The Vedic -ya-presents: Passives and Intransitivity in Old Indo-Aryan. By Leonid Kulikov. Leiden Studies in Indo-European, vol. 19. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012. Pp. xxix + 994.

Founded on May 14, 1939 by John Dewey and Sidney Hook, the Committee for Cultural Freedom (CCF) has been acknowledged as the most formidable anti-Stalinist liberal organization. Its first public statement of principles endeavored to demarcate the salient incommensurable conflict between democratic and totalitarian societies. Amidst a political climate, particularly in New York City, where Communist influence reached its zenith, the CCF dissected the core premise of the Popular Front by naming the Soviet Union a totalitarian state. It proclaimed that, (...) “in fear or despair they [Crypto-Stalinists] hasten to exalt one brand of intellectual servitude over another; to make fine distinctions between various methods of .. (shrink)

Weissenbacher, Stephen P. Weldon, and Tomoko Yoshida.

Newman’s Anglican sermon—“The Danger of Accomplishments”— warned his Oxford audience of the dangers both of higher education and of a life of luxury. Yet how can this sermon’s rejection of flowery literature that entertains and arouses pleasant feelings in its readers be reconciled with Newman’s later advocacy in his The Idea of a University that classical literature is an important aspect of a liberal education?

The evidence favoring sex differences in pain seems compelling (berkley). This commentary considers the role of such factors as anxiety, somatosensory amplification, and coping style in accounting for the differential response to pain in the laboratory and clinic, and emphasizes the need to base evaluation and treatment upon individual reports rather than gender-based stereotypes.

This collection is a powerful statement about the many directions a post-metaphysical ethics might take.

This paper examines various views—religious, scientific, philosophical—on the meaning and significance of world history. The view it defends is a phenomenological, non-metaphysical one, i.e., it is one that does not seek to understand history in the light of end-states lying beyond time and history but which seeks, rather, to lay bare the logic at work within the contingency of events. Taking as its focus the phenomenon of globalization, the paper seeks to make explicit the global ontology that is implicit in (...) philosophical hermeneutics. The thesis it defends in this regard is that, to the degree that it prevails and by reason of a kind of “functional necessity,” globalization is capable of bringing into being a global ethic of mutuality and reciprocity. (shrink)

The general practice of tracing the concept of human rights back to its presumed philosophical origins in the concepts of natural law and/or natural right, and invoking those concepts to give the idea of human rights its moral direction and philosophical substance, is dramatically mistaken. Interpreting human rights as the philosophical progeny of these earlier traditions allows the uglier aspects of natural rights and natural law, which the concept of human rights was intended to remedy, to serve as the defining (...) characteristics of human rights. (shrink)

ABSTRACTSolving a conflict between two response options in an interference task has been found to increase control in a subsequent conflict situation. The present research examined whether such conflict adaptation persists in the presence of distractors that have motivational relevance and are therefore competing for attentional resources. In an adjusted flanker task, motivational distractors were presented together with the current trial while the previous trial never included any distractor. Accumulated evidence across three studies showed that motivational distractors reduced the conflict (...) adaptation effect. This was found irrespective of the location at which the distractor occurred, and independent of its valence. Study 3 and a merged data analysis ruled out low-level alternative explanations. In line with a dual competition account (P... (shrink)

For whatever reason, scholars have recently reapproached the moral philosophy of Thomas Hobbes with a renewed interest in establishing its validity. Two influential interpretations have emerged, a theistic interpretation and a concep- tualistic interpretation, the former by Howard Warrender in The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, and the latter by David Gauthier in tfhe fcogic of leviathan.Both Warrender and Gauthier maintain that Hobbes's egoistic psychology invalidates his moral theory, and undertake to rescue its formal validity by regrounding the theory on his (...) theology, on the one hand, and on his methodological (rather than metaphysical) materialism, on the other. The result in both instances is a piecemeal analysis that dissolves the political realism for which Hobbes was famous, and ignores altogether the comprehensive intentions which he so carefully expressed. Hobbes takes on the appearance of something that might be best described as a pre-Kantian Kant. (shrink)

Kant suggests that moral metaphysics can be shown to be politically applicable by thinking of the analogically similar applicability of the principles of speculative reason to the external world of sense experience. Just as the categories of understanding, e.g., causality, substance, and so on must be schematized, i.e., given a temporal representation in order to be made applicable to the forms of sensuous intuitions, so also the principles of morality—most especially the idea of the autonomous will—must be schematized to be (...) made politically applicable. The paper shows how Kant employs his schematism in metaphysics to make the principles of morality applicable to political experience and concludes with observations on the moral and political implications of a politics that pays homage to Kantian morality. (shrink)

Harrison's study is an exegesis of book III, part II of Hume's Treatise of Human Nature, with an epilogue on the correlative section in the Enquiry. Each chapter begins with a summary of a section of the Treatise, and follows with Harrison's own exegetical and critical comments.

The "fundamental human desire for liberty is also primordially a desire for mastery, not only over oneself but also over others". Compound for John Locke the problems that follow from this connection between liberty and mastery of others by adding to it the idea central to Locke's liberal politics, that government has "nothing to do with moral virtues and vices", but only with making men free and secure, and you have the basis for the dilemma addressed in this book. A (...) liberal political doctrine of rights must be accompanied by an account of the art of governing men, one which educates men for liberty. (shrink)

It has been part of the more orthodox reading of David Hume's philosophy that he denied that propositions containing "ought" can validly be deduced from propositions containing only "is." Failure to acknowledge the dichotomy that exists between factual statements and normative statements results in the "naturalistic fallacy" of unjustifiably transforming fact into value. Many of Hume's readers argue that he committed this fallacy himself.

Cultural influences are pervasive throughout human behaviour, and as human–robot interactions become more common, roboticists are increasingly focusing attention on how to build robots that are culturally competent and culturally sustainable. The current treatment of culture in robotics, however, is largely limited to the definition of culture as national culture. This is problematic for three reasons: it ignores subcultures, it loses specificity and hides the nuances in cultures, and it excludes refugees and stateless persons. We propose to shift the focus (...) of cultural robotics to redefine culture as an emergent phenomenon. We make use of three research programmes in the social and cognitive sciences to justify this definition. Consequently, cultural behaviour cannot be explicitly programmed into a robot, rather, a robot must be designed with the capability to participate in the interactions that lead to the arising of cultural behaviour. In the final part of the paper, we explore which capacities and abilities are the most salient for a robot to do this. (shrink)