Believing in God requires not only a leap of faith but also an extension of people’s normal capacity to perceive the minds of others. Usually, people perceive minds of all kinds by trying to understand their conscious experience (what it is like to be them) and their agency (what they can do). Although humans are perceived to have both agency and experience, humans appear to see God as possessing agency, but not experience. God’s unique mind is due, the authors suggest, (...) to the uniquely moral role He occupies. In this article, the authors propose that God is seen as the ultimate moral agent, the entity people blame and praise when they receive anomalous harm and help. Support for this proposition comes from research on mind perception, morality, and moral typecasting. Interestingly, although people perceive God as the author of salvation, suffering seems to evoke even more attributions to the divine. (shrink)

The authors examined how a perceiver’s identification of a target person’s actions covaries with attributions of mind to the target. The authors found in Study 1 that the attribution of intentionality and cognition to a target was associated with identifying the target’s action in terms of high-level effects rather than low-level details. In Study 2, both action identification and mind attribution were greater for a liked target, and in Study 3, they were reduced for a target suffering misfortune. In Study (...) 4, it was again found that action identification and mind attribution were greater for a liked target, but like that for the self or a liked other, positive actions were identified at higher levels than negative actions, with the reverse being true for disliked others. In Study 5, the authors found that instructing participants to adopt the target’s perspective did not affect mind attribution but did lead to higher level identifications of the.. (shrink)

Conventional wisdom holds two seemingly opposed beliefs. One is that communities are often much better than individuals at dealing with certain situations or solving certain problems. The other is that crowds are usually, and some say always, at best as intelligent as their least intelligent members and at worst even less. Consistency would seem to be easily re-established by distinguishing between advanced, sophisticated social organizations which afford the supporting communities a high level of collective performance, and primitive, mob-like structures which (...) pull the group towards the lower end of the achievement scale. But this reconciliation meets with some objections. The most familiar ones concern the mixed record of elaborate social systems, which are said to occasionally or even, according to some accounts, systematically produce wrong decisions, poor assessments, disastrous plans, counterproductive measures, etc. A more recent set of objections rests on cases where ‘crowds’, i,e, groups not organized in a sophisticated way, produce good results, in fact, results which better those of most, or even all, members of the group. Such cases are collected in James Surowiecki’s book The Wisdom of Crowds, which argues more generally in favor of an ‘order out of chaos’ view of collective thinking: whether sophisticated or simple, social organizations for the production of knowledge or problem-solving can benefit from the absence of certain individualistc constraints which are traditionally thought to foster excellence in cognitive tasks. This flavor of paradox is enhanced by Surowiecki’s choice of phrase: at the surface level, ‘wisdom of crowds’ conflicts with the well-entrenched cliché of the folly1 of crowds; but at a deeper level, Surowiecki seems to appeal to one frequent connotation of ‘wisdom’ which is precisely its paradoxical character. Whether Surowiecki actually intended to exploit this.. (shrink)

Dealing with major issues in Jewish biomedical law, this book focuses upon the influence of morality, the rise of patient autonomy, and the role played by scientific progress in this area of Jewish Law. The book examines Jewish Law in comparison with canon, common, and modern Israeli law.

Can Rawls’s theory provide a framework for assessing obligations to future generations? Extending the veil of ignorance so that participants in the original position do not know to which generation they belong appears to fail in this endeavour. Earlier generations cannot improve their situation by “cooperating” with later generations. Such circumstances, lacking mutuality, leave no room for an agreement or contract. Nevertheless, the original position can be reconstructed so as to model relations of mutuality between generations even if these are (...) absent from the real world. This chapter assesses earlier attempts to do this and provides a rationale for viewing the just savings principle as a clause in the full formulation of the difference principle. (shrink)

The hypothesis that “Odes” 1.34 and 1.35 constitute a single poem is supported by a systematic examination of the use of address in the “Odes”. Specifically, the lack of address in 1.34 and the address of Fortuna by way of a circumlocution at 1.35.1 are both almost unparalleled; the combined poem, however, follows the common Horatian practice of addressing a previously named god by means of an epithet or circumlocution. The structure and progression of thought, furthermore, closely resemble that of (...) “Odes” 1.2. Quite possibly the division arose when the delayed address was taken to signal a new poem. (shrink)

Die Metamathematik der reellen Zahlen kann durch verschiedene formale Theorien der reellen Zahlen entwickelt werden. Ausgehend von der Theorie der reell abgeschlossenen Körper werden Erweiterungen beweistheoretisch untersucht und mit anderen typischen mathematischen Theorien mittels der Relation der Interpretierbarkeit verglichen. Die Ergebnisse bestimmen die logischen Ressourcen jener Theorien und begründen ein eigenes Reduktionsprogramm.

Note from the Editors Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy covers the period that begins, very roughly, ... The core of the subject matter is, of course, philosophy and its history. But the volume's papers reflect the fact that ...

This book offers a uniquely authoritative overview of early-modern philosophy, written by an international team of specialists.

The bestselling author of "Emotional Intelligence" presents a spiritual-scientific dialogue between Buddhist teachers and Western psychologists, physicians, and scientists on the mind's uncanny ability to heal the body.

The paper presents seven basic features of Francisco Suárez’s metaphysics. They are as follows: “Univocalization” of the concept of being and transcendental properties, “reification” of the act-potency doctrine, “ontologization” of individuality, “conceptualization” of the Scotist perspective, “existential” character of the concept of being, “epistemologization” and “methodologization” of metaphysics. Whereas the first five are indicated as remaining in the preserve of the traditional scholastic philosophy, the last two are taken as portending the methodological priority of the subjective states of affairs of (...) early modern “main-stream” philosophy. (shrink)

This note offers two related arguments. First, I supplement the existing scholarly consensus that the speaker of Sophocles’ Tereus fr. 588 Radt is Procne by suggesting that her addressee is a shepherd, whose existence was recently discovered and confirmed by a new papyrus for fr. 583. Second, I attempt to contextualize P.J. Finglass's placement of fr. 583 in the first episode of the play and to respond to the ‘internment’ problem posited by David Fitzpatrick by suggesting that the play takes (...) place on an anniversary or some sort of commemoration of Philomela's supposed death. This proposal justifies the doleful tenor of the fragment and its generalizing subject-matter, the lonely plight of married women torn from their natal families, and resolves the question of Procne's state of knowledge about her sister's fate; and it allows for the internment of Philomela to figure into the play's plot by making Philomela's ‘death’ an established event before the play begins, as Gregory Dobrov suggests. (shrink)

This paper provides a mathematical model of scientific discovery. It is shown in the context of this model that any discovery problem that can be solved by a computable scientist can be solved by a computable scientist all of whose conjectures are finitely axiomatizable theories.

We argue that the strengths of the Theory of Event Coding (TEC) can usefully be applied to a wider scope of cognitive tasks, and tested by more diverse methodologies. When allied with a theory of conceptual representation such as Barsalou's (1999a) perceptual symbol systems, and extended to data from eye-movement studies, the TEC has the potential to address the larger goals of an embodied view of cognition.

L’article de Grigory Agabalian est une description sémantique de la suffixation en –isme porteuse d’un sens valorisationnel, formalisée sur des variables à instancier. A partir d’une forme de d’une modale ou attitudinale de par, il apparaît nécessaire d’introduire une variable supplémentaire qui n’est plus une « base de construct...

Unraveling likeness to God in Plato requires a fresh approach that makes the greatest sense of it within Plato's larger moral philosophy. Such an understanding of likeness to God can be found by taking a fresh look at it through the lens of Plato's Philebus, where we find the idea that virtue is part of the divine realm right alongside the down-to-earth idea that virtue is rational activity in relation to the world as we find it. This chapter argues that (...) the same idea can be found in Stoic ethics as well, in a way that can reveal new options for understanding Plato's conception of virtue as likeness to God. (shrink)

El presente artículo plantea que el canon y la tradición filosófica occidental siguen siendo la concepción dominante en el ámbito de la educación media y universitaria. Esta situación ha permitido que se impongan y perpetúen históricamente en la academia latinoamericana, reafirmando así la condición colonial del quehacer filosófico y, en consecuencia, incidir en los discursos, prácticas e instituciones. En esta dirección, en el primer apartado se propone una reflexión crítica acerca del concepto de normalidad filosófica y sus proyecciones en el (...) filosofar latinoamericano y en la enseñanza de la filosofía. En el segundo apartado se problematiza la naturalización de la colonialidad implicada en la aceptación de la normalidad filosófica, en términos de la imposición del eurocentrismo cultural y epistémico, en los procesos de la enseñanza actual de la filosofía. Este breve recorrido permitirá, finalmente, mostrar que la exclusión y el privilegio del filosofar europeo, resultan ser factores que limitarían la posibilidad de otorgar validez y legitimidad a otras formas de pensamiento. (shrink)

Secondary commentators on Emile Durkheim have interpreted his ontology in conflicting and contradictory ways. Some have claimed that he treats social entities as mysterious substances which exist over andabove individuals. Others claim he is ontologically committed to exactly nothing more than individuals. Few studies have carefully analyzed his ontological commitments in detail, and the conventional wisdom on the issue leaves much to be desired. I argue Durkheim holds neither a substance nor an individualist view of social ontology. Instead, he is (...) committed to the reality of emergent social relations which form the proper subject matter of sociology. (shrink)

A questão aqui levantada se move em dois polos implicados mutuamente a partir do círculo hermenêutico heideggeriano, a saber, metafísica e homem. O primeiro momento do ensaio consiste em apontar como Heidegger opera a desconstrução da metafísica com o objetivo de mostrar que a metafísica não é simplesmente uma disciplina entre outras da filosofia, mas um acontecimento essencial do ser-aí humano. O segundo momento pretende definir a partir de que experiência fundamental do ente humano nasce a metafísica. Ser e tempo (...) e, principalmente, Que é Metafísica, servirão de guia para o presente ensaio. (shrink)

David Atkinson asks whether nonempirical constructions can lead to genuine knowledge in science, and answers in the negative. Thought experiments, in his view, are to be commended only insofar as they eventually lead to real experiments. The claim does not rely on a general study, conceptual or historical, of thought experiments as such: the range of the paper is at once narrower and broader. Atkinson views thought experiments as commonly understood as just one kind of episode in the development of (...) physics in which real experimentation is bypassed, and he believes that such episodes are justified only inasmuch as they are transitory stages on the way to genuine empirical inquiry. Atkinson wants to kill with one arrow what is usually regarded as two different birds: the notion that thought experiments proper can be persuasive in themselves, and the thesis that theories which cannot be brought to the tribunal of experience can nevertheless belong to science. He thus implicitly opposes three views which are commonly, albeit not universally, held: (i) some thought experiments are conclusive; (ii) some theories belong to science despite not being evidently and concretely amenable to empirical corroboration; (iii) the two issues are largely independent. The standpoint from which Atkinson operates is a rather strict form of empiricism, one which relies on a fairly sharp distinction between the conceptual and empirical dimensions of inquiry. My outlook is rather different: the conceptual and empirical seem to me to be intertwined, both conceptually, as suggested by Quine’s critique of logical positivism, and empirically, as revealed by the evidence provided by science itself in its daily and historical reality. Rather than take the high road, I propose to focus first on the critique to which Atkinson subjects Galileo’s thought experiment, and the lessons he draws from his analysis.. (shrink)