In this new volume in the Oxford Psychology Series, the author presents a highly readable account of the cognitive unconscious, focusing in particular on the problem of implicit learning. Implicit learning is defined as the acquisition of knowledge that takes place independently of the conscious attempts to learn and largely in the absence of explicit knowledge about what was acquired. One of the core assumptions of this argument is that implicit learning is a fundamental, "root" process, one that lies at (...) the very heart of the adaptive behavioral repertoire of every complex organism. The author's goals are to outline the essential features of implicit learning that have emerged from the many studies that have been carried out in a variety of experimental laboratories over the past several decades; to present the various alternative perspectives on this issue that have been proposed by other researchers and to try to accommodate these views with his own; to structure the literature so that it can be seen in the context of standard heuristics of evolutionary biology; to present the material within a functionalist approach and to try to show why the experimental data should be seen as entailing particular epistemological perspectives; and to present implicit processing as encompassing a general and ubiquitous set of operations that have wide currency and several possible applications. Chapter 1 begins with the core problem under consideration in this book, a characterization of "implicit learning" as it has come to be used in the literature. Reber puts this seemingly specialized topic into a general framework and suggests a theoretical model based on standard heuristics of evolutionary biology. In his account, Reber weaves a capsule history of interest in and work on the cognitive unconscious. Chapter 2 turns to a detailed overview of the experimental work on the acquisition of implicit knowledge, which currently is of great interest. Chapter 3 develops the evolutionary model within which one can see learning and cognition as richly intertwining issues and not as two distinct fields with one dominating the other. Finally, Chapter 4 explores a variety of entailments and speculations concerning implicit cognitive processes and their general role in the larger scope of human performance. (shrink)

This text explores the border between medical and social problems, the boundary between health and social change. The book studies the body as the mediator between individual and collective experience, finding that many health problems, for example the trauma of violence or depression in the course of chronic pain, are less individual medical problems than interpersonal experiences of social suffering. It argues for an ethnographic approach to moral practice in medicine, one that embraces the infrapolitical context of illness, responses to (...) it, the social institutions relating to it and the way it is configured in medical ethics. (shrink)

Reviewing his life's work in several areas, Koestler shows that the development of human intelligence mirrors the hierarchical order of the universe, examines links between creativity and humor, science, and art, and criticizes the behaviorist theory of cultural evolution.

A long tradition of research including classical rhetoric, esthetics and poetics theory, formalism and structuralism, as well as current perspectives in (neuro)cognitive poetics has investigated structural and functional aspects of literature reception. Despite a wealth of literature published in specialized journals like Poetics, however, still little is known about how the brain processes and creates literary and poetic texts. Still, such stimulus material might be suited better than other genres for demonstrating the complexities with which our brain constructs the world (...) in and around us, because it unifies thought and language, music and imagery in a clear, manageable way, most often with play, pleasure, and emotion (Schrott and Jacobs, 2011 ). In this paper, I discuss methods and models for investigating the neuronal and cognitive-affective bases of literary reading together with pertinent results from studies on poetics, text processing, emotion, or neuroaesthetics, and outline current challenges and future perspectives. (shrink)

This is the first volume compiling English translations of Leibniz's journal articles on natural philosophy, presenting a selection of 26 articles, only three of which have appeared before in English translation. It also includes in full Leibniz's public controversies with De Catelan, Papin, and Hartsoeker. The articles include work in optics, on the fracture strength of materials, and on motion in a resisting medium, and Leibniz's pioneering applications of his calculus to these issues by construing them as mini-max and inverse (...) tangent problems. Other topics covered by the articles include: criticisms of the Cartesian estimate of motive force and Leibniz's proposal of a different way of estimating force to replace it; a proposed theory of celestial motions and gravitation, and derivation of the inverse square law; challenge problems concerning the isochronous curve and the catenary; a sample of work on gaming theory; and Leibniz's critique of atomism. (shrink)

Through arresting narratives we meet a woman aiding refugees in sub-Saharan Africa, facing the chaos of a meaningless society and a doctor trying to stay alive during Mao's cultural revolution - individuals challenged by their societies and in existential moral experiences that define what it means to be human.

There are competing ethical concerns when it comes to designing any clinical research study. Clinical trials of possible treatments for Ebola virus are no exception. If anything, the competing ethical concerns are exacerbated in trying to find answers to a deadly, rapidly spreading, infectious disease. The primary goal of current research is to identify experimental therapies that can cure Ebola or cure it with reasonable probability in infected individuals. Pursuit of that goal must be methodologically sound, practical and consistent with (...) prevailing norms governing human subjects research. Some maintain that only randomized controlled trials with a placebo or standard-of-care arm can meet these conditions. We maintain that there are alternative trial designs that can do so as well and that sometimes these are preferable to RCTs. (shrink)

Few philosophers are as widely read or as widely misunderstood as Friedrich Nietzsche. When Danto's classic study was first published in 1965, many regarded Nietzsche as a brilliant but somewhat erratic thinker. Danto, however, presented a radically different picture, arguing that Nietzsche offered a systematic and coherent philosophy that anticipated many of the questions that define contemporary philosophy. Danto's clear and insightful commentaries helped canonize Nietzsche as a philosopher and continue to illuminate subtleties in Nietzsche's work as well as his (...) immense contributions to the philosophies of science, language, and logic. This new edition, which includes five additional essays, not only further enhances our understanding of Nietzsche's philosophy; it responds to the misunderstandings that continue to muddy his intellectual reputation. Even today, Nietzsche is seen as everything from a precursor of feminism and deconstruction to a prophetic writer and spokesperson for disgruntled teenage boys. As Danto points out in his preface, Nietzsche's writings have purportedly inspired recent acts of violence and school shootings. Danto counters these misreadings by elaborating an anti-Nietzschian philosophy from within Nietzsche's own philosophy "in the hope of disarming the rabid Nietzsche and neutralizing the vivid frightening images that have inspired sociopaths for over a century." The essays also consider specific works by Nietzsche, including _Human, All Too Human_ and _The Genealogy of Morals_, as well as the philosopher's artistic metaphysics and semantical nihilism. (shrink)

Surveys philosophy from the neo-Platonists to St. Anselm, showing how Greek philosophy took the form in which it was known to its cultural inheritors and how ...

In this paper I challenge the usual interpretations of Newton's and Leibniz's views on the nature of space and the relativity of motion. Newton's ‘relative space’ is not a reference frame; and Leibniz did not regard space as defined with respect to actual enduring bodies. Newton did not subscribe to the relativity of intertial motions; whereas Leibniz believed no body to be at rest, and Newton's absolute motion to be a useful fiction. A more accurate rendering of the opposition between (...) them, I argue, leads to a wholly different understanding of Leibniz's theory of space, one which is not susceptible to the objections Newton had raised against Descartes regarding the representation of motion. This in turn suggests a new approach for contemporary theory of space, one which neither hypostatizes space nor tries to reduce it to relations among actual things. * This work was generously supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, with a Fellowship for College Teachers and Independent Scholars (FB-26897-89), and also by a sabbatical leave from my institution, Middlebury College. Iam very grateful to various members of faculty of York University for their appreciative reception of an earlier one-week-old version of this paper. ‘Relative Space in Newton and Leibniz’, read to the Department of Philosophy there in January 1990, and to Robert Rynasiewicz for criticisms of an extract read at the 1991 History of Science meeting. (shrink)

Recently, American Psychologist published a review of the evidence for parapsychology that supported the general claims of psi (the umbrella term often used for anomalous or paranormal phenomena). We present an opposing perspective and a broad-based critique of the entire parapsychology enterprise. Our position is straightforward. Claims made by parapsychologists cannot be true. The effects reported can have no ontological status; the data have no existential value. We examine a variety of reasons for this conclusion based on well-understood scientific principles. (...) In the classic English adynaton, “pigs cannot fly.” Hence, data that suggest that they can are necessarily flawed and result from weak methodology or improper data analyses or are Type I errors. So it must be with psi effects. What we find particularly intriguing is that, despite the existential impossibility of psi phenomena and the nearly 150 years of efforts during which there has been, literally, no progress, there are still scientists who continue to embrace the pursuit. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

In Danto's view, Andy Warhol's Brillo Box was not only a radical attack on traditional definitions of the art work; it brought the history of Western art to a close. In this collection of interconnected essays, he grapples with this and many more of the most challenging issues in art today, from the problems of contemporary pluralism to the dilemmas of censorship and state support for artists.

Matthew Lipman’s Thinking in Education develops an approach to philosophical inquiry with children (PwC) that claims to develop critical, creative and caring thinking. With Lipman, these kinds of thinking are primarily tied to analytic-logical commitments, and as such, his approach concerns only one way to conceptualize thinking. To address this issue and create space for another understanding, I introduce the concept of affect based on the work of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. From a theoretical perspective, affect helps to deepen (...) the relationship between thinking, the body and experience in PwC; in addition, from a practical standpoint, it expands and enriches facilitation practices and curriculum design. To explore affect, I first show why PwC would benefit from such a theoretical expansion while also looking at connections already present within the literature on PwC. After a brief overview of affect theory and some of its initial applications to education, I propose a reading of Deleuzian affect augmented by thinkers like Claire Colebrook and Brian Massumi. Finally, I explore philosophical inquiry through affect and suggest how facilitation practices and curriculum design can respond in lieu of this conceptualization. This response examines several areas: inquiry, concepts, the community and ethical-political engagement. (shrink)

Persuasive and humane, this classic of philosophy offers Schopenhauer's fullest examination of ethical themes, articulating a descriptive form of ethics that contradicts the rationally based prescriptive theories. Starting with his polemic against Kant's ethics of duty, Schopenhauer argues that compassion forms the basis of morality, and he outlines a perspective on ethics in which passion and desire correspond to different moral characters, behaviors, and worldviews. He further defines his metaphysics of morals, employing Kant’s transcendental idealism to illustrate both the interconnectiveness (...) of being and the affinity of his ethics to Eastern thought. (shrink)

In this paper I offer a fresh interpretation of Leibniz’s theory of space, in which I explain the connection of his relational theory to both his mathematical theory of analysis situs and his theory of substance. I argue that the elements of his mature theory are not bare bodies (as on a standard relationalist view) nor bare points (as on an absolutist view), but situations. Regarded as an accident of an individual body, a situation is the complex of its angles (...) and distances to other co-existing bodies, founded in the representation or state of the substance or substances contained in the body. The complex of all such mutually compatible situations of co-existing bodies constitutes an order of situations, or instantaneous space. Because these relations of situation change from one instant to another, space is an accidental whole that is continuously changing and becoming something different, and therefore a phenomenon. As Leibniz explains to Clarke, it can be represented mathematically by supposing some set of existents hypothetically (and counterfactually) to remain in a fixed mutual relation of situation, and gauging all subsequent situations in terms of transformations with respect to this initial set. Space conceived in terms of such allowable transformations is the subject of Analysis Situs. Finally, insofar as space is conceived in abstraction from any bodies that might individuate the situations, it encompasses all possible relations of situation. This abstract space, the order of all possible situations, is an abstract entity, and therefore ideal. (shrink)

When everyone can be a publisher, what distinguishes the journalist? This article considers contemporary challenges to institutional roles in a digital media environment and then turns to three broad journalistic normative values - authenticity, accountability, and autonomy - that affect the credibility of journalists and the content they provide. A set of questions that can help citizens determine the trustworthiness of information available to them emerges from the discussion.

Reductio arguments are notoriously inconclusive, a fact which no doubt contributes to their great fecundity. For once a contradiction has been proved, it is open to interpretation which premise should be given up. Indeed, it is often a matter of great creativity to identify what can be consistently given up. A case in point is a traditional paradox of the infinite provided by Galileo Galilei in his Two New Sciences, which has since come to be known as Galileo’s Paradox. It (...) concerns the set of all numbers, N: since to every number there is a corresponding square, there are as many squares as numbers. But since there are non-squares between the squares, “all numbers, comprising the squares and the non-squares, are greater than the squares alone”, i.e. there must be fewer numbers in the set of all squares S than in N. Thus N is both equal to and greater than S. This is a contradiction, so one of the premises must be given up: the question is, which one? (shrink)

The author examines recent developments in parapsychological research and explains their implications for physicists.

We construct a variety of inner models exhibiting features usually obtained by forcing over universes with large cardinals. For example, if there is a supercompact cardinal, then there is an inner model with a Laver indestructible supercompact cardinal. If there is a supercompact cardinal, then there is an inner model with a supercompact cardinal κ for which 2κ = κ+, another for which 2κ = κ++ and another in which the least strongly compact cardinal is supercompact. If there is a (...) strongly compact cardinal, then there is an inner model with a strongly compact cardinal, for which the measurable cardinals are bounded below it and another inner model W with a strongly compact cardinal κ, such that \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${H^{V}_{\kappa^+} \subseteq {\rm HOD}^W}$$\end{document}. Similar facts hold for supercompact, measurable and strongly Ramsey cardinals. If a cardinal is supercompact up to a weakly iterable cardinal, then there is an inner model of the Proper Forcing Axiom and another inner model with a supercompact cardinal in which GCH + V = HOD holds. Under the same hypothesis, there is an inner model with level by level equivalence between strong compactness and supercompactness, and indeed, another in which there is level by level inequivalence between strong compactness and supercompactness. If a cardinal is strongly compact up to a weakly iterable cardinal, then there is an inner model in which the least measurable cardinal is strongly compact. If there is a weakly iterable limit δ of <δ-supercompact cardinals, then there is an inner model with a proper class of Laver-indestructible supercompact cardinals. We describe three general proof methods, which can be used to prove many similar results. (shrink)

Brian Garrett constructs cases satisfying Andy Hamilton’s definition of weak q‐memory. This does not establish that a peculiar kind of memory is at least conceptually coherent. Any ‘apparent memory experiences’ that satisfy the definition turn out not to involve remembering anything at all. This conclusion follows if we accept, as both Hamilton and Garrett do, a variety of first‐person authority according to which memory judgements may be false, but not on the ground that someone other than the remembering subject had (...) the remembered experience. Garrett’s brain‐bisection illustration sounds convincing, but only because we retain the idea that the subjects created by implanting a hemisphere each in two different bodies are entitled to say that they remember experiences before the surgery in the ordinary sense. To that extent the illustration presents a case of ordinary memory, not q‐memory. (shrink)

We show that the theories “ZFC \ There is a supercompact cardinal” and “ZFC \ There is a supercompact cardinal \ Level by level inequivalence between strong compactness and supercompactness holds” are equiconsistent.