Subjects estimated the time of intentions to perform an action, of the action itself, or of an auditory effect of the action. A perceptual attraction or binding effect occurred between actions and the effects that followed them. Judgements of intentions did not show this binding, suggesting they are represented independently of actions and their effects. In additional unpredictable judgement conditions, subjects were instructed only after each trial which of these events to judge, thus discouraging focussed attention to a specific event. (...) Stronger binding effects were found, with intention, action and effect fusing to a single central point in time. In a control task, subjects reported the time of the first or second tone in sequence. Tone sequences showed no binding at all when subjects knew in advance which tone to judge, but showed the same fusion as actions when the event to be judged was not predictable. Binding of actions and effects, but not of tone sequences, occurs pre-attentively, and automatically. The data are consistent with a reconstructive process, implemented after actions, which generates a coherent sense of agency. However, this process should only be triggered only when our actions make it appropriate. We suggest that this mechanism is triggered in advance by efferent processing. This conclusion was supported by a further study in deafferented subject IW. This subject showed the normal binding of a tone towards an action, although his experience of the action was of pre-motor, rather than peripheral origin. The experience of intentional action involves an interplay between pre-motor and reconstructive processes. (shrink)

This paper is about teaching elementary logic to blind or visually impaired students. The targeted audience are teachers who all of sudden have a blind or visually impaired student in their introduction to logic class, find limited help from disability centers in their institution, and have no idea what to do. We provide simple techniques that allow direct communication between a teacher and a visually impaired student. We show how the use of what is known as Polish notation simplifies communication, (...) and pedagogically is a great notation for a Braille reader. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:The judgments of conscientious and informed experts play a central role in two elements of clinical equipoise. The first, and most widely discussed, element involves ensuring that no participant in a randomized trial is allocated to a level of treatment that everyone agrees is substandard. The second, and less often discussed, element involves ensuring that trials are likely to generate social value by producing the information necessary to resolve a clinically meaningful uncertainty or disagreement about the relative merits of a (...) set of interventions. The distribution of judgments in expert communities can take many forms, each with important implications for whether a trial satisfies one or both elements of clinical equipoise. In this article we use a graphical approach to represent three ways in which expert community uncertainty can vary: by spread, modality, and skew. Understanding these different distributions of expert judgment has three important implications: it helps to make operational the requirement of social value, it shows that some conditions for initiating studies to promote social value diverge from common assumptions about clinical equipoise, and it has important implications for how trials should be designed and monitored, and what patients should be told during informed consent. (shrink)

Debates around the state-firm analogy as a route to justifying workplace democracy tend towards a static view of both state and firm, and position workplace democracy as the objective. We contend, however, that states and firms are connected to one another in ways that should alter the terms of the debate, and that the achievement of workplace democracy raises a new set of political issues about the demos in the democratic firm and ‘worker migration’ at the boundaries of the firm. (...) Our argument thus contains two key steps: First, drawing on an empirical case study of a worker-owned firm, we enrich the state-firm analogy by developing a more dynamic view of both, focussing on the creation of workplace democracies; worker movement in and out of them; the dynamic meanings of ‘citizenship’ within them; and the status of the unemployed in a world of democratic workplaces. We then argue that in moving to a more sociological view of the state, the things we were comparing begin to show their real-world connections to one another. By going beyond the idealised view of states that has distorted the state-firm analogy debates, we arrive at a more robust view of how widespread workplace democracy might reconfigure basic political relationships in society. (shrink)

Investors with standard monetary preferences will give a fund manager incentives to increase firm profits, which can be achieved through a share in profits via carried interest. When investors have social preferences, it is not clear which incentives the manager should receive. We explore this puzzle by applying an agency theory perspective to impact investing, a practice where investors seek both financial returns and a measurable social or environmental impact. Using an inductive, qualitative approach, we identify and describe the ethical (...) tensions and challenges faced by fund managers to structure and implement impact-based variable compensation schemes. Our results indicate that economic incentives tied to non-financial objectives are useful to alleviate goal incongruity between principals and agents during fund creation but have the potential to lead to perverse effects during the fund lifecycle, where managers may exploit subjective non-financial metrics to maximize personal wealth. We introduce the concept of impact fidelity, a conceptual equivalent of fiduciary duty, to ensure that investment decisions reflect the asset owner’s impact preferences. (shrink)

Type II DNA topoisomerases (Topo II) are essential enzymes implicated in key nuclear processes. The recent discovery of a novel kind of Topo II (DNA topoisomerase VI) in Archaea led to a division of these enzymes into two non‐homologous families, (Topo IIA and Topo IIB) and to the identification of the eukaryotic protein that initiates meiotic recombination, Spo11. In the present report, we have updated the distribution of all Topo II in the three domains of life by a phylogenomic approach. (...) Both families exhibit an atypical distribution by comparison with other informational proteins, with predominance of Topo IIA in Bacteria, Eukarya and viruses, and Topo IIB in Archaea. However, plants and some Archaea contain Topo II from both families. We confront this atypical distribution with current hypotheses on the evolution of the three domains of life and origin of DNA genomes. BioEssays 25:232–242, 2003. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

(No abstract is available for this citation).

The genetically manipulated organism crisis demonstrated that technological development based solely on the law of the marketplace and State protection against serious risks to health and safety is no longer a warrant of ethical acceptability. In the first part of our paper, we critique the implicitly individualist social-acceptance model for State regulation of technology and recommend an interdisciplinary approach for comprehensive analysis of the impacts and ethical acceptability of technologies. In the second part, we present a framework for the analysis (...) of impacts and acceptability, devised—with the goal of supporting the development of specific nanotechnological applications—by a team of researchers from various disciplines. At the conceptual level, this analytic framework is intended to make explicit those various operations required in preparing a judgement about the acceptability of technologies that have been implicit in the classical analysis of toxicological risk. On a practical level, we present a reflective tool that makes it possible to take into account all the dimensions involved and understand the reasons invoked in determining impacts, assessing them, and arriving at a judgement about acceptability. (shrink)

Currently, the widely used notion of activity is increasingly present in computer science. However, because this notion is used in specific contexts, it becomes vague. Here, the notion of activity is scrutinized in various contexts and, accordingly, put in perspective. It is discussed through four scientific disciplines: computer science, biology, economics, and epistemology. The definition of activity usually used in simulation is extended to new qualitative and quantitative definitions. In computer science, biology and economics disciplines, the new simulation activity definition (...) is first applied critically. Then, activity is discussed generally. In epistemology, activity is discussed, in a prospective way, as a possible framework in models of human beliefs and knowledge. (shrink)

his is a book to broaden the mind. It brings the reader into a world only vaguely imaginable and richly enlightens it with extraordinary attention to interesting historical details. It is beautifully written and endlessly interesting.

: A number of critics have argued that Berkeley's metaphysics can offer no tenable account of human agency. In this paper I argue that Berkeley does have a coherent account of action. The paper addresses arguments by C.C. W. Taylor, Robert Imlay, and Jonathan Bennett. The paper attempts to show that Berkeley can offer a theory of action, maintain many of our common intuitions about action, and provide a defensible solution to the problem of evil.

Descartes’ demon is a deceiver: the demon makes things appear to you other than as they really are. However, as Descartes famously pointed out in the Second Meditation, not all knowledge is imperilled by this kind of deception. You still know you are a thinking thing. Perhaps, though, there is a more virulent demon in epistemic hell, one from which none of our knowledge is safe. Jonathan Schaffer thinks so. The “Debasing Demon” he imagines threatens knowledge not via the (...) truth condition on knowledge, but via the basing condition. This demon can cause any belief to seem like it’s held on a good basis, when it’s really held on a bad basis. Several recent critics, Conee, Ballantyne & Evans ) grant Schaffer the possibility of such a debasing demon, and argue that the skeptical conclusion doesn’t follow. By contrast, we argue that on any plausible account of the epistemic basing relation, the “debasing demon” is impossible. Our argument for why this is so gestures, more generally, to the importance of avoiding common traps by embracing mistaken assumptions about what it takes for a belief to be based on a reason. (shrink)

Many Christian theologians have associated beauty, both in nature and art, with the Holy Spirit. They include early Fathers like St Irenaeus and St Clement of Alexandria, as well as later writers like Calvin, Jonathan Edwards, Sergius Bulgakov and Hans Urs von Balthasar. This text investigates what they said and why. In doing so, it also serves as an introduction to the whole area of theological aesthetics. Besides exploring the connection between the Holy Spirit and beauty, it ranges more (...) widely by considering topics such as divine glory, inspiration and the eschatological character of beauty. Its discussions bring together two areas of lively interest in contemporary Christianity: the theology of the Holy Spirit and theological aesthetics. (shrink)

In political philosophy, perfectionism is the view that it is the job of the state to best enable its citizens to live good or flourishing lives. It claims that certain lives can be judged to be sound, and thus instructs governments to promote those lives using state institutions etc. Anti-perfectionism denies this. It says that it is not the job of the state to promote good lives. Instead it should restrict itself to securing basic rights and duties, a threshold level (...) of resources and so on. Citizens should be left to adopt pursuits however they see fit. For some anti-perfectionists, this is precisely because we cannot judge any putative life to be sound. However, many are not sceptics, and justify state neutrality for other reasons. All accounts of anti-perfectionism must overcome what has been called the asymmetry objection: what justifies the imbalance inherent in anti-perfectionism? Why believe that the state is permitted to act on judgements about justice, but not on judgements about flourishing? My thesis argues that attempts to respond to the asymmetry objection have failed thus far. Further, I offer an account of political morality that can overcome the problem. The first four chapters of the thesis clarify the debate between perfectionists and anti-perfectionists, narrowing the former down into its most plausible form. Chapters five and six focus on two failed attempts to vindicate anti-perfectionism – Brian Barry’s argument from scepticism and Jonathan Quong’s Rawlsian approach. In the final chapter I put forward a much more promising argument in favour of anti-perfectionism – justice as a set of constraints. (shrink)

Introduction: "I chose therefore my party & am a whigg": the First and Third Earls of Shaftesbury as political icons / Patrick Muller, Dresden -- Part I. The First Earl of Shaftesbury -- Whig wit: Andrew Marvell and the Earls of Shaftesbury / Nigel Smith, Princeton University -- Trade for peace: a complete account of the First Earl of Shaftesbury: interest in Carolina's Indian trade / Andrew Agha, University of South Carolina, Columbia -- John Locke and the reputation of (...) the First Earl of Shaftesbury / Mark Goldie, University of Cambridge -- Part II. The Third Earl of Shaftesbury in his time -- Shaftesbury, an early voice of the radical enlightenment / Jonathan Israel, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University -- Shaftesbury and Locke: a tale of three letters / Daniel Carey, National University of Ireland, Galway -- "An equal commonwealth": Lord Ashley and the republican project of the late 1690s / Patrick Muller, Dresden -- Party politics in characteristicks / Jacob Sider Jost, Dickinson College, Carlisle -- Psychological and political balances: the Third Earl of Shaftesbury's reading of James Harrington / Laurent Jaffro -- (Re)defining the commonwealth: Shaftesbury's concept of political freedom / Angela Taraborrelli, St. John's University of Rome -- Shaftesbury's non-secular cosmopolitanism / David Alvarez, DePauw University, Greencastle -- Taste, the people and the public according to the Third Earl of Shaftesbury / Lawrence E. Klein, University of Cambridge -- Part III. The Third Earl of Shaftesbury: afterlife -- Art, morality and choice: the Third Earl of Shaftesbury and John Molesworth / William Molesworth, Dublin -- "Moral painting, by way of dialogue": Shaftesbury in the cry / Rebecca Anne Barr, National University of Ireland, Galway -- "Virtue pointing to her rugged mountain": Shaftesbury in America / James Pratt, University of Toronto -- Radicalizing sympathy: William Godwin's reading of Shaftesbury / Roman A. Barton, Humboldt-Universitat, Berlin. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 28.1 (2004) 202-217 [Access article in PDF] Literary Universals and the Sciences of the Mind Jonathan Gottschall St. Lawrence University The Mind and its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion, by Patrick Hogan; 302 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, $65.00. Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts: A Guide for Humanists, by Patrick Hogan; 244 pp. New York: Routledge, 2003, $19.95. I Two (...) recent books by Patrick Colm Hogan deserve attention for all they get right and, to a lesser but important extent, for where they go wrong. Hogan is among the most accomplished members of an expanding group of humanistic scholars who are assimilating and putting to use the most promising models of human potential taking shape in the human sciences. By drawing on theory and research in cognitive and brain sciences, evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology, behavioral genetics, and cross-cultural anthropology, this group is finally beginning to push literary studies beyond defunct tabula rasa and psychoanalytic theories of human potential that have served as the main foundations for the elaboration of literary theory over recent decades.1 Varieties of hard social constructivism and psychoanalysis have continued to dominate thought in the humanities, despite the fact that those theories have lost all credibility in the human sciences.2 Hogan's books provide a preview of the kinds of theoretical models that will fill the vacuum once literary scholars fully assimilate [End Page 202] the news that stubbornly fashionable constructivist and psychoanalytic theories of human potential are obsolete.In Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts Hogan presents an accessible introduction to the exploration of the arts from the perspective of cognitive science. As a literary scholar, his main concerns are with literature, written and oral, but his conviction that cognitive science can illuminate all of the arts is clearly indicated in examples from painting, music, and film. The writing is pitched at a level appropriate for the general reader, and no prior reading in cognitive science is assumed. The introductory chapters provide an overview of the broad outlines of theory and research in cognitive science to date, and explain the types of problems the arts raise from the perspective of cognitive science. The middle chapters examine aspects of art making and consumption in light of specific issues that have been important in cognitive study. These chapters focus primarily on artistic creativity, metaphor, literary universals, audience response, and literary emotion. The final chapter considers attempts to explain why human cognitive architecture takes the precise form it does, and includes an extended skeptical critique of the source of the most influential explanations: evolutionary psychology. Hogan's critique of evolutionary psychology is important and I will discuss it at length later in the review.Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts will be welcomed by any reader who wants to better understand basic developments in cognitive science and their potential importance to the study of literature and the arts. It is addressed mainly to the uninitiated and is thus suitable for upper-level literary theory and criticism courses. The Mind and its Stories is a more ambitious volume that seeks (1) to clear the way for the reestablishment of a revamped research program in literary universals, (2) to show how literary data bears on important questions in cognitive science and psychology, and (3) to present a specific hypothesis about the proliferation of certain plot structures in world literature.In The Mind and Its Stories Hogan does nothing less than restore the political and intellectual respectability of the study of literary universals. The Mind and Its Stories begins where it must, with a cogent critique of the most common objection to the development of a sustained research program in literary universals: the largely unexamined conviction that the identification of human universals (in literature and other fields) almost necessarily supports doctrines of inequality that justifies one group's domination of others. Hogan exposes the fundamental illogic of this position, which holds essentially that theories of human equality [End Page 203] are too dangerous to entertain because they might serve to prop up... (shrink)

Essays on Philosophy and Economic Methodology By Daniel M. Hausman Cambridge University Press, 1992. Pp. 259. ISBN 0?521?41740?6. £35.00. Le Fondement de la morale: Essai d'éthiquephilosophique By André Léonard Cerf, 1991. Pp. 381. ISBN not available. FF240. The Philosophy of Time Edited By Robin Le Poidevin and Murray MacBeath Oxford University Press, 1993. Pp. 230. ISBN 0?19?823998?X. £27.50. The Ethics and Politics of Human Experimentation By Paul M. McNeill Cambridge University Press, 1993. Pp. 315. ISBN 0?521?41627?2. £35.00. Modern Conditions, Postmodern (...) Controversies By Barry Smart Routledge, 1991. Pp. 241. ISBN 0?415?06952. £10.99. Religion in Relation. Method, Application and Moral Location By Ivan Strenski Macmillan, 1993. Pp. ix + 257. ISBN 0?333?53469?7. £45.00. Robert Nozick: Property, Justice and the Minimal State By Jonathan Wolff Polity Press, 1991. Pp. ix + 168. ISBN 0?7456?0603?2. £8.95 pbk. (shrink)

Muraskas et al. and Hefferman and Heilig present the painfully elusive ethical questions regarding decisionmaking in the care of the extremely low birth weight infants in the intensive care nursery. At what gestation or size do we resuscitate? Can we stop resuscitation after we have started? How much money is too much to spend? Is the distress of the parents of the ELBW infant, the anguish of their caregivers, and the moral and ethical uncertainty of the approach to these infants (...) too much to pay? Who speaks for the neonate: the parent, nurse, attorney, or physician? Ideally these questions should have been answered 30 years ago when modern neonatology embarked on a journey from where it could not return. A new breed of physician, called seduced by the high-tech lure and the promise of saving lives previously unsavable pioneered a lucrative and life-saving technological revolution in the care of premature newborns. This rapid advancement in neonatology occurred a few years after the death of a premature infant named Patrick Kennedy in 1963. While the country mourned, medical scientists vowed that this would not happen again. First continuous positive airway pressure, then mechanical ventilation, changed medical care of premature newborns forever. It began an era of euphoria and excitement. Neonatologists raced to push to the edge of newborn viability. What was the youngest salvageable gestational age? What was the smallest that could be saved? Yes, we dreamed, and still do dream of artificial placentas. Ethical questions took a back seat in the search for the edge because the waters were uncharted and the tough questions could not be answered without experience. WhatwastobethecostindollarsandinanguishtosavethePatrickKennedysoftheworld?Triumphsledtograveconcerns asweapproachedtheedge.However,noadvancementinneonatologyhaseverchangedtheultimatequestions. (shrink)

Discovering someone disagrees with you is a common occurrence. The question of epistemic significance of disagreement concerns how discovering that another disagrees with you affects the rationality of your beliefs on that topic. This book examines the answers that have been proposed to this question, and presents and defends its own answer.

There is an emerging consensus among interpreters that in his Critical writings Kant ascribes unconscious representations to the mind. The nature and extent of this ascription over the course of Kant’s philosophical development is however not well understood. I argue that from his earliest published writings Kant consistently ascribes unconscious representations to the mind; that some of these representations are unconscious in the strong sense that they are not available to introspection; and that Kant extends his commitment to unconscious representations (...) by ascribing to the mind unconscious acts of judging and reasoning. (shrink)

Emotion theory includes attempts to reduce or assimilate emotions to states such as bodily feelings, beliefs-desire combinations, and evaluative judgements. Resistance to such approaches is motivated by the claim that emotions possess a sui generis phenomenology. Uriah Kriegel defends a new form of emotion reductivism which avoids positing irreducible emotional phenomenology by specifying emotions’ phenomenal character in terms of a combination of other phenomenologies. This article argues Kriegel’s approach, and similar proposals, are unsuccessful, since typical emotional experiences are constituted by (...) sui generis feelings towards value. (shrink)

Despite its philosophical interest, Susanna Newcome’s Enquiry Into the Evidence of the Christian Religion (1728, revised 1732) has received little attention from commentators. This paper seeks to redress this oversight by offering a reconstruction of Newcome’s innovative argument for God’s existence. Newcome employs a cosmological argument that differs from Thomist and kalām version of the argument. Specifically, Newcome challenges that idea that the causal chains observed in nature can exist independently. She does this through an appeal to findings from Newtonian (...) natural philosophy that suggest that the universe has entropic tendencies. This suggests that the continued operations of nature are dependent on a cause external to the universe. Newcome identifies this external cause with God. Various strengths and weaknesses of Newcome’s argument are discussed and an attempt is made to situate the argument within her broader epistemic framework and the larger context of Newtonian physico-theology. The paper also explores what is known of Newcome’s biography and intellectual milieu. (shrink)