By introducing the concept of “mental data,” Palermos (2023) highlights an underappreciated aspect of data ethics that policymakers would do well to heed. Sweeping artificial intelligence (AI) legi...

Name der Zeitschrift: Der Islam Jahrgang: 94 Heft: 1 Seiten: 314-318.

This third paper locates the synthetic neurorobotics research reviewed in the second paper in terms of themes introduced in the first paper. It begins with biological non-reductionism as understood by Searle. It emphasizes the role of synthetic neurorobotics studies in accessing the dynamic structure essential to consciousness with a focus on system criticality and self, develops a distinction between simulated and formal consciousness based on this emphasis, reviews Tani and colleagues' work in light of this distinction, and ends by (...) forecasting the increasing importance of synthetic neurorobotics studies for cognitive science and philosophy of mind going forward, finally in regards to most- and myth-consciousness. (shrink)

In online social networks, the audience size commanded by an organization or an individual is a critical measure of that entity’s popularity and this measure has important economic and/or political implications. Such efforts to measure popularity of users or exploit knowledge about their audience are complicated by the presence of fake profiles on these networks. In this study, analysis of 62 million publicly available Twitter user profiles was conducted and a strategy to identify automatically generated fake profiles was established. Using (...) a combination of a pattern-matching algorithm on screen-names and an analysis of update times, a reasonable number of highly reliable fake user accounts were identified. Analysis of profile creation times and URLs of these fake accounts revealed their distinct behavior relative to a ground truth data set. The characteristics of friends and followers of users in the two data sets further revealed the very different nature of the two groups. The ratio of number of followers-to-friends for ground truth users was ∼1, consistent with past observations, while the fake profiles had a median ratio ∼30, indicating that the fake users we identified were primarily focused on gathering friends. An analysis of the temporal evolution of accounts over 2 years showed that the friends-to-followers ratio increased over time for fake profiles while they decreased for ground truth users. Our results, thus, suggest that a profile-based approach can be used for identifying a core set of fake online social network users in a time-efficient manner. (shrink)

Few figures of the Middle Ages command the attention of so many modern disciplines as Robert Grosseteste (c. 1170-1253). Theology, Philosophy, History, and Science are all areas which his life and thought continue to have significance and to inspire re-interpretation. Accompanied by a series of original commentaries, this new edition of Grosseteste's work, with English translation, draws together the perspectives of modern scientists and medieval specialists. Volume I of a six volume series, Knowing and Speaking presents two of the earliest (...) of Grosseteste's works, the treatises On the Liberal Arts and On the Generation of Sounds. These are accompanied by a significant Middle English treatise on the Seven Liberal Arts whose anonymous fifteenth-century author translated and excerpted passages from Grosseteste's treatises in a re-imagining of their structure and function.0Each work is treated separately within the volume, which is constructed in three parts. On the Liberal Arts sets Grosseteste's thoughts on the arts subjects and emphasises moral concerns about the purpose of learning. On the Generation of Sounds builds on the theories and statements of On the Liberal Arts in connection to the production of sound, elaborating the earlier position, relating the generation of sounds to human vocal and speech production. (shrink)

John Searle (1932-) is one of the most famous living American philosophers. A pupil of J. L. Austin at Oxford in the 1950s, he is currently Mills Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Language at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1995 John Searle published "The Construction of Social Reality", a text which not only promises to disclose the institutional backdrop against which speech takes place, but initiate a new 'philosophy of society'. Since then "The Construction of (...) Social Reality" has been subject to a flurry of criticism. While many of Searle's interlocutors share the sense that the text marks an important breakthrough, he has time and again accused critics of misunderstanding his claims. Despite Searle's characteristic crispness and clarity there remains some confusion, among both philosophers and sociologists, regarding the significance of his proposals. This book traces some of the high points of this dialogue, leveraging Searle's own clarifications to propose a new way of understanding the text. In particular, Joshua Rust looks to Max Weber in suggesting that Searle has articulated an ideal type. In locating The Construction of Social Reality under the umbrella of one of sociology's founding fathers, this book not only makes Searle's text more accessible to the readers in the social sciences, but presents Max Weber as a thinker worthy of philosophical reconsideration. Moreover, the recharacterization of Searle's claims in terms of the ideal type helps facilitate a comparison between Searle and other social theorists such as Talcott Parsons. (shrink)

Introduction -- Fundamental ontology : external realism and scientific naturalism -- Consciousness and materialist theories of mind -- Intentional mental states -- Reason and action -- From acts to speech acts : the intention to communicate -- From sounds to words : the intention to represent -- On the meaning of meaning : critical remarks -- The construction of social reality -- Topics concerning institutional reality : reasons, language, politics, and the background.

Key elements of John Searle’s articulation of the Standard Model of Social Ontology can be found within Max Weber’s ideal type of legal-rational authority. However, the fact that, for Weber, legal-rational authority is just one of three types of legitimate authority, along with traditional and charismatic authority, suggests limitations to the Standard Model’s scope of applicability. Where Searle takes himself to have provided an account of “the structure of human civilization,” Weber’s taxonomy suggests that Searle has only (...) given us an account of a way of being a civilization. This understanding of traditional authority also reveals why the Standard Model misconstrues the structure of ordinary, informal statuses, such as friendship. (shrink)

There has recently been a renewed interest in the “force” interpretation of evolutionary biology. In this article, I present the general structure of the arguments for the force interpretation and identify a problem in its overly permissive conditions for being a Newtonian force. I then attempt a solution that (1) helps to illuminate the difference between forces and other types of causes and (2) makes room for random genetic drift as a force. In particular, I argue that forces are not (...) different in kind from other types of causes but rather that forces are situated on a continuum of causes distinguished by their unifying power. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 5185 Helen C. White Hall, Madison, WI 53706; e‐mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

Technical artifacts do not seem particularly continuous with institutional statuses. If statuses are defined in terms of their constitutive rules, as Searle maintains, then disassociation is always possible – someone or something can satisfy those rules without being able to realize the functional effects that are associated with that status. The gap between technical artifacts and Searlean statuses suggests the possibility of an additional social kind, which I call, following Muhammad Ali Khalidi, a ‘real social kind’. However, the placement (...) of real social kinds between technical artifacts and statuses recommends a reconfiguration of Khalidi’s most abstract characterization of the notion. This reconfiguration also lends support to his surprising claim that money is a real social kind. (shrink)

In a 2014 article in The Guardian, an Indigenous shaman of the Yanomami people of the Amazon rainforest named Davi Kopenawa offers a devastating critique of white society. It is formed of excerpts from multiple interviews, which form the basis of his memoir The Falling Sky, compiled and translated by his French anthropologist collaborator Bruce Albert. Here I bring the dual lenses of philosophy and dance studies to explore how Kopenawa’s lifelong interaction with white people facilitated his reworking (...) of Yanomami shamanic discourse into a parrhesia against the “epidemic fumes” of climate change, on behalf of the Yanomami of the Amazon, white people, and all the beings of the earth. (shrink)

We motivate the desire for self-driving and explain its potential and limitations, and explore the need for—and potential implementation of—morals, ethics, and other value systems as complementary “capabilities” to the Deep Technologies behind self-driving. We consider how the incorporation of such systems may drive or slow adoption of high automation within vehicles. First, we explore the role for morals, ethics, and other value systems in self-driving through a representative hypothetical dilemma faced by a self-driving car. Through the lens of engineering, (...) we explain in simple terms common moral and ethical frameworks including utilitarianism, deontology, and virtue ethics before characterizing their relationship to the fundamental algorithms enabling self-driving. The concepts of behavior cloning, state-based modeling, and reinforcement learning are introduced, with some algorithms being more suitable for the implementation of value systems than others. We touch upon the contemporary cross-disciplinary landscape of morals and ethics in self-driving systems from a joint philosophical and technical perspective, and close with considerations for practitioners and the public, particularly as individuals may not appreciate the nuance and complexity of using imperfect information to navigate diverse scenarios and tough-to-quantify value systems, while “typical” software development reduces complex problems to black and white decision-making. (shrink)

There is much in The Sensory Order that recommends the oft-made claim that Hayek anticipated connectionist theories of mind. To the extent that this is so, contemporary arguments against and for connectionism, as advanced by Jerry Fodor, Zenon Pylyshyn, and John Searle, are shown as applicable to theoretical psychology. However, the final section of this chapter highlights an important disanalogy between theoretical psychology and connectionist theories of mind.

Richard Wright gave a series of lectures in Europe from 1950 to 1956, collected in the following year in the volume, White Man, Listen! One dominant theme in all four essays is that expanding the moral imagination is centrally important in repairing our racism-benighted globe. What makes Wright’s version of this claim unique is his forthright admission that expanding the moral imagination necessarily involves pain and suffering. The best place to hear Wright in regard to the necessary pain of (...) expanding the moral imagination, I would argue, is his poetry collection, This Other World: Projections in the Haiku Manner. To wit, for Wright the necessary pain of expanding one’s moral imagination is the loneliness that results from delegating to others—in the etymological sense of “deputizing or committing”—one’s whiteness qua privilege or social capital. In conclusion, lonely delegation constitutes an imperative template from Wright regarding the painful expansion of our own moral imagination, in the service of social justice for economically oppressed communities of color across the globe. (shrink)

Historically, the concept of androgyny has been as problematic as it has been appealing to Western progressives. The appeal clearly includes, inter alia, the opportunity to abandon or ameliorate certain identities. As for the problematic dimension, the central problem seems to be the reduction of otherness to the norms of straight white middle/upper-class Western cismen, particularly because of the consequent worsening of actual others’ marginalization and exclusion from social institutions. Despite these problems, I wish to suggest that androgyny—as evidenced (...) by the enthusiasm felt for it by many Westerners—bespeaks something larger and more important than the concept itself, and that modified conception of it might be helpful in pursuit of social justice. (shrink)

Numerous studies have shown almost uniformly positive opinions among patients and physicians regarding theconceptof advance directives (either a healthcare proxy or living will). Several of these studies have also shown that the actual use of advance directives is significantly lower than this enthusiasm would suggest, but they have not explained the apparent discordance. Nor have researchers explained why members of minority groups are much less likely to complete advance directives than are white patients. In this study, we used a (...) focus group methodology to examine the ways in which diverse populations of patients view the medical, philosophical, and practical issues surrounding advance directives. We were motivated by the significantly lower prevalence of advance directives among African-American and Hispanic patients at one urban teaching hospital (18% for Caucasians, 4% for African-Americans, and 2% for Hispanics). Our premise was that African-American and Hispanic populations, who have had higher rates of morbidity and mortality across numerous disease categories, and historically have had limited access to care and opportunities to discuss health concerns, may be more suspicious about the right of autonomy that an advance directive is designed to ensure. (shrink)

Numerous studies have shown almost uniformly positive opinions among patients and physicians regarding theconceptof advance directives (either a healthcare proxy or living will). Several of these studies have also shown that the actual use of advance directives is significantly lower than this enthusiasm would suggest, but they have not explained the apparent discordance. Nor have researchers explained why members of minority groups are much less likely to complete advance directives than are white patients. In this study, we used a (...) focus group methodology to examine the ways in which diverse populations of patients view the medical, philosophical, and practical issues surrounding advance directives. We were motivated by the significantly lower prevalence of advance directives among African-American and Hispanic patients at one urban teaching hospital (18% for Caucasians, 4% for African-Americans, and 2% for Hispanics). Our premise was that African-American and Hispanic populations, who have had higher rates of morbidity and mortality across numerous disease categories, and historically have had limited access to care and opportunities to discuss health concerns, may be more suspicious about the right of autonomy that an advance directive is designed to ensure. (shrink)

This article explores Fanon's thought on dance, beginning with his explicit treatment of it in Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth. It then broadens to consider his theorization of Black embodiment in racist and colonized societies, considering how these analyses can be reformulated as a phenomenology of dance. This will suggest possibilities for fruitful encounters between the two domains in which (a) dance can be valorized while (b) opening up sites of resignification and resistance for (...) Black persons and communities-including a revalorization of Black embodiment as a kind of empowering danced experience. (shrink)

“All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” -/- Karl Marx might have been thinking of punk rock when he wrote these words in 1847, but he overlooked the possibility that new forms of solidity and holiness could spring into existence overnight. Punk rock was a celebration of nastiness, chaos, and defiance of convention, (...) which quickly transcended itself and developed its own orthodoxies, shibboleths, heresies, and sectarian wars. Is punk still alive today? What has it left us with? Does punk make any artistic sense? Is punk inherently anarchist, sexist, neo-Nazi, Christian, or—perish the thought—Marxist? When all’s said and done, does punk simply suck? These obvious questions only scratch the surface of punk’s philosophical ramifications, explored in depth in this unprecedented and thoroughly nauseating volume. Thirty-two professional thinkers-for-a-living and students of rock turn their x-ray eyes on this exciting and frequently disgusting topic, and penetrate to punk’s essence, or perhaps they end up demonstrating that it has no essence. You decide. -/- Among the nail-biting questions addressed in this book: Can punks both reject conformity to ideals and complain that poseurs fail to confirm to the ideals of punk? How and why can social protest take the form of arousing revulsion by displaying bodily functions and bodily abuse? Can punk ethics be reconciled with those philosophical traditions which claim that we should strive to become the best version of ourselves? How close is the message of Jesus of Nazareth to the message of punk? Is punk essentially the cry of cis, white, misogynist youth culture, or is there a more wholesome appeal to irrepressibly healthy tendencies like necrophilia, coprophilia, and sadomasochism? In its rejection of the traditional aesthetic of order and complexity, did punk point the way to “aesthetic anarchy,” based on simplicity and chaos? By becoming commercially successful, did punk fail by its very success? Is punk what Freddie Nietzsche was getting at in The Birth of Tragedy, when he called for Dionysian art, which venerates the raw, instinctual, and libidinous aspects of life? (shrink)

In this working paper, we discuss why researchers and policymakers need to better understand how different theoretical accounts of stability lead to different frameworks of analysis. Though ubiquitously mentioned, stability remains an under-theorized notion in security studies. Expert accounts tend to present stability as a generic description, readily applicable to most political phenomena Ð a stabilized state, a stable region, an unstable society. While seemingly equivocal, such uses exhibit different conceptualizations, exhibiting different features and demanding multiple research programs. To date, (...) most accounts of stability tend to take stability to be an (unconstructed) natural phenomenon or a non-derivative social construction. In this introductory paper, we claim that there is a third way to account for stability that remains unexplored in security studies. Simply put, it involves taking stability to be a derivative social construction (i.e., systemic fallout). We then argue that this alternative account should serve as the theoretical basis for an independent research program within stability studies. (shrink)

_ Source: _Page Count 25 This article concerns a moment in French intellectual history when the self-evidences of structuralism become doubtful under the pressure exerted by _discourse_; it thus treats a _second turn_ within the linguistic turn as it occurred in France. The work of Emile Benveniste, and texts by Jean-Francois Lyotard and Paul Ricoeur, flesh out this development. I use them, as well as John Searle’s response, to approach anew Derrida’s essay “Signature Event Context.” Derrida’s distance from this (...) second linguistic turn thereby becomes visible, and the distinct status of _discourse_ in Derrida’s own thought emerges. Finally, critiquing Derrida’s folding of discourse into a notion of “signifying form” in SEC, while drawing on his account there of “citationality,” I sketch new directions for conceiving of context and discourse themselves, ones arguably able to withstand Derrida’s express concerns. (shrink)

How should we think about the ways search engines can go wrong? Following the publication of Safiya Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression (Noble 2018), a view has emerged that racist, sexist, and other problematic results should be thought of as indicative of algorithmic bias. In this paper, I offer an alternative angle on these results, building on Noble’s suggestion that search engines are complicit in a racial contract (Mills 1990). I argue that racist and sexist results should be thought of as (...) part of the workings of the social system of white ignorance. Along the way, I will argue that we should think about search engines not as sources of testimony, but as information-classification systems, and make a preliminary case for the importance of the social epistemology of technology. (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)

Social acceptance is assumed to have widespread positive effects on the recipient; however, ethnic/racial minorities often react negatively to social acceptance by White individuals. One possibility for such reactions might be their lack of trust in the genuineness of White individuals’ positive evaluations. Here, we examined the role that oxytocin—a neuropeptide putatively linked to social processes—plays in modulating reactions to acceptance or rejection during interracial interactions. Black participants received intranasal oxytocin or placebo and interacted with a White, (...) same-sex stranger who provided positive or negative social feedback. After positive feedback, participants given oxytocin tended to display approach-oriented cardiovascular responses of challenge, exhibited more cooperative behavior, and perceived the partner to have more favorable attitudes toward them after the interaction. Following negative feedback, oxytocin reduced anger suppression. Oxytocin did not modulate testosterone reactivity directly, but our exploratory analysis showed that the less participants suppressed anger during the interaction with their partner, the greater testosterone reactivity they displayed after the interaction. These results survived the correction for multiple testing with a false discovery rate of 20%, but not with a rate of 10 or 5%. Discussion centers on the interplay between oxytocin and social context in shaping interracial interactions. (shrink)

The structural-systematic philosophy requires a moral theory. This essay seeks to determine whether either of two recent works, Joshua Greene’s Moral Tribes and Michael Tomasello’s A Natural History of Human Morality, should influence that theory. It first argues that Greene’s fails to make its case for utilitarianism over deontology. It then argues that Tomasello’s thesis that early humans developed moralities of sympathy and fairness, particularly when taken in conjunction with aspects of Alan Gewirth’s moral theory, fits well with the (...) moral theory envisaged by extant works on the structural-systematic philosophy. The envisaged theory maintains the objectivity of human rights. (shrink)

Table of Contents Foreword .................................................................................................... ......................................... xiv Preface .................................................................................................... .............................................. xv Acknowledgment .................................................................................................... .......................... xxiii Section 1 On the Cusp: Critical Appraisals of a Growing Dependency on Intelligent Machines Chapter 1 Algorithms versus Hive Minds and the Fate of Democracy ................................................................... 1 Rick Searle, IEET, USA Chapter 2 We Can Make Anything: Should We? .................................................................................................. 15 Chris Bateman, University of Bolton, UK Chapter 3 Grounding Machine Ethics within the Natural System ........................................................................ 30 Jared Gassen, JMG Advising, USA Nak Young Seong, Independent Scholar, (...) South Korea Section 2 From the Outside In: Intelligent Machine Technologies as a Window on Human Morality both as Evolved and as Evident in Internet Discourse, Today Chapter 4 The Emergence of Arti cial Autonomy: A View from the Foothills of a Challenging Climb ............. 51 Fernando da Costa Cardoso, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal Luís Moniz Pereira, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal Chapter 5 Semantic Analysis of Bloggers Experiences as a Knowledge Source of Average Human Morality .... 73 Rafal Rzepka, Hokkaido University, Japan Kenji Araki, Hokkaido University, Japan Section 3 From the Inside Out: The Ethics of Human Enhancement from Moral Perception to Competition in the Workplace Chapter 6 Machine Ethics Interfaces: An Ethics of Perception of Nanocognition ............................................... 97 Melanie Swan, Kingston University, UK Chapter 7 Ethical Concerns in Human Enhancement: Advantages in Corporate/Organizational Settings ......... 124 Ben Tran, Alliant International University, USA Section 4 From Far to Near and Near to Far: The Ethics of Distancing Technologies in Education and Warfare Chapter 8 Responsibility and War Machines: Toward a Forward-Looking and Functional Account ................. 152 Jai Galliott, Macquarie University, Australia Chapter 9 Ethical Responsibilities of Preserving Academicians in an Age of Mechanized Learning: Balancing the Demands of Educating at Capacity and Preserving Human Interactivity ................... 166 James E. Willis III, Indiana University, USA Viktoria Alane Strunk, Independent Scholar, USA Section 5 Wrapping Things Up, then Unwrapping Them Again: Integral Visions of Morality in a Technological World, Over Evolutionary Time, with Revolutionary Means, and with Open Questions about the Final Purpose of It All Chapter 10 Bridging Two Realms of Machine Ethics ........................................................................................... 197 Luís Moniz Pereira, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal Ari Saptawijaya, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal & Universitas Indonesia, Indonesia Chapter 11 Robots in Warfare and the Occultation of the Existential Nature of Violence ................................... 225 Rick Searle, IEET, USA Chapter 12 Self-Referential Complex Systems and Aristotle’s Four Causes ........................................................ 239 Aleksandar Malecic, University of Nis, Serbia Related References .................................................................................................... ........................ 261 Compilation of References .................................................................................................... ........... 292 About the Contributors .................................................................................................... ................ 325 Index .................................................................................................... ............................................... 329 . (shrink)

It is common to hear talk of the aim of belief and to find philosophers appealing to that aim for numerous explanatory purposes. What belief 's aim explains depends, of course, on what that aim is. Many hold that it is somehow related to truth, but there are various ways in which one might specify belief 's aim using the notion of truth. In this article, by considering whether they can account for belief 's standard of correctness and the epistemic (...) norms governing belief, I argue against certain prominent specifications of belief 's aim given in terms of truth, and advance a neglected alternative. (shrink)

The existential analysis -- The death of dasein -- The timeliness of dasein -- The derivation of time -- The time of being.

To raise the question of the nature of narrative is to invite reflection on the very nature of culture and, possibly, even on the nature of humanity itself. So natural is the impulse to narrate, so inevitable is the form of narrative for any report of the way things really happened, that narrativity could appear problematical only in a culture in which it was absent—absent or, as in some domains of Western intellectual and artistic culture, programmatically refused. As a panglobal (...) fact of culture, narrative and narration are less problems than simply data. As the late Roland Barthes remarked, narrative "is simply there like life itself . . . international, transhistorical, transcultural."1 Far from being a problem, then, narrative might well be considered a solution to a problem of general human concern, namely, the problem of how to translate knowing into telling,2 the problem of fashioning human experience into a form assimilable to structures of meaning that are generally human rather than culture-specific. We may not be able fully to comprehend specific thought patterns of another culture, but we have relatively less difficulty understanding a story coming from another culture, however exotic that culture may appear to us. As Barthes says, "narrative...is translatable without fundamental damage" in a way that a lyric poem or a philosophical discourse is not. · 1. Roland Barthes, "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives," Music, Image, Text, trans. Stephen Heath , p. 79.· 2. The words "narrative," "narration," "to narrate," and so on derive via the Latin gnārus and narro from the Sanskrit root gnâ . The same root yields γνωριμος : see Emile Boisacq, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque , under the entry for this word. My thanks to Ted Morris of Cornell, one of our greatest etymologists. Hayden White, professor in the program of history of consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is the author of The Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, The Greco-Roman Tradition, and Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe. " The Narrativization of Real Events" appeared in the Summer 1981 issue of Critical Inquiry. Critical Responses to the present essay include Louis O. Mink's "Everyman His or Her Own Annalist", and Marilyn Robinson Waldman's "The Otherwise Unnoteworthy Year 711: A Reply to Hayden White," both in the Summer 1981 issue of Critical Inquiry. (shrink)

The author examines three fundamental concepts: existence, a priori knowledge, and value. These concepts have been recurrent concerns of western philosophy and also reveal important similarities and differences between the movements from which the author takes his departure.

In recent decades, a new scientific approach to understand, explain, and predict many features of religion has emerged. The cognitive science of religion has amassed research on the forces that shape the tendency for humans to be religious and on what forms belief takes. It suggests that religion, like language or music, naturally emerges in humans with tractable similarities. This new approach has profound implications for how we understand religion, including why it appears so easily, and why people are willing (...) to fight-and die for it. Yet it is not without its critics, and some fear that scholars are explaining the ineffable mystery of religion away, or by showing that religion is natural proves or disproves the existence of God. An Introduction to the Cognitive Science of Religion offers students and general readers an accessible introduction to the approach, providing an overview of key findings and the debates that shape it. The volume includes a glossary of key terms, and each chapter includes suggestions for further thought and further reading as well as chapter summaries highlighting key points. This book is an indispensable resource for introductory courses on religion and a much-needed option for advanced courses. (shrink)

The newly updated Right and Wrong 2nd Edition is an accessible introduction to the major traditions in western philosophical ethics, written in a lively and engaging style. It is designed for entry-level ethics courses and includes real-life ethical scenarios chosen to appeal directly to students. Greatly expanded and improved, this successful text introduces students to the major ethical traditions, and provides a simple methodology for resolving ethical dilemmas Treats teleological and deontological approaches to ethics as the two most important traditions, (...) but now includes chapters on virtue ethics and the ethics of care The very accessible writing style speaks directly to students’ own experience Draws examples from three types of real-life ethical scenarios submitted by students: academic dishonesty, partying, and personal relationships Provides a concise treatment of this notoriously complex subject, perfect for entry-level ethics and applied ethics courses. (shrink)

(2013). Brandom and Gadamer on the Hermeneutical (Il)legitimacy of Rational Reconstruction. International Journal of Philosophical Studies. ???aop.label???

In Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions, Sartre highlights how emotions can transform our perspective on the world in ways that might make our situations more bearable when we cannot see an easy or happy way out. The point of this chapter is to spell out and discuss Sartre’s theory of emotion as presented in the Sketch with two aims in mind. The first is to show that although emotions have the power to transform our perspectives on the world (...) in ways described by Sartre, Sartre is mistaken to think emotions comprise the cognitive transformations in question. The second aim is to show why on one plausible way of thinking about the relationship holding between emotions and the cognitive transformations they help to bring about, emotions turn out to be the very sort of things that Sartre claims at the outset they are not, namely types of bodily feelings or sensations, a view of emotion that can be accredited to William James. (shrink)