In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 487 61oign6 de Locke, qui a fait entrer les math6matiques dans la logique, il est leur successeur attitr6. II a 6pous6 une doctrine pacifiste encore plus imp6rative que celle de Voltaire. N'a-t-il pas lui aussi cherch6 a cultiver son jardin pour en faire un paradis terrestre, et ce n'est certes pas sa faute ni celle de la raison humaine sice paradis s'estompe darts un avenir toujours plus (...) 61oign6 pour n'~tre en d6finitive qu'un mirage. P. Gay qui est ~t sa fa~on un bon disciple de Locke est un pragmatiste plus qu'un rationaliste. Le programme des philosophes n'Stait pas seulement raisonnable, il ~tait pratique. MSme si ceux-ci se sonl: paffois montr6s, ridicules pour avoir m~connu la grande part de l'irrationnel daus l'esprit humain, ils ont du moins le m~rite d'avoir fair appel au bon sens de la collectivit6, ce bon sens qui fondait route la m6thode de Descartes. Pour P. Gay, comme pour les hommes du xvm e sidle, le philosophe est avant tout le sage et le savant, l'homme de bien et le citoyen, tel qu'il est dit daus l'Encyclopddie. C'est le "militaire phflosophe" dont l'auteur est inconnu, le "philosophe ignorant" de Voltaire, le "philosophe sans le savoir" de Sedaine. Une nouvelle conception de l'homme se fait jour, celle d'un 8tre ~ la lois rationnel et sensible. Par derriere de nombreux avatars se retrouve une philosophic g6n~rale commune: celle de Locke et de Condillac, de Hume, d'Helv6tius et de Diderot, celle-l~t m6me qu'E. C.assirer a su mettre en lumi~re en insistant sur son c6t6 formel, et que le philosophe sovi6tique J. Luppol a quelque peu fauss6e par une interpr6tation marxiste et par trop dogrnatique de l'histoire. Elle s'exprime clairement dans le Discours pr~lirninaire de d'Alembert. Le sensationnalisme a promu l'id~e de la souverainet~ de l'esprit critique et par l~t m~me a r6pudi6 la toute-puissance de la Raison. La nouvelle m6thode pr6conis ~e permet une dialectique nouvelle, qui est pr~cis6ment celle de l'homme moderne. EUe entraine une conception diff6rente du monde et de l'homme, une interpretation nouvelle de leurs rapports. La psychologie est amen~e ~ faire ses premiers pas en tant que science; mais c'est une analyse impitoyable du moi profond en marge d'une exploration de la vie sociale et du monde ext~rieur qui a fray6 la voie ~t la modernitY, et nous a donn~ le sentiment de notre libertY. C'est ainsi qu'il convient de faire entrer le Rousseau des Confessions aussi bien que du Contrat social dans la grande famille d~sunie qui fait le sujet du livre de P. Gay. Pour nous, en nous pla~ant ~t un point de rue quelque peu different de celui de notre auteur, et tout en reconnaissant avec lui que le dix-huiti~me si~cle a port~ une atteinte mortelle ~ la m~taphysique, nous croyons pouvoir dire que le dix-huiti~me si~cle n'est pas tant le si~cle qui a reni~ Dieu, mais le si~cle qui s'en est fait une conception plus moderne en le repoussant darts un pass~ lointain et t~n~breux ou en le situant, non sans ivresse, darts un avenir tr~s incertain. R. NIKLAUS Exeter, England La Filosofia Politica di Schelling. By Claudio Cesa. (Bari, Laterza, 1969. Pp. 252. n.p.) Was Schelling an original political philosopher? This does not seem to be the opinion of the author of this very careful research, which is beyond any doubt the 488 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY most extensive study of this aspect of Schelling's thought, at least until 1806. However, even if Schelling was not, as it is frequently stated, indifferent to the problems and the vicissitudes of politics, his theoretical thinking on this subject never went beyond temporary systematizations, to be given up, or modified, after a while. The author shows how Schelling, especially in this fieM, was influenced either by his environment in general, or by some personalities he happened to contact: first... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.4 (2003) 561-562 [Access article in PDF] Gianni Paganini, Miguel Benítez, and James Dybikowski, editors. Scepticisme, Clandestinité et Libre Pensée. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2002. Pp. 382. Cloth, €60.00. This book consists of papers from two Tables rondes held in Dublin in 1999 on the occasion of the Tenth International Congress on the Enlightenment. The contributors are: Paganini, Benítez, Dybikowski, Alan Charles Kors, Winfried (...) Schröder, José R. Maia Neto, Adam Sutcliffe, Justin Champion, Antony McKenna, Lorenzo Bianchi, Christine Berkvens-Stevelinck, Pierre Lurbe, Stephen David Snobelen, Nigel Aston, and Stuart Brown. There is remarkably little overlap among the papers and Paganini has clearly insisted on very [End Page 561] high standards. Because of space limitations, I shall focus on several of the general themes which run through the book rather than on individual contributions.Despite the phenomenal success Richard Popkin and collaborators like the late Charles B. Schmitt, Giorgio Tonelli, and Ezequiel de Olaso have had in documenting the amazing impact of skepticism in the Renaissance and in the years up to the Enlightenment, this volume demonstrates that skepticism, that many-faceted force, continued throughout the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. After Bayle, and the application of his special forms of skepticism to theological topics—forms which were often employed, contrary to Bayle's probable intentions, in defense of atheism—skepticism went "underground." A large variety of literature was circulated in manuscript form, the clandestine literature of the period. The lesson which this conference celebrates is that skepticism did not cease being a major cultural force. Thus there is, thanks to the philosophical dimension of the clandestine literature in the eighteenth century, a transition from Christian rationalism to an anti-Christian rationalism.Major figures of the Enlightenment were, of course, well-acquainted with skepticism, e.g., Berkeley, Voltaire, Hume, Crousaz, Condillac, Reid, and Kant. Not surprisingly, the major topics discussed in these papers center around skepticism, fideism and atheism, proofs for the existence of God, and the status of the "preambles" to the faith. These all receive careful attention. The tension between the arguments for Christian Pyrrhonism versus anti-Christian rationalism runs through many of these papers. And of course Bayle's points of view on both sides of the Christian debate appear in much of the clandestine literature. The matter of the immortality of the soul is carefully discussed. What is the status of this doctrine? Is it a question of Church dogma or is it another belief to be discarded in the light of reason?The connection perceived to hold between atheism and political legitimacy are explored in several papers. In the seventeenth century, Locke would exclude atheists from the body politic, in part because they were unable to truthfully swear an oath. Atheists were perceived as a danger for many eighteenth-century figures and the political need to suppress atheism was widely understood and accepted by those in the various religious establishments. Bayle's two-century-old attempt to break the putative logical tie between morality and religion failed in his own day, and despite the efforts of the authors of clandestine philosophical literature, the intimate link Bayle tried to break seems to be stronger than ever in much of the world today. It is interesting that the United States is virtually the only industrial and democratic society in which atheists are virtually precluded from being political candidates in federal, and probably most local, elections. Among other things, the papers in this volume help one to understand just how difficult breaking free from theological constraints in the interest of political freedom has proved to be. Harry McFarland Bracken Arizona State University, Tempe... (shrink)

A unifying theory of general anesthetic-induced unconsciousness must explain the common mechanism through which various anesthetic agents produce unconsciousness. Functional-brain-imaging data obtained from 11 volunteers during general anesthesia showed specific suppression of regional thalamic and midbrain reticular formation activity across two different commonly used volatile agents. These findings are discussed in relation to findings from sleep neurophysiology and the implications of this work for consciousness research. It is hypothesized that the essential common neurophysiologic mechanism underlying anesthetic-induced unconsciousness is, as with (...) sleep-induced unconsciousness, a hyperpolarization block of thalamocortical neurons. A model of anesthetic-induced unconsciousness is introduced to explain how the plethora of effects anesthetics have on cellular functioning ultimately all converge on a single neuroanatomic/neurophysiologic system, thus providing for a unitary physiologic theory of narcosis related to consciousness. (shrink)

We generalize two well-known model-theoretic characterization theorems from propositional modal logic to first-order modal logic. We first study FML-definable frames and give a version of the Goldblatt–Thomason theorem for this logic. The advantage of this result, compared with the original Goldblatt–Thomason theorem, is that it does not need the condition of ultrafilter reflection and uses only closure under bounded morphic images, generated subframes and disjoint unions. We then investigate Lindström type theorems for first-order modal logic. We show that FML has (...) the maximal expressive power among the logics extending FML which satisfy compactness, bisimulation invariance and the Tarski union property. (shrink)

In the coverage of the problems of war and peace in Catholicism, researchers sometimes omit the regional component of their manifestation. We are talking about local traditions in Catholicism, which have their own specific approach to solving this problem and sometimes may differ significantly from the "conventional" position. The study of this field is necessary because in the delineated field the position of those theologians who were on the "outskirts" of Catholicism in the intercultural dialogue, on the one hand, led (...) to a deviation from the humanistic orientation about Catholicism. the war. An example would be the concept of a "holy war" of the Crusades, which had the anti-Islamic rhetoric generated not only in the West but also in the East. (shrink)

Deficits in social cognition and more specifically in communication have an important impact on the real-life functioning of people with schizophrenia. In particular, patients have severe problems in communicative-pragmatics, for example, in correctly inferring the speaker’s communicative intention in everyday conversational interactions. This limit is associated with morphological and functional alteration of the left middle temporal gyrus, a cerebral area involved in various communicative processes, in particular in the distinction of ironic communicative intention from sincere and deceitful ones. We performed (...) an fMRI study on 20 patients with SZ and 20 matched healthy controls while performing a pragmatic task testing the comprehension of sincere, deceitful, and ironic communicative intentions. We considered the L-MTG as the region of interest. SZ patients showed difficulties in the correct comprehension of all types of communicative intentions and, when correctly answering to the task, they exhibited a higher activation of the L-MTG, as compared to HC, under all experimental conditions. This greater involvement of the L-MTG in the group of patients could depend on different factors, such as the increasing inferential effort required in correctly understanding the speaker’s communicative intentions, and the higher integrative semantic processes involved in sentence processing. Future studies with a larger sample size and functional connectivity analysis are needed to study deeper the specific role of the L-MTG in pragmatic processes in SZ, also in relation to other brain areas. (shrink)

This special issue of Journal of Consciousness Studies brings together work from a range of philosophers, neuroscientists, psychologists, cognitive scientists, behavioural scientists, and computer scientists who are all united in their approach to answering questions about consciousness. The contributions to this journal are inspired by work presented at the inaugural Designed Mind Symposium, held at the University of Edinburgh Informatics Forum on 7-8 November 2017.

This is my first systematic publication on fearism. It is a general theoretical study but does not itself remain un-affected. Based on experience and theorizing on fearism, I am convinced it is a deeply terrifying encounter, as would be the encounter critically of any harmful violent ideology. Fearism, arguably, is the most terrifying to encounter, which no doubt explains why it has not been spoken about in human history so directly until only this last decade....

The premise behind this paper is that "we" have a very serious Fear Problem. As a stream of inquiry in the larger In Search of Fearlessness Movement, the author pursues a long lingering question and concern about how the West has near neglected the call to examine "fearlessness" in contradistinction to the East. With the purpose to build a better understanding of fearlessness, theories about it, and how it fits into the author's most recent turn to co-developing a philosophy of (...) fearism.... (shrink)

In this paper, I argue for the modest claim that people's apparent indifference to animal pain may not be predicated upon speciesism. I defend that claim by developing an analogy between current attitudes toward at least some non‐human animal pain — that which pigs endure while having their tails ‘docked’— and our culture's indifference to the pain that male human infants experience while being circumcised. And I conclude that to convince more of their philosophical and social critics, ‘animal liberationists’ need (...) to spend more time analyzing the pain that non‐human animals experience and defending its moral significance, rather than assuming that such pain is significant and then simply arguing that unnecessary forms of it exist. (shrink)

The aim of this study was to test red - green dichromats' ability to discriminate between illuminant and surface-reflectance changes in natural scenes. Stimuli were simulations of natural scenes presented on a colour monitor with 10-bit resolution per gun. The natural scenes were obtained with a fast hyperspectral imaging system. Six different scenes (including rocks, foliage, and buildings) were tested. In each trial, two images were presented in sequence, each for 1 s, with no interval. The images differed in the (...) phase of daylight on the scene: first with correlated colour temperature 25 000 K, then 6 700 K. The spectral reflectance of a region in the second image was changed randomly, consistent with a local change in daylight. The observer's task was to decide whether a particular surface in the successive images was the same (pure illuminant change) or different (illuminant change with a surface-reflectance change). The performance of four deuteranopes and five protanopes varied considerably across the scenes tested, with mean colour constancy indices (± 1 SEM) of 0.48 (± 0.13) and 0.19 (± 0.10), respectively (1.0 representing ideal performance). Deuteranopes seemed less disadvantaged than protanopes, performing close to normal with some scenes. (shrink)

In a recently-published work of much learning and great interest, La Frontière de l'Euphrate de Pompée à la Conquète Arabe , M. Victor Chapot has dealt at some length with the history of the eastern legions. But neither he, nor, so far as I can find, any other writer, has attempted to fix their camps with full regard to chronology, and many points have been left uncertain. Although there is little direct evidence—less than for any other part of the Roman (...) Empire—it may be possible to construct with reasonable probability a more exact military map of the eastern frontier. (shrink)