The present paper unravels ontological and normative conditions of personhood for the purpose of critiquing ‘Cognitivist Views’. Such views have attracted much attention and affirmation by presenting the ontology of personhood in terms of higher-order cognition on the basis of which normative practices are explained and justified. However, these normative conditions are invoked to establish the alleged ontology in the first place. When we want to know what kind of entity has full moral status, it is tempting to establish an (...) ontology that fits our moral intuitions about who should qualify for such unique normative standing. But this approach conflates personhood’s ontology and normativity insofar as it stresses the primacy of the former while implicitly presupposing the latter; it thereby suffers from a ‘Normative Fallacy’ by inferring from ‘ought’ to ‘is’. Following my critique of Cognitivism, I sketch an alternative conception, contending that, whereas the Cognitivist ontology of personhood presupposes the normative, a social ontology is constituted by it. In due consideration of evidence from developmental psychology, the social embeddedness of persons—manifested in the ability of taking a ‘second-person stance’—is identified as a key feature of personhood that precedes higher-order cognition, and is directly linked to basic normative concerns. (shrink)

From epileptic seizures to depressive symptoms, predictive neurotechnologies are used for a large range of applications. In this article we focus on advisory devices; namely, predictive neurotechnology programmed to detect specific neural events (e.g., epileptic seizure) and advise users to take necessary steps to reduce or avoid the impact of the forecasted neuroevent. Receiving advise from a predictive device is not without ethical concerns. The problem with predictive neural devices, in particular advisory ones, is the risk of seeing one’s autonomous (...) choice supplanted by the predictions instead of being supplemented by it. For users, there is a potential shift from being assisted by the system to being over-dependent on the technology. In other terms, it introduces ethical issues associated with epistemic dependency. In this article, we examine the notion of epistemic authority in relation to predictive neurotechnologies. Section 1 of our article explores and defines the concept of epistemic authority. In section 2, we illustrate how predictive devices are best conceived of as epistemic authorities and we explore the subject-device epistemic relationship. In section 3, we spell out the risk of harms interconnected with epistemic deferral. We conclude by stressing a set of preliminary measures to prepare users for the authoritative nature of predictive devices. (shrink)

Why and how do norms emerge? Which norms emerge and why these ones in particular? Such questions belong to the ‘problem of the emergence of norms’, which consists of an inquiry into the production of norms in social collectives. I address this question through the ethnographic study of the emergence of ‘norms against violence’ in the political collective Occupy Geneva. I do this, first, empirically, with the analysis of my field observations; and, second, theoretically, by discussing my findings. In consequence (...) of two episodes categorized as sexual assaults that occurred in their camp, the members of Occupy Geneva decided to tackle those issues in a general assembly. Their goal was to amend their first charter of good conduct in order to reform its norms and complete it with norms aiming to regulate ‘facts’ of ‘unjustified violence’. During a collective deliberation, new norms were devised, debated and consensually adopted. The writing of the new charter took place in a second general assembly during which the wording of the written norms was collectively decided. I show that indignation over the sexual assaults was the main motive that led to the collective deliberation, and that the entire process of the making of these norms was characterized by different collective emotions. Indeed, indignation, contempt and fear played major roles in the emergence of norms prohibiting violence, allowing punishment and exclusion of wrongdoers, and prescribing collective intervention against an aggressor to neutralize the threat represented. These findings prompt me to hypothesize that social norms emerge from emotions thanks to the latters’ internal structure; and that emotions provide causal and grounding explanations for this emergence. Thus, emotions allow us to answer the questions: ‘Why do norms emerge?’ and ‘Why do they have their specific forms?’ In short, I argue that social norms have emotional foundations. (shrink)

The complexity of the physiological phenotype currently prevents us from identifying an integrative measure to assess how the internal state and environmental conditions modify life‐history strategies. In this article, it is proposed that shorter telomeres should lead to a faster pace‐of‐life where investment in self‐maintenance is decreased as a means of saving energy for reproduction, but at the cost of somatic durability. Inversely, longer telomeres would favor an increased investment in soma maintenance and thus a longer reproductive lifespan (i.e., slower (...) pace‐of‐life). Under this hypothesis, telomere dynamics could be such an integrative mediator, which will assemble the information about oxidative stress levels, inflammation status and stress reactivity, and relate this information to the potential lifespan of the organism and its pace‐of‐life strategy. The signaling function of telomere dynamics can also reach over generations, a phenomenon in which the telomere lengths of gametes would provide a channel through which offspring would receive information about their environment early in their development, hence increasing the possibilities for developmental plasticity. -/- . (shrink)

One of the trademarks of Nicolai Hartmann’s ontology is his theory of levels of reality. Hartmann drew from many sources to develop his version of the theory. His essay “Die Anfänge des Schichtungsgedankens in der alten Philosophie” testifies of the fact that he drew from Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus. But this text was written relatively late in Hartmann’s career, which suggests that his interest in the theories of levels of the ancients may have been retrospective. In “Nicolai Hartmann und seine (...) Zeitgenossen,” Martin Morgenstern puts the emphasis on contemporaries of Hartmann: Émile Boutroux, Max Scheler, Heinrich Rickert, Karl Jaspers, and Arnold Gehlen. But there is another plausible source for Hartmann’s conception of levels that has so far remained overlooked in the literature. Hartmann studied with and was influenced by Nikolai Lossky. Lossky has a theory of levels that he adopted from Vladimir Solovyov. Solovyov presents his theory of levels, among other places, in Oпpaвдaнie дoбpa, where he says that the five principal stages of the cosmogonic process of ascension toward universal perfection, which are given in experience, are the mineral or inorganic realm, the vegetal realm, the animal realm, the realm of natural humanity, and the realm of spiritual or divine humanity. This theory appears to bear significant similarities with the theory of levels of reality that Hartmann will develop a few decades later. Solovyov was widely read in Russia and it would be unlikely that Hartmann was not at least minimally acquainted with his work. Chances are that Hartmann came into contact with it in some details. An intellectual lineage could thus likely be traced from Hartmann back to Solovyov. In this paper, I document and discuss this possible lineage. (shrink)

The philosophical assumptions that organize moral sociology as practical philosophy are the outcome of a secular quest to investigate the principles, norms and values behind the constitution of society. As a protracted response to the whole utilitarian-atomistic-individualistic tradition that systematically deemphasizes the constitutive role that morality plays in the structuration of self and society, the sociological tradition has continued, by its own means, the tradition of moral and practical philosophy in theoretically informed empirical research of social practices. Going back to (...) classic moral philosophy, I want to show in this article how social theory is involved in the quest for ‘the good life with and for the others in just institutions’ (Ricoeur). (shrink)

Dans le courant du XVII e siècle se multiplient en Chine les discours sur l’amitié. En partie liés à la déliquescence des structures traditionnelles et notamment familiales qui servaient de base au fonctionnement social de l’empire, ils proposent de réévaluer le lien amical dans l’organisation politique. He Xinyin (1517-1579) est à cet égard l’un des penseurs les plus innovants et radicaux. À travers la lecture de quelques essais majeurs recueillis dans le recueil de ses œuvres complètes, l’article entend expliciter la (...) réévaluation de l’amitié et sa dimension subversive chez cet auteur et montrer comment une telle redéfinition a pu instiller dans la culture chinoise du XVII e siècle et au-delà de nouveaux rapports subjectifs où l’individu émerge comme une entité cardinale dans les rapports sociaux ainsi que les idées de liberté d’expression. (shrink)

Les concepts scientifiques, même usés, même désuets, ne sont jamais définitivement périmés. Ils peuvent toujours faire retour dans les conjonctures théoriques ultérieures. Cela tient à la nature très particulière du concept, irréductible aux descriptions positivistes : issus de l’expérience et ayant vocation à en rendre raison, les concepts représentent autant d’arrachements à l’expérience et de survols explicatifs de l’expérience. Des épistémologues antipositivistes du xxe siècle ont été attentifs à de telles caractéristiques philosophiques. On expose ici leur modèle de la conceptualisation (...) scientifique et on le met au travail sur un cas, le concept de tendance, dont on montre il survit à la période de sa première formulation et il mérite de revenir dans les débats psychophysiologiques contemporains. (shrink)

In sum, major critics of the twentieth century continually insist that poetry's unique value lies in its ability to convey meanings for which there are no public criteria whatsoever. But there are no such meanings, and to praise a poem for conveying them is empty. Again, these critics assume that what we understand by emotion is to be identified simply with an inner experience or state of mind and that this state of mind is what is conveyed by, or gives (...) meaning and definition to, words which are used to refer to our emotional life. The emotions or qualities of emotions supposedly communicated by poetry alone, moreover, are said to elude public language altogether; they can be neither defined nor discussed but only embodied in images. But whatever the status these private experiences have for us, they as yet play no part in our language, even our poetic language, and reference to them certainly contributes nothing to our criticism of poetry. Criticism can play a central role in interpreting and shaping our lives, but it will only be worth writing if its vocabulary has content. If criticism is to become intelligible, it must begin by abandoning the appeal to private knowledge.Frederic K. Hargreaves, Jr. received his doctorate in English from Boston University. (shrink)

Le problème abordé par cette étude concerne l’interprétation du statut de l’imagination dans les Méditations métaphysiques, dans son rapport avec l’intellection et la conception de l’espace, de ses objets et des propriétés mathématiques. Il s’agit en particulier de savoir comment l’imagination distincte paraît assurer la réalité de son objet lorsqu’il s’agit de l’espace en général et lorsqu’il s’agit des figures particulières.

In his article “The Megarian and Aristotelian Concept of Possibility”, Nicolai Hartmann attempts to revive an interpretation of the conception of possibility of the Megarians that stood in opposition to the Aristotelian conception of possibility and thus in opposition to the Aristotelian conception of modality in general. In this introduction, I undertake to situate Hartmann’s article in its historical context. Did Hartmann come to adopt this thesis through his study of ancient Greek philosophy? Or did he already have a predilection (...) for the Megarian conception of possibility prior to this? If so, how did this predilection come about? Was there an influence from his friend Vasily Sesemann, who published an article discussing the Megarians the previous year? Or were both Hartmann and Sesemann influenced early on by their mutual Russian teacher Nikolai Lossky, or even by a general tendency pervading Russian thought—itself grounded in the fatalism typical of the Russian collective unconscious—as we find it expressed in the philosophy of Vladimir Solovyov, Lev Tolstoy, and other Russian thinkers? (shrink)

Reading the Communist Manifesto against the contemporary background of massive unemployment, the author argues that Marx's theory of work is no longer adequate to tackle the problem of `workers without work' and suggests that it has to be reformulated in such a way that its normative intuitions and its critical impulses can be maintained. In the first part, he presents a philosophical critique of Marxism that is inspired by Jürgen Habermas and Hannah Arendt. In the second part, he presents a (...) sociological critique of Marxism and argues that the theory of the alienation of work implies a justification of work and the work society. Finally, in the last part, the author presents an ideological critique of Marxism that is inspired by Marcel Mauss' sociology of the gift. Criticising the contractualist assumptions of workfare solutions, he proposes a package solution for a radical decommodification of the labour market by means of a disjunction of income and work. (shrink)

La philosophie des sciences d'Emile Meyerson (1859-1933) suscite aujourd'hui un regain d'interet. Proche de Bergson, de Brunschvicg et de De Broglie, Meyerson apparait comme un membre eminent, quoique neglige, de la tradition epistemologique francaise. Antipositiviste, fin connaisseur de la science classique et de la thermodynamique, il propose de penetrantes interpretations de la relativite et des quanta. Nourri de metaphysique allemande, il est egalement curieux des avancees theoriques de son temps, comme en temoignent ses riches correspondances avec Einstein, Husserl, Cassirer, ou (...) encore Dewey et MacTaggart. L'oeuvre foisonnante et complexe de Meyerson, critiquee par Bachelard, n'a cesse d'etre lue et appreciee de penseurs tels que Popper, Kuhn et Quine. Cette etude, s'appuyant sur les grands ouvrages publies du vivant de l'auteur, mais aussi sur des archives inedites, montre que l'epistemologie meyersonienne represente une tres originale et tres actuelle anthropologie de la connaissance. (shrink)

"The extensive attention devoted to abortion has led Christians for too long to overlook much of the exploding bioethics agenda. Moreover, to focus only on 'issues' is to fail to address the profound changes taking place in the very nature of the medical profession. This book signals the commitment of the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity to help expand the church's bioethical vision and to foster a more substantial Christian contribution to the public debate."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by (...) Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved. (shrink)

We present an age-structured model for erythropoiesis in which the mortality of mature cells is described empirically by a physiologically realistic probability distribution of survival times. Under some assumptions, the model can be transformed into a system of delay differential equations with both constant and distributed delays. The stability of the equilibrium of this system and possible Hopf bifurcations are described for a number of probability distributions. Physiological motivation and interpretation of our results are provided.

La guerre et la captivité, en mettant Raymond Ruyer en relation avec des biologistes, ont donné à ce philosophe parti du mécanisme et de la théorie de la relativité l’occasion d’accéder au matériau scientifique dont il avait besoin pour élaborer sa « psycho-biologie ». Mais les thèses les plus fortes de Néo-finalisme sont le résultat d’une évolution lente entamée dès la fin de sa thèse de doctorat. Parti de positions nettement actualistes, Ruyer a commencé à soupçonner la nécessité d’une profondeur (...) virtuelle de la vie au milieu des années 1930, et il a atteint le point de bascule dans l’épaisseur du sens et de la signification dans les ultimes publications précédant la seconde guerre mondiale. Il lui est alors apparu qu’il devait admettre, par-delà la sécheresse de la structuration causale du proche en proche, une doublure psycho-biologique susceptible d’animer la moindre étendue de matière. (shrink)

The essay hypothesizes a norm condition of stasis—the mood of sentient peace occupied on a quiet porch. From there the psyche is drawn upward by concept, into the benign/abstract world or downward into the pre-verbal which links us with prespeech man/woman. Is there any default position in this map of the positions of consciousness?

Taiwan has a population of 23 million, of which some 500,000 are Aborigines. Recent conflicts over a national biobank as part of Taiwan's biotechnological industrial development, genetic research on Aboriginal origins, and commercialization of research findings involving Aborigines have raised a number of important ethical conflicts. These ethical conflicts involve on one hand, the importance of researchers' duties, and on the other hand, Aboriginal rights. This paper will go in three steps. First, this paper describes the three cases of ethical (...) violations of Aboriginal rights committed by Taiwanese researchers in the course of their scientific duties. After having given an account of ethical conflicts between research duties and Aboriginal rights, the paper addresses larger ethical issues underlying this Taiwanese research context. Finally, the paper considers if stronger ethical regulation could reconcile Aboriginal rights and research duties. (shrink)

Problem solving in a materially rich environment requires interacting with chance. Sixty-four participants were invited to solve 5-letter anagrams presented as movable tiles in conditions that either allowed the participants to move the tiles as they wished or only allowed random shuffling (without rearranging the tiles post shuffling) thus contrasting pure luck with an interactive model. We hypothesised that shuffling would break unhelpful mental sets and introduce beneficial unplanned problem-solving trajectories. However, participants performed significantly worse when shuffling, which suggests luck (...) plays less of a role than has been previously suggested. Granular analysis of seven critical cases revealed arbitrary path dependency across both conditions and moments of missed luck. It also questions current models of non-agentic luck and the ability to separate agent and luck. This research has implications for fostering better problem solving in an uncertain and fluid world. (shrink)

According to Thagard and Stewart :1–33, 2011), creativity results from the combination of neural representations, and combination results from convolution, an operation on vectors defined in the holographic reduced representation framework. They use these ideas to understand creativity as it occurs in many domains, and in particular in science. We argue that, because of its algebraic properties, convolution alone is ill-suited to the role proposed by Thagard and Stewart. The semantic pointer concept allows us to see how we can apply (...) the full range of HRR operations while keeping the modal representations so central to Thagard and Stewart’s theory. By adding another combination operation and using semantic pointers as the combinatorial basis, this modified version overcomes the limitations of the original theory and perhaps helps us explain aspects of creativity not covered by the original theory. While a priori reasons cast doubts on the use of HRR operations with modal representations :5039–5054, 1987) such as semantic pointers, recent models point in the other direction, allowing us to be optimistic about the success of the revised version. (shrink)

Avec des textes de D. Armstrong, M.Esfeld, K. Fine, D. Lewis, H. Mellot, K. Mulligan, M. Rea, P. Unger, P. van Inwagen, D. Zimmerman. L’ontologie est la partie de la métaphysique qui traite de l’être en général, et non d’un être en particulier, et son domaine d’enquête excède même le monde actuel puisqu’elle porte sur l’ensemble du possible, sur les objets possibles et réels ainsi que sur leurs propriétés ou sur leurs structures ultimes. Ce volume fournit les textes fondamentaux pour (...) réfléchir aux principales notions de l’ontologie contemporaine. Y sont abordés les problèmes de la composition matérielle des objets, de la causalité, de la nature du temps et des relations en général. Les questions de méthode portent sur le lien avec la logique et les sciences tout autant que sur le recours aux catégories conceptuelles et aux intuitions. (shrink)

Within the philosophy of mind, consciousness is currently understood as the expression of one or other cognitive modality, either intentionality , transparency , subjectivity or reflexivity . However, neither intentionality, subjectivity nor transparency adequately distinguishes conscious from nonconscious cognition. Consequently, the only genuine index or defining characteristic of consciousness is reflexivity, the capacity for autonoetic or self-referring, self-monitoring awareness. But the identification of reflexivity as the principal index of consciousness raises a major challenge in relation to the cognitive mechanism responsible (...) for operationalizing such a reflexive state. Current reliance by higher-order and intrinsic self-representational theories on self-representing data structures to achieve reflexive self-awareness is highly problematic, suggesting a solution in terms of a self-referential processing regime. (shrink)

Friendship occupies the last place in the five social relations in the Confucian tradition, yet it plays an important role in Confucian writings. In this article, I discuss the notion of friendship that lasts beyond death from ancient China. I examine how the friendship between Bo Ya and Zhong Ziqi finds its continuation in that of Fan Shi and Zhang Shao, insofar as one of the two friends dies in both cases. These friendly bonds are tinged with a tragic tone (...) and have fueled the imagination of the Chinese who sublimate or amplify them in all kinds of literary genres – poetry, theater, and novel – dating back to the pre-imperial period and to the Han Dynasty. All the authors underscore the faithfulness of these characters, which they consider to be the characters’ virtue. They also emphasize the spiritual link that transcends life and death. Based on the translation of these well-known and celebrated narratives, I intend to show how the exemplary nature of friendship is enhanced or mythologized, and how intertextuality has shaped the Chinese vocabulary itself in this regard. (shrink)

This text is a review of Joseph Urbas's Emerson's Metaphysics: A Song of Laws and Causes (Lexington Books, 2016). In this book, Urbas proposes a reconstruction of the metaphysics of the American poet, essayist, and self-defined philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. According to Urbas, Emerson has a coherent metaphysics, the fundamental principle of which is the category of causation. Reacting to David Hume, Emerson would have deliberately emphasized causation, connection, relation, tie, link, and so on. Emerson is thus characterized as a (...) "causationist" and his philosophy is considered a "causationism." Urbas also argues — against other prevalent interpretations — that Emerson's philosophy is part of the New England "ontological turn" and that it is best understood as a "metaphysical realism" of both particulars and universals alike. I examine these lines of argumentation and propose a couple of critical remarks concerning Emerson's relations to Goethe and Francis Ellingwood Abbot. (shrink)

This is a review of an interdisciplinary work of intellectual history on the Moscow philosophical-mathematical school. The author, Ilona Svetlikova, is primarily interested in the thought of the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century mathematician and philosopher Nikolai Bugaev, of his son Boris Bugaev — better known under his nom de plume Andrei Belyi —, of Nikolai Bugaev’s student Pavel Nekrasov, and of other disciples of Bugaev, especially Vissarion Alekseev, the Baron Mikhail Taube, and Pavel Florensky. The book explores the views (...) of these thinkers, all of whom were more or less closely associated with the Moscow Mathematical Society, on issues at the crossroads of mathematics, philosophy, literature, religion, and political ideology. Since he was the originator and pillar of the Moscow philosophico-mathematical circle, my critical comments focus on Nikolai Bugaev. (shrink)