Anyone who aims to translate Hegel into readable English should bear in mind what he said in an early essay, viz. that before the living spirit which dwells in a philosophy can reveal itself it must be brought to birth by a kindred spirit. His approach to Hegel will therefore be sympathetic and in order to grasp the full import of what he is saying will try to think along with him, will try to become, as G.R.G. Mure said, an (...) actor in the dialectic. Then Hegel will be no more difficult to read in English than in German. The difficulties associated with his style and terminology are, in my opinion, exaggerated. Professor James Doull rightly says that just because Hegel’s terminology is thoroughly systematic, it is intelligible directly in a given passage to one who is at home in it. Differences in vocabulary and syntax are no barrier to the adequate expression of philosophic truth. In this connection it would be interesting and perhaps amusing if we could have Hegel’s comments on the biassed views of his Dutch disciple G.J.P.J. Bolland who founded a Hegelian school in Leiden at the beginning of this century. In a collection of his sayings occurs the following: “Honour to whom honour is due. Great is the spirit of Hegel - but in-the first decade of the twentieth century pure reason speaks the language of Holland and Bolland.” In a correspondence with Francis Sedlak in 1911 he stated that “even the language of Hegel is inferior to Dutch” and referred to English as a “semi-barbarous language in which the finest things cannot be said.”. (shrink)

How can an incomplete and uncertain model of the environment be used to perceive, infer, decide and act efficiently? This is the challenge that both living and artificial cognitive systems have to face. Symbolic logic is, by its nature, unable to deal with this question. The subjectivist approach to probability is an extension to logic that is designed specifically to face this challenge. In this paper, we review a number of frequently encountered cognitive issues and cast them into a common (...) Bayesian formalism. The concepts we review are ambiguities, fusion, multimodality, conflicts, modularity, hierarchies and loops. First, each of these concepts is introduced briefly using some examples from the neuroscience, psychophysics or robotics literature. Then, the concept is formalized using a template Bayesian model. The assumptions and common features of these models, as well as their major differences, are outlined and discussed. (shrink)

New Atlantis is an incomplete utopian novel by Sir Francis Bacon, published in 1627. In this work, Bacon portrayed a vision of the future of human discovery and knowledge, expressing his aspirations and ideals for humankind. The novel depicts the creation of a utopian land where "generosity and enlightenment, dignity and splendor, piety and public spirit" are the commonly held qualities of the inhabitants of the mythical Bensalem. The plan and organization of his ideal college, Salomon's House (or Solomon's (...) House), envisioned the modern research university in both applied and pure sciences. (shrink)

According to Partial Aggregation, a serious harm can be outweighed by a large number of somewhat less serious harms, but can outweigh any number of trivial harms. In this paper, I address the question of how we should extend Partial Aggregation to cases of risk, and especially to cases involving small risks of serious harms. I argue that, contrary to the most popular versions of the ex ante and ex post views, we should sometimes prevent a small risk that a (...) large number of people will suffer serious harms rather than prevent a small number of people from certainly suffering the same harms. Along the way, I object to the ex ante view on the grounds that it gives an implausible degree of priority to preventing identified over statistical harms, and to the ex post view on the grounds that it fails to respect the separateness of persons. An insight about the nature of claims emerges from these arguments: there are three conceptually distinct senses in which a person’s claim can be said to have a certain degree of strength. I make use of the distinction between these three senses in which a claim can be said to have strength in order to set out a new, more plausible, view about the aggregation of people’s claims under risk. (shrink)

James Moore states that "some of the most distinctive and central arguments of Hutcheson's philosophy - the importance of ideas brought to mind by the internal senses, the presence in human nature of calm desires, of generous and benevolent instincts - will be found to emerge in the course of these writings.""--Jacket.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

The Evolution of Complexity is addressed to a broad audience of academics and researchers from different disciplines, who are interested in the picture of our world emerging from the new sciences of complexity. This book reviews the new concepts proposed by the diverse theories of evolution, self-organisation, general systems, cybernetics, and the `complex adaptive systems' approach pioneered by the Santa Fe institute. The thread which holds everything together is the growth of complexity during the history of the universe: from elementary (...) particles, via atoms, molecules, living cells, multicellular organisms, plants, and animals to human beings, and societies. The different sections of the book discuss the foundations and philosophy of complexity evolution, its mathematical and computer models, its explanation of self-organising and living systems, the insights it provides into the origin of mind, language and culture, and its practical applications in areas such as management and system design. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

This book offers clinicians a long-awaited comprehensive paradigm for assessing object relations functioning in disturbed younger and older adolescents. It gives a clear sense of how object relations functioning is manifest in different disorders, and illuminates how scores on object relations measures are converted into a therapeutically relevant diagnostic matrix and formulation. Outlining the process of object relations assessment, Kelly presents vividly detailed cases of a range of disorders including anorexia nervosa, borderline states, depressive disorders, and trauma. The cases portray (...) the vicissitudes of object relations functioning and disruption that result in a unique structural developmental composite for a given adolescent. A major concern is demonstrating the utility and validity of two object representation measures--The Mutuality of Autonomy Scale and The Social Cognition Object Relations Scale --that are the main ones employed in the assessment of adolescents. MOA and SCORS scores facilitate a multidimensional understanding of the nuances of an adolescent's object relations functioning, and provide clinicians with organized, theory-based data leading to clear, specific treatment directions and guidelines and appropriate therapeutic programming. The book addresses the following questions: * Is individual psychotherapy indicated--will this adolescent benefit from an insight-oriented approach? * What are the likely directions that transference parameters will take in the treatment? * What types of countertransference reactions are likely to be anticipated in a given patient? * Is medication likely to be helpful in making this adolescent more accessible for treatment? Focusing only on adolescents, covering both the TAT and the Rorschach, and utilizing object relations theory as its major interpretive foundation, the book offers practitioners an alternative to general references based on a more actuarial, nomothetic, and atheoretical interpretive approach. It reflects one school of contemporary thought in projective assessment--one that advocates a more phenomenological, theory-based approach to test application and interpretation. (shrink)

_The Nature of Moral Thinking_ is an introductory text to the questions of ethics, offering a solid philosophical and historical basis for understanding the central issues. Francis Snare discusses in detail the classical philosophical arguments of Plato and Butler in relation to relativism and subjectivism and treats Marx and Nietzsche in regard to the origins and explanation of morality.

"The TVVOO Bookes of Francis Bacon. Of the proficience and aduancement of Learning, divine and humane. To the King. At London. Printed for Henrie Tomes, and are to be sould at his shop at Graies Inne Gate in Holborne. 1605." That was the original title-page of the book now in the reader's hand--a living book that led the way to a new world of thought.

La cognition humaine paraît étroitement liée à la structure de l'espace et du temps relativement auxquels le corps, le geste, l'intelligibilité semblent devoir se déterminer. Pourtant, ce qui, après les approches physico-mathématiques de Galilée et de Newton, fut caractérisé par Kant comme formes de l'intuition sensible, n'a cessé au cours des siècles qui suivirent de se trouver remis en cause dans leur saisie première par les développements théoriques. En mathématiques d'abord, avec les géométries non-euclidiennes, en physique ensuite, où relativité générale (...) puis théories quantiques et critiques ont dû remanier profondément l'objectivité de ces concepts pour en faire des catégories, certes toujours aussi essentielles, mais de plus en plus contre-intuitives, et maintenant en biologie où la temporalité, notamment, et la causalité se révèlent largement différentes de celles de la physique. C'est ce que nous tentons de présenter et de discuter dans ce texte en vue d'en dégager la pertinence pour la cognition elle-même. (shrink)

In this paper we report preliminary results on how people revise or update a previously held set of beliefs. When intelligent agents learn new things which conflict with their current belief set, they must revise their belief set. When the new information does not conflict, they merely must update their belief set. Various AI theories have been proposed to achieve these processes. There are two general dimensions along which these theories differ: whether they are syntactic-based or model-based, and what constitutes (...) a minimal change of beliefs. This study investigates how people update and revise semantically equivalent but syntactically distinct belief sets, both in symbolic-logic problems and in quasi-real-world problems. Results indicate that syntactic form affects belief revision choices. In addition, for the symbolic problems, subjects update and revise semantically-equivalent belief sets identically, whereas for the quasi-real-world problems they both update and revise differently. Further, contrary to earlier studies, subjects are sometimes reluctant to accept that a sentence changes from false to true, but they are willing to accept that it would change from true to false. (shrink)

This chapter compares the institutional setting and integrations processes in Switzerland and the EU. The major findings are that EU integration is trying to achieve more political integration and accommodation of a much higher degree of diversity in much less time than has ever been the case in Switzerland. Integration and expansion processes that were slower and non-linear in Switzerland and that happened in separate phases (e.g. religious diversification, linguistic diversification, territorial expansion, etc.) are all going on at the same (...) time in the EU. Especially integration and accession with enormous shocks of diversification are engineered at the same time in the EU. From this point of view, the EU has already tried to go beyond many stages that took centuries to be completed in Switzerland. The institutional design of the European Union seems to echo quite well the federal state formation process in Switzerland. The following precisions are however necessary in the comparative perspective. First, the momentary stage of European Integration, characterized by intergovernmental crisis management, resembles the (dysfunctional) intergovernmental centralism of the Swiss cantons during the decades before the formation of the federal-state in 1848. Second, due to the greater diversity of the European Union, this quasi-federal system has derived in extreme asymmetries between the member states. Since EU identity is not well entrenched among European citizens (and politicians), it has been hard to design institutions and policies of common territorial protection and redistribution and there is mistrust towards centralistic EU institutions (specially in the countries more affected by the economic crisis). Most European citizens do not feel that their interests are taken into account by the European Union. Third, it is important to note that in Swiss federalism the municipalities play an important role, they are much more than just administrative districts. This city-centred and bottom up construct of citizenship is guaranteed by the Swiss federal constitution. Citizens feel that their most immediate and local identity is not jeopardized but rooted in and guaranteed by the Swiss federal constitution. Compared to sub-national Swiss federalism, EU federalism is entirely focused on the nation-state and the EU institutions. Serious consideration ought to be given to the idea that European citizenship is not only about bringing citizenship to a higher European level but also about bringing it more to the root-level of citizenship: the city. Direct democracy has acted as a federator in the Swiss context. Switzerland made direct democracy and direct democracy made Switzerland. There has been a slow and iterative process of adaptation of structurally similar institutions of direct democracy at all levels (communal, cantonal, federal) of all units (all communes, all cantons, confederation roughly between 1830-1891. To the contrary, the EU is only incipiently in a process of introducing direct democracy (in some member-states and ECI), and so far direct democracy is mainly practiced as national plebiscitary democracy. Under this guise it is seen as a threat to EU integration and probably not without good reason. While in Switzerland the coherent introduction of direct democracy at all levels of the polity in the long run served as an important unifier, direct democracy has even not been considered as integrative part of all levels of political integration in the EU. It is of great interest that the one element in which the European Union has based the construction of EU citizenship and identity – mobility of residence – has been implicitly discouraged in Switzerland. The institutional design as incorporated in Swiss multicultural identity (which aims fundamentally at the protection of cantonal autonomy, culture and language) has facilitated that Switzerland is called today a successful multicultural society. Most citizens identify with Switzerland as a country and they like it as it is, but they do not want to take advantage of their formal right to move to other parts of the country, especially not across language borders. The same institutional design that has made of Switzerland a successful case of multiculturalism and democracy poses important barriers that make it difficult for the Swiss to move their residence across their country. Considering that one of the main features of European citizenship is the freedom of movement and residence, this poses a main concern. The Swiss compromise between the formal right and economic necessity of mobility on the one hand and the protection of political and cultural sub-identities on the other hand, is commuting. Due to the vast size, this is of limited applicability in the EU. However, in a Europe of cities and trans-border regions, commuting is an important option provided that every European citizen lives reasonably close to an important economic centre. In short, the Europe of commuters deserves attention in the context of EU citizenship. (shrink)