The basic principles of scientific research from the great French physiologist whose contributions in the 19th century included the discovery of vasomotor nerves; nature of curare and other poisons in human body; more.

An updated and expanded successor to Culver and Gert's Philosophy in Medicine, this book integrates moral philosophy with clinical medicine to present a comprehensive summary of the theory, concepts, and lines of reasoning underlying the ...

Cinematic time -- The cinema of consciousness -- I and we : the American politics of adoption -- The malaise of our educational institutions -- Making (the) difference -- Technoscience and reproduction.

This new translation of four revised radio interviews, conducted in December 2002 at France Culture with Elie During, is the best introduction to Stiegler's Time and Technics series. This collection includes a new interview conducted specially for this volume and an interview with Artpress from 2001. In Philosophising By Accident, Stiegler introduces some of the key arguments about the technical constitution of the human and its relation to politics, aesthetics and economics. He reads philosophical texts from the perspective of his (...) controversial thesis about the three types of memory and speaks about concepts central to his later works, such as synchrony/diachrony, grammatisation and the industrial temporal object. (shrink)

Today’s question concerning technology involves asking about both the post-pandemic world and the post-data-economy world, in a situation where resentments and scapegoats are easily generated. We c...

This essay asks why Aristotle, certainly no friend to unlimited democracy, seems so much more comfortable with unconstrained rhetoric in political deliberation than current defenders of deliberative democracy. It answers this question by reconstructing and defending a distinctly Aristotelian understanding of political deliberation, one that can be pieced together out of a series of separate arguments made in the Rhetoric, the Politics, and the Nicomachean Ethics.

Current thinking and research on consciousness and the brain.

Collingwood’s account of re-enactment is often misunderstood as providing methodological guidance to historians. Williams’s chapter is perceptive in seeing through this erroneous interpretation. Williams is however very critical of Collingwood’s account of the relationship between philosophy and history. He reads Collingwood’s account of absolute presuppositions as embracing a form of ‘radical historicism’ and argues that, like many other philosophers who reject foundationalism, Collingwood tends to use the word ‘we’ in an evasive way, both in an inclusive sense “as implying universalistic (...) preconditions on interpretation and intelligibility” and in a contrastive sense “under which ‘we’ here and now are distinct from others elsewhere and elsewhen, who lived in others and different intelligible human formations”. William’s chapter appropriately introduces this volume since the question concerning the nature of absolute presuppositions, and in what sense they can be said to be constitutive of the forms of inquiry which they make possible, is a central concern of this collection and is discussed by several contributors. (shrink)

Williamson (2000) [Knowledge and its Limits, Oxford: Oxford University Press] argues that attempts to substitute narrow mental states or narrow/environmental composites for broad and factive mental states will result in poorer explanations of behavior. I resist Williamson.

The justification of Bayes' rule by cognitive rationality principles is undertaken by extending the propositional axiom systems usually proposed in two contexts of belief change: revising and updating. Probabilistic belief change axioms are introduced, either by direct transcription of the set-theoretic ones, or in a stronger way but nevertheless in the spirit of the underlying propositional principles. Weak revising axioms are shown to be satisfied by a General Conditioning rule, extending Bayes' rule but also compatible with others, and weak updating (...) axioms by a General Imaging rule, extending Lewis' rule. Strong axioms (equivalent to the Miller–Popper axiom system) are necessary to justify Bayes' rule in a revising context, and justify in fact an extended Bayes' rule which applies, even if the message has zero probability. (shrink)

In this paper, we analyze the astronomical tables in al-Zīj al-Muqtabis by Ibn al-Kammād (early twelfth century, Córdoba), based on the Latin and Hebrew versions of the lost Arabic original, each of which is extant in a unique manuscript. We present excerpts of many tables and pay careful attention to their structure and underlying parameters. The main focus, however, is on the impact al-Muqtabis had on the astronomy that developed in the Iberian Peninsula and the Maghrib and, more generally, on (...) the transmission and diffusion of Indian astronomy in the West after the arrival of al-Khwārizmī’s astronomical tables in al-Andalus (Muslim Spain) in the tenth century. This tradition of Indian origin competed with the Greek tradition represented by al-Battānī’s astronomical tables and was much more alive in the Iberian Peninsula and the Maghrib than previously thought. From Spain, the Indian tradition entered mainstream European astronomy, where we find echoes of it in all versions of the Alfonsine Tables, both in manuscript and in the printed editions (beginning in 1483), as well as in Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus, published in 1543. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper reconsiders the arguments of my book, The Longing for Total Revolution, in response to the thoughtful analyses collected in this symposium. It restates the book’s main genealogical and critical arguments about the philosophical sources of uniquely modern forms of social discontent, while distinguishing those arguments from recent attempts to uncover the deeper, theological sources of discontent. It focuses, in particular, on the role played in modern social discontent by the group of thinkers I describe as the “Kantian (...) left”: a long line of social critics who sought to “realize” Kant’s understanding of human autonomy in society, thereby gaining what Marx called “control and conscious mastery” over our social world, not just over our wills. (shrink)

Abduction was first introduced in the epistemological context of scientific discovery. It was more recently analyzed in artificial intelligence, especially with respect to diagnosis analysis or ordinary reasoning. These two fields share a common view of abduction as a general process of hypotheses formation. More precisely, abduction is conceived as a kind of reverse explanation where a hypothesis H can be abduced from events E if H is a good explanation of E. The paper surveys four known schemes for abduction (...) that can be used in both fields. Its first contribution is a taxonomy of these schemes according to a common semantic framework based on belief revision. Its second contribution is to produce, for each non-trivial scheme, a representation theorem linking its semantic framework to a set of postulates. Its third contribution is to present semantic and axiomatic arguments in favor of one of these schemes, ordered abduction, which has never been vindicated in the literature. (shrink)

The relationship between applied ethics and moral theory is not merely one in which the former benefits from the latter, rather it is one that is mutually beneficial. But before either can benefit, the moral theory must be sufficiently developed and precise that there are few if any disagreements on how it applies to particular cases. In this paper, I shall present a summary of the theory I have developed in The Moral Rules and then try to show how attempting (...) to apply it to particular cases not only helps one to get clearer about the cases, but also enables one to improve the theory. In particular I shall show how attempting to apply the same theory to different fields and to different kinds of cases forces one to recognize that there is a wider array of morally relevant features than at first seems to be the case. (shrink)

Bertrand Russell presented three systems of propositional logic, one first in Principles of Mathematics, University Press, Cambridge, 1903 then in “The Theory of Implication”, Routledge, New York, London, pp. 14–61, 1906) and culminating with Principia Mathematica, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1910. They are each based on different primitive connectives and axioms. This paper follows “Peirce’s Law” through those systems with the aim of understanding some of the notorious peculiarities of the 1910 system and so revealing some of the early history (...) of classical propositional logic. “Peirce’s Law” is a valid formula of elementary propositional logic: [ ⊃ p] ⊃ p This sentence is not even a theorem in the 1910 system although it is one of the axioms in 1903 and is proved as a theorem in 1906. Although it is not proved in 1910, the two lemmas from the proof in 1906 occur as theorems, and Peirce’s Law could have been derived from them in a two step proof. The history of Peirce’s Law in Russell’s systems helps to reconstruct some of the history of axiomatic systems of classical propositional logic. (shrink)

In this article, I examine Nietzsche's famous claim that moralities are a “sign-language” or “symptomatology” of the affective states of moral agents. I sketch out the sentimentalist interpretation of this claim, which has become prevalent in the scholarly literature, and argue that it cannot be correct. The relation it posits between values and the affects that explain them displays certain distinctive characteristics—noncontingency, expressive transparency, and specificity—which the relation between affects and values Nietzsche envisages in the examples that illustrate his claim (...) ostensibly lacks. I argue that the relation between affects and values is better understood as functional, rather than expressive: he explains moral judgments by showing how they serve certain emotional needs of the agent. Thus, Nietzsche's claim is better understood as articulating a kind of sentimental pragmatism. I conclude with some brief thoughts on the relation between this pragmatism and sentimentalism. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Elusiveness of Fulfillment and Complete Resignation Nietzsche's “New Happiness” Notes References Further Reading.

Among the four components proposed by Sbarra and Coan to guide the research aimed at understanding the role of emotion in the connection between social relationship and health, I view the fourth one, labeled “transactional dimensions,” as offering particularly rich promises in this regard. To illustrate, I sketch the example of individual, interpersonal, and collective effects entailed by the process of social sharing of emotion. The example rests on the bidirectional flow of transactions that develops continuously between these three levels.

Written by a non-Jewish analytic philosopher, this book addresses the issue of whether, and to what extent, current opposition to Israel on the liberal-left embodies anti-Semitic stances. It argues that the dominant climate of liberal opinion disseminates, however inadvertently, a range of anti-Semitic assertions and motifs of the most traditional kind. It advocates a return to an unrestricted anti-racism which would allow liberals to defend Palestinian interests without demonizing Jews.

Issues concerning technological risk have increasingly become the subject of deliberative exercises involving participation of ordinary citizens. The most popular topic for deliberation has been genetically modified foods. Despite the varied circumstances of their establishment, deliberative “minipublics” almost always produce recommendations that reflect a worldview more “precautionary” than the “Promethean” outlook more common among governing elites. There are good structural reasons for this difference. Its existence raises the question of why elites sponsor mini-publics and if policy is little affected by (...) the results of deliberations, questions the possibility of deliberative legitimation of public policy. We make this argument by looking at mini-publics on GM foods in France, the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, and Switzerland. Deliberative legitimation becomes plausible if elites can attenuate their Promethean outlook. This is possible if ecological modernization discourse pervades their politics; Denmark provides an illustration. (shrink)

I show how a robot with what looks like a hard problem of consciousness might emerge from the earnest attempt to make a robot that is smart and self-reflective. This problem arises independently of any assumption to the effect that the robot is conscious, but deserves to be thought of as related to the human problem in virtue of the fact that (1) the problem is one the robot encounters when it tries to naturalistically reduce its own subjective states (2) (...) it seems incredibly difficult from the robot’s own naturalist perspective and, most importantly, (3) it invites the robot to engage in the exact same metaphysical responses as humans offer to the problem of consciousness. Despite the fact that it invites the robot to consider extravagant metaphysical solutions, the problem I explore is purely algorithmic. The robot cannot complete its naturalist physicalist reduction as a matter of algorithmic fact, whether or not the naturalist physicalist reduction would be correct as a matter of metaphysical fact. It is hoped that by reproducing the familiar seeming problem in an artificial context, a greater understanding of the human problem of consciousness can be achieved. (shrink)