We offer a critique of the role of the parallel fiber beam as the unit of cerebellar computation, with the as its mode of operation. Instead we see the microcomplex linking cerebellar cortex and nuclei as the unit, with parallel fibers providing the means to coordinate the effects of microcomplexes in modulating various motor pattern generators (MPGs).

The Meno, one of the most widely read of the Platonic dialogues, is seen afresh in this original interpretation that explores the dialogue as a theatrical presentation. Just as Socrates's listeners would have questioned and examined their own thinking in response to the presentation, so, Klein shows, should modern readers become involved in the drama of the dialogue. Klein offers a line-by-line commentary on the text of the Meno itself that animates the characters and conversation and carefully probes each significant (...) turn of the argument. "A major addition to the literature on the Meno and necessary reading for every student of the dialogue."--Alexander Seasonske, Philosophical Review "There exists no other commentary on Meno which is so thorough, sound, and enlightening."-- Choice Jacob Klein was a student of Martin Heidegger and a tutor at St. John's College from 1937 until his death. His other works include Plato's Trilogy: Theaetetus, the Sophist, and the Statesman, also published by the University of Chicago Press. (shrink)

This article discusses recent legal conflicts between state universities and conservative religious students in the United States, focusing on Christian Legal Society v. Martinez. In recent years, several universities have denied recognition to religious student organizations that discriminate on the basis of religion or sexual orientation. I argue that scholars on both sides of the issue have failed to recognize the full scope of the privilege that the universities demand. If the courts accept the universities' demands, then the courts dangerously (...) expand the government's authority to suppress dissenters. No proponent of civil liberties should welcome this change. (shrink)

Currently, the most popular views about how to update de se or self-locating beliefs entail the one-third solution to the Sleeping Beauty problem.2 Another widely held view is that an agent‘s credences should be countably additive.3 In what follows, I will argue that there is a deep tension between these two positions. For the assumptions that underlie the one-third solution to the Sleeping Beauty problem entail a more general principle, which I call the Generalized Thirder Principle, and there are situations (...) in which the latter principle and the principle of Countable Additivity cannot be jointly satisfied. The most plausible response to this tension, I argue, is to accept both of these principles, and to maintain that when an agent cannot satisfy them both, she is faced with a rational dilemma. (shrink)

Despite a staggering body of research demonstrating sex differences in expressed emotion, very few theoretical models (evolutionary or non-evolutionary) offer a critical examination of the adaptive nature of such differences. From the perspective of a socio-relational framework, emotive behaviors evolved to promote the attraction and aversion of different types of relationships by advertising the two most parsimonious properties ofreciprocity potential, or perceived attractiveness as a prospective social partner. These are the individual's (a)perceived capacityor ability to provide expedient resources, or to (...) inflict immediate harm onto others, and their (b)perceived trustworthinessor probability of actually reciprocating altruism (Vigil 2007). Depending on the unique social demands and relational constraints that each sex evolved, individuals should be sensitive to advertise “capacity” and “trustworthiness” cues through selective displays of dominant versus submissive and masculine versus feminine emotive behaviors, respectively. In this article, I introduce the basic theoretical assumptions and hypotheses of the framework, and show how the models provide a solid scaffold with which to begin to interpret common sex differences in the emotional development literature. I conclude by describing how the framework can be used to predict condition-based and situation-based variation in affect and other forms of expressive behaviors. (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)

In Mind and World, John McDowell provided an influential account of how perceptual experience makes knowledge of the world possible. He recommended a view he called “conceptualism”, according to which concepts are intimately involved in perception and there is no non‐conceptual content. In response to criticisms of this view (especially those from Charles Travis), McDowell has more recently proposed a revised account that distinguishes between two kinds of representation: the passive non‐propositional contents of perceptual experience – what he now calls (...) “intuitional content” – and the propositional contents of judgment – what he now calls “discursive content.” In this paper, I criticize McDowell's account of intuitional content. I argue that he equivocates between two different notions of intuitional content. These views propose different, and incompatible, ways of understanding how a perceiver makes a judgment based on perceptual experience. This is because these two views result from an underlying indeterminacy as to what, if anything, McDowell now means by “conceptual” when he makes claims that intuitional content is conceptual. (shrink)

There are presently three broad approaches the project of naturalizing intentionality: a purely informational approach (Dretske and Fodor), a purely teleological approach (Millikan and Papineau), and a mixed informationally-based teleological approach (Dretske again). I will argue that the last teleosemantic theory offers the most promising approach. I also think, however, that the most explicit version of a pure teleosemantic theory of content, namely Millikan’s admirable theory, faces a pair of objections. My goal in this paper is to spell out Millikan’s (...) pure teleosemantic theory; then to present two objections; and finally to ask the question whether a teleosemantic framework can be saved from the objections. (shrink)

As a naturalistically inclined philosopher, I reject the thesis that meaning is intrinsically normative. I consider the deflationary proposal that meaning is not normative at all and I find it unacceptable. I argue from the difficulties met by the deflationary proposal in favor of the teleosemantic view that the normativity of meaning arises from biological functions.

Ethical beliefs are not justified by familiar methods. We do not directly sense ethical properties, at least not in the straightforward way we sense colors or shapes. Nor is it plausible to think – despite a tradition claiming otherwise – that there are self-evident ethical truths that we can know in the way we know conceptual or mathematical truths. Yet, if we are justified in believing anything, we are justified in believing various ethical propositions e.g., that slavery is wrong. If (...) ethical beliefs are not justified in these familiar ways, how are they justified? -/- In her widely read, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” and in her short complimentary paper, “On Brute Facts,” G.E.M. Anscombe answers this question with a compelling and unorthodox account of justification in ethics. Because of her polemical tone and because “Modern Moral Philosophy” does so much else besides, this contribution is easy to overlook. But her account is worth taking seriously, since (a) it is an underappreciated yet plausible account that sidesteps traditional controversies, (b) it offers rich conceptual tools for interpreting and critiquing ethical theories, (c) it suggests an appealing account of the place of ethical theory in ethical knowledge and, (d) it provides useful guidance for doing applied ethics. (shrink)

Populists are often cast as deniers of rationality, creators of a climate of “post-truth,” and valuing tribe over truth and the rigors of science. Their critics claim the authority of rationality and empirical facts. Yet the critics no less than populists enable an environment of spurious claims and defective argumentation. This is especially true in the realm of science. An important case study is the account of scientific trust offered by a leading public intellectual and historian of science, Naomi Oreskes, (...) and the misapplication of that theory during the coronavirus pandemic. (shrink)

This paper reports on the results of an experiment conducted with experienced corporate directors. The study findings indicate that directors employ prospective rationality cognition, and they sometimes make decisions that emphasize legal defensibility at the expense of personal ethics and social responsibility. Directors recognize the ethical and social implications of their decisions, but they believe that current corporate law requires them to pursue legal courses of action that maximize shareholder value. The results suggest that additional ethics education will have little (...) influence on the decisions of many business leaders because their decisions are driven by corporate law, rather than personal ethics. (shrink)

Alva Noë’s version of the enactive conception in _Action in Perception_ is an important contribution to the study of visual perception. First, I argue, however, that it is unclear (at best) whether, as the enactivists claim, work on change blindness supports the denial of the existence of detailed visual representations. Second, I elaborate on what Noë calls the ‘puzzle of perceptual presence’. Thirdly, I question the enactivist account of perceptual constancy. Finally, I draw attention to the tensions between enactivism and (...) two trends in cognitive neuroscience: the two-visual systems model of human vision and the theory of internal forward models of action. (shrink)

Market metaphors have come to dominate discourse on medical practice. In this essay, we revisit Peter Berger and colleagues’ analysis of modernization in their book The Homeless Mind and place that analysis in conversation with Max Weber’s 1917 lecture “Science as a Vocation” to argue that the rise of market metaphors betokens the carry-over to medical practice of various features from the institutions of technological production and bureaucratic administration. We refer to this carry-over as the product presumption. The product presumption (...) foregrounds accidental features of medicine while hiding its essential features. It thereby confounds the public understanding of medicine and impedes the professional achievement of the excellences most central to medical practice. In demonstrating this pattern, we focus on a recent article, “Physicians, Not Conscripts—Conscientious Objection in Health Care,” in which Ronit Stahl and Ezekiel Emanuel decry conscientious refusals by medical practitioners. We demonstrate that Stahl and Emanuel’s argument depends on the product presumption, ignoring and undermining central features of good medicine. We conclude by encouraging conscientious resistance to the product presumption and the language it engenders. (shrink)

The volume under review is an ambitious undertaking in three parts to edit and analyze the treaties, laws, and covenants of the ancient Near Eastern world, and the authors are to be congratulated for assembling the anthology of texts in part 1. Unfortunately, both the analytic resources provided in part 2 and the historical survey in part 3 are flawed. This article explores the various factors that compromise the comparative approach employed by the authors in these two parts.

The article analyses the constitution of subjectivity in Ruben Östlund’s film Force Majeure. At the centre of attention stands the male protagonist who is uncapable of reconciling his inner nature with the external expectations. If the film may be un- derstood as a critique of existing middle-class conventions, it also reproduces a highly conventional ideal of the self-identical subject. The article argues that this confusion or irony is an expression of a Cartesian subject – still prevalent in the film – (...) in crisis. A neglected aspect of Descartes’ theory is that the autonomy of the subjects presupposes the existence of God. The problem for Östlund’s char- acters is that there is no God. Still, they act as if he, or as if any au- thority might, legitimize their subjectivity. Thus, the whole existence becomes a series of performances. The idea of an inner nature cor- responds with the notion of an outer nature. The latter is certainly very present in Force Majeure, but at the same time this nature is constantly problematized. On an allegorical level, the film may thus be read as a comment on the Anthropocene, a state where we no longer know neither what “nature”, nor “culture” is. (shrink)

An examination of the idealized image of Rome before 146b.c.constructed in theJugurtha reveals that despite the narrator's own stated opinions, his depiction of it is perverse and unhistorical. The narrator's value judgements are unappealing, his archaizing affected, his history plainly wrong: these are serious interpretative problems. Is this an attempt, as in the dialogues of Cicero, to re-educate the moral intuitions of his day by means of a fictitious past? Perhaps; but narratological analysis of the relevant sections suggests another solution, (...) an extrapolation to the narratorial persona of the technique of ironic subversion used in the speeches. The key to understanding the depiction of Rome before 146 lies in the identification of political and historical discourse and the consequent extension to the latter of the factionalization characteristic of the former. The problematic aspects of the depiction of Rome before 146 empower the reader to articulate a critique of faction; the text needs to be surmounted to be understood. (shrink)

What is the antidote to romantic love that all too often exhausts itself over night? This work suggests love can be a reflection of our spiritual being. It states that by the time we are living together something beyond passion is required something intentional and conscious is needed.

This unparalleled reference work offers general readers as well as scholars clearly written introductions to over seven hundred of the main religious and philosophical writings of Greco-Roman paganism, early Judaism, and formative Christianity from the period of Alexander the Great to Mohammed.

Everyone can agree that modern Westerners live in a secular age. That the process of "disenchantment" which led to this age constituted an epistemic loss, that it was not just a rejection of false beliefs but a real alteration in the way the world is experienced, has been shown by previous scholarship, notably that of Charles Taylor. This paper makes the case that this disenchantment was not only a latent possibility from the earliest interactions of Christianity with pre-Christian Roman society, (...) but developed from theological and political developments unique to Western Christendom. In so doing, it builds on the work of Taylor as well as that of Michael Allen Gillespie, who has written about the theological origins of modernity. It also provides a brief illustration of a recurrence, within the secular epistemic frame, of the same distinct features Christianity demonstrated in Rome which first made that frame possible. (shrink)

This article examines the history of cybernetics in France, and the history of French cybernetics in the context of the emergent field of the history of cybernetics. Drawing upon an unfamiliar group of intellectuals and sources, I discuss the way in which French cybernetics was not primarily the hyper-philosophical strain we have come to associate with names such as Derrida and Lévi-Strauss, but an approach to thinking through political and social problems that some on the left would even deign to (...) call pragmatic. In particular, I follow a group of intellectuals known as the Groupe des dix, who, in the aftermath of the tumult of May ‘68, formed an interdisciplinary think tank to try to work out how to bridge the gap between science and society. In order to facilitate conversations between politicians, philosophers, biologists, and sociologists (to name just a few of the represented disciplines), the Groupe reached for a language that was supposed to be truly omnidisciplinary: that of cybernetics. And they did so in a country where cybernetics was not properly represented as a laboratory science. On this last point, this paper makes an addition to the history of cybernetics by offering a portrait not of cybernetics in action, but of cybernetics in vulgarization. Not that the Groupe would not make their own stamp on politics: Several of them still hold significant power in adjudicating the role of science and technology in the public sphere in the French state. (shrink)

Qu'est-ce que penser? Qu'est-ce que la pensée? À quelles conditions un être est-il conscient? Une douleur, une expérience olfactive, une perception visuelle, une intention, une croyance et un remords ont-ils une nature mentale commune? Si oui, la science peut-elle la découvrir? Le concept d'intentionnalité a été introduit en philosophie afin de clarifier le contenu de ces questions. Il désigne la capacité de viser mentalement des objets et de se représenter mentalement des états de choses. Ce livre analyse les problèmes soulevés (...) par l'introduction du concept d'intentionnalité dans la philosophie contemporaine. Il montre d'abord comment la philosophie du langage du XXe siècle a tenté de résoudre les énigmes logiques et ontologiques engendrées par la définition de l'intentionnalité. Il montre ensuite que la question centrale de la philosophie de l'esprit du XXe siècle a été de savoir si l'intentionnalité est la caractéristique distinctive des phénomènes mentaux : de tous les phénomènes mentaux et d'eux seuls. Remerciements Introduction Chapitre premier. L'ordre mental cartésien Chapitre 2. L'héritage ontologique de Brentano Chapitre 3. La logique et le défi des objets inexistants Chapitre 4. La référence directe Chapitre 5. L'intensionnalité est-elle un critère de l'intentionnalité? Chapitre 6. Les variétés de l'intentionnalité Chapitre 7. L'intentionnalité est-elle la propriété exclusive des phénomènes mentaux? Chapitre 8. Peut-on naturaliser l'intentionnalité? Chapitre 9. À quoi sert l'intentionnalité? Chapitre 10. Tous les phénomènes mentaux possèdent-ilsl'intentionnalité? Conclusion Bibliographie Index. (shrink)