessor as professor in Steinfurt refers to other ‘like-minded philosophers’ who believe that philosophy is a ‘structured system of the liberal arts’. Casmann himself states that philosophy is a ‘structured unity of erudite wisdom’. The text is part of the debate between Daniel Hoffmann and (...) the Reformed philosophers about the relation between philosophy and theology. It can be made plausible that Hoffmann himself was Casmann’s target. The paper shows that a ‘structured unity of erudite wisdom’ presupposes harmony between theological insights and the findings of philosophy. Thus the earliest discussions of philosophy as a system were meant to immunise Reformed philosophy against Hoffmann’s attempt to revive Lutheran anti-philosophy. © 2018, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Argument for the role of the human conscience in determining right and wrong, good and evil.

INTRODUCTION Lee Palmer Wandel In Essay XII, Book II of his Essais, first published in, Michel de Montaigne posed the question 'Que sçay-je? ...

In this article, we revisit the longstanding debate of whether there is a pattern in the evolution of organisms towards greater complexity, and how this hypothesis could be tested using an interdisciplinary lens. We argue that this debate remains alive today due to the lack of a quantitative measure of complexity that is related to the teleonomic (i.e., goal-directed) nature of living systems. Further, we argue that such a biological measure of complexity can indeed be found in the vast literature (...) produced within life history theory. We propose that an ideal method to quantify this complexity lies within life history strategies (i.e., schedules of survival and reproduction across an organism’s life cycle), as it is precisely these strategies that are under selection to optimize the organism’s fitness. In this context, we set an agenda for future steps: (1) how this complexity can be measured mathematically, and (2) how we can engage in a comparative analysis of this complexity across species to investigate the evolutionary forces driving increases or, for that matter, decreases in teleonomic complexity. (shrink)

This book attempts to advance Donald Griffin's vision of the "final, crowning chapter of the Darwinian revolution" by developing a philosophy for the science of animal consciousness. It advocates a Darwinian bottom-up approach that treats consciousness as a complex, evolved, and multidimensional phenomenon in nature rather than a mysterious all-or-nothing property immune to the tools of science and restricted to a single species. -/- The so-called emergence of a science of consciousness in the 1990s has at best been a science (...) of human consciousness. This book aims to advance a true Darwinian science of consciousness in which its evolutionary origin, function, and phylogenetic diversity are moved from the field’s periphery to its very centre, thus enabling us to integrate consciousness into an evolutionary view of life. Accordingly, this book has two objectives: (i) to argue for the need and possibility of an evolutionary bottom-up approach that addresses the problem of consciousness in terms of the evolutionary origins of a new ecological lifestyle that made consciousness worth having and (ii) to articulate a thesis and beginnings of a theory of the place of consciousness as a complex evolved phenomenon in nature that can help us to answer the question of what it is like to be a bat, an octopus, or a crow. -/- A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness will appeal to researchers and advanced students interested in advancing our understanding of animal minds as well as anyone with a keen interest in how we can develop a science of animal consciousness. (shrink)

In this essay, we discuss Simona Ginsburg and Eva Jablonka’s The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul from an interdisciplinary perspective. Constituting perhaps the longest treatise on the evolution of consciousness, Ginsburg and Jablonka unite their expertise in neuroscience and biology to develop a beautifully Darwinian account of the dawning of subjective experience. Though it would be impossible to cover all its content in a short book review, here we provide a critical evaluation of their two key ideas—the role of Unlimited (...) Associative Learning in the evolution of, and detection of, consciousness and a metaphysical claim about consciousness as a mode of being—in a manner that will hopefully overcome some of the initial resistance of potential readers to tackle a book of this length. (shrink)

There has been much criticism of the idea that Friston's free-energy principle can unite the life and mind sciences. Here, we argue that perhaps the greatest problem for the totalizing ambitions of its proponents is a failure to recognize the importance of evolutionary dynamics and to provide a convincing adaptive story relating free-energy minimization to organismal fitness.

While we agree in broad strokes with the characterisation of rationalization as a “useful fiction,” we think that Fiery Cushman's claim remains ambiguous in two crucial respects: (1) the reality of beliefs and desires, that is, the fictional status of folk-psychological entities and (2) the degree to which they should be understood as useful. Our aim is to clarify both points and explicate the rationale of rationalization.

The broad spectrum revolution brought greater dependence on skill and knowledge, and more demanding, often social, choices. We adopt Sterelny's account of how cooperative foraging paid the costs associated with longer dependency, and transformed the problem of skill learning. Scaffolded learning can facilitate cognitive control including suppression, whereas scaffolded exchange and trade, including inter-temporal exchange, can help develop resolve.

This paper is a response to a recent paper by Bobier and Omelianchuk in which they argue that the critics of Giubilini and Minerva’s defence of infanticide fail to adequately justify a moral difference at birth. They argue that such arguments would lead to an intuitively less plausible position: that late-term abortions are permissible, thus creating a dilemma for those who seek to argue that birth matters. I argue that the only way to resolve this dilemma, is to bite the (...) naturalist bullet and accept that the intuitively plausible idea that birth constitutes a morally relevant event is simply mistaken and biologically misinformed. (shrink)

Phillips et al. make a compelling case for a reversal in the current paradigm in “other minds” research by considering the representation of other people's knowledge more basic than the attribution of belief. Unfortunately, they only discuss primates. In this commentary, I argue that the representation of others' knowledge is an evolutionary ancient trait, first appearing during the Cambrian explosion.

In a recent special issue dedicated to Dani Rodrik’s (2015) influential monograph Economics Rules, Grüne-Yanoff and Marchionni (2018) raise a potentially damning problem for Rodrik’s suggestion that progress in economics should be understood and measured laterally, by a continuous expansion of new models. They argue that this could lead to an “embarrassment of riches”, i.e. the rapid expansion of our model library to such an extent that we become unable to choose between the available models, and thus needs to be (...) solved to make ‘model pluralism’ viable. Drawing on Veit’s (2019a) ‘model pluralism’ account, this paper argues that model pluralism as a thesis about the relationship between science and nature undermines the very idea of a general model selection framework for policy making. (shrink)

This essay presents and analyzes the recent work of four prominent contemporary Jewish ethicists: Eugene Borowitz, David Novak, Byron Sherwin, and Walter Wurzburger. These authors are united in their affirmation of covenant as the central category of Jewish moral obligation and their concern to construct a Jewish ethic out of the classical sources of Judaism. Yet, as an individual analysis of their books will show, they adopt markedly different views of the authority of traditional Jewish law , the respective (...) roles of individual and community in moral deliberation, and the degree to which changing historical circumstances alter moral truths. (shrink)

One of the most expected properties of a logical system is that it can be algebraizable, in the sense that an algebraic counterpart of the deductive machinery could be found. Since the inception of da Costa's paraconsistent calculi, an algebraic equivalent for such systems have been searched. It is known that these systems are non self-extensional (i.e., they do not satisfy the replacement property). More than this, they are not algebraizable in the sense of Blok-Pigozzi. The same negative results hold (...) for several systems of the hierarchy of paraconsistent logics known as Logics of Formal Inconsistency (LFIs). Because of this, these logics are uniquely characterized by semantics of non-deterministic kind. This paper offers a solution for two open problems in the domain of paraconsistency, in particular connected to algebraization of LFIs, by obtaining several LFIs weaker than C1, each of one is algebraizable in the standard Lindenbaum-Tarski's sense by a suitable variety of Boolean algebras extended with operators. This means that such LFIs satisfy the replacement property. The weakest LFI satisfying replacement presented here is called RmbC, which is obtained from the basic LFI called mbC. Some axiomatic extensions of RmbC are also studied, and in addition a neighborhood semantics is defined for such systems. It is shown that RmbC can be defined within the minimal bimodal non-normal logic E+E defined by the fusion of the non-normal modal logic E with itself. Finally, the framework is extended to first-order languages. RQmbC, the quantified extension of RmbC, is shown to be sound and complete w.r.t. BALFI semantics. (shrink)

This goal of this thesis in the philosophy of nature is to move us closer towards a true biological science of consciousness in which the evolutionary origin, function, and phylogenetic diversity of consciousness are moved from the field’s periphery of investigations to its very centre. Rather than applying theories of consciousness built top-down on the human case to other animals, I argue that we require an evolutionary bottomup approach that begins with the very origins of subjective experience in order to (...) make sense of the place of mind in nature. To achieve this goal, I introduce and defend the pathological complexity thesis as both a framework for the scientific investigation of consciousness and as a lifemind continuity thesis about the origins and function of consciousness. (shrink)