This paper aims to provide an updated synthesis on the works of Archimedes and the fundamental impact these have had on subsequent mathematical practice. The influence his mathematical processes have had on modern mathematics and how these have helped develop the field is discussed in historical perspective. Some of the recent investigations into the Archimedes Palimpsest are discussed and synthesized, namely, how they alter our understanding of some of his earlier works, and how Archimedean principles are seen to have laid (...) the foundations of possible new branches of mathematics. (shrink)

Every day, new warnings emerge about artificial intelligence rebelling against us. All the while, a more immediate dilemma flies under the radar. Have forces been unleashed that are thrusting humanity down an ill-advised path, one that's increasingly making us behave like simple machines? In this wide-reaching, interdisciplinary book, Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger examine what's happening to our lives as society embraces big data, predictive analytics, and smart environments. They explain how the goal of designing programmable worlds goes hand (...) in hand with engineering predictable and programmable people. Detailing new frameworks, provocative case studies, and mind-blowing thought experiments, Frischmann and Selinger reveal hidden connections between fitness trackers, electronic contracts, social media platforms, robotic companions, fake news, autonomous cars, and more. This powerful analysis should be read by anyone interested in understanding exactly how technology threatens the future of our society, and what we can do now to build something better. (shrink)

When epistemologists talk about knowledge, the discussions traditionally include only a small class of other epistemic notions: belief, justification, probability, truth. In this paper, we propose that epistemologists should include an additional epistemic notion into the mix, namely the notion of assuming or taking for granted.

A cross-section of the writings of Dominique Lestel, Vinciane Despret and Roberto Marchesini is presented here in translation across three special issues on philosophical ethology. These thinkers, relatively unknown in anglophone scholarship, offer important contributions to contemporary debates in posthumanism and animal studies. Particularly in so far as they scrutinise our often awkward attempts to understand the behaviour of animals in labs and fields – to know what animal bodies can do – they share in the rethinking of interspecies forms (...) of life, as domains of both empirical knowledge and zoo-political performance, and thereby take important steps towards a new philosophical ethology. (shrink)

Which rules should guide our reasoning? Human reasoners often use reasoning shortcuts, called heuristics, which function well in some contexts but lack the universality of reasoning rules like deductive implication or inference to the best explanation. Does it follow that human reasoning is hopelessly irrational? I argue: no. Heuristic reasoning often represents human reasoners reaching a local rational maximum, reasoning more accurately than if they try to implement more “ideal” rules of reasoning. I argue this is a genuine rational achievement. (...) Our ideal rational advisors would advise us to reason with heuristic rules, not more complicated ideal rules. I argue we do not need a radical new account of epistemic norms to make sense of the success of heuristic reasoning. (shrink)

While there is a growing literature on “dark traits” (i.e., socially aversive traits), there has been a lack of integration with the burgeoning research literature on positive traits and fulfilling and growth-oriented outcomes in life. To help move the field toward greater integration, we contrasted the nomological network of the Dark Triad (a well-studied cluster of socially aversive traits) with the nomological network of the Light Triad, measured by the 12-item Light Triad Scale (LTS). The LTS is a first draft (...) measure of a loving and beneficent orientation toward others (“everyday saints”) that consists of three facets: Kantianism (treating people as ends unto themselves), Humanism (valuing the dignity and worth of each individual), and Faith in Humanity (believing in the fundamental goodness of humans). Across four demographically diverse samples (N = 1,518), the LTS demonstrated excellent reliability and validity, predicting life satisfaction and a wide range of growth-oriented and self-transcendent outcomes above and beyond existing measures of personality. In contrast, the Dark Triad was negatively associated with life satisfaction and growth-oriented outcomes, and showed stronger linkages to selfish, exploitative, aggressive, and socially aversive outcomes. This exploratory study of the contrasting nomological networks of the Light vs. Dark Triad provides several ways forward for more principled and data driven approaches to explore both the malevolent and benefice... (shrink)

Ben Rich, J.D., Ph.D., presents a scholarly, passionate view of the ethics of the “barriers to effective pain management.” His manuscript is detailed, analytical, and compassionate. No reasonable sensitive person, especially a physician committed to caring for patients, can disagree with the proposal that human beings should have their physical, emotional, and spiritual pain tended to aggressively, meticulously, and compassionately. Similarly, the same individuals advocating for such pain management would agree that no one should go to jail unless he or (...) she is guilty of a serious crime, that decent people should not be robbed or murdered, that children should not be hungry or homeless, and that all citizens of the United States deserve healthcare. Our society attempts to achieve these goals. Laws are written, discussed, and approved by state and federal congresses, voted on by citizens, and theoretically upheld by the courts, churches, and decent individuals. But, unless the world suddenly becomes inhabited by virtuous, ethical humans who can unfailingly differentiate “good” from “bad,” then, in spite of an abundance of laws and lawyers, doctors, and nurses, this world will continue to have pain and suffering. And, although we want to hold our doctors, politicians, educators, champion athletes, and others to “higher standards” than the average citizen, it is best to remind ourselves frequently that all humans can be weak and are bound to make imprecise judgments, that there is not a homogenous definition of “good,” that values and religious beliefs are variable. (shrink)

Rhythmic structure in speech is characterized by sequences of stressed and unstressed syllables. A large body of literature suggests that speakers of English attempt to achieve rhythmic harmony by evenly distributing stressed syllables throughout prosodic phrases. The question remains as to how speakers plan metrical structure during speech production and whether it is planned independently of phonemes. To examine this, we designed a tongue twister task consisting of disyllabic word pairs with overlapping phonological segments and either matching or non‐matching metrical (...) structure. Results showed that speakers had more difficulty producing metrically regular word pairs, compared to irregular pairs; that is, word pairs with irregular meter had faster productions and fewer speech errors in this production task. This finding of metrical regularity inhibiting production is inconsistent with an abstract metrical structure that is planned independently of phonemes at the point of phonological encoding. (shrink)

(2006). James Hillman's A Terrible Love of War Chris Hedges’ War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning and Barbara Ehrenreich's Blood Rites. Journal of Military Ethics: Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 67-73.

J. JUDD OWEN AND JEFFREY STOUT SUGGEST THE NEED TO RETHINK OUR understanding of the normative commitments of liberal democracy in response to recent challenges from its "cultured despisers". In this essay I argue that Owen and Stout fail to redeem liberal democracy against these critics because they reject the possibility of constitutional neutrality with respect to an indeterminate plurality of religions. As a result, a religious test on citizenship is inevitable under any democratic constitution expressed in their terms, and (...) this test lays liberal democracy open to the despisers' main line of attack. As an alternative, I offer a defense of constitutional neutrality that is based on the work of Franklin I. Gamwell, who has developed a compound conception of justice for this purpose. Gamwell systematically distinguishes between formative and substantive conceptions of justice and the role they play in a theory of constitutional democracy. On Gamwell's account, a democratic constitution expressed as a formative conception of justice will be neutral with respect to all substantive moral disagreement. As such, it can be consistently affirmed by the adherents of an indeterminate plurality of religions. This account of liberal democracy avoids a religious test on citizenship and therefore can overcome the core objection raised against it by its contemporary critics. (shrink)

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has proposed substantial changes to the current regulatory system governing human subjects research in its Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, entitled “Human Subjects Research Protections: Enhancing Protections for Research Subjects and Reducing Burden, Delay, and Ambiguity for Investigators.” Some of the most significant proposed changes concern the use of biospecimens in research. Because research involving biological materials begins with an initial interaction with an individual, such research falls squarely within the human subjects (...) research regulatory framework known as the “Common Rule,” which applies to research conducted or funded by the HHS and the other signatory agencies and departments. However, as described in detail below, much biospecimen research may fall within exemptions and exceptions under the Common Rule and, thus, may be conducted without consent. The ANPRM proposes requiring written consent for research use of biospecimens, even if the biospecimens were initially collected for a purpose other than research or have been stripped of identifiers. (shrink)

Like Laland et al., I think Mayr’s distinction is problematic, but I identify a further problem with it. I argue that Mayr’s distinction is a false dichotomy, and obscures an important question about evolutionary change. I show how this question, once revealed, sheds light on some debates in evo-devo that Laland et al.’s analysis cannot, and suggest that it provides a different view about how future integration between biological disciplines might proceed.

A Benacerraf–Field challenge is an argument intended to show that common realist theories of a given domain are untenable: such theories make it impossible to explain how we’ve arrived at the truth in that domain, and insofar as a theory makes our reliability in a domain inexplicable, we must either reject that theory or give up the relevant beliefs. But there’s no consensus about what would count here as a satisfactory explanation of our reliability. It’s sometimes suggested that giving such (...) an explanation would involve showing that our beliefs meet some modal condition, but realists have claimed that this sort of modal interpretation of the challenge deprives it of any force: since the facts in question are metaphysically necessary and so obtain in all possible worlds, it’s trivially easy, even given realism, to show that our beliefs have the relevant modal features. Here I show that this claim is mistaken—what motivates a modal interpretation of the challenge in the first place also motivates an understanding of the relevant features in terms of epistemic possibilities rather than metaphysical possibilities, and there are indeed epistemically possible worlds where the facts in question don’t obtain. (shrink)

Sensitivity has sometimes been thought to be a highly epistemologically significant property, serving as a proxy for a kind of responsiveness to the facts that ensure that the truth of our beliefs isn’t just a lucky coincidence. But it's an imperfect proxy: there are various well-known cases in which sensitivity-based anti-luck conditions return the wrong verdicts. And as a result of these failures, contemporary theorists often dismiss such conditions out of hand. I show here, though, that a sensitivity-based understanding of (...) epistemic luck can be developed that respects what was attractive about sensitivity-based approaches in the first place but that's immune to these failures. (shrink)

_Examines the significance of animal environments in contemporary continental thought._.

From the Crusades to the colonial era to the global war on terror, this sweeping volume exposes “civilization” as a stage-managed account of history that ...

Artificial intelligence is a general-purpose technology (GPT), term given to technologies that shape an entire era and reorient innovations by reconfiguring the economy’s logic and functioning and bringing in new business models. AI offers unprecedented opportunities and risks. The benefits of AI are extraordinary, as are its potential harms. Potential damage does not have the same degree of problematization, since the intensity and extent of the damage varies according to the domain and the object of application. To address the scale (...) of this challenge, regulation is necessary but not sufficient. Standards, unwritten codes of compliance and arbitration procedures, supervision and auditability, AI governance, international agreements, compliance with current local and global standards and laws. All of this needs to be integrated. Society seems to have no alternative to facing the challenges of at least mitigating the damage already identified and trying to predict future damage in advance. The purpose of this article is to encourage reflection regarding the main initiatives that are available to society to protect its citizens and organizations from the potential harm caused by AI models, vis-à-vis the technology’s own limits to act in ethical and legal compliance. (shrink)

Emotion Review, Volume 14, Issue 3, Page 167-181, July 2022. A growing cadre of influential scholars has converged on a circumscribed definition of empathy as restricted only to feeling the same emotion that one perceives another is feeling. We argue that this restrictive isomorphic matching definition is deeply problematic because it deviates dramatically from traditional conceptualizations of empathy and unmoors the construct from generations of scientific research and clinical practice; insistence on an isomorphic form undercuts much of the functional value (...) of empathy from multiple perspectives of analysis; and combining the opposing concepts of isomorphic matching and self-other awareness implicitly requires motivational content, causing the RIM definition to implicitly require the kind of non-matching emotional content that it explicitly seeks to exclude. (shrink)

Recent work by Brian Skyrms offers a very general way to think about how information flows and evolves in biological networks—from the way monkeys in a troop communicate to the way cells in a body coordinate their actions. A central feature of his account is a way to formally measure the quantity of information contained in the signals in these networks. In this article, we argue there is a tension between how Skyrms talks of signalling networks and his formal measure (...) of information. Although Skyrms refers to both how information flows through networks and that signals carry information, we show that his formal measure only captures the latter. We then suggest that to capture the notion of flow in signalling networks, we need to treat them as causal networks. This provides the formal tools to define a measure that does capture flow, and we do so by drawing on recent work defining causal specificity. Finally, we suggest that this new measure is crucial if we wish to explain how evolution creates information. For signals to play a role in explaining their own origins and stability, they can’t just carry information about acts; they must be difference-makers for acts. _1_ Signalling, Evolution, and Information _2_ Skyrms’s Measure of Information _3_ Carrying Information versus Information Flow _3.1_ Example 1 _3.2_ Example 2 _3.3_ Example 3 _4_ Signalling Networks Are Causal Networks _4.1_ Causal specificity _4.2_ Formalizing causal specificity _5_ Information Flow as Causal Control _5.1_ Example 1 _5.2_ Examples 2 and 3 _5.3_ Average control implicitly ‘holds fixed’ other pathways _6_ How Does Evolution Create Information? _7_ Conclusion Appendix >. (shrink)

Income inequality has increasingly become more ubiquitous within rather than across countries. Yet much of the theorizing has been at macro levels and does not sufficiently account for the firms within regions, which are primary sources of income inequality. Moreover, much of the research that does implicate firms, assumes that firms impact inequality equivalently. It neither accounts for the heterogeneity of firms within regions nor the potential for differential impact from that heterogeneity. Our study challenges these assumptions through a theory (...) that connects a firm’s life cycle and recruiting and compensation strategies to its impact on income inequality within and across regions. We incorporate a set of contingencies that also have the potential to alter the model’s predictions, which are based on external shocks and ownership of the firm. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of this model for theory, policy, and practice. (shrink)

Drawing on recent advances in evolutionary biology, prominent scholars return to the question posed in a pathbreaking book: how evolution itself evolved.

How can Scripture address the crucial justice issues of our time? In this book Mark Brett offers a careful reading of biblical texts that speak to such pressing public issues as the legacies of colonialism, the demands of asylum seekers, the challenges of climate change, and the shaping of redemptive economies. Brett argues that the Hebrew Bible can be read as a series of reflections on political trauma and healing -- the long saga of successive ancient empires violently (...) asserting their sovereignty over Israel and of the Israelites forced to live out new pathways toward restoration. Brett retrieves the prophetic voice of Scripture and applies it to our contemporary world, addressing current justice issues in a relevant, constructive, compelling manner. (shrink)

The Psychology of Creative Writing takes a scholarly, psychological look at multiple aspects of creative writing, including the creative writer as a person, the text itself, the creative process, the writer's development, the link between creative writing and mental illness, the personality traits of comedy and screen writers, and how to teach creative writing. This book will appeal to psychologists interested in creativity, writers who want to understand more about the magic behind their talents, and educated laypeople who enjoy reading, (...) writing, or both. From scholars to bloggers to artists, The Psychology of Creative Writing has something for everyone. (shrink)

It is commonly held that the context with respect to which an indexical is interpreted is determined independently of the interpretation of the indexical. This view, which I call Context Realism, has explanatory significance: it is because the context is what it is that an indexical refers to what it does. In this paper, I provide an argument against Context Realism. I then develop an alternative that I call Context Constructivism, according to which indexicals are defined not in terms of (...) features of utterance situations, but rather in terms of roles that objects could play. (shrink)

The frame problem refers to the fact that organisms must be able to zero in on relevant aspects of the world and intelligently ignore the vast majority of the world that is irrelevant to their goals. In this paper we aim to point out the connection between two leading frameworks for thinking about how organisms achieve this. Predictive processing is a rapidly growing framework within cognitive science which suggests that organisms assign a high ‘weight’ to relevant aspects of the world, (...) effectively treating relevant aspects of the world as if they are more precise. This assignment of weight is called precision-weighting and is the predictive processing account of how organisms allocate their attention. Relevance Realization is a framework that conceptualizes an organism’s ability to realize relevance as resulting from a dynamical system in which a cognitive agent makes use of opponent processing relationships to zero in on relevant aspects of the world. In this paper we use recent work on the diametric model of autism and psychosis to demonstrate that the tradeoffs inherent to precision-weighting are also inherent to relevance realization. This connection will demonstrate that although these frameworks have a different intellectual background and use a different set of concepts and vocabulary, they are both pointing to the same underlying process. The fact that these different frameworks have converged on such a similar solution to the problem of how organisms realize relevance serves to demonstrate the plausibility of that solution. (shrink)

In an examination of Ryle's distinction between knowing how and knowing that D. G. Brown is led to the conclusion that “All knowing how is knowing that.” The distinction is improper, and these tags should be dropped. All knowledge is propositional, after all, though there is a legitimate way of retaining the essentials of Ryle's account. Knowledge for which the primary evidence is a person's performance replaces the category of knowing how in this reformulated version of the distinction. But to (...) have this type of knowledge is to know the answers to questions concerning the way in which it can be done. And this is knowing that. (shrink)

This study analyzes the metajournalistic discourse surrounding leaks and whistleblowing crafted by online journalism industry publications since 2004. The goal of the study is to understand how jou...

We critically review key lines of evidence and theoretical argument relevant to Machery's These include interactions between different kinds of concept representations, unified approaches to explaining contextual effects on concept retrieval, and a critique of empirical dissociations as evidence for concept heterogeneity. We suggest there are good grounds for retaining the concept construct in human cognition.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 43.1 (2005) 1-19 [Access article in PDF] God's Immutability and the Necessity of Descartes's Eternal Truths Dan Kaufman Descartes's doctrine of the creation of the eternal truths (henceforth "the Creation Doctrine") has been thought to be a particularly problematic doctrine, both internally inconsistent and detrimental to Descartes's system as a whole. According to the Creation Doctrine, the eternal truths, such as the (...) truths of mathematics and those concerning true and immutable natures, are freely created by God.1 The Creation Doctrine has led several scholars to think that Descartes held (or was committed to) the view that the eternal truths are not necessary truths; in fact, there are no necessary truths if Descartes is correct.2 [End Page 1]In fact, however, Descartes held both of the following.The eternal truths are freely created by God.The eternal truths are necessarily true.That Descartes held (1) is uncontroversial; in fact, it is the characteristic thesis of his Creation Doctrine. However, his commitment to (2) is more controversial. I believe the controversy surrounding (2) arises precisely because Descartes' acceptance of (1) is so uncontroversial. That is, some have thought that his acceptance of (1) eliminates any possibility of accepting (2). This view is mistaken. In several texts, it is clear that Descartes believes that the eternal truths are necessarily true; this is especially noticeable in the 2 May 1644 letter to Mesland (AT IV 118; CSMK 235). The task, then, is to account for the necessity of the eternal truths within the confines of the Creation Doctrine; that is, to explain the fact that (2) is true, given that (1) is true.3 Unfortunately, Descartes says precious little about this issue. To make matters worse, there is a scarcity of treatments of this issue in the literature; and the literature that does address this issue tends to treat it quickly and vaguely, perhaps recognizing the difficulty of addressing it in any detail. In this paper, I attempt to remedy this unfortunate situation.I begin by examining the most prominent interpretation of Descartes's explanation of the necessity of the eternal truths: the Immutability Interpretation.4 This interpretation is given by Margaret Osler and most prominently by Edwin Curley.5 According to this interpretation, the eternal truths are necessarily true because they are created by God, and God's will is immutable. I will show that this interpretation is incorrect: It is either too weak to explain the necessity of the eternal truths or it is too strong in that it would commit Descartes to necessitarianism, [End Page 2] a view he does not hold.6 I also show that some suggestions for salvaging the Immutability Interpretation fall short. In the final section I present an alternative interpretation. My interpretation has a firm basis in Descartes's texts, does not have the shortcomings of the Immutability Interpretation, and has several virtues of its own. 1. Immutability Before examining the role, if any, that God's immutability actually plays in Descartes's explanation of the necessity of the eternal truths, it may be helpful to have a working account of God's immutability. To be immutable is not merely to be unchanging, but rather to be unable to change. That is: I1: x is immutable iff x is essentially unchanging.7We must recognize, however, that there are extrinsic and relational properties that a thing may acquire or lose without any real change in the thing; that is, there are so-called Cambridge changes that something may undergo without thereby being mutable. For example if x is five feet tall at t and x is five foot five at some later time t´, then x has really changed; but if x is not an uncle at t and x is an uncle at some later time t´, then x has not really changed in virtue of acquiring this property. The idea is that there are some properties which are, to use Edward Wierenga's and Nicholas Wolterstorff's term, "change... (shrink)

Deleuze, The Dark Precursor is organized around three themes that critically overlap: dialectic, structure, and being.

The dominant explanation of the origins of religion in the nineteenth century was what we will call the Positivist Theory of religion, according to which religion is understood as form of primitive science, falsely based on an animistic method of explanation of events. Recently, this theory has been revived under the guise of evolutionary psychology and has arguably become the dominant naturalistic explanation of religion today. This essay examines this new form of animism based on the hypothesis of an ‘agency (...) detector’ in the human mind that causes us to believe in gods and spirits. The essay argues that the new positivist theory of religion suffers from all the flaws of the earlier one as well as additional problems of its own. (shrink)

The thesis that agents should calibrate their beliefs in the face of higher-order evidence—i.e., should adjust their first-order beliefs in response to evidence suggesting that the reasoning underlying those beliefs is faulty—is sometimes thought to be in tension with Bayesian approaches to belief update: in order to obey Bayesian norms, it’s claimed, agents must remain steadfast in the face of higher-order evidence. But I argue that this claim is incorrect. In particular, I motivate a minimal constraint on a reasonable treatment (...) of the evolution of self-locating beliefs over time and show that calibrationism is compatible with any generalized Bayesian approach that respects this constraint. I then use this result to argue that remaining steadfast isn’t the response to higher-order evidence that maximizes expected accuracy. (shrink)

De Neys offers a welcome departure from the dual-process accounts that have dominated theorizing about reasoning. However, we see little justification for retaining the distinction between intuition and deliberation. Instead, reasoning can be treated as a case of multiple-cue decision making. Reasoning phenomena can then be explained by decision-making models that supply the processing details missing from De Neys's framework.

The field of emotion regulation has developed rapidly, and a number of emotion regulatory strategies have been identified. To date, empirical attention has focused on contrasting specific regulatio...

Implicit attitudes are mental states posited by psychologists to explain behaviors including implicit racial and gender bias. In this paper I investigate the belief view of the implicit attitudes, on which implicit attitudes are a kind of implicit belief. In particular, I focus on why implicit attitudes, if they are beliefs, are often resistant to updating in light of new evidence. I argue that extant versions of the belief view do not give a satisfactory account of this phenomenon. This is (...) because proponents of the belief view have focused on overly narrow explanations of recalcitrance in terms of belief storage. Expanding the focus of the belief view to the kinds of irrational and arational transitions between beliefs and other mental states provides compelling (if preliminary) explanations of recalcitrance. (shrink)