In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:?;5. HUME AND SPINOZA It is strange that there has been so little interest in comparing two great philosophers, Hume and -Spinoza, who were both so important and influential in bringing about the decline of traditional religion. Jessop's bibliography indicates no interest in Hume and Spinoza up to the 1930 's. The Hume conferences of 1976, as far as I have been able to 2 determine, avoided the topic. (...) In one of the better new Hume volumes, Livingston and King, Hume, A Re-evaluation, 3 Spinoza is cited twice, and once incorrectly at that. On the other hand, in the massive new Spinoza volume edited by Siegfried Hessing, Speculum Spinozanun 1677-1977, Hume is mentioned four times, but only one of these has any real relevance to Hume's views vis-a-vis Spinoza's. Some discussion of Hume's comments, usually brief, occurs in the commentators. B. M. Laing, in David Hume, (London 1932), has just three short references to Spinoza. John Laird, in Hume's Philosophy of Human Nature, (London 1932) has a couple of cursory references to Spinoza, plus a bit more extended statement of Pierre Bay le" s critique of him. In H. H. Price, Hume's Theory of the External World, (Oxford 1940), there is one paragraph on Hume and Spinoza. In Norman Kemp Smith, The Philosophy of David Hume (London 1941), there are three references to Spinoza. Rachel Kydd, Reason and Conduct in Hume's Treatise (Oxford 194 6), has the greatest number of references to Spinoza. She was concerned to compare him with Hume on other matters than are dealt with in this paper, namely Spinoza's theory of reason and 9 the passions. In contrast, André Leroy, David Hume, (Paris 1953), has just one paragraph on Spinoza dealing with the immateriality of the soul; and Ernest C. Mossner, in his monumental Life of David Hume, (Austin 1954), has only one reference to Spinoza - James Beattie's denunciation of Hume, Hobbes, Malebranche, Leibniz and Spinoza. Lastly, in a fairly recent commentary by James Noxon, Spinoza is mentioned 66. three times, but not for anything in Hume's text. Noxon does point out (p. 75) that Spinoza is not mentioned in ] 2 Hume's correspondence. John H. Randall has offered an explanation for this neglect of Spinoza by Hume scholars, namely that "Hume stands for all time as the antithesis of Spinoza in his thought". In the England of Hume's day, Spinoza was little known, but still better known at the time than he was in France or England. Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus 14 had been twice translated into English anonymously. He had been attacked by Bishop Stillingfleet, by John Evelyn, by Berkeley and several others. But Spinoza was not a major figure, except to the English Deists, and to Hume's early patron, the Chevalier Andrew Michael Ramsay. Most of the information known about Spinoza came from Pierre Bayle' s Historical and Critical Dictionary, where the article "Spinoza" is the longest in the Dictionary, about three hundred pages in length. My suspicion, or hypothesis, is that Hume first became interested in Spinoza through Ramsay, and then learned what he knew about Spinoza from Bayle' s article. When the young David Hume went to France to write his A Treatise of Human Nature in 1734, he went first to see the Chevalier Ramsay, who entertained Hume for about two weeks. Ramsay was a leading Scottish Catholic, was the teacher of Bonnie Prince Charlie, a leading Scottish revolutionary, 18 as well as the Grand Master of the Free Masons. With Ramsay's eclectic views it is not odd that he had a serious interest in Spinoza's theory, and that he was composing answers to it. Ramsay advised Hume about his own book, and Hume felt he had to show Ramsay the Treatise before he 19 brought it back to England. In the Treatise there is a not too well studied section on Spinoza, Of the immateriality of the soul 20 (T240-45). In introducing Spinoza into the discussion of 67. the immateriality of the soul, Hume follows what was common practice in his day, namely to insult Spinoza and his theory... (shrink)

Historian James H. Jones published the first edition of Bad Blood, the definitive history of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, in 1981. Its clear-eyed examination of that research and its implications remains a bioethics classic, and the 30-year anniversary of its publication served as the impetus for the reexamination of research ethics that this symposium presents. Recent revelations about the United States Public Health Service study that infected mental patients and prisoners in Guatemala with syphilis in the late 1940s in (...) order to determine the efficacy of treatment represent only one of the many attestations to the persistence of ongoing, critical, and underaddressed issues in research ethics that Bad Blood first explored. Those issues include, but are not limited to: the complex and contested matters of the value of a given research question, the validity of the clinical trial designed to address it, and the priorities of science. (shrink)

Perhaps no technological innovation has so dominated the second half of the twentieth century as has the introduction of the programmable computer. It is quite difficult if not impossible to imagine how contemporary affairs—in business and science, communications and transportation, governmental and military activities, for example—could be conducted without the use of computing machines, whose principal contribution has been to relieve us of the necessity for certain kinds of mental exertion. The computer revolution has reduced our mental labors by means (...) of these machines, just as the Industrial Revolution reduced our physical labor by means of other machines. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to explore three alternative frameworks for understanding the nature of language and mentality, which accent syntactical, semantical, and pragmatical aspects of the phenomena with which they are concerned, respectively. Although the computational conception currently exerts considerable appeal, its defensibility appears to hinge upon an extremely implausible theory of the relation of form to content. Similarly, while the representational approach has much to recommend it, its range is essentially restricted to those units of language that (...) can be understood in terms of undefined units. Thus, the only alternative among these three that can account for the meaning of primitive units of language is one emphasizing the basic role of skills, habits, and tendencies in relating signs and dispositions. (shrink)

The book uses Zen Buddhism as the opening wedge for an extraordinarily wide-ranging exploration of consciousness.

Based on the Zen philosophy about focusing away from the self, a guide to "neural Zen" meditative practices draws on recent findings in brain research to outline recommendations for various methods of pursuing a balanced, selfless state of ...

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Technological revolutions are dissected into three stages: the introduction stage, the permeation stage, and the power stage. The information revolution is a primary example of this tripartite model. A hypothesis about ethics is proposed, namely, ethical problems increase as technological revolutions progress toward and into the power stage. Genetic technology, nanotechnology, and neurotechnology are good candidates for impending technological revolutions. Two reasons favoring their candidacy as revolutionary are their high degree of malleability and their convergence. Assuming the emerging technologies develop (...) into mutually enabling revolutionary technologies, we will need better ethical responses to cope with them. Some suggestions are offered about how our approach to ethics might be improved. (shrink)

We need to clarify at least four aspects of selfhood if we are to reach a better understanding of consciousness in general, and of its alternate states. First, how did we develop our self-centred psychophysiology? Second, can the four familiar lobes of the brain alone serve, if only as preliminary landmarks of convenience, to help understand the functions of our many self-referent networks? Third, what could cause one's former sense of self to vanish from the mental field during an extraordinary (...) state of consciousness? Fourth, when a person's physical and psychic self do drop off briefly, how has conscious experience then been transformed? In particular, what happens to that subject's personal sense of time? Our many-sided self arose in widely distributed brain networks. Since infancy, these self-oriented circuits have been over-conditioned by limbic biases. Selfhood then seems to have evolved along lines suggesting at least in shorthand the operations of a kind of ‘I-Me-Mine’ complex. But what happens when this egocentric triad briefly dissolves? Novel states of consciousness emerge. Two personally-observed states are discussed: insight-wisdom ; internal absorption. How do these two states differ phenomenologically? The physiological processes briefly suggested here emphasize shifts in deeper systems, and pivotal roles for thalamo-cortical interactions in the front and back of the brain. (shrink)

Taking Brian Cantwell Smith’s study, “Limits of Correctness in Computers,” as its point of departure, this article explores the role of models in computer science. Smith identifies two kinds of models that play an important role, where specifications are models of problems and programs are models of possible solutions. Both presuppose the existence of conceptualizations as ways of conceiving the world “in certain delimited ways.” But high-level programming languages also function as models of virtual (or abstract) machines, while low-level programming (...) languages function as models of causal (or physical) machines. The resulting account suggests that sets of models embedded within models are indispensable for computer programming. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to provide a systematic defense of the single-case propensity account of probabilistic explanation from the criticisms advanced by Hanna and by Humphreys and to offer a critical appraisal of the aleatory conception advanced by Humphreys and of the deductive-nomological-probabilistic approach Railton has proposed. The principal conclusion supported by this analysis is that the Requirements of Maximal Specificity and of Strict Maximal Specificity afford the foundation for completely objective explanations of probabilistic explananda, so long as (...) they are employed on the basis of propensity criteria of explanatory relevance. (shrink)

Fix a countable nonstandard model M of Peano arithmetic. Even with some rather severe restrictions placed on the types of minimal cofinal extensions N≻M that are allowed, we still find that there are 2ℵ0 possible theories of (N,M) for such N’s.

The purpose of this essay is to investigate the properties of singular causal systems and their population manifestations, with special concern for the thesis of methodological individualism, which claims that there are no properties of social groups that cannot be adequately explained exclusively by reference to properties of individual members of those groups, i.e., at the level of individuals. Individuals, however, may be viewed as singular causal systems, i.e., as instantiations of (arrangements of) dispositional properties. From this perspective, methodological individualism (...) appears to be an ambiguous thesis: some properties of collections of (independent) systems of the same kind are reducible, but other properties of collections of (dependent) systems of the same kind are not. In cases of the first kind, therefore, methodological individualism is true, but trivial; while in cases of the second kind, it is significant, but false. Hence, if the arguments that follow are correct, at least some of the properties of social groups should qualify as emergent. (shrink)

It is a commonplace in our histories of Greek philosophy that the first thinker to fashion deductive arguments was Parmenides of Elea. One corollary of this view is that Ionian philosophers before Parmenides provided no arguments in support of their views. In what follows I offer a critique of this dismissive characterization, focusing on the first thinker for whom we have a substantial body of evidence, Xenophanes of Colophon. Specifically, Xenophanes argued that retelling the old stories of divine strife and (...) warfare was out of keeping with the qualities of cleanliness and purity considered essential to a proper symposium. He held also that the presence of fossilized remains at inland and mountainous locations was best explained by positing cycles of worldwide flooding and drought, and he linked many other phenomena with the presence of earth and/or water. He also distinguished between having direct perceptual access to events and knowing the clear and sure truth about them, and concluded that about far-off matters such as the gods and the nature of all things no man can know the certain truth. He held also that a series of contrasts between divine and human attributes followed from an initial assumption of divine greatness. (shrink)

The idea that human thought requires the execution of mental algorithms provides a foundation for research programs in cognitive science, which are largely based upon the computational conception of language and mentality. Consideration is given to recent work by Penrose, Searle, and Cleland, who supply various grounds for disputing computationalism. These grounds in turn qualify as reasons for preferring a non-computational, semiotic approach, which can account for them as predictable manifestations of a more adquate conception. Thinking does not ordinarily require (...) the execution of mental algorithms, which appears to be at best no more than one rather special kind of thinking. (shrink)

The notion of program verification appears to trade upon an equivocation. Algorithms, as logical structures, are appropriate subjects for deductive verification. Programs, as causal models of those structures, are not. The success of program verification as a generally applicable and completely reliable method for guaranteeing program performance is not even a theoretical possibility.

1. WHAT IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE? One of the fascinating aspects of the field of artificial intelligence (AI) is that the precise nature of its subject ..

Public relations (PR) is trying to gain professional status by stressing specialized education for the field. Results are mixed, at best. Most practitioners have had educations in some aspects of communication, but so far only a small (though growing) number acknowledge it as being in public relations per se. Furthermore, when certain key attributes of professionalism are measured, practitioners with formal educations in public relations differ little from those without such educations.

Three images of holiness have, at different times, enjoyed wide currency among American Protestants: holiness as pilgrimage, holiness as perfection, and holiness as pentecostal outpouring. Since the colonial era, confidence in the attainment of holiness has grown dramatically. Yet such assurance has not been matched by equal agreement on the content of the holy life.