That’s Bill Calvin, whose brain is worthy of study in its own right. Technically, he’s a theoretical neurophysiologist and affiliate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Washington. But he’s also known as a scientist with a wide-ranging intellect and a prolific (and accessible) writer who constantly offers remarkable insights about the world around him. As I sat down to interview Calvin in his book-lined Seattle home last Fall, I recalled the comments of someone who (...) had come to GBN to hear Calvin speak. He said that he didn’t know—or care—what Calvin was going to talk about because everything that Bill Calvin said was not only interesting, but worth learning about. After more than three hours of conversation with Calvin, I couldn’t agree more. (shrink)

Psychology's fascination with memory and its imperfections dates back further than we can remember. The first careful experimental studies of memory were published in 1885 by German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus, and tens of thousands of memory studies have been conducted since. What has been learned, and what might the future of memory be?

The spatial misrepresentation objection (SMO) against the wave theory of sound argues that if sounds are compression waves, then our auditory experiences are massively illusory for not representing sounds as propagating in the medium. Thus, it claims that the wave theory should be rejected because it is unreasonable to accept such an error theory of hearing. This paper presents a metaphysics of compression waves to show that the wave theory correctly implies that we cannot hear sounds as propagating. Moreover, I (...) argue that the SMO is based on a mischaracterisation of the phenomenology of auditory experiences. A new conception of auditory perception is then proposed to explain how a sound source and its compression wave are both represented in the same auditory experience. Finally, I compare my view with some alternative theories of sound. Overall, it is found that the SMO is more of an objection against the traditional conception of hearing than a challenge to the wave theory of sound. (shrink)

Abstract:Calvin Warren talks about Heidegger's influence on Afropessimism, and about the philosophical significance of the Harlem Renaissance.

This book looks back at the simpler versions of mental life in apes, Neanderthals, and our ancestors, back before our burst of creativity started 50,000 years...

According to Finite Fine-grainedness (roughly), there is a finite sequence of intuitively small differences between any two welfare levels. The assumption of Finite Fine-grainedness is essential to Gustaf Arrhenius’s favored sixth impossibility theorem in population axiology and plays an important role in the spectrum argument for the (Negative) Repugnant Conclusion. I argue that Theravāda Buddhists will deny Finite Fine-grainedness and consider the space that doing so opens up—and fails to open up—in population axiology. I conclude with a lesson for population (...) axiology that generalizes beyond the Buddhist context: to plausibly deny Finite Fine-grainedness, we must locate a welfare good—such as the good of awakening (bodhi)—with some rather esoteric axiological properties. (shrink)

This is a book about the human sciences. However, it is not a treatise on scientific methodology nor is it a proposal for a unification of the human sciences through an integration of their findings within a general conceptual scheme.

Sketching a new portrait of the human self in this thought-provoking book, leading American philosopher Calvin O. Schrag challenges bleak deconstructionist and postmodernist views of the self as something ceaselessly changing, without origin or purpose. Discussing the self in new vocabulary, he depicts an action-oriented self defined by the ways in which it communicates. The self, says Schrag, is open to understanding through its discourse, its actions, its being with other selves, and its experience of transcendence. In his discussion, (...) Schrag responds critically to both modernists and postmodernists, avoiding what he calls the modernists' overdetermination of unity and identity and the postmodernists' self-enervating pluralism. He agrees with postmodernist attacks on both the classical theory of the self as a metaphysical substance and the modern epistemological construal of the self as transparent mind, yet he maintains that jettisoning the self as understood in these terms does not mean jettisoning it altogether. The self as subject is not dead, nor are the constitutive features of self-formation and self-understanding. In addressing the role of culture in the dynamics of self-formation, the author offers a critique of Max Weber's and Jürgen Habermas's view of modernity as a radical differentiation of three cultural spheres: science, morality, and art; he adds religion as a legitimate fourth cultural sphere. The overview of Schrag's philosophy that _The Self after Postmodernity_ provides will appeal to readers with an interest in literary criticism and religion as well as philosophy. (shrink)

This chapter traces some of the ancient and medieval history of the debate about whether there are distinct and potentially conflicting true goods or genuine tension between the pursuit of self-interest and the pursuit of what has intrinsic value. Much modern moral theory posits that morally good agents are prepared to restrain the pursuit of even their enlightened self-interest when it conflicts with what is intrinsically good or is good for others. This puts Morality at odds with a long Ethical (...) tradition that is especially indebted to Aristotle and his followers and that proposes the ultimate aim of any rational agent to be that agent’s flourishing or happiness. The chapter concludes, pace Elizabeth Anscombe and Alasdair MacIntyre, that while the view embedded in much modern moral theory reached its full development in the context of a theologically infused medieval tradition, which involved Anselm of Canterbury, Peter Abelard and John Duns Scotus, its roots are earlier, and its metaphysical underpinnings are independent of that context. (shrink)

Neurobiologist William Calvin explores the human brain, positing that the neurons in the brain operate in an accelerated version of biological evolution, evolving ideas through random variations and selections, and supports his hypothesis with numerous ca.

We consider how human subjects establish signaling conventions in the context of Lewis-Skyrms signaling games. These experiments involve games where there are precisely the right number of signal types to represent the states of nature, games where there are more signal types than states, and games where there are fewer signal types than states. The aim is to determine the conditions under which subjects are able to establish signaling conventions in such games and to identify a learning dynamics that approximates (...) how they succeed when they do. Our results suggest that human agents tend to use a win-stay/lose-shift with inertia dynamics to establish conventions in such games. We briefly consider the virtues and vices of this low-rationality dynamics. (shrink)

The pipeline model framework proposed by Char et al. makes a timely contribution to the literature in allowing one to take a step back and consider machine learning healthcare app...

Gyula Klima has argued that the disagreements between Nominalists and Realists in the middle ages, as exemplified in the views of John Buridan and Thomas Aquinas, centered less in semantics and metaphysics than in epistemology and philosophy of mind. This paper suggests that in the light of Prof. Klima’s arguments, the disagreements in these areas cannot easily be separated and raise a number of issues that remain of philosophical importance.

Kyosei, a traditional Japanese concept, has been applied to a variety subjects, from biology to business. It has more recently become synonymous with the concepts of corporate responsibility, ethical decision making, stakeholder maximization, and responsible reciprocity. The purpose of this paper is to trace kyosei's modern business application back to ancient Confucian thought. The ideals associated with Confucianism were instrumental in the creation of Japanese business codes of ethics during the early part of the seventeenth century. A short history of (...) this period is presented to provide a contextual framework for understanding these codes. A specific code of ethics, called the shuchu kiyaku, is presented for the first time in English and shown to have direct roots in Confucian writings. Statements from modern company codes and from modern Japanese and American businessmen are presented to reflect the philosophy of business embodied in that ancient code of ethics. (shrink)

Three philosophical questions that are often confused should instead be keep distinct: First, what is a thought? Second, what is that in virtue of which a thought is a thought? Third, what is it that determines of what a thought is a thought? These questions raise very different issues within Ockham’s philosophy. Although Ockham’s views about the first question evolve, he seems to answer the second and the third questions in the same way, maintaining throughout his career that the intentionality (...) of thoughts, which he expresses in terms of signification, is a primitive feature of them. Ockham’s view contrasts sharply with the view that can be found in Aquinas and others that a thought is a form of being present in an immaterial way. This alternative view explains intentionality by reducing it to the co-presence of a number of non-cognitive factors. This latter view offers hope of unifying epistemology and such sciences as optics but at the price of a very peculiar ontology. Ockham avoids this peculiarity, but his way of doing so raises issues about what determines the taxonomy of thoughts, and about whether the items which are thoughts are essentially so or whether by God’s power they could exist without being thoughts. Despite Ockham’s terminology of similitude, the taxonomy of thoughts is not fixed by internal features of the metaphysical items which are thoughts but by the objects of the thoughts, and this suggests a negative answer to the questions whether thoughts are essentially thoughts, an answer that Ockham seems not to draw explicitly but which is explicit in the work of some, like Pierre d’Ailly, who are much influenced by him. (shrink)

The research ethics framework put forward by McCradden et al. to support systematic inquiry in the development of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies in healt...

Speaking as one of the founders of American Continental philosophy, Calvin O. Schrag offers an exceptionally clear, balanced, and informative discussion of a complex questions vexing postmodern currents of philosophical and theological reflection: Does the "death" of the god conceived as a "highest being" in Western, and especially modern, traditions open a new space within which to rethink God in terms of a "gift" or "giving" that would stand beyond the usual spate of metaphysical categories? Schrag draws with grace, (...) ease, and precision upon the history of Western metaphysics, from Plato and Aristotle through Nietzsche and Heidegger. Most important to his central question of God as "otherwise than Being," however, are such influential post-Heideggerian thinkers as Jean-Luc Marion, Jacques Derrida, and Emmanuel Levinas. Schrag's inquiry engages these thinkers at a serious level and also expands recent discussions by relating them to the work of figures hitherto overlooked or underplayed, most notably Paul Tillich. (shrink)

. This work will be useful to all who wonder what to do about the largely negative results of postmodern thought.Ó ÑJoseph C. Flay The Resources of Rationality addresses the postmodernist assault on the claim of reason and develops a ...

In "The Cerebral Code," he has solidly embedded his ideas in experimental neurophysiology and neuropharmacology, deriving from his decades in the laboratory.

In _Ontological Terror_ Calvin L. Warren intervenes in Afro-pessimism, Heideggerian metaphysics, and black humanist philosophy by positing that the "Negro question" is intimately imbricated with questions of Being. Warren uses the figure of the antebellum free black as a philosophical paradigm for thinking through the tensions between blackness and Being. He illustrates how blacks embody a metaphysical nothing. This nothingness serves as a destabilizing presence and force as well as that which whiteness defines itself against. Thus, the function of (...) blackness as giving form to nothing presents a terrifying problem for whites: they need blacks to affirm their existence, even as they despise the nothingness they represent. By pointing out how all humanism is based on investing blackness with non-Being—a logic which reproduces antiblack violence and precludes any realization of equality, justice, and recognition for blacks—Warren urges the removal of the human from its metaphysical pedestal and the exploration of ways of existing that are not predicated on a grounding in Being. (shrink)

In this incisive work, Calvin M. Hoy focuses exclusively on Hayek's philosophy of individual freedom. Beginning with an analysis of Hayek's definition of freedom, the author examines his proposed methods for preserving personal liberty through economic, legal, and governmental measures, and provides a trenchant critique of Hayek's arguments. Ultimately, Hoy demonstrates that a minimal socialist state is compatible with Hayek's principles, and that Hayek has not successfully stated a comprehensive philosophy of freedom because he focuses on the type and (...) ignores the amount of coercion permissible in a free society. (shrink)

"A new translation by Henry Beveridge, Esq.".

Professor Weiss's book, in which he attempts to lay bare the structures of historical reality and shed new light on methods used by historians in understanding the past, is a closely reasoned, provocative, and seminal work, exhibiting a philosophical vision reminiscent of the speculative and metaphysical profundity of a Hegel or a Spinoza. The reader of History: Written and Lived soon becomes aware that the author understands philosophy to be a serious enterprise and that he is in possession of the (...) necessary conceptual tools to pursue this enterprise with rigor and insight. In this respect the author's present treatise is no exception to his previous writings, and there is a real sense in which his book on history cannot be fully understood except in light of his previous book, Modes of Being. The metaphysical schematization which he formulated in Modes of Being provides the basis for much that he has to say on the subject of history. The connection between the two works is made explicit by the author himself when he writes: "The historic world is one product resulting from an interrelating of the basic realities which make up the universe. On the basis of other inquiries I have come to the conclusion that these basic realities are four in number. I have called them Actuality, Ideality, Existence and God ". What Professor Weiss thus presents is, in the last analysis, not only a philosophy of history but more specifically a metaphysics of history. It is more the cognitive attitude of Hegel than of Burckhardt, more the categorial analysis of Whitehead than of Comte that govern Weiss's reflections on history. (shrink)

Abstract:The article interrogates notions of resistance and will against the Black Radical Tradition vis-à-vis a close reading of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Will to Power and through Hortense Spiller’s seminal essay, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe.” In reading Spillers alongside Nietzsche, the essay argues that black nihilism presents a more severe problem than Nietzsche could anticipate: that the black will is denied active desire and a cosmological body is left to express its “power”—only to highlight (black) resistance as a question.