This book deals with the basic views of those philosophers and their influence on Chinese history and culture.

The concept of ontogenetic niche is used here to interpret how species-typical behaviors develop through active, context-dependent processes. Ontogenetic niches typically include social stimuli, such as those arising from parents, siblings, and others that provide 'nurturing' in the form of resources, stimulation, and affordances for development. This approach is a useful alternative to wrestling with artificial dichotomies such as nature-nurture.

Paul Ricœur prononça cette allocution en Allemagne en janvier 1990, à l’occasion de la remise du prix Karl-Jaspers que l’Université de Heidelberg lui avait décerné pour l’année 19891.Ce prix a été créé à l’initiative de cette Université en 1983 pour commémorer le centenaire de la naissance du philosophe Karl Jaspers, qui y enseigna dès avant la Première...

(2010). Insult to Injury: Ethical Confusion in American Heart Association Guidelines for Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation and Emergency Cardiovascular Care. The American Journal of Bioethics: Vol. 10, No. 1, pp. 68-70.

With 40 years in public service, and 23 years on the Senate Foreign Relations committee, Richard Lugar's career and views are of particular interest today, when the U.S. must be particularly careful to choose a wise course of foreign policy. In this collection of essays, distinguished scholars, government officials, public servants and businessmen honor the man who sees Teddy Roosevelt's 'big stick...not as a substitute for good sense, but an expression of it, ' in addition to analyzing the U.S.'s responsibilities (...) and possible courses of action in the Middle East, in building democratic allies, in using intelligence, and much more. (shrink)

Because consciousness has an organizational, or functional, center, Gray supposes that there must be a corresponding physical center in the brain. He proposes further that since this center generates consciousness, ablating it would eliminate consciousness, while leaving behavior intact. But the center of consciousness is simply the product of the functional linkages among sensory input, memory, inner speech, and so on, and behavior.

This paper explores whether resolving to "live like there's no tomorrow" would be conducive to living life to the fullest. While there is much to commend a life lived with a sense of urgency, I conclude that living like there's no tomorrow, in the final analysis, is neither advisable, nor realizable. In its place I suggest a life lived in mindfulness of the transitory and uncertain nature of our lives.

We identify the significance and typical requirements of developmental analyses of the microbiome-gut-brain in parents, offspring, and parent-offspring relations, which have particular importance for neurobehavioral outcomes in mammalian species, including humans. We call for a focus on behavioral measures of social-emotional function. Methodological approaches to interpreting relations between the microbiota and behavior are discussed.

Publication de deux poèmes byzantins du 12ème s. attribués à Théodore Prodomos, qui fournissent un certain nombre de renseignements sur les tentes des camps d'hiver des Comnène, et en particulier sur celle de la maison d'Irène la Sevastokratorissa. Cette étude mène l'auteur à un commentaire historico-artistique des éléments décrits: il compare d'abord ceux-ci avec l'art des 11ème et et 12ème s., et particulièrement avec l'art profane, puis il s'interroge sur l'authenticité des descriptions par rapport aux figures de rhétorique employées dans (...) ces textes. (shrink)

Despite anxieties about the growing power of neo-liberalism, the crisis of the EU and the upsurge of right-wing political movements, it is important to recognize that utopian movements on the left have also in recent years been symbolically revitalized and organizationally sustained. This article analyses three recent social upheavals as utopian civil society movements, placing the 2008 US presidential campaign of Barack Obama, the Egyptian uprising in Tahrir Square and the Occupy Movement in the USA inside the narrative arc that (...) began with the non-violent democratic uprisings against authoritarian governments four decades earlier. In this new utopian surge, however, there is an unprecedented connection of eastern and western impulses, demonstrating that the tide of democratic thought and action is hardly confined to Judeo-Christian civilizations. (shrink)

In this essay, I argue that Socrates adopts a philosophical stance of indifference that is particularly unique to the Protagoras. The peculiarity stems from Socrates’s significant interest in dealing with Protagoras as a certain kind of thinker rather than merely a sophist in general. The stance of indifference is shown to be a dramatic reaction to the attitude sophists like Protagoras take toward philosophical problems, specifically, thinkers who understand solutions to philosophical problems as commodities. The stance is shown to anticipate (...) certain Academic skeptical methods, to embolden Socratic ignorance, and shore up defenses against the sophistic insecurity of needing to succeed for the sake of success. This stance is elaborated upon in three specific aspects of Socrates’s dramatic portrayal culminating in a re-reading of the poem of Simonides and the myth of Prometheus and Epimetheus. I resist readings that try to see the Protagoras as a simple takedown of sophistry or as a catalog of platonic doctrine, and instead treat Protagoras as a “philosopher in decline,” a significantly dangerous type of thinker who is savvy enough to repurpose genuine insight for the sake of easy answers to immensely difficult problems. (shrink)

A recent noninterventionist account of divine agency has been proposed that marries the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics to the instability of chaos theory. On this account, God is able to bring about observable effects in the macroscopic world by determining the outcome quantum events. When this determination occurs in the presence of chaos, the ability to influence large systems is multiplied. This paper argues that although the proposal is highly intuitive, current research in dynamics shows that it is far (...) less plausible than previously thought. Chaos coupled to quantum mechanics proves to be a shaky foundation for models of divine agency. (shrink)

This book examines the implication of Emmanuel Levinas' philosophy of ethics for the theory, criticism, and practice of human communication.

Accuracy in the philosophical theory of rationality demands that we recognize particular beliefs as arising within the context of larger units, the cultural or conceptual schemes, patterns, or practices, involvement in which itself provides standards and grounds for their rational evaluation. At the same time, though, a satisfactory account of rationality cannot hold the standards, values, or commitments of one particular culture, practice, or conceptual scheme, even one’s own, immune from rational criticism. In order to accurately and responsibly picture the (...) shape of our commitments and the dynamics of their revision over time, in other words, the theory of rationality must reconcile the immanence of reason to particular cultural and conceptual units with its transcendence of them. This raises a deep and far-ranging problem of perspective. In his perspicuous presentation of it, Hilary Putnam put the problem this way: There are two points that must be balanced, both points that have been made by philosophers of many different kinds: (1) talk of what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ in any area only makes sense against the background of an inherited tradition; but (2) traditions themselves can be criticized … On the one hand, there is no notion of reasonableness at all without cultures, practices, procedures; on the other hand, the cultures, practices, procedures we inherit are not an algorithm to be slavishly followed. As Mill said, commenting on his own inductive logic, there is no rule book which will not lead to terrible results ‘if supposed to be conjoined with universal idiocy.’ Reason is, in this sense, both immanent (not to be found outside of concrete language games and institutions) and transcendent (a regulative idea that we use to criticize the conduct of all activities and institutions). (p. 431). As Putnam argues, it is difficult to find a standpoint of theory from which the contrasting claims of immanence and transcendence can be reconciled.. (shrink)

Is the restricted, consistent, version of the T-scheme sufficient for an ‘implicit definition’ of truth? In a sense, the answer is yes (Haack 1978 , Quine 1953 ). Section 4 of Ketland 1999 mentions this but gives a result saying that the T-scheme does not implicitly define truth in the stronger sense relevant for Beth’s Definability Theorem. This insinuates that the T-scheme fares worse than the compositional truth theory as an implicit definition. However, the insinuation is mistaken. For, as Bays (...) rightly points out, the result given extends to the compositional truth theory also. So, as regards implicit definability, both kinds of truth theory are equivalent. Some further discussion of this topic is mentioned (Gupta 2008 , Ketland 2003 , McGee 1991 ), all in agreement with Bays’s analysis. (shrink)

The antagonism between G. W. F. Hegel and Friedrich Schleiermacher during their thirteen years of association as colleagues at the University in Berlin has been well documented in recent Hegel scholarship. What is left unexplained by this scholarship is the sudden onset of Schleiermacher’s animosity toward Hegel upon the latter’s arrival in Berlin. Although there had been differences of opinion between these two figures from their earliest publications—Hegel had already criticized Schleiermacher’s Speeches on Religion in 1802 in Faith and Knowledge (...) —there was no evidence of rancor until Hegel joined the faculty at Berlin. In fact, it was Schleiermacher, as Rector of the University, who was principally responsible for securing the position for Hegel in the first place. (shrink)