Jeffrey (1983) proposed a generalization of conditioning as a means of updating probability distributions when new evidence drives no event to certainty. His rule requires the stability of certain conditional probabilities through time. We tested this assumption (“invariance”) from the psychological point of view. In Experiment 1 participants offered probability estimates for events in Jeffrey’s candlelight example. Two further scenarios were investigated in Experiment 2, one in which invariance seems justified, the other in which it does not. Results were in (...) rough conformity to Jeffrey (1983)’s principle. (shrink)

Filmosophy is a provocative new manifesto for a radically philosophical way of understanding cinema. It coalesces twentieth-century ideas of film as thought (from Hugo Münsterberg to Gilles Deleuze) into a practical theory of "film-thinking," arguing that film style conveys poetic ideas through a constant dramatic "intent" about the characters, spaces, and events of film. Discussing contemporary filmmakers such as Béla Tarr and the Dardenne brothers, this timely contribution to the study of film and philosophy will provoke debate among audiences and (...) filmmakers alike. FILMOSOPHY ® is a registered U.S. trademark owned by Valentin Stoilov (www.filmosophy.com) for educational services in the field of motion picture history theory and production. Mr. Stoilov is not the source or origin of this book and has not sponsored or endorsed it or its author. (shrink)

The topic of my dissertation is satire. This seems to excite many people, and over the past four years I have heard many variations of a similar refrain: “Oh, wow. You’re studying satire? That’s very topical. You must have a lot of material to work with.” There is a way in which this is true, though I suspect in a way that diverges from the way that most of my interlocutors believed. I suspect that the material they imagined me to (...) be working with was the output of Donald Trump, first a candidate for and now holder of the office of President of the United States. That is not the material I find interesting. More interesting to me is their statement. It evinces a number of beliefs that I find interesting, chief among them that Trump makes the current period particularly apt for satire, as if a doddery and incompetent ruling class is somehow a recent phenomenon. And I suspect that underneath this belief in the aptness of satire is a belief in the power of satire. Satire is somehow how people are going to strike back at the vice-governed fools who rule us. Those beliefs are the material I want to work with. This is my interest in satire, then: not so much what it is about satire that makes it powerful, but what is it about satire that makes people think it is powerful? And what is it about satire that makes people think it is powerful when there is pretty powerful evidence that it is not? Unfortunately, here is where I run into the problem that in a very important way I do not have a lot of material to work with. There is not an awful lot on satire within the analytic tradition: outside of a few references to satire, analytic discussions of satire are limited to two short articles. Accordingly, I have taken the task of my dissertation to be to create an account of satire that helps to bring forward why satire is a thing that people can imagine to be powerful, that they can imagine to be politically effective. My dissertation will effectively have two halves, one where I build my account and one where I begin to apply it. The purpose of applying my account, which will comprise the final two chapters, will not be to show its implications so much as how it can be used. My goal will not so much be to give definitive answers about the nature of satire, but rather to give a demonstration of how my account facilitates engaging questions about the role of satire in social and political context. (shrink)

Deleuze’s philosophy of immanence, because it vigorously rejects every appeal to the beyond, is often presumed to be indifferent to the concerns of religion. This book argues against such a presumption. It does so, first of all, by emphasising how both Deleuze’s thought and the notion of religion are motivated by a demand to create new modes of existence, or to imagine and enact a future that would substantively break with the present configuration of being. If Deleuze’s thought and the (...) notion of religion intersect in this regard, then their divergence must be located elsewhere, namely in the distinction between immanence and transcendence. The book thus argues that the enemy of Deleuze’s thought is not religion in general but instead the specific operation of transcendence. Furthermore, it argues that since Deleuze’s thought is not simply anti-religious, it cannot be identified with secularism. Along these lines, the book shows how Deleuzian immanence is able both to oppose religious transcendence and to enter an allliance with immanent accounts of the name of God. The effect of this is to suspend the paralysing debate between religion and the secular in order to attend to the ways in which immanence – whether “religious” or “secular” – is able to break with the present and to create the future. (shrink)

This study deals with the ontological background reference of religious experience in general, and it aimed to demonstrate how our existential condition of finitude is imposed to understand the most varied forms of manifestations of religious phenomena that arise in the contemporary world. Thus, we will start from the distinction between a hermeneutic-phenomenological conception of the religious experience in its essence and the empirical approaches on its diverse concrete configurations. In the end, we will try to point out that the (...) possibilities of apprehension of religious phenomena in general lack an existential element that is essentially constitutive for us, namely, the condition of the precariousness of the finite being faced with the opening of meaning that exceeds it in its horizon of transcendence. As general contribution, this way of understanding must foreclose every claim to make absolute a background meaning that should remain open as the most radical condition of possibility for the religious phenomena. (shrink)

Asim Barut once,en passant, asked the question “For what transitions of the hydrogen atom do the spectral lines coincide”? It is a pleasure for us to give the answer in this paper.

I outline Rawls's theory of justification, highlighting its philosophical and pragmatic conditions. I argue that the theory has remained essentially unchanged since his earliest methodological writings, and that his recent writings have sought to show how "justice as fairness" can satisfy these conditions, given Rawls's new construal of the "fact of pluralism" which theories of justice designed for modern Western liberal democracies must address. I argue that neither Rawls's revised conception of reflective equilibrium, based on the "fixed points" of such (...) societies' political cultures rather than on individuals' "considered moral judgments" nor the newer notion of "overlapping consensus", succeed in justifying "justice as fairness" according to the terms of Rawls's theory of justification. (shrink)

Acupuncture, herbs, and bodywork are fast becoming accepted as complements to standard healing methods. This riveting personal story of the unconventional education of an alternative healer provides extraordinary insight into how and why such methods work. Blending Chinese medicine, the martial arts, and Native American knowing, Daniel Santos challenges us to view the body and its healing in an exciting new way.

Prediction draws on both simulation and theory. I ask how simulation is defined, and what the roles of simulation and theory are, respectively. Simulation is flexible in structure and resources. Often simulation and theory are combined in prediction. The function of simulation consists of representing a situation that is relevantly like the target situation with regards to the feature predicted.

Prenant acte du fait que le XVIe siècle occidental est un moment fondateur de nouveaux savoirs et d'une nouvelle théorie du sujet, Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani a choisi de mettre en évidence en quoi la période a contribué à ouvrir le débat sur la “nature” et le rôle des femmes. Il ne s'agit pas ici de la condition des femmes réelles mais du foyer de discours qui se développe à leur sujet dans les milieux lettrés. Discours dans lesquels elle propose de distinguer (...) d'une part les interventio... (shrink)

Summary This paper explores the legacy of the great French experimental physicist Victor Regnault through the example of Gabriel Lippmann, whose engagement with electrical standardization during the early 1880s was guided by Regnault's methodological precept to measure ‘directly’. Lippmann's education reveals that the theoretical practice of ‘direct’ measurement entailed eliminating extraneous physical effects through the experimental design, rather than, like physicists in Britain and Germany, making numerical ‘corrections’ to measured values. It also provides, paradoxically, exemplars of the qualitative theoretical practices (...) that sustained Regnault's misguided ambition to avoid theory. By considering the largely negative reactions to Lippmann's proposals for selecting suitable electrical units and methods of measuring the ohm, this paper associates these theoretical practices with the ineffectual rhetorical strategies employed by Lippmann to promote his work, and thereby indicates that the practice of direct measurement was limited to French experimental physics. Whilst this result aligns readily with the existence of divergent nineteenth century British and German cultures of precision, it emerges from a very different disciplinary context in which the practice of precision electrical measurement developed independently of submarine telegraphy. This is because, as this paper illustrates, telegraphic engineering and experimental physics remained separate professions in France. (shrink)

Systematic cross-national analyses of political debates on the admission of refugees and asylum seekers require a theoretically coherent and empirically comprehensive typology of frames and arguments used. The paper proposes such a typology of frames and arguments used by governments, opposition parties and social movements in public debates on the admission of refugees. We argue that the collective identity and characteristics of the receiving country on the one hand and refugees’ characteristics on the other constitute the key dimensions to which (...) frames in political discourse about the admission of refugees refer. We distinguish between six different frames – economic, cultural, moral, legal, security-related and international – of how the “we” and the “others” can be interpreted. Furthermore, we specify typical arguments associated with the respective frames for or against the admission of refugees. Given that the typology was developed based on a discourse analysis of a very diverse set of countries, including some of the so-called “Global South”, we claim that it can be used to analyze political debates on the admission of refugees in other countries as well and can thus contribute to an accumulation of knowledge. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper discusses competing notions of the concept of ‘order’ in the Admonition Controversy with respect to the interpretation of the decorum of 1 Corinthians 14:26-30, a text principally concerned with order in worship. As the controversy ensued the understanding of ‘order’ broadened to include church discipline and polity, both Puritan and Conformist alike constructed their polemic with a rhetorical appeal to the Pauline text in question-interpretations at odds with each other. Furthermore, both sides understood their interpretation as standing (...) faithfully in the tradition of Calvin. This paper follows the appeals to 1 Corinthians 14:26-40 by Advanced Protestants and Conformists from its use in the treatise ‘Of Ceremonies’ found in the Book of Common Prayer, through the Admonition to the Parliament, the responses of John Whitgift and Thomas Cartwright, and finally Richard Hooker’s Preface to the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie. (shrink)

This article proposes a new account of causal asymmetry and of how it relates to temporal asymmetry. The key concept on which the account is based is that of inclusion, i.e. of an object being “in” another. Thus, part I develops the notion of what is “possible with respect to” a given object, and what is not, based on what is included in it. This leads to a counterfactual dependence asymmetry which is independent of the direction of time. Part II (...) provides a crash course in local time, describing how to derive temporal precedence (“before”) and time’s characteristic asymmetry in terms only of states of physical objects called “recorders”, a derivation which yields a relativistically correct model of time’s arrow. Putting the counterfactual and temporal asymmetries together allows, in part III, to propose an explanation of why causes are observed to precede their effects in time. The upshot is that, even though many of our intuitions about causal asymmetry are profoundly connected to our temporal perspective, there remains a robust counterfactual asymmetry whereby a change in an object requires something distinct from it. (shrink)

In this addition to the award-winning Church and Postmodern Culture series, respected theologian Daniel Bell compares and contrasts capitalism and Christianity, showing how Christianity provides resources for faithfully navigating the postmodern global economy. Bell approaches capitalism and Christianity as alternative visions of humanity, God, and the good life. Considering faith and economics in terms of how desire is shaped, he casts the conflict as one between different disciplines of desire. He engages the work of two important postmodern philosophers, Deleuze (...) and Foucault, to illuminate the nature of the postmodern world that the church currently inhabits. Bell then considers how the global economy deforms desire in a manner that distorts human relations with God and one another. In contrast, he presents Christianity and the tradition of the works of mercy as a way beyond capitalism and socialism, beyond philanthropy and welfare. Christianity heals desire, renewing human relations and enabling communion with God. (shrink)

A meditation on the lessons to be learned from South Africa's transformation in the wake of apartheid. Justice, truth, and identity; race, society, and law--all come into dramatic play as South Africa makes the tumultuous transition to a post-apartheid democracy. Seeking the timeless through the timely and trying to find the deeper meaning in the sweep of events, Daniel Herwitz brings the vast resources of the philosophical essay to bear on the new realities of post-apartheid South Africa--from racial identity (...) to truth commissions, from architecture to film and television. A public intellectual's reflections on public life, Herwitz's essays question how the new South Africa has constructed its concepts of reconciliation and return and how its historical emergence has meant a rethinking, reimagining, reexperiencing, relabeling, and repoliticizing of race. Herwitz's purpose is to give a philosophical reading of society--a society already relying on implicitly philosophical concepts in its social and political agendas. Working through these concepts, testing their relevance for reading society, his book itself becomes a part of the politics of definition and description in the new South Africa. (shrink)

Research in person and face perception has broadly focused on group-level consensus that individuals hold when making judgments of others. However, a growing body of research demonstrates that individual variation is larger than shared, stimulus-level variation for many social trait judgments. Despite this insight, little research to date has focused on building and explaining individual models of face perception. Studies and methodologies that have examined individual models are limited in what visualizations they can reliably produce to either noisy and blurry (...) or computer avatar representations. Methods that produce low-fidelity visual representations inhibit generalizability by being clearly computer manipulated and produced. In the present work, we introduce a novel paradigm to visualize individual models of face judgments by leveraging state-of-the-art computer vision methods. Our proposed method can produce a set of photorealistic face images that correspond to an individual's mental representation of a specific attribute across a variety of attribute intensities. We provide a proof-of-concept study which examines perceived trustworthiness/untrustworthiness and masculinity/femininity. We close with a discussion of future work to substantiate our proposed method. (shrink)