War and peace in the Bible -- Theoretical aspects of war in rabbinic thought -- War and peace in modern Jewish thought and practice -- Israel, war, ethics and the media.

Sentences \(\varphi\) and \(\psi\) are _cognitive synonyms_ for one when they play the same role in one’s cognitive life. The notion is pervasive (Sect. 1 ), but elusive: it is bound to be hyperintensional (Sect. 2 ), but excessive fine-graining would trivialize it and there are reasons for some coarse-graining (Sect. 2.1 ). Conceptual limitations stand in the way of a natural algebra (Sect. 2.2 ), and it should be sensitive to subject matters (Sect. 2.3 ). A cognitively adequate individuation (...) of content may be intransitive (Sect. 3 ) due to ‘dead parrot’ series: sequences of sentences \(\varphi _1, \ldots, \varphi _n\) where adjacent \(\varphi _i\) and \(\varphi _{i+1}\) are cognitive synonyms while \(\varphi _1\) and \(\varphi _n\) are not (Sect. 3.1 ). Finding an intransitive account is hard: Fregean equipollence won’t do (Sect. 3.2 ) and a result by Leitgeb shows that it wouldn’t satisfy a minimal compositionality principle (Sect. 3.3 )._Sed contra_, there are reasons for transitivity, too (Sect. 3.4 ). In Sect. 4, we come up with a formal semantics capturing this jumble of desiderata, thereby showing that the notion is coherent. In Sect. 5, we re-assess the desiderata in its light. (shrink)

Recently, a number of experiments have emphasized the degree to which subjects fail to detect large changes in visual scenes. This finding, referred to as “change blindness,” is often considered surprising because many people have the intuition that such changes should be easy to detect. Levin, Momen, Drivdahl, and Simons documented this intuition by showing that the majority of subjects believe they would notice changes that are actually very rarely detected. Thus subjects exhibit a metacognitive error we refer to (...) as “change blindness blindness.” Here, we test whether CBB is caused by a misestimation of the perceptual experience associated with visual changes and show that it persists even when the pre- and postchange views are separated by long delays. In addition, subjects overestimate their change detection ability both when the relevant changes are illustrated by still pictures, and when they are illustrated using videos showing the changes occurring in real time. We conclude that CBB is a robust phenomenon that cannot be accounted for by failure to understand the specific perceptual experience associated with a change. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss the claim that the successful reduction of qualitative to physical states requires some sort of intelligible connection between our qualitative and physical concepts, which in turn requires a conceptual analysis of our qualitative concepts in causal-functional terms. While I defend this claim against some of its recent critics, I ultimately dispute it, and propose a different way to get the requisite intelligible connection between qualitative and physical concepts.

David Michael Levin's ongoing exploration of the moral character and enlightenment-potential of vision takes a new direction in _The Philosopher's Gaze_. Levin examines texts by Descartes, Husserl, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Benjamin, Merleau-Ponty, and Lévinas, using our culturally dominant mode of perception and the philosophical discourse it has generated as the site for his critical reflections on the moral culture in which we are living. In Levin's view, all these philosophers attempted to understand, one way or another, the (...) distinctive pathologies of the modern age. But every one also attempted to envision—if only through the faintest of traces, traces of mutual recognition, traces of another way of looking and seeing—the prospects for a radically different lifeworld. The world, after all, inevitably reflects back to us the character, the reach and range, of our vision. In these provocative essays, the author draws on the language of hermeneutical phenomenology and at the same time refines phenomenology itself as a method of working with our experience and thinking critically about the culture in which we live. (shrink)

To reassure those concerned about wholesale discontinuity between human existence and posthumanity, transhumanists assert shared ground with antiquity on vital challenges and aspirations. Because their claims reflect key misconceptions, there is no shared vision for transhumanists to invoke. Having exposed their misuses of Prometheus, Plato, and Aristotle, I show that not only do transhumanists and antiquity crucially diverge on our relation to ideals, contrast-dependent aspiration, and worthy endeavors but that illumining this divide exposes central weaknesses in transhumanist argumentation. What is (...) more, antiquity’s handling of these topics suggests a way through the impasse in current enhancement debates about human “nature” and helps to resolve a tension within transhumanists’ accounts of what our best moments signify about the ontological requirements for real flourishing. (shrink)

Defends the ancient thesis that man is a piece of matter, that all his states are physical states, and all his properties physical properties. This is done in a metaphysical framework which accommodates talk of the identity and diversity of such 'virtual entites' as states and properties without being committed to their actual existence.

Meaning has traditionally been regarded as a problem for philosophers and psychologists. Advances in cognitive science since the early 1960s, however, broadened discussions of meaning, or more technically, the semantics of perceptions, representations, and/or actions, into biology and computer science. Here, we review the notion of “meaning” as it applies to living systems, and argue that the question of how living systems create meaning unifies the biological and cognitive sciences across both organizational and temporal scales.

In a footnote to his ‘What is it Like to be a Bat?’, Thomas Nagel sketches a promising account of phenomenal concepts that purports to explain why mind-body identity statements, even if necessary, will always seem contingent. Christopher Hill and Brian McLaughlin have recently developed this sketch into a more robust theory. In Nagel's more recent work, however, he suggests that the only adequate theory of phenomenal concepts is one that makes the relation between phenomenal and physical states intelligible, or (...) ‘transparent’. Developing such a theory, however, appears to be no easy task. In this paper I argue that the Nagel-Hill-McLaughlin proposal is preferable – and that a serious problem with it, noticed by Stephen Yablo, can be avoided by revising the proposal according to some further suggestions made by Nagel himself. (shrink)

Molyneux's Question, that is, “Suppose a man born blind, and now adult, and taught by his touch to distinguish between a cube and a sphere... and the blind man made to see: Quaere, whether by his sight, before he touched them, he could now distinguish, and tell, which is the globe, which the cube”, was discussed by many theorists in the 17th and 18th centuries, and has recently been addressed by contemporary philosophers interested in the nature, and identity conditions, of (...) perceptual concepts. My main concern in this paper is to argue – against Evans, Campbell, and a number of other contemporary philosophers – that a test of the sort Molyneux envisioned, at least if carefully designed and administered, can indeed be a crucial experiment for the claim that we deploy the same perceptual concepts when identifying shapes by sight and by touch. I will explore some implications of this argument for a theory of recognitional concepts. And I’ll try to trace out some unhappy consequences of various alternative views. (shrink)

I argue that 'c' occurs extensionally in 'c caused e' and 'D' occurs extensionally in 'c caused e because c is D'. I claim that this has been insufficiently appreciated because the two contexts are often run together and because it has not been clear that the description D of c is among the referents of an explanatory argument. I argue as well that Hume's analysis of causation is consistent with taking causation to be a relation between single events, and (...) that even if events are eliminated as virtual entities, extensionality holds for all terms in the resulting context. (shrink)

Our studies of naturally occurring human dialogue have led to the recognition of a class of regularities which characterize impoltant aspects of communication. People appear to interact according to established patterns which span several turns in a dialogue and which recur frequently. These patterns appear to be organized around the goals which the dialogue serves for each participant. Many things which are said later in a dialogue can only be interpreted as pursuit of these goals, established by earlier dialogue.These patterns (...) have been represented b) a set of knowledge structures called Dialogue‐Games, capturing shared, conventional knowledge that people have about communication and how it can be used to achieve goals. A Dialogue‐Game has Parameters, which represent those elements that vary across instances of a particular pattern‐the particular dialogue participants and the content topic. The states of the world which must be in effect for a particular Dialogue‐Game to be employed successfully are represented by Specifications of these Parameters. Finally, the expected sequence of intermediate states that occur during instances of a particular conventional pattern are represented by the Components of the corresponding Dialogue‐Game.Representations for several Dialogue‐Games are presented here, based on our analyses of different kinds of naturally occurring dialogue. A process model is discussed, showing Dialogue‐Game identification, pursuit, and termination as part of the comprehension of dialogue utterances. This Dialogue‐Game model captures some of the important functional aspects of language, especially indirect uses to achieve implicit communication. (shrink)

First published in 1988. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

It is standard practice in philosophical inquiry to test a general thesis (of the form 'F iff G' or 'F only if G') by attempting to construct a counterexample to it. If we can imagine or conceive of1an F that isn't a G, then we have evidence that there could be an F that isn't a G — and thus evidence against the thesis in question; if not, then the thesis is (at least temporarily) secure. Or so it is standardly (...) claimed.But there is increasing skepticism about how seriously to take what we can imagine or conceive as evidence for (or against) a priori philosophical theses, given the many historical examples of now-questionable theses that once seemed impossible to doubt — and also the recent experimental research .. (shrink)

Many experiments have demonstrated that people fail to detect seemingly large visual changes in their environment. Despite these failures, most people confidently predict that they would see changes that are actually almost impossible to see. Therefore, in at least some situations visual experience is demonstrably not what people think it is. This paper describes a line of research suggesting that overconfidence about change detection reflects a deeper metacognitive error founded on beliefs about attention and the role of meaning as a (...) support for a coherent perceptual experience. Accordingly, CBB does not occur in all situations , while the scope of the phenomenon remains broad enough to suggest more than a misunderstanding of a small niche of visual experience. I finish by arguing that despite the very small amount of research on visual metacognition, these beliefs are critical to understand. (shrink)

Animating Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological idea of the body as a pre-reflective organizing principle in perception, consciousness and language has become a productive and popular endeavor within philosophy of mind during the last two decades. In this context Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions of an embodied mind has played a central role in the attempts to naturalize phenomenological insights in relation to cognitive science and neuropsychological research. In this dialogue the central role of art and aesthetics in phenomenology has been neglected or at best (...) treated as a peripheral phenomenon. In this article I argue that the failure to place art and aesthetics at the center of thought within phenomenology leads to a neglect of the expressive primacy of the body in movement. In the current naturalization of phenomenology the questions related to expressive movement are often consigned to the notions of motor intentionality or gesture. However, in his book How the Body Shapes the Mind the philosopher Shaun Gallagher interestingly concludes, based on experimental results, that bodily movements of gesture cannot be accounted for by the phenomenologically adapted notions of ‘body image’ and ‘body schema’. Symptomatically, Gallagher ends his chapter on bodily gesture with a section title asking the relevant question that remains unanswered within a phenomenology of mind: Expressive movement from the beginning? The search for an answer to this question points, in my view, to the possibility of a more radical understanding of the embodied mind based on the primacy of expressive experimentation rather than representational experience, which makes the question of art and aesthetics a core issue. Following the image of thought in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze I argue that art, as the production of sensation through experimentation, presents us with a mode of thinking that accounts for expressive bodily movement as a constitutive force in subjective thought and experience. (shrink)

Advocates of cognitive enhancement maintain that technological advances would augment autonomy indirectly by expanding the range of options available to individuals, while, in a recent article in this journal, Schaefer, Kahane, and Savulescu propose that cognitive enhancement would improve it more directly. Here, autonomy, construed in broad procedural terms, is at the fore. In contrast, when lauding the goodness of enhancement expressly, supporters’ line of argument is utilitarian, of an ideal variety. An inherent conflict results, for, within their utilitarian frame, (...) the content of rational, hence autonomous, choices is quite restricted. Further, advocates do not clearly indicate their relative emphasis between the often conflicting goals of maximizing benefit and avoiding harm. In practice, their construction of harms is highly expansive, for disabilities include any constraints that “rational” people would decline if it were technically possible to do so. For advocates, this means that where enhancement measures are available, those constraints become avoidable limitations, and not to remove them is to harm. The centrality of harm-avoidance and their ideal utilitarian frame entail sociopolitical requirements that enhancement defenders disallow when trumpeting autonomy in the vein of individual choice. Advocates have thus not done enough to support the claim that their views are wholly separate from earlier eugenics. (shrink)

Significant progress in the molecular investigation of endogenous bioelectric signals during pattern formation in growing tissues has been enabled by recently developed techniques. Ion flows and voltage gradients produced by ion channels and pumps are key regulators of cell proliferation, migration, and differentiation. Now, instructive roles for bioelectrical gradients in embryogenesis, regeneration, and neoplasm are being revealed through the use of fluorescent voltage reporters and functional experiments using well‐characterized channel mutants. Transmembrane voltage gradients (Vmem) determine anatomical polarity and function as (...) master regulators during appendage regeneration and embryonic left‐right patterning. A state‐of‐the‐art recent study reveals that they can also serve as prepatterns for gene expression domains during craniofacial patterning. Continued development of novel tools and better ways to think about physical controls of cell‐cell interactions will lead to mastery of the morphogenetic information stored in physiological networks. This will enable fundamental advances in basic understanding of growth and form, as well as transformative biomedical applications in regenerative medicine. (shrink)

This paper examines the adequacy of an evolutionary-oriented notion of rationality—ecological rationality—that has recently been proposed in economics. Ecological rationality is concerned with what it is rational to do, and in this sense is a version of what philosophers call ‘practical rationality’. Indeed, the question of the adequacy of ecological rationality as it is understood in the paper, is the question of whether ecological rationality is a genuine notion of practical rationality. The paper first explicates and motivates the notion of (...) ecological rationality by (a) explicating the notion of practical rationality, (b) grounding ecological rationality in an evolutionary approach to the emotions which is mainly illustrated by the example of fear, and (c) outlining the reasons adduced in economics for generalizing ecological rationality beyond the emotions. The paper then argues that (d) the raison d’être of practical rationality is first and foremost a specific role it plays in the explanation of behavior, or in telling why it has occurred. Finally, based on (a)–(d), the paper argues that (e) ecological rationality lacks a constitutive feature of practical rationality—namely, normativity—which is related to the latter’s basic explanatory role, and thus cannot be considered a genuine notion of practical rationality. While the paper focuses on the economic version of ecological rationality, its conclusions apply just as well to other, related, versions of the ecological notion that have been proposed in biology and evolutionary psychology. (shrink)

In recent years, functionalism has emerged as the most appealing candidate for a materialistic theory of mind. Its central thesis - that types of mental states can be defined in terms of their causal and counterfactual relations to the sensory stimulations, other internal states, and behavior of the entities that have them - offers hope for a reasonable materialism: it promises type-identity conditions for beliefs, sensations, and emotions that are not irreducibly mental, yet would permit entities that are physically quite (...) different to be in mental states of the same type. (shrink)

Eugene Gendlin's contribution to the theory of language is the focus of this collection of essays edited by David Michael Levin.