In "The Cerebral Code," he has solidly embedded his ideas in experimental neurophysiology and neuropharmacology, deriving from his decades in the laboratory.

Volume 20, Issue 7, July 2020, Page 133-135.

What determines whether an action is right or wrong? Morality, Rules, and Consequences: A Critical Reader explores for students and researchers the relationship between consequentialist theory and moral rules. Most of the chapters focus on rule consequentialism or on the distinction between act and rule versions of consequentialism. Contributors, among them the leading philosophers in the discipline, suggest ways of assessing whether rule consequentialism could be a satisfactory moral theory. These essays, all of which are previously unpublished, provide students in (...) moral philosophy with essential material and ask key questions on just what the criteria for an adequate moral theory might be. (shrink)

By subjecting Nietzsche to a Platonic critique, author William H. F. Altman punctures his “pose of untimeliness” while making use of Nietzsche’s own aphoristic style of presentation. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche—named for a Prussian King—is thereby revealed to be the representative philosopher of the Second Reich.

In a new approach to a vexing problem in modern philosophy, William H. F. Altman shows that Heidegger’s decision to join the Nazis in 1933 can only be understood in the context of his complicated relationship with the Great War.

The pedagogical technique of the playful Plato, especially his ability to create living discourses that directly address the student, is the subject of Plato the Teacher. “The crisis of the Republic” refers to the decisive moment in his central dialogue when philosopher-readers realize that Plato’s is challenging them to choose justice by going back down into the dangerous Cave of political life for the sake of the greater Good, as both Socrates and Cicero did.

The German Stranger provides a guide to Leo Strauss that situates his thought in the context of National Socialism; by destroying any middle ground between 'Athens' and 'Jerusalem, ' Strauss undermined modernity's secular bulwark against political theology. Once National Socialism is understood as an atheistic religion re-enacted by post-Revelation 'philosophers, ' the German avatar of Plato's Athenian Stranger can be recognized as its principal theoreticia.

In this book, William H. F. Altman argues that it is not order of composition but reading order that makes Euthyphro, Apology of Socrates, Crito, and Phaedo “late dialogues,” and shows why Plato’s decision to interpolate the notoriously “late” Sophist and Statesman between Euthyphro and Apology deserves more respect from interpreters.

Treating consciousness as awareness or attention greatly underestimates it, ignoring the temporary levels of organization associated with higher intellectual function (syntax, planning, logic, music). The tasks that require consciousness tend to be the ones that demand a lot of resources. Routine tasks can be handled on the back burner but dealing with ambiguity, groping around offline, generating creative choices, and performing precision movements may temporarily require substantial allocations of neocortex. Here I will attempt to clarify the appropriate levels of explanation (...) (ranging from quantum aspects to association cortex dynamics) and then propose a specific mechanism (consciousness as the current winner of Darwinian copying competitions in cerebral cortex) that seems capable of encompassing the higher intellectual function aspects of consciousness as well as some of the attentional aspects. It includes features such as a coding space appropriate for analogies and a supervisory Darwinian process that can bias the operation of other Darwinian processes. (shrink)

The notion of authority in education has become an increasingly negative concept, regarded by some as championed only by rigid traditionalists and those who cling on to outdated educational theory and philosophy. Authority and the Teacher seeks to overturn the notion that authority is a restrictive force within education, serving only to stifle creativity and drown out the voice of the student. William H. Kitchen argues that any education must have, as one of its cornerstones, a component which encourages (...) the fullest development of knowledge, which serves as the great educational emancipator. In this version of knowledge-driven education, the teacher's authority should be absolute, so as to ensure that the teacher has the scope to liberate their pupils. The pupil, in the avoidance of ignorance, can thus embrace what is rightfully theirs; the inheritance of intellectual riches passed down through time.By invoking the work of three major philosophers - Polanyi, Oakeshott and Wittgenstein - as well as contributions from other key thinkers on authority, this book underpins previous claims for the need for authority in education with the philosophical clout necessary to ensure these arguments permeate modern mainstream educational thinking. (shrink)

It must strive to defeat our centuries-old habituation to the book as spectacle, in order that we may be brought to dwell in the immediacies of our lively selves in the world, as we do in our oral/aural life.

Plan-ahead becomes necessary for those movements which are over-and-done in less time than it takes for the feedback loop to operate. Natural selection for one of the ballistic movements (hammering, clubbing, and throwing) could evolve a plan-ahead serial buffer for hand-arm commands that would benefit the other ballistic movements as well. This same circuitry may also sequence other muscles (children learning handwriting often screw up their faces and tongues) and so novel oral-facial sequences may also benefit (as might kicking and (...) dancing). An elaborated version of the sequencer may constitute a Darwin Machine that spins scenarios, evolves sentences, and facilitates insight by offline simulation. An example is given of an evolutionary scenario from an apelike ancestor, demonstrating the transition behaviors and growth curve considerations that any such theory needs to have; this particular scenario (involving throwing improvements) also suggests an explanation for the puzzling design of the Acheulean "handaxe.". (shrink)

Citing the Lincoln Savings and Loan scandal, the Leo Frank murder trial, and other cases, author William Simon takes a fresh look at the ethics of lawyering.

Abstractabstract:Vaccine hesitancy continues to pose a formidable obstacle to increasing national COVID-19 vaccination rates in the US, but this is not the first time that American vaccination efforts have confronted resistance and apathy. This study examines the history of US vaccination efforts against smallpox, polio, and measles, highlighting persistent drivers of vaccine hesitancy as well as factors that helped overcome it. The research reveals that logistical barriers, negative portrayals in the media, and fears about safety stymied inoculation efforts as early (...) as the 18th century and continue to do so. However, vaccine hesitancy has been markedly diminished when trusted community leaders have guided efforts, when ordinary citizens have felt personally invested in the success of the vaccine, and when vaccination efforts have been tied to broader projects to improve public health and social cohesion. Deliberately cultivating such factors could be an effective strategy for lessening opposition today, when COVID-19's distinctive characteristics make addressing vaccine hesitancy more urgent than it has ever been. (shrink)

Investigates the rapid evolution of the ape brain into the hominid brain, and explains why understanding our evolutionary past can help us survive an uncertain future.

This paper offers a sketch of the complicated conflicts which arise—and metastasize seemingly daily—in the era of Big Data. Given the public’s ubiquitous-yet-ostensibly-voluntary data surrender, and industry’s ubiquitous-yet-ostensibly-anodyne collection of the same, inaction is not an option for any near-just society. By revisiting the philosophical basis for Panoptic apparatus, sketching the tumultuous history of US contract law trying to protect the public from itself, and comparing existing industry codes for similarly-situated—read: terrifyingly invasive—fields, the paper will provide a preliminary framework for (...) identifying and confronting the galaxy of problems associated with data analytics. (shrink)

For those participating in the ever-developing discussion in modern society about the role of traditional morality, The Ethical Navigator is a much-needed guide to the central concepts of ethics. William H. Capitan, through examples taken from pop culture, religious scriptures, and historical documents, provides easily grasped discussions of moral authority. The book demonstrates how today's emphasis on individual freedoms has stripped us of the morality to protect the freedom of society. A highly accessible work, The Ethical Navigator concludes with (...) practical ways to re-invest ethics into daily life. (shrink)

An expanded version has now appeared: HOW BRAINS THINK: Evolving Intelligence, Then and Now in the Science Masters series (BasicBooks 1996 in the USA and Weidenfeld & Nicolson in the UK, various translation editions elsewhere, including China). My Darwin Machines model for cerebral cortical circuitry has now appeared as THE CEREBRAL CODE: Thinking a Thought in the Mosaics of the Mind (MIT Press 1996).

Since Richard Dawkins ' The Extended Phenotype got me to thinking about copying units in the mid-1980s, I have been trying to define a cerebral code by searching for what can be successfully replicated in the brain's neural circuitry, a minimum replicable unit. I indeed found such circuitry. But to explore creativity in higher intellectual function, I wanted to see if the resulting copies could compete in a Darwinian manner, the process shaping up quality as it goes. And that forced (...) me to try and boil down a lot of evolutionary biology, attempting to abstract the features that were essential from those that merely contributed to speed or stability. This isn't the place to describe the neural outcome -- it's in The Cerebral Code and, more briefly, in the seventh chapter of my other 1996 book, How Brains Think -- but this does seem an appropriate place to review what I started calling "The Six Essentials." They seem applicable to a wide range of problems within memetics9 as the field attempts to cope with evolutionary models of information transmission. For a more. (shrink)

This book deals with theoretical problems that arise at points of contact between the concerns of philosophers and historians about the practice of ...

In this book, William H. F. Altman turns to Demosthenes-universally regarded as Plato's student in antiquity-and Plato's other Athenian students in order to add external and historical evidence for Plato's original curriculum.

This book sets forth an ontological Copernican revolution.