The ethics of care has regularly been described via contrast with deontological, consequentialist, and virtue theories of ethics. Often, such descriptions play care and justice against one another as potentially congruent but frequently competing social goods. This articulation of the field, which moves across major perspectives within moral and political philosophy, does not fully describe how ethics appears in some areas of humanities, particularly literary studies, where an ‘ethics of alterity’ has predominated for several decades. This ethics emphasizes a scene (...) of encounter across difference, and an ethical responsibility to the other which has been narrativized via the scene of hospitality. This essay proposes that the ethics of care and the ethics of alterity share much—more than care ethics shares with other kinds of moral philosophy. But it also identifies differences which have made it easier to position alterity, rather than care, as a guiding ethos for literature, literary criticism, and literature education. Why is this so, and what would it mean for the ethics of care to be more central in literary study and literature education? Taking as an occasion a novel explicitly concerned with care-taking and care-giving, J.M. Coetzee’s Slow Man (2005), the essay explores the prospects for a care-focused practice of literary studies. (shrink)

Lewis signaling games illustrate how language might evolve from random behavior. The probability of evolving an optimal signaling language is, in part, a function of what learning strategy the agents use. Here we investigate three learning strategies, each of which allows agents to forget old experience. In each case, we find that forgetting increases the probability of evolving an optimal language. It does this by making it less likely that past partial success will continue to reinforce suboptimal practice. The learning (...) strategies considered here show how forgetting past experience can promote learning in the context of games with suboptimal equilibria. (shrink)

Over the last two decades, scientific accounts of religion have received a great deal of scholarly and popular attention both because of their intrinsic interest and because they are widely as constituting a threat to the religion they analyse. The Believing Primate aims to describe and discuss these scientific accounts as well as to assess their implications. The volume begins with essays by leading scientists in the field, describing these accounts and discussing evidence in their favour. Philosophical and theological reflections (...) on these accounts follow, offered by leading philosophers, theologians, and scientists. This diverse group of scholars address some fascinating underlying questions: Do scientific accounts of religion undermine the justification of religious belief? Do such accounts show religion to be an accidental by-product of our evolutionary development? And, whilst we seem naturally disposed toward religion, would we fare better or worse without it? Bringing together dissenting perspectives, this provocative collection will serve to freshly illuminate ongoing debate on these perennial questions. (shrink)

This chapter presents the main formalism of the book, which is used in subsequent chapters to describe a variety of concepts in Husserlian phenomenology, and thereby unify them. A dynamical systems approach to Husserl is introduced, and several dynamical laws of Husserlian phenomenology are described. The first is an expectation rule according to which expectations are determined by what a person knows, sees, and does. The second is a learning rule according to which background knowledge is updated in a specific (...) way when experiences fulfill or frustrate prior expectations. In addition to these rules, a “supervenience function” is described, which associates how a thing is seen with a “trail set,” the set ways that thing is expected to look, relative to all possible ways of moving around it. This function further illustrates the explanatory dimension of phenomenology described in Chap. 2, whereby how we immanently experience things is determined by how we expect them to look relative to counterfactual movement patterns. (shrink)

We consider the efficacy of various forms of reinforcement learning with punishment in evolving linguistic conventions in the context of Lewis-Skyrms signalling games. We show that the learning strategy of reinforcement with iterative punishment is highly effective at evolving optimal conventions in even complex signalling games. It is also robust and can be easily extended to a self-tuning variety of reinforcement learning. We briefly discuss some of the virtues of reinforcement with iterative punishment and how it may be related to (...) learning in nature. (shrink)

This work introduces the ACTWith model of moral cognition. This is a model of conscience and conscientious agency, inspired by Socratic philosophy, neurology and artificial intelligence. The ACTWith model is a synthesis across these disciplines, integrating ancient and contemporary insights into the human condition, while distilling this synthesis into a practicable dynamic simplified via architectural paradigms imported from theories of computational models of human learning. It was developed in response to the need in these fields for a clear articulation of (...) conscience. In the world at large, conscience is often referenced, yet hardly understood. This work fills this gap. (shrink)

Despite successful transplantation outcomes in Europe, uncontrolled organ donation after circulatory determination of death has essentially been a non-starter in North America. In this paper, I identify and explore a set of interesting, ethics-related considerations that are of relevance to this organ donation-transplantation practice. The analysis provides a theoretical platform for my development of a proposal for the creation of a particular ethical practice and policy space for kidney uDCDD in the U.S. and Canada that recognizes and aims to effectively (...) address the various, identified challenges and constraints. (shrink)

The change in shape of the C. elegans embryo from an ovoid ball of cells into a worm-shaped larva is driven by three events within the cells of the hypodermis (epidermis): (1) intercalation of two rows of dorsal cells, (2) enclosure of the ventral surface by hypodermis, and (3) elongation of the embryo. While the behavior of the hypodermal cells involved in each of these processes differs dramatically, it is clear that F-actin and microtubules have essential functions in each of (...) these processes, whereas contraction of actomyosin structures appears to be involved specifically in elongation. Molecular analysis of these processes is revealing components specific to C. elegans as well as components found in other systems. Since C. elegans hypodermal cells demonstrate dramatically different behaviors during intercalation, enclosure and elongation, the study of cytoskeletal dynamics in these processes may reveal both unique and conserved activities during distinct epithelial morphogenetic movements. BioEssays 23:12–23, 2001. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

_Explores how the thought of Leo Strauss amounts to a model for thinking about the connection between philosophy, Jewish thought, and history._.

This paper concerns two composite Lewis-Skyrms signaling games. Each consists in a base game that evolves a language descriptive of nature and a metagame that coevolves a language descriptive of the base game and its evolving language. The first composite game shows how a pragmatic notion of truth might coevolve with a simple descriptive language. The second shows how a pragmatic notion of probability might similarly coevolve. Each of these pragmatic notions is characterized by the particular game and role that (...) it comes to play in the game. (shrink)

Social theory between progress and apocalypse -- Autonomy and domination: Weber's cage -- Barbarism and modernity: Eisenstadt's regret -- Integration and justice: Parsons' utopia -- Despising others: Simmel's stranger -- Meaning evil -- De-civilizing the civil sphere -- Psychotherapy as central institution -- The frictions of modernity and their possible repair.

This forward-thinking collection presents new work that looks beyond the division between the analytic and continental philosophical traditions—one that has long caused dissension, mutual distrust, and institutional barriers to the development of common concerns and problems. Rather than rehearsing the causes of the divide, contributors draw upon the problems, methods, and results of both traditions to show what post-divide philosophical work looks like in practice. Ranging from metaphysics and philosophy of mind to political philosophy and ethics, the papers gathered here (...) bring into mutual dialogue a wide range of recent and contemporary thinkers, and confront leading problems common to both traditions, including methodology, ontology, meaning, truth, values, and personhood. Collectively, these essays show that it is already possible to foresee a future for philosophical thought and practice no longer determined neither as "analytic" nor as "continental," but, instead, as a pluralistic synthesis of what is best in both traditions. The new work assembled here shows how the problems, projects, and ambitions of twentieth-century philosophy are already being taken up and productively transformed to produce new insights, questions, and methods for philosophy today. (shrink)

Heyman's two crucial theses are that people over-value immediate rewards, and that addictive substances “subvert the value of competing commodities.” These perennial ideas were discussed by Plato. Whereas Heyman provides scientific clarification and support for the first, the second remains problematic. I outline how this deficiency might be remedied via evolutionary considerations.

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)

FROST (copy 2): From the John Holmes Library collection.

It is generally believed that natural languages have lots of contextually sensitive expressions. In addition to familiar examples like ‘I’, ‘here’, ‘today’, ‘he’, ‘that’ and so on that everyone takes to be contextually sensitive, examples of expressions that many would take to be contextually sensitive include tense, modals, gradable adjectives, relational terms , possessives and quantifi ers . With the exception of contextually sensitive expressions discussed by Kaplan [1977], there has not been a lot of discussion as to the mechanism (...) whereby contextually sensitive expressions get their values in context, aside from vague references to speakers’ intentions. In a recent paper, I proposed a candidate for being this mechanism and defended the claim that it is such. Because, as I suggested, these issues have been most extensively discussed in the case of demonstratives, I focused on these expressions by way of contrasting the mechanism I proposed with others in the literature. In the present work, I simply state what I claim is the mechanism by means of which demonstratives secure semantic values in contexts without defending the claim that it is so. I then consider some claims made by Kent Bach, and arguments for those claims, which would undermine the account I propose of how demonstratives secure semantic values in context. (shrink)

The idea of self-reliance is important not only because it is often taken to be definitive of the ethics of democratic individualism, but because its greatest theorists have been uncommonly forthright about a problem that, though familiar to ordinary civic experience, frequently gets ignored: that self-reliant individuality is a basis for not fully supporting otherwise endorsed social justice causes. This article turns to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Bob Dylan who are unusual for so honestly reflecting upon this (...) problem and who, because of the differences in the way they conceptualize it, are instructive for civic ethics. I demonstrate that Emerson and Thoreau imbue their self-reliant withdrawal from social action with a self-satisfaction that is lacking for Dylan, who is much readier to acknowledge the moral costs of self-reliance. This acknowledgement does not invalidate self-reliance but alters its epistemological, ethical and political features, providing a variant of self-reliance more suitable to contemporary conditions. (shrink)

:Our theoretical claim is that racism was consciously devised, and later evolved, to serve two conflicting purposes. First, racism served a legal-economic purpose, legitimating ownership and savage treatment of slaves by southern whites, preserving the value of property rights in labor. Second, racism allowed slave owners to justify, to themselves and to outsiders, how a morally "good" person could own slaves. Racism portrayed African slaves as being less than human, or else as being other than human. The interest of the (...) historical narrative presented here is the emergence of racial chattel slavery as a coherent and fiercely defended ideal, rather than the "necessary evil" that had been the perspective of the Founders. The reason that this is important is that the ideology of racism persisted far beyond the destruction of the institution of slavery, through Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and in some ways persisting even today. This work is an example of the problems of assuming that there is a "feedback" mechanism by which moral intuitions are updated and perfected; to the contrary, as suggested by Douglass North, even socially inferior ideologies can prove extremely persistent. (shrink)

The Rise of Politics and Morality in Nietzsche’s Genealogy examines Nietzsche’s account of the origin of political society and moral life in the Second Essay of his On the Genealogy of Morals. It argues this account is coherent and grounded in Nietzsche's understanding of nature and the will to power.

In a chapter illustrating outrageous words and criminal deeds, Valerius Maximus, the Tiberian editor of exempla, includes in his list of foreign examples reference to an impious son, Mithridates, who fought with his father over who should rule : Mitridates autem multo sceleratius, qui non cum fratre de paterno regno, sed cum ipso patre bellum de dominatione gessit. in quo qui aut homines ullos adiutores inuenerit aut deos inuocare ausus sit, † pare admiratione habet †.

This article examines Kevin Scharp’s formal solution to the alethic paradoxes, ADT, which stands for ascending and descending truth. One of the main supposed benefits of ADT over its competitors is that it alone can validate the uses of truth concepts in theoretical contexts, such as truth-theoretic semantics. The appendixes contain a new consistency proof for ADT, and additionally show that it is conservative. As a result of its conservativity, the article argues that ADT faces a problem in accounting for (...) certain mathematical uses of truth. Thus, Scharp’s theory needs to be amended in order to fulfill its aim of replicating all substantive uses of truth. (shrink)

He is one of the wisest men of all time. Since the time of the Bible, he is the only man to be celebrated by the three major Western religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. His name is Maimonides. A philosopher, rabbi, physician, religious thinker and logician, today this sage is considered among the greatest thinkers. The Secret Life reveals his ancient teachings in modern terms. In The Secret Life, you will discover true wisdom and success in every aspect of (...) life comes not from our public persona and life -- as so many believe -- but in our secret thoughts and actions. Maimonides shows how every person can find their true and best self, not only deriving happiness for themselves, but spreading that bliss to everyone they touch. The benefits of living the Secret Life are countless. Changing your approaches to giving charity, to seeking justice, to loving others, and to believing in yourself enough to find and act on your true calling will lead you to remarkable heights. You will find a new resilience against the difficulties and turmoil in life, a new inner power that will keep you focused on the things that really matter, and an inner peace few will ever have. The Secret Life is, quite literally, life changing. "Whatever you do should be done out of nothing else but pure love." -- Maimonides Jeffrey Katz is a lifelong student and teacher of rationalist religious philosophy. He became fascinated in his youth by his discovery of the ancient wisdom of Maimonides, and received rabbinic ordination while focusing on disseminating the ancient, life-changing wisdom he had uncovered. He is a practicing attorney, has appeared on national television on a broad range of issues, and has lectured widely. (shrink)

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have ushered in a transformative phase in artificial intelligence (AI). Unlike conventional AI, LLMs excel in facilitating fluid human–computer d...

Despite traditional viewpoints that see rhetoric as nothing more than a techné or bios, rhetoric may be viewed as being capable of instantiating basic human goods. This paper proposes that rhetoric motivates our capacities for action and brings the processes involved in action – including the bearing of practical reason on them – into accord with virtue, enabling us to exercise practical wisdom in and through prudential judgments so that when these judgments have a direct bearing on others we may (...) say that they are just. (shrink)

During the past twenty years there has been a growing interest in monastic education within the larger field of Buddhist studies. Within the last ten years in particular, a number of monographs and articles examining the training and education of monks in Korea, Tibet/India, Thailand/Laos, and Sri Lanka, have been published. Many of those works have paid particular attention to the texts used in monastic training, as well as to how the information contained in those very texts is imparted to (...) and embodied by monks and novices. While the growing attention to Buddhist education and training texts certainly provides us with a more considerable understanding of monastic culture, focusing exclusively on the contents of texts and handbooks used in the training of monks and novices neglects other forms of monastic learning. Indeed, several scholars have recently begun to explore more diffuse ways in which monastic ideals become transmitted to newcomers to the sangha as well as to examine how learning in monasteries generates monastic identities. (shrink)

It is Heidegger who asks what there is to be thought after the end of metaphysics, and indeed his own work is never far from a response to the question. This is neither to say that there is only one such response, nor even to suppose that Heidegger’s thinking provides only one response. To be sure, the origin of the question is not difficult to identify. Metaphysics, as the grounding of known beings in some anterior or first being, comes to (...) its end as thinking becomes capable of grasping it as a sum of relations. This occurs when thinking is awakened to the difference between inquiring about beings , including the first being, and asking the question of the meaning of Being . In an important sense, then, the “end” of metaphysics coincides with the appearing of its place within a more primordial horizon. Attending more closely to the historical configuration of this metaphysics, Heidegger often concentrates on the recurrence, or else the persistence, of an urge in thinkin .. (shrink)