While behaviourist psychology had proven its worth to the US military during the Second World War, the 1950s saw behaviourism increasingly associated with a Cold War discourse of ‘totalitarianism’. This article considers the argument made in Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism on totalitarianism as a form of behaviourist control. By connecting Arendt’s Cold War anti-behaviourism both to its discursive antecedents in a Progressive-era critique of industrial labour, and to contemporaneous attacks on behaviourism, this paper aims to answer two interlocking (...) questions: Why was behaviourism overtaken by cognitivism as the dominant theoretical orientation of psychologists in the 1960s, and what role did the concept of language play in this shift? (shrink)

Production and comprehension have long been viewed as inseparable components of language. The study of vision, by contrast, has centered almost exclusively on comprehension. Here we investigate drawing—the most basic form of visual production. How do we convey concepts in visual form, and how does refining this skill, in turn, affect recognition? We developed an online platform for collecting large amounts of drawing and recognition data, and applied a deep convolutional neural network model of visual cortex trained only on natural (...) images to explore the hypothesis that drawing recruits the same abstract feature representations that support natural visual object recognition. Consistent with this hypothesis, higher layers of this model captured the abstract features of both drawings and natural images most important for recognition, and people learning to produce more recognizable drawings of objects exhibited enhanced recognition of those objects. These findings could explain why drawing is so effective for communicating visual concepts, they suggest novel approaches for evaluating and refining conceptual knowledge, and they highlight the potential of deep networks for understanding human learning. (shrink)

This interview with the philosopher Bernard Stiegler was conducted in Paris on 28 January 2015, and first appeared in Dutch translation in the journal De uil van Minerva. The conversation begins by discussing the fundamental place occupied by the concept of ‘technics’ in Stiegler’s work, and how the ‘constitutivity’ of technics does and does not relate to Kant and Husserl. Stiegler is then asked about his relationship with Deleuze, and he responds by focusing on the concept of quasi-causality, but also (...) by arguing that there is a certain trajectory in Deleuze’s thought, situating his own philosophy in relation to its various moments. Stiegler is then asked to respond to the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attacks carried out three weeks prior to the interview. After making a couple of precautionary remarks, Stiegler relates such occurrences to the problem of what he calls ‘spiritual poverty’, to the intensification of ‘negative sublimation’ that can occur when there is a disconnection between the generations, and more generally to the growth of nihilism. All of these phenomena relate to the exploitation of technology by a virulent capitalism that irrationally believes that only the market is rational. After consideration of the complex historical relationship between Islam and modernization, and of both of these to Nietzsche’s ‘death of God’, and after recalling the destructive role played by the West in the rise of fundamentalism and jihadism, Stiegler concludes by reflecting on the fact that, ultimately, ‘intellectuals’ have failed to use technologies in ways that produce alternatives to consumerism. (shrink)

Better Call Saul and Philosophy is an anthology, a collection of essays exploring the philosophical themes present in the hit television show Better Call Saul. Premiering in the Spring of 2015, Better Call Saul serves as a prequel to the much beloved and critically acclaimed television show Breaking Bad in a which mild-mannered high school chemistry teacher, Walter White - through a series of poor, albeit strained decisions - slowly but steadily becomes a monstrous drug kingpin. In Better Call Saul, (...) a struggling but cocksure attorney, Jimmy McGill goes through a similar transformation to become a cunning, devious criminal lawyer for the underworld. Beyond this, Better Call Saul is populated with a number of additional characters going through their own evolution - from a brother burdened with a psychosomatic(?) ailment, to a former police officer delving deeper into the wrong side of the law to provide for his family. -/- Much like the beloved show, Better Call Saul and Philosophy is an anthology-- a collection of snippets and essays that slowly reveal a much more complex story. Premiering in the Spring of 2015, Better Call Saul serves as a prequel to the much beloved and critically acclaimed television show Breaking Bad. Critics of the series have noted that its storytelling is emblematic, or "The New Golden Age of Television": programming that not only rewards multiple watches, but also calls for a careful, reasoned analysis of characters, plots, and themes. Better Call Saul is the type of program that is so rich with these elements that it not only calls for a book like Better Call Saul and Philosophy, but might even feel incomplete without it! -/- Now, readers can join alongside struggling-but-cocksure attorney Jimmy McGill as he goes through a series of transformative experiences and scenarios. Featuring the work of contemporary philosophers, Better Call Saul and Philosophy offers its readers a chance to delve deeply into a wide range of philosophical issues the show presents, including the nature of good and evil, personal identity, free will and determinism, the law as it relates to morality, the ethical implications of the war on drugs, death and dying, and many, many more. Fans of the show will love a chance to appreciate the show on much deeper level--and, for those hoping to learn a bit about philosophy as well as the show, the book perfectly marries the two together in a unique and engaging way. -/- This book is the latest edition (#8) in the series Pop Culture and Philosophy. (shrink)

I contend that scientific realism and realism about natural kinds should be given separate treatment because a person could be a scientific realist in general without having key realist commitments about natural kinds. I utilize Chakravartty’s three dimensions of commitment for scientific realism to create three key conditions for realism regarding natural kinds in particular. I find that Dupré’s promiscuous realism fails at least one these conditions, and therefore, for the sake of terminological consistency and clarity, we should classify promiscuous (...) realism as an antirealist view of natural kinds. (shrink)

Learning to drive is a significant event for the transition to adulthood and delay or avoidance may have social, practical, and psychological implications. For those with Developmental Coordination Disorder, driving presents a considerable challenge, and the literature shows that there are differences in driving ability between individuals with and without DCD. The aim of the current research is to further our understanding of the mechanisms underlying the driving experiences of individuals with DCD. Nineteen participants with DCD and 36 controls aged (...) 18–57 years took part in this study. Participants completed standardized tests, questionnaires and a driving simulation task designed to measure speed, road positioning, and rate of change of steering in three conditions with increasing perceptual complexity. Results indicate that behaviors for all participants changed as the perceptual demands of the task increased. However, drivers with DCD were more affected than all other groups, driving more slowly, and driving further to the right. These findings illustrate how the impact of both internal and external constraints negatively affect the success of the driving task for individuals with DCD compared to their TD peers. (shrink)

Ist Kunst eine Form des Handelns? Und wenn ja, in welchem Sinne? Handlungen werden häufig als praktische Verkörperung von Intentionen aufgefasst. Die Beiträge des Bandes zeigen: Von der kunstphilosophischen Tradition her lässt sich die Frage nach Kunst und Handlung sowohl mit Blick auf die Hervorbringung von Kunst als auch mit Blick auf ihre Erfahrung stellen. Kunst im Rahmen einer Poetik aufzufassen bedeutet allerdings, sie als eine Handlung zu bestimmen, der bestimmte Ziele zu eigen sind.

Kane provides Self-Forming Actions as a rebuttal to allegations that indeterministic choices are determined by luck and are therefore not free. This paper explicates Kane’s proposal and provides a conceptual complication for Kane’s SFAs. The quantum events in an indeterministic world can be recreated in a deterministic world by pseudorandom number generation. This deterministic world is indistinguishable from the indeterministic world it simulates at the quantum, neurological, and phenomenological levels. Thus, indeterministic quantum behavior cannot secure free will in Kane’s SFAs (...) in any way which is not reproducible in a deterministic world. The paper addresses the objections that the proposed problem is merely an epistemic rather than metaphysical one and that a deterministic agent does not have plural voluntary control. I conjecture that a dualistic account of libertarian free will may dodge the problems I raise regarding Kane’s SFAs. (shrink)

Actions that financially benefit one person may present risk to another person. For example, the payment incentives of portfolio managers and investors are often asymmetrical such that actions that benefit a portfolio manager can pose financial risk to clients. Despite the presence and potential harm of these asymmetries, few have addressed the question of who exploits these asymmetries and how to mitigate potential harm. Our study examined the effect of selfish personality traits (the Dark Triad) and interpersonal bonding on decision-making (...) for the self, another person, and another person with under reward asymmetry present. Results demonstrated that individuals higher in narcissism and psychopathy made risky decisions for themselves. However, when reward asymmetries were present, all three Dark Triad traits were associated with making riskier decisions for another person in order to benefit the self. There was also a significant interaction between interpersonal closeness generated through bonding and psychopathy such that bonding made the decision-making processes of those high in psychopathy less risky for others. These findings have implications for how different individuals with different relationships make self and other-based financial decisions, and how those decisions change when rewards are asymmetrical. (shrink)

Production and comprehension have long been viewed as inseparable components of language. The study of vision, by contrast, has centered almost exclusively on comprehension. Here we investigate drawing—the most basic form of visual production. How do we convey concepts in visual form, and how does refining this skill, in turn, affect recognition? We developed an online platform for collecting large amounts of drawing and recognition data, and applied a deep convolutional neural network model of visual cortex trained only on natural (...) images to explore the hypothesis that drawing recruits the same abstract feature representations that support natural visual object recognition. Consistent with this hypothesis, higher layers of this model captured the abstract features of both drawings and natural images most important for recognition, and people learning to produce more recognizable drawings of objects exhibited enhanced recognition of those objects. These findings could explain why drawing is so effective for communicating visual concepts, they suggest novel approaches for evaluating and refining conceptual knowledge, and they highlight the potential of deep networks for understanding human learning. (shrink)

A widely touted approach to involving laypeople in science and technology policy-related decisions is the consensus conference. Virtually nothing written on the topic provides detailed discussion of the many steps from citizen recruitment to citizen report. Little attention is paid to how and why the mechanics of the consensus conference process might influence the diversity of the participants in theses fora, the quality of the deliberation in the citizen sessions, the experiences of the participants and organizers, and other outcomes that (...) affect democratic decision making within the conference and more broadly over the long term. As an aid to those interested in utilizing the consensus conference format, the authors outline in detail how they set about organizing their consensus conference on nanotechnology in the spring of 2005. They discuss what specific aspects of their consensus conference worked, and why, and also consider what they learned of relevance to future application. (shrink)

Transcranial magnetic stimulation, EEG, and behavioral studies by our group implicate spurious activation of speech perception neurocircuitry in the genesis of auditory hallucinations in schizophrenia. The neurobiological basis of these abnormalities remains uncertain, however. We review our ongoing studies, which suggest that altered cortical coupling underlies speech processing in schizophrenia and is expressed via disrupted gamma resonances and impaired corollary discharge function of self-generated verbal thought.

Background: Family members are often required to act as substitute decision-makers when health care or research participation decisions must be made for an incapacitated relative. Yet most families are unable to accurately predict older adult preferences regarding future health care and willingness to engage in research studies. Discussion and documentation of preferences could improve proxies' abilities to decide for their loved ones. This trial assesses the efficacy of an advance planning intervention in improving the accuracy of substitute decision-making and increasing (...) the frequency of documented preferences for health care and research. It also investigates the financial impact on the healthcare system of improving substitute decision-making.Methods/DesignDyads (n = 240) comprising an older adult and his/her self-selected proxy are randomly allocated to the experimental or control group, after stratification for type of designated proxy and self-report of prior documentation of healthcare preferences. At baseline, clinical and research vignettes are used to elicit older adult preferences and assess the ability of their proxy to predict those preferences. Responses are elicited under four health states, ranging from the subject's current health state to severe dementia. For each state, we estimated the public costs of the healthcare services that would typically be provided to a patient under these scenarios. Experimental dyads are visited at home, twice, by a specially trained facilitator who communicates the dyad-specific results of the concordance assessment, helps older adults convey their wishes to their proxies, and offers assistance in completing a guide entitled My Preferences that we designed specifically for that purpose. In between these meetings, experimental dyads attend a group information session about My Preferences. Control dyads attend three monthly workshops aimed at promoting healthy behaviors. Concordance assessments are repeated at the end of the intervention and 6 months later to assess improvement in predictive accuracy and cost savings, if any. Copies of completed guides are made at the time of these assessments.DiscussionThis study will determine whether the tested intervention guides proxies in making decisions that concur with those of older adults, motivates the latter to record their wishes in writing, and yields savings for the healthcare system.Trial RegistrationISRCTN89993391. (shrink)

Considered together, Butler and Whitehead draw from a wide palette of disciplines to develop distinctive theories of becoming, of syntactical violence, and creative opportunities of limitation. The contributors of this volume offer a unique contribution to and for the humanities in the struggles of politics, economy, ecology, and the arts.

Education as Freedom is a groundbreaking edited text that documents and reexamines African-American empirical, methodological, and theoretical contributions to knowledge-making, teaching, and learning and American education from the nineteenth through the twenty-first century, a dynamic period of African-American educational thought and activism. Education as Freedom is a long awaited text that historicizes the current racial achievement gap as well as illuminates the myriad of African American voices and actions to define the purpose of education and to push the limits of (...) the democratic experiment in the United States. (shrink)

A community's abilities to promote health and maximize its response to public health threats require fulfillment of one of the four elements of public health legal preparedness, the capacity to effectively coordinate law-based efforts across different governmental jurisdictions, as well as across multiple sectors and disciplines. Government jurisdictions can be viewed “vertically” in that response efforts may entail coordination in the application of laws across multiple levels, including local, state, tribal, and federal governments, and even with international organizations. Coordination of (...) legal responses to public health emergencies also may involve a horizontal dimension comprising numerous and diverse sectors, such as public health, public and private health care, emergency management, education, law enforcement, the judiciary, and the military.Although responses to many acute health threats can implicate multiple jurisdictions and sectors, the jurisdictional and sectoral dimensions of legal preparedness are complex and may vary substantially by the nature of a threat, its geographic and geopolitical extent, and the operational response demanded. (shrink)

A community's abilities to promote health and maximize its response to public health threats require fulfillment of one of the four elements of public health legal preparedness, the capacity to effectively coordinate law-based efforts across different governmental jurisdictions, as well as across multiple sectors and disciplines. Government jurisdictions can be viewed “vertically” in that response efforts may entail coordination in the application of laws across multiple levels, including local, state, tribal, and federal governments, and even with international organizations. Coordination of (...) legal responses to public health emergencies also may involve a horizontal dimension comprising numerous and diverse sectors, such as public health, public and private health care, emergency management, education, law enforcement, the judiciary, and the military.Although responses to many acute health threats can implicate multiple jurisdictions and sectors, the jurisdictional and sectoral dimensions of legal preparedness are complex and may vary substantially by the nature of a threat, its geographic and geopolitical extent, and the operational response demanded. (shrink)

The contributors to The Moral of the Story, all preeminent political theorists, are unified by their concern with the instructive power of great literature. This thought-provoking combination of essays explores the polyvalent moral and political impact of classic world literatures on public ethics through the study of some of its major figures-including Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes, Jane Austen, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Robert Penn Warren, and Dostoevsky. Positing the uniqueness of literature's ability to promote dialogue on salient moral and intellectual virtues, (...) editor Henry T. Edmonson III has culled together a wide-ranging exploration of such fundamental concerns as the abuse of authority, the nature of good leadership, the significance of "middle class virtues" and the needs of adolescents. This collection reinvigorates the study of classic literature as an endeavor that is not only personally intellectually satisfying, but also an inimitable and unique way to enrich public discourse. (shrink)

THOMSON, Judith Jarvis (1929– ) Judith Jarvis Thomson received her BA from Barnard College in 1950, her MA from Cambridge University in 1956, and a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1959. Her first teaching position was at Barnard where she was a lecturer from 1955–9, an instructor from 1959–60, and then Assistant Professor from 1960–2. In 1963, she moved to Boston, first as an Assistant Professor at Boston University (1963–4), and then to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where (...) she has remained ever since. She became full Professor in 1969, and between 1990 and 1996 held the Laurence S. Rockefeller Chair in Philosophy at MIT. She has received a large number of awards and honours, and contributed in many ways to professional philosophy in America. In 1992, she held the Presidency of the American Philosophical Association (Eastern Division), and in 1999, she gave the Tanner Lectures at Princeton University. She is Chair of the American Philosophical Association's Board of Officers for 2002-5, and gave the Association's Carus Lectures in 2003. She is also widely acknowledged as one of the best teachers of philosophy, and the excellence of the graduate program at MIT is due in no small measure to her influence. Thomson’s philosophical work ranges widely but her main areas of concentration are moral philosophy and metaphysics. In moral philosophy, Thomson has made seminal contributions to all three sub-fields of that discipline, applied ethics, moral theory and metaethics. (Indeed, the nature of her work makes these divisions seem somewhat artificial.) The papers gathered together in Rights, Restitution and Risk, and, since then, papers such as, ‘Self- Defence’, ‘Physician Assisted Suicide: Two Moral Arguments’ and ‘Assisted Suicide: The Philosophers Brief’ (written jointly with John RAWLS, Robert NOZICK, Ronald DWORKIN. (shrink)

Images of vulnerability have populated the philosophical landscape from Hobbes to Hegel, Levinas to Foucault, often designating a sense of corporeal susceptibility to injury, or of being threatened or wounded and therefore have been predominantly associated with violence, finitude, or mortality. More recently, feminist theorists such as Judith Butler and Adriana Cavarero have begun to rethink corporeal vulnerability as a critical or ethical category, one based on our primary interdependence and intercorporeality. However, many contemporary theorists continue to associate vulnerability (...) with violence and finitude rather than providing an account of the normative theory that might underpin vulnerability as a critical category. In this article, I explore an alternative notion of vulnerability in relation to both a theory of power and a normative account that draws on recognition theory. My aim in this article is twofold: first, to examine the complexity of vulnerability and how it relates to forms of recognition; second, to outline how the notion of vulnerability can operate as the basis for critiquing objectionable forms of vulnerability. This is to consider vulnerability not only as an ethical or ontological question but as a political one, and shifts arguments about its abuse and entanglement with power and violence to the public political sphere. (shrink)

In Consciousness Explained and other works, Daniel Dennett uses the concept of phenomenology (along with his variant, called heterophenomenology) in almost complete disregard of the work of Husserl and his successors in German and French philosophy. Yet it can be argued that many of the most important ideas of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and others (and not just the idea of intentionality) reappear in Dennett's work in only slightly altered form. In this article I try to show this in two ways, first (...) by talking in a general way about Dennett's phenomenology, and second by examining his treatment of the concept of the self. In both cases I argue that Dennett should have read his Husserl and Merleau-Ponty more carefully, since in the end his (hetero-) phenomenology is methodologically incoherent and suffers from something like a weakness of will. This emerges especially in his use of the notion of fiction. (shrink)

In this article we develop and defend what we call the “Trust View” of promissory obligation, according to which making a promise involves inviting another individual to trust one to do something. In inviting her trust, and having the invitation accepted (or at least not rejected), one incurs an obligation to her not to betray the trust that one has invited. The distinctive wrong involved in breaking a promise is a matter of violating this obligation. We begin by explicating the (...) core notion of “inviting someone to trust one to do something”, suggesting that it involves signaling to the other individual one's recognition of the importance the relevant action has for her, and one’s willingness to license her to have faith or optimism in one's character with regard to the performance of that action. We then turn to a defense of the Trust View, arguing that it has considerable appeal in its own right, that it is distinct from and superior to three similar accounts (T.M. Scanlon's Assurance View, Judith Jarvis Thomson's Reliance View and David Owens' Authority View), and that several objections to it can be answered. (shrink)

The growing influence of the late French philosopher Gilles Deleuze in Christian theology is nowhere more apparent than in this impressive work by Daniel Colucciello Barber. Here diaspora is explored not as a sociological phenomenon but as a concept, a composition of thought that reveals the differential nature of the origins of Christianity and its others, religion and secularism. What seems to be at stake in the concept of diaspora, for Barber, is its ability to destabilize the logic of domination (...) that has been identified with much of the history of Christianity, and which arguably carries over into secularism as it is historically conceived.According to Barber’s view of the gospels, the Christian declaration—understood as the injunction to love one’s enemies and imitate divine perfection—provides a liberatory opening out of this logic of dominion and into the construction of new possibilities of human relatedness. How is it, then, that Christianity has historically been allied with .. (shrink)

En este artículo se parte del planteamiento de Merleau-Ponty del cuerpo como una existencia ambigua, que no se puede reducir a un mero sujeto o a una mera cosa. Esto lleva a explorar el cuerpo desde ambas perspectivas. En primer lugar, se analiza el cuerpo como un objeto producto de las representaciones del capitalismo cognitivo y del sistema farmacopornográfico de poder descrito por Paul Beatriz Preciado. En segundo lugar, se analiza el cuerpo como sujeto, como elemento que posibilita la acción (...) política, a partir de las reflexiones que han realizado Judith Butler y Jacques Rancière en torno al cuerpo vulnerable y al cuerpo estético, respectivamente. De esta manera, se encuentra que si bien el cuerpo se encuentra atravesado por los diferentes dispositivos de poder del capitalismo contemporáneo, así mismo en este se encuentra la potencialidad de resistencia y emancipación frente a estos mecanismos. (shrink)

The notion of vulnerability has become a central category through which feminist philosophers such as Judith Butler and Adriana Cavarero have sought to examine the complexity of embodied interdependence and corporeal openness to others. In this chapter, I engage with J.M. Coetzee’s texts The Lives of Animals and Waiting for the Barbarians to explore the intricacies of embodied vulnerability and bring these texts into dialogue with the philosophical approaches of Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond and Bernard Waldenfels. The chapter examines (...) the relation between embodied knowledge, vulnerability and responsiveness, and raises questions about the kinds of responses we are called to make in the face of the other’s vulnerability. (shrink)

Princess Diana’s death was a tragedy that provoked mourning across the globe; the death of a homeless person, more often than not, is met with apathy. How can we account for this uneven distribution of emotion? Can it simply be explained by the prevailing scientific understanding? Uncovering a rich tradition beginning with Aristotle, _The Secret History of Emotion_ offers a counterpoint to the way we generally understand emotions today. Through a radical rereading of Aristotle, Seneca, Thomas Hobbes, Sarah Fielding, and (...) Judith Butler, among others, Daniel M. Gross reveals a persistent intellectual current that considers emotions as psychosocial phenomena. In Gross’s historical analysis of emotion, Aristotle and Hobbes’s rhetoric show that our passions do not stem from some inherent, universal nature of men and women, but rather are conditioned by power relations and social hierarchies. He follows up with consideration of how political passions are distributed to some people but not to others using the Roman Stoics as a guide. Hume and contemporary theorists like Judith Butler, meanwhile, explain to us how psyches are shaped by power. To supplement his argument, Gross also provides a history and critique of the dominant modern view of emotions, expressed in Darwinism and neurobiology, in which they are considered organic, personal feelings independent of social circumstances. The result is a convincing work that rescues the study of the passions from science and returns it to the humanities and the art of rhetoric. (shrink)

Claiming close to 800 million adherents, Pentecostalism is the fastest growing religious community in the world; nevertheless, the movement remains under-researched, encouraging more academic investment. This article takes on this task by exploring Pentecostalism regarding gender and sex. Why have Pentecostals ardently supported gender normativity? Why have Pentecostal denominations in the United States adamantly opposed the recent Equality Acts bill? This essay's argument is that Pentecostal belief and practice, rooted in theology and pneumatology, actually denounce gender bifurcation, supporting instead fluid (...) movement with the Holy Spirit into and out of gender performances. Judith Butler's performance theory, Sarah Coakley's Trinitarian theology, and Lisa Stephenson's imago Spiritus frame the overall argument. As Paul declares, there is no longer male or female in Christ. (shrink)

Claiming close to 800 million adherents, Pentecostalism is the fastest growing religious community in the world; nevertheless, the movement remains under‐researched, encouraging more academic investment. This article takes on this task by exploring Pentecostalism regarding gender and sex. Why have Pentecostals ardently supported gender normativity? Why have Pentecostal denominations in the United States adamantly opposed the recent Equality Acts bill? This essay's argument is that Pentecostal belief and practice, rooted in theology and pneumatology, actually denounce gender bifurcation, supporting instead fluid (...) movement with the Holy Spirit into and out of gender performances. Judith Butler's performance theory, Sarah Coakley's Trinitarian theology, and Lisa Stephenson's imago Spiritus frame the overall argument. As Paul declares, there is no longer male or female in Christ. (shrink)

This essay explores the relationship between nature and grace and the theological impact of this relationship on feminist anthropological debates. Engaging this debate through an examination and critique of Serene Jones’ ‘eschatological essentialism’, this essay suggests that Jones mistakenly characterizes constructivism, and thus turns too quickly to an essentialist paradigm without considering its risks. Using Judith Butler and Karl Barth, this essay proposes an account of identity that the author calls a ‘Christological constructivism’. Suggesting that the person and work (...) of Christ instantiates a grace that disrupts nature, Daniels argues for an account of identity as ‘more-than’, suggesting that this anthropology engenders healing for women, and men, within communities religious and otherwise. (shrink)