Philosophy, scientific psychology, and common sense all distinguish perception from cognition. While there is little agreement about how the perception–cognition boundary ought to be drawn, one prominent idea is that perceptual states are dependent on a stimulus, or stimulus-dependent, in a way that cognitive states are not. This paper seeks to develop this idea in a way that can accommodate two apparent counterexamples: hallucinations, which are prima facie perceptual yet stimulus-independent; and demonstrative thoughts, which are prima facie cognitive yet stimulus-dependent. (...) The payoff is not only a specific proposal for marking the perception–cognition boundary, but also a deeper understanding of the natures of hallucination and demonstrative thought. (shrink)

Substituted judgment has increasingly become the accepted standard for rendering decisions for incapacitated adults in the USA. A broad exception exists with regard to patients with diminished capacity secondary to depressive disorders, as such patients’ previous wishes are generally not honoured when seeking to turn down life-preserving care or pursue aid-in-dying. The result is that physicians often force involuntary treatment on patients with poor medical prognoses and/or low quality of life as a result of their depressive symptoms when similarly situated (...) incapacitated patients without such depressive symptoms would have their previous wishes honoured via substituted judgment. This commentary argues for reconsidering this approach and for using a substituted judgment standard for a subset of EMP/LQL patients seeking death. (shrink)

Are evolution and creation irreconcilably opposed? Is 'intelligent design' theory an unhappy compromise? Is there another way of approaching the present-day divide between religious and so-called secular views of the origins of life? Jacob Klapwijk offers a philosophical analysis of the relation of evolutionary biology to religion, and addresses the question of whether the evolution of life is exclusively a matter of chance or is better understood as including the notion of purpose. Writing from a Christian point of view, (...) he criticizes creationism and intelligent design theory as well as opposing reductive naturalism. He offers an alternative to both and an attempt to bridge the gap between them, via the idea of 'emergent evolution'. In this theory the process of evolution has an emergent or innovative character resulting in a living world of ingenious, multifaceted complexity. (shrink)

As conceptual and theoretical discussions on environmental valuation approaches have advanced there is growing interest in the impact that valuation has on decision making. The perceived legitimacy of the outputs of valuation studies is seen as one factor influencing their impact on policy decisions. One element of this is ensuring that participants of valuation processes see the results as legitimate and would be willing to accept decisions based on these findings. Here, we test the perceived legitimacy to participants of two (...) approaches to deliberative monetary valuation, deliberated preferences and Deliberative Democratic Monetary Valuation, in the context of marine planning in the Clyde estuary in Scotland. We compare and contrast deliberated preference and deliberative democratic monetary valuation and track their emergence as responses to critiques of conventional stated preference approaches. We then present the results of our case study where we found that deliberative democratic monetary valuation produced valuations that were perceived as more legitimate that deliberated preference as the basis for decision making by those involved in the valuation process. (shrink)

Susan Carey's account of Quinean bootstrapping has been heavily criticized. While it purports to explain how important new concepts are learned, many commentators complain that it is unclear just what bootstrapping is supposed to be or how it is supposed to work. Others allege that bootstrapping falls prey to the circularity challenge: it cannot explain how new concepts are learned without presupposing that learners already have those very concepts. Drawing on discussions of concept learning from the philosophical literature, this article (...) develops a detailed interpretation of bootstrapping that can answer the circularity challenge. The key to this interpretation is the recognition of computational constraints, both internal and external to the mind, which can endow empty symbols with new conceptual roles and thus new contents. (shrink)

This book provides a detailed account of the role of property in German Idealism. It puts the concept of property in the center of the philosophical systems of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel and shows how property remains tied to their conceptions of freedom, right, and recognition. The book begins with a critical genealogy of the concept of property in modern legal philosophy, followed by a reconstruction of the theory of property in Kant's Doctrine of Right, Fichte's Foundations of Natural Right, (...) and Hegel's Jena Realphilosophie. By turning to the tradition of German Rechtsphilosophie, as opposed to the more standard libertarian and utilitarian frameworks of property, it explores the metaphysical, normative, political, and material questions that make property intelligible as a social relation. The book formulates a normative theory of property rooted in practical reason, mutual recognition, and social freedom. This relational theory of property, inspired by German Idealism, brings a fresh angle to contemporary property theory. Additionally, it provides crucial philosophical background to 19th century debates on private property, inequality, labor, socialism, capitalism, and the state. The Concept of Property in Kant, Fichte, and Hegel will appeal to scholars and advanced students interested in 19th Century German philosophy, social and political philosophy, philosophy of law, political theory, and political economy. (shrink)

The qualities of Abraham's God, as tradition has them, are personal presence and guidance, a God who makes and keeps promises, who “covenants” with him and communicates with him directly; and who acts justly, not in a forensic sense but in a practical way.

A new public centered long-range corporate planning orientation is proposed. Underlying this orientation is the rationale that the main purpose of business activity is the satisfaction of socially desirable needs, i.e. needs that are compatible with long run public welfare. Such need satisfaction will tend to bring about improvements in the quality of private and public life. Corporate planning should thus facilitate the performance of business activities designed to achieve the satisfaction of socially desirable needs.The determination of what are socially (...) desirable needs will be based on public consensus, which corporations can periodically assess, and incorporate into their long range plans. A long-range planning procedure, incorporating social welfare considerations is developed. It is suggested that a planning procedure such as this is essential for the existence of firms in the long run. (shrink)

In the age of change in the institutional and conceptual setting in which the ancient tradition of Jewish learning would go forward, what we see in the two most important figures of the transitional generation is only the end of the old, not the beginning of the new. Saul Lieberman continued the received tradition that learning means exegesis of texts, but did not fully master the logic of that received tradition and so distorted it. Salo W. Baron undertook a new (...) intellectual tradition, one that pursued historical study in place of the exegesis of texts, but did. not really grasp the requirements of the kind of new history that he proposed to write. Announcing the advent of social history into the academy of Jewish learning, what he wrote as the economic part of that social history was merely the paraphrase of received texts, with glosses that look suspiciously like a kind of free-associative exegesis. While the one scholar demonstrated the decadence of an old tradition of learning, the other succeeded in showing only the difficulty of actually mastering the discourse of an entirely new academic world. (shrink)

Physicians expressing opinions on medical matters that run contrary to the consensus of experts pose a challenge to licensing bodies and regulatory authorities. While the right to express contrarian views feeds a robust marketplace of ideas that is essential for scientific progress, physicians advocating ineffective or dangerous cures, or actively opposing public health measures, pose a grave threat to societal welfare. Increasingly, a distinction has been made between professional speech that occurs during the physician-patient encounter and public speech that transpires (...) beyond the clinical setting, with physicians being afforded wide latitude to voice empirically false claims outside the context of patient care. This paper argues that such a bifurcated model does not sufficiently address the challenges of an age when mass communications and social media allow dissenting physicians to offer misleading medical advice to the general public on a mass scale. Instead, a three-tiered model that distinguishes between citizen speech, physician speech and clinical speech would best serve authorities when regulating physician expression. (shrink)

Un partisan du monisme matérialiste qui souscrit au réalisme intentionnel s’engage à octroyer aux contenus des représentations mentales une efficacité causale dans la production d’effets physiques. Deux difficultés se présentent : d’une part, le caractère extrinsèque des propriétés sémantiques paraît inconciliable avec leur efficacité causale ; d’autre part, comme un matérialiste suppose que toute entité qui exemplifie une propriété sémantique exemplifie simultanément des propriétés physiques, celles-ci risquent de priver celle-là d’efficacité causale . La première section est consacrée au premier problème, (...) et la seconde section au second problème.A philosopher who subscribes jointly to physicalism and to intentional realism is bound to grant content causal efficacy in the causation of physical effects. He must then overcome two problems. First, the extrinsicness of semantic properties seems to deprive them of causal power . Secondly, on minimalist physicalist assumptions, no entity can instantiate a semantic property unless it simultaneously instantiates some physical properties. A representation's semantic property risks therefore to be deprived of causal efficacy by its physical properties . I deal with the first problem in the first section of this paper and with the second problem in the second section. (shrink)

In this study, I clarify and defend the critique of the ‘sages’ and ‘robbers’ that is found in the _Zhuangzi_. As detailed in Chapter 8 of the _Zhuangzi_, both the (non-Daoist) ‘sages’ and ‘robbers’ are equally responsible for society’s ills. This is because both the ‘sages’ and ‘robbers’ are perceptually alienated from nature. This perceptual alienation involves the inability to perceive nature as fundamentally indeterminate (_wu_, 無). The Daoist alternative to the ‘sages’ and ‘robbers’ is to cultivate awareness of our (...) interdependence with nature. This study calls this process an ‘attunement to nature’ or, as Chapter 8 describes it, to not depart from ‘the actuality of their endowed circumstances’ (其性命之情) and to ‘see oneself when you see others/things’ (自見而見彼). Attunement involves an awareness of how nature primordially forms an indeterminate continuum (_wu_). (shrink)

As the World Anti-Doping Code is up for revision, the paper proposes a framework for reading the Code based on a relatively literal approach and an almost exclusive focus on the ?spirit of sport? as a key element of the Code. The author argues that this single element can contribute to revealing the underlying rationale of the Code, as it serves to justify bans of doping substances and methods, in some cases without recurring to evidence sustaining the claims made. For (...) a substance/method to be banned, the Code requires that two out of three criteria be met: performance enhancement, health risk and the spirit of sport. The paper demonstrates how these provisions link to other parts of the Code, (under the rules of the Code 2009) in the absence of performance-enhancing properties combined with a health risk. The paper draws implications from these findings regarding terminological (im)precision, legal certainty/predictability, transparency/accountability, limits to arbitrary exercise of power and internal/external validity. (shrink)

What is the moral value of formal democratic decision-making? Egalitarian accounts of democracy provide a powerful answer to this question. They present formal democratic procedures as a way for a society of equals to arrive at collective decisions in a transparent and mutually acceptable manner. More specifically, such procedures ensure and publicly affirm that all members of a political community, in their capacity as autonomous actors, are treated as equals who are able and have a right to participate in collective (...) decision-making. Recently, a number of authors have raised what I describe as the ‘no impact’ objection. This objection focuses on the egalitarian emphasis on autonomy to cast doubt on the moral value of formal democratic procedures. It holds that individual participation in formal democratic decision-making has no impact on the eventual result, and therefore cannot be understood as an exercise in autonomy. Consequently, the ‘no impact’ objection claims that the moral value of formal democracy cannot be explained with reference to an egalitarian ideal of ‘rule by the people’. In this article, I refute this objection by complementing an egalitarian account of democracy with an account of basic autonomy. (shrink)

Non-cognitive gadgets are fancy tools shaped to meet specific, local needs. Cecilia Heyes defines cognitive gadgets as dedicated psychological mechanisms created through social interactions and culturally, not genetically, inherited by humans. She has boldly proposed that many human cognitive mechanisms are gadgets. If true, these claims would have far-reaching implications for our scientific understanding of human social cognition. Here we assess Heyes’s cognitive gadget approach as it applies to mindreading. We do not think that the evidence supports Heyes’s thought-provoking thesis (...) that human children are taught to read minds the way they are taught to read words. We highlight a potential circularity lurking behind this analogy, and we explain why we are unpersuaded by Heyes’s anti-mentalistic proposal for handling data inconsistent with the gadget view, which others take to be evidence for mindreading in human infancy. We conclude that while human minds may well be filled with gadgets, mindreading is unlikely to be one of them. (shrink)

This paper assesses the scope and limits of a widely influential model of goal-ascription by human infants: the shared-intentionality model. It derives much of its appeal from its ability to integrate behavioral evidence from developmental psychology with cognitive neuroscientific evidence about the role of mirror neuron activity in non-human primates. The central question raised by this model is whether sharing a goal with an agent is necessary and sufficient for ascribing it to that agent. I argue that advocates of the (...) shared-intentionality model underestimate both the distinction between the target and the goal of a goal-directed action and the gap between sharing and ascribing a goal. (shrink)

The revised classic on the professional and legal standards of school psychology This completely updated edition of the leading ethics and law guide provides ...

The close proximity and topical confluence of two early fourteenth-century quodlibetal disputations, those of John Duns Scotus and Jacques de Thérines, has drawn the attention of several scholars. Antonie Vos argues that Thérines’s quodlibet exhibits the influence of Scotus’s, yet no solid evidence has yet been provided for the chronology of their delivery or publication. Most scholars agree that they likely delivered their quodlibets in the same year: 1306. The following article gives a full exposition of corresponding topics in the (...) two texts, closely analyzing them for clues as to which influenced the other. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Every social order depends on a pathway to atonement for those who breach behavioral expectations. However, observers from a variety of fields now agree that the United States has entered an age of non-apology, where the two words “I’m sorry” simply cannot be said, particularly by powerful men facing allegations of sexual misconduct. This essay draws attention to, and comments upon, this trend. We first identify the sociopolitical factors that have inaugurated the era of non-apology, namely growing political polarization. (...) We then explain the consequences of this shift in societal expectations surrounding apology. This state of affairs, which associates genuine apology with emasculation and defeat, is harmful: it foments a toxic culture that will not allow redress for survivors of sexual assault and harassment; and it provides no answers to complex questions of how society can address the guilt of those who engage in sexual misconduct. (shrink)

Aristotle is often thought of as one of the fathers of essentialism in Western philosophy. Aristotle’s argument for the essence of human beings is, however, much more flexible than this prejudice might suggest. In the passage about the “human function” at Nichomachean Ethics 1.7, Aristotle gives an account of the particular “function” (or “achievement,” ergon) of human beings that does not ask very much of the modern reader—only that she be prepared to analyze human beings as a logical category according (...) to certain rules. While this may trouble the naturalistic reductionist or the post-humanist thinker, it is not clear that Aristotle’s request is unreasonable, especially given what the function argument goes on to offer. It places normative thinking in the constellation of type-property-activity, a narrowing of the search for the human good, but not an overly constrictive one. The second, substantive stage of the argument gives a more narrow interpretation of what the unique property and its corresponding activity are in the case of humans—but even here Aristotle’s apparently “thick” conclusions about the ultimate human good ultimately leave more room for a pluralistic disagreement about ends than might be expected. (shrink)

Intelligence, as measured by grades and/or standardized test scores, plays a principal role in the medical school admissions process in most nations. Yet while sufficient intelligence is necessary to practice medicine effectively, no evidence suggests that surplus intelligence beyond that threshold is correlated with providing higher quality medical care. This paper argues that using perceived measures of intelligence to distinguish between applicants, at levels that exceed the level of intelligence required to practice medicine, is both unfair to applicants and fails (...) to serve the interests of patients. (shrink)

Ancient Greek Philosophy From Thales, who is often considered the first Western philosopher, to the Stoics and Skeptics, ancient Greek philosophy opened the doors to a particular way of thinking that provided the roots for the Western intellectual tradition. Here, there is often an explicit preference for the life of reason and rational thought. We … Continue reading Ancient Greek Philosophy →.