In this presentation we shall discuss the nature of mind vis-a-vis the brain and computers. Such a comparison presumes a general equivalence of brains and computers and models the brain as a huge biological computer, with consciousness added. The uniqueness of Mind in the lines of ancient Indian thought has been accpted as the basic concept in the analysis. Regarding the chief difference between mind and brain, material of the mind is taken to be subtle matter.The brain is made of (...) gross matter and is a part of the physical body. Considering the brain and the computer, the brain is a biological structure made of organic molecules, whereas computer chips are inorganic objects manufactured by etching circuits on the surface of silica chips. Thus the human brain, occupying volume, is a volumetric entity whereas a computer, as electronic circuitry on a silica chip, is an areal entity. This explains the vast processing power andexceptional capabilities of the human brain. (shrink)

In a series of recent papers, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong has used findings in social psychology to put pressure on the claim that our moral beliefs can be non-inferentially justified. More specifically, he has suggested that insofar as our moral intuitions are subject to what psychologists call framing effects, this poses a real problem for moral intuitionism. In this paper, we are going to try to add more fuel to the empirical fire that Sinnott-Armstrong has placed under the feet of the intuitionist. (...) Along the way, we first provide an overview of what Sinnott-Armstrong calls the Master Argument against intuitionism. Then we examine some of the literature on framing effects—especially as it pertains to moral philosophy. Finally, we present the results of a new study which create yet another hurdle intuitionists must clear if they want to motivate their view. It appears that in addition to being influenced by framing effects, our moral intuitions are also influenced by an actor–observer bias as well—a bias whereby we hold other people to different moral standards than we would hold ourselves even if we were in the same situation. If we’re right, the burden is on the moral intuitionist to explain why we should have faith in our moral intuitions despite the gathering evidence concerning their seeming unreliability. And by our lights, this is something that simply cannot be done from the armchair. (shrink)

Sartre's moral thinking progressed from an abstract, idealistic ethics of authenticity to a more concrete, realistic, and materialistic morality. Much of Sartre's important unpublished work on ethics - relevant to both his 'first' and his 'second' ethics - has become available to scholars only in the years since his death. Only now has it become possible to give a complete presentation of both the first and the second ethics and to accurately identify their relationship. Sartre's Two Ethics also presents Professor (...) Anderson's original criticisms of Sartre's two ethics, and concludes that the second is a significant advance over the first. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that internalistic foundationalist theories of the justification of memory belief are inadequate. Taking a discussion of John Pollock as a starting point, I argue against any theory that requires a memory belief to be based on a phenomenal state in order to be justified. I then consider another version of internalistic foundationalism and claim that it, too, is open to important objections. Finally, I note that both varieties of foundationalism fail to account for the epistemic (...) status of our justified nonoccurrent beliefs, and hence are drastically incomplete. (shrink)

This article examines some of the main tenets of competition theory in light of the theory of evolution and the concept of an ecological niche. The principle of competitive exclusion and the related assumption that communities exist at competitive equilibrium - fundamental parts of many competition theories and models - may be violated if non-equilibrium conditions exist in natural communities or are incorporated into competition models. Furthermore, these two basic tenets of competition theory are not compatible with the theory of (...) evolution. Variation in ecologically significant environmental factors and non-equilibrium in population numbers should occur in most natural communities, and such changes have important effects on community relations, niche overlap, and the evolution of ecosystems. Ecologists should view competition as a process occurring within a complexdynamic system, and should be wary of theoretical positions built upon simple laboratory experiments or simplistic mathematical models.In considering the relationship between niche overlap and competition, niche overlap should not be taken as a sufficient condition for competition; many factors may prevent or diminish competition between populations with similar resource utilization patterns. The typically opposing forces of intraspecific and interspecific competition need to be simultaneously considered, for it is the balance between them that in large part determines niche boundaries. (shrink)

Hass wird in der Arbeit als eine anhaltende affektive Gesinnung verstanden, die auf eine erlebte Kränkung oder Ungerechtigkeit zurückgeht und auf Rache an ihrem Urheber, in extre­men Fällen auf die Vernichtung des Feindes gerichtet ist. Die Dynamik und Radikalität insbesondere des malignen Hasses resultiert, so die These des Autors, aus einer Affektretention, die durch die selbst empfundene Schwäche oder Ohnmacht des Hassenden bedingt ist. Durch diesen Rückstau wird der Hass demnach in der Latenzphase immer weiter genährt, bis er schließlich in (...) akute destruktive Handlungen umschlagen kann. Als charakteristische Struktur des Hasses wird dabei eine Dialektik von Selbststeigerung und Selbstdestruktivität mit fortschreitender Entleerung des Selbst herausgearbeitet. Diese indivi­duelle Dynamik findet sich in oft potenzierter Form im Hass von Gruppen wieder. Der Autor untersucht die Phänomenologie des Hasses und die daraus resultierende Form von Destruktivität anhand literarischer Beispiele, psychischer Störungen und gesellschaftlicher Phänomene. (shrink)

In recent years historians have revisited the creation of the United Nations (UN) system by highlighting the enduring influence of Empire and recognizing the substantial role of cultural and scientific actors in wartime international diplomacy. The British biochemist Joseph Needham, who participated in the creation of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), was one of them. Yet, if historians have recognized his role as the leading architect of the sciences at UNESCO, they still fall short of engaging (...) with the Chinese and imperial geography of his involvement with UNESCO. During the Second World War, Needham was stationed in war-torn China. As director of the Sino-British Scientific Cooperation Office, Needham not only organized Sino-British scientific cooperation against the Japanese invasion, but his mission inspired his engagement for a reform of international science and fueled an international campaign that led him to become the director of UNESCO’s Natural Science division after the war. By reconstructing his campaign in context, this article seeks to demonstrate how the imperial and transnational scientific networks of the wartime era fostered the creation of a scientific mandate for UNESCO. It situates Needham’s activism and ideas in the context of the Sino-Japanese war, imperial wartime technocracy, and China’s scientific nationalism. In so doing, it reveals a string of forgotten partners from China and the British Empire. Their conception of a reorganized international science and shared belief in modern science and its ideal of universality shaped Needham’s vision for science at UNESCO, while their activism contributed decisively to the success of his campaign. This inquiry hence participates in recent efforts to challenge the existing Eurocentrism corseting the historiography of the UN and expands the historiography of scientific internationalism beyond Europe and North America. Importantly, it also contributes to uncovering the technocratic ties established between Empire and the UN system from its onset. (shrink)

Neurath's proposal for the form of protocol statements explicates the multiple embedding of a singular sentence as specifying different conditions for the acceptance of such a sentence as a bona fide scientific datum. Before theories are accepted or rejected in the light of such evidence, however, a further condition must be met which Neurath did not formalize. The different conditions are discussed and shown to constitute a naturalistic theory of scientific data and a pragmatic theory of theory acceptance.

Hedge funds are targets of mounting ethical criticism. The most salient focuses on their opacity. Hedge funds are structured to block transparency for strategic reasons: that is, they systematically deny information to their own investors and to governments in order to protect their competitive advantage, even though the information they hide holds tremendous significance for the interests of both groups. In this article I will detail the ethical allegations made against hedge funds, showing why their opacity creates intractable conflicts that (...) cannot be resolved through government regulation. Sometimes opacity be regulated away; but with hedge funds I show why it cannot because of “regulatory recalcitrance.” In the end a form of voluntary moral coordination, a form of “microsocial contract” instituted as an industry standard, is required relief. In a word, the solution to hedge fund opacity is ethical. (shrink)

The large, professionally managed corporation is the distinctive economic institution of the twentieth century. It has proved uniquely effective in mobilizing resources and knowledge; increasing productivity; and creating new technologies, products, and services. Corporations have proliferated and grown because they meet the needs of various members of society: customers, workers and communities, as well as investors. The worldwide spread of corporate activity has produced an increasingly integrated and interdependent global economy.The success of the corporation, however, inevitably gives rise to questions (...) and criticisms. Corporations are spontaneous and voluntary associations in which diverse individuals and interests collaborate for the creation and distribution of wealth. Some critics question whether organizations with the vast scale and scope of contemporary multinationals can be effectively controlled and directed toward these purposes. Others are concerned about the limited range of interests directly represented in corporate governance, and the lack of openness in corporate decision-making. And, as multinational corporations expand their activities and linkages, both corporate managers and their critics search for principles for action that transcend national borders and cultural values, and modes of operation that will achieve the broad purposes of the corporation on a long-term and sustainable basis, without undue conflict with diverse human and social norms. (shrink)

Interpretations of Heidegger often fail to distinguish between two very different matters -- on the one hand “the turn” (die Kehre), and on the other hand “the change in Heidegger’s thinking” (die Wendung im Denken), that is, the shift in the way Heidegger formulated and presented his philosophy beginning in the 1930s. Failure to make this distinction can be disastrous for understanding Heidegger, and the danger becomes more acute the closer one gets to texts like Introduction to Metaphysics, where both (...) the “turn” and the “change” begin to come into their own.1.. (shrink)

Abstract This paper examines the treatment of thick ethical concepts in Williams's work in order to evaluate the consistency of his treatment of ethical and epistemic concepts and to assess whether the idea of a thick concept can be extended from ethics to epistemology. A virtue epistemology is described modeled on a cognitivist virtue ethics. Williams's genealogy of the virtues surrounding propositional knowledge (the virtues of ?truthfulness?) is critically evaluated. It is concluded that this genealogy is an important contribution to (...) the project of virtue epistemology. Thick concepts must not only feature in the account but will sustain more of the marks of objectivity than their ethical counterparts. This is so even on Williams's demanding assumptions. (shrink)

The tragedies of the past decade have led to an identity crisis among humanitarians. Respecting traditional principles of neutrality and impartiality and operating procedures based on consent has created as many problems as it has solved.

For Thomas Aquinas, the Book of Job is the authoritative teaching concerning divine providence. In his Literal Exposition on Job, Aquinas offers a line-by-line commentary on the scriptural text. He analyzes the text not only by way of cross-references within the Book of Job and to other parts of Scripture, but also by appeal to the writings of Aristotle, the Church Fathers, and other Christian Aristotelians. Anthony Damico's translation is more literal than literary, preferring to render the Latin words (...) wherever possible by their obvious English derivatives. Martin Yaffe provides an extensive interpretive essay, bibliography, and indexes of citations. (shrink)

Determining whether US companies and some of the persons involved in them are acting ethically when conducting the research described in the Havrix Case and the Surfaxin Trial requires reflection on the moral objections that could be raised against what they did. Given the wide range of possible moral objections, it would be folly to try to display and discuss them all in the space of this essay. I concentrate then on a kind of moral objections that strike me as (...) especially interesting, plausible, and important. I try to work out whether such objections are valid and, if so, what significance they have for the conduct of the pharmaceutical companies in question — and for the conduct of ourselves as citizens of democratic countries under whose jurisdiction these companies operate. (shrink)

Abstract. Value judgments are meaningless. This thesis was one of the notorious tenets of Carnap’s mature logical empiricism. Less well known is the fact that in the Aufbau values were con-sidered as philosophically respectable entities that could be constituted from value experiences. About 1930, however, values were banished to the realm of meaning-less me-taphysics, and Carnap came to endorse a strict emotivism. The aim of this paper is to shed new light on the question why Carnap abandoned his originally positive (...) attitude concerning values. It is argued that Carnap’s non-cognitivist attitude was the symptom of a deep-rooted and never properly dissolved tension be-tween his conflicting inclinations towards Neokantianism and Lebensphilosophie. In America Carnap’s non-cognitivism became a major obstacle for a closer collaboration between lo-gical empiricists and American pragmatists. Carnap’s persisting ad---herence to the dualism of practical life and theoretical science was the ultimate reason why he could not accept Morris’s and Kaplan’s pragmatist the-ses that cognitivism might well are compatible with a logical and empiricist scientific philosophy. (shrink)

Although this thesis is denied by much recent scholarship, Ockham holds that the ultimate ground of a moral judgement's truth is a divine command, rather than natural or non-natural properties. God could assign a different moral value not only to every exterior act, but also to loving God. Ockham does allow that someone who has not had access to revelation can make correct moral judgements. Although her right reason dictates what God in fact commands, she need not know that God (...) so commands. Ockham's divine-command theory plays an important role in the shift away from a nature-based ethics, and it anticipates contemporary problems concerning truth in meta-ethics. (shrink)

The introduction of statistical models represented by directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) has proved fruitful in the construction of expert systems, in allowing efficient updating algorithms that take advantage of conditional independence relations (Pearl, 1988, Lauritzen et al. 1993), and in inferring causal structure from conditional independence relations (Spirtes and Glymour, 1991, Spirtes, Glymour and Scheines, 1993, Pearl and Verma, 1991, Cooper, 1992). As a framework for representing the combination of causal and statistical hypotheses, DAG models have shed light on a (...) number of issues in statistics ranging from Simpson’s Paradox to experimental design (Spirtes, Glymour and Scheines, 1993). The relations of DAGs with statistical constraints, and the equivalence and distinguishability properties of DAG models, are now well understood, and their characterization and computation involves three properties connecting graphical structure and probability distributions: (i) a local directed Markov property, (ii) a global directed Markov property, (iii) and factorizations of joint densities according to the structure of a graph (Lauritizen, et al., 1990). (shrink)

Over the past twenty-five years, Thomas Nagel has played a major role in the philosophico-biological debate on subjectivity and consciousness. This extensive collection of published essays and reviews offers Nagel's opinionated views on the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and political philosophy, as well as on fellow philosophers like Freud, Wittgenstein, Rawls, Dennett, Chomsky, Searle, Nozick, Dworkin, and MacIntyre.

Biographical note: Thomas Alkemeyer (Dr. phil.) ist Professor für Soziologie und Sportsoziologie an der Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg. Ulrich Bröckling (Dr. phil.) ist Professor für Kultursoziologie an der Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg. Tobias Peter (Dr. rer. pol.) ist wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter am Institut für Soziologie der Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg.

The Making of Western Indology: Henry Thomas Colebrooke and the East India Company. By Rosane Rocher and Ludo Rocher. Royal Asiatic Society Books. London: Routledge, 2012. Pp. xv + 238, 5 plates. $145.

An anthology of previously unpublished essays from some of the most outstanding scholars working in philosophy, mathematics, and computer science today, _Self-Reference_ reexamines the latest theories of self-reference, including those that attempt to explain and resolve the semantic and set-theoretic paradoxes. With a thorough introduction that contextualizes the subject for students, this book will be important reading for anyone interested in the general area of self-reference and philosophy.

This article examines Augustine’s early anthropology, particularly through De Genesi aduersus Manichaeos. The most thorough treatment of this topic is found in the enduring work of Robert J. O’Connell, SJ. O’Connell argues that Augustine drew directly from the Enneads in De Genesi aduersus Manichaeos to formulate his anthropology. This article evaluates and critiques the evidence and implications of O’Connell’s position concerning Augustine’s articulation of the “fall of the soul.” I argue that an attentive text-based reading of De Genesi aduersus Manichaeos (...) reveals the shortcomings of O’Connell’s “Plotinian” rendering of Augustine’s anthropology. More importantly, I show that De Genesi aduersus Manichaeos illuminates dimensions of Augustine’s anthropology often overlooked. These include the human’s transformation to spiritalis through Christ and the eschatological configuration of the caeleste corpus. In contrast to O’Connell’s theory, which emphasizes the necessary “circularity” of Augustine’s anthropological framework (that is, the soul “returns” to a condition identical to the aboriginal state), I argue that in De Genesi aduersus Manichaeos Augustine advances an anthropology that is not merely “circular.”. (shrink)

Nominalists, who believe that everything there is is concrete and nothing is abstract, seem to have a problem with mathematics. Mathematics says that there are lots of prime numbers, and prime numbers don’t seem to be concrete. What should a nominalist do with mathematics? In the last few decades several programs in the philosophy of mathematics have been formulated which are, more or less explicitly, accounts of what a nominalist can say about mathematics. These programs, and the criticism of them, (...) make up a substantial part of the literature in the philosophy of mathematics during this time. Usually such a program involves two parts. One is purely philosophical. It deals with the motivation for nominalism, and argues why certain technical results would show that nominalists have an account of mathematics. The other part is to provide the technical results needed in the program. (shrink)

7984 Marius is a minor planet located in the asteroid main-belt region between Mars and Jupiter, which formed about 4.5 billion years ago when the planets emerged from the dense gas and dust disk around the Sun. The asteroid has an orbit with a semi-major axis of 2.63 AU, an eccentricity of 0.20, and an inclination of 9.1°, with an orbital period of 4.27 years. Light curves indicate a rotation period of 3.54 h and a slightly elongated shape. A radiometric (...) analysis of infrared observations shows that 7984 Marius has a low albedo of about 6% and a diameter of approximately 10.5 km. The low albedo points toward a possible carbonaceous surface composition. Its absolute magnitude is 13.6 mag, and the object reaches a maximum brightness of about 16.4 mag during favorable oppositions. (shrink)

En la época moderna se prioriza uno de nuestros dos «lados», el «lado» analítico, a expensas de nuestro «lado» más sintético e intuitivo. Las nefastas consecuencias del énfasis en la razón instrumental que empezó en la época de Francis Bacon han sido descritoselocuentemente por varios pensadores importantes, incluyendo Max Weber, Martin Heidegger y Jürgen Habermas. El descuido de nuestras capacidades imaginativas puede empobrecer nuestras producciones artísticas y científicas y puede dificultar el acceso a la experiencia religiosa. La solución pasa por (...) fomentar las habilidades que están siendo marginadas progresivamente en el sistema educativo actual en un intento de conseguir un sano equilibrio o armonía entre las distintas habilidades cognitivas del ser humano. (shrink)