It is impossible to hold patently contradictory beliefs in mind together at once. Why? Because we know that it is impossible for both to be true. This impossibility is a species of rational necessity, a phenomenon that uniquely characterizes the relation between one person's beliefs. Here, Eric Marcus argues that the unity of the rational mind--what makes it one mind--is what explains why, given what we already believe, we can't believe certain things and must believe certain others in this (...) special sense. What explains this is that beliefs, and the inferences by which we acquire them, are constituted by a particular kind of endorsement of those very states and acts. This, in turn, entails that belief and inference are essentially self-conscious: to hold a belief or to make an inference is at the same time to know that one does. An examination of the nature of belief and inference, in light of the phenomenon of rational necessity, reveals how the unity of the rational mind is a function of our knowledge of ourselves as bound to believe the true. Rational self-consciousness is the form of mental togetherness. (shrink)

Two leaders in the field offer a compelling analysis of the current state of the art and reveal the steps we must take to achieve a truly robust artificial intelligence. Despite the hype surrounding AI, creating an intelligence that rivals or exceeds human levels is far more complicated than we have been led to believe. Professors Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis have spent their careers at the forefront of AI research and have witnessed some of the greatest milestones in (...) the field, but they argue that a computer beating a human in Jeopardy! does not signal that we are on the doorstep of fully autonomous cars or superintelligent machines. The achievements in the field thus far have occurred in closed systems with fixed sets of rules, and these approaches are too narrow to achieve genuine intelligence. The real world, in contrast, is wildly complex and open-ended. How can we bridge this gap? What will the consequences be when we do? Taking inspiration from the human mind, Marcus and Davis explain what we need to advance AI to the next level, and suggest that if we are wise along the way, we won't need to worry about a future of machine overlords. If we focus on endowing machines with common sense and deep understanding, rather than simply focusing on statistical analysis and gatherine ever larger collections of data, we will be able to create an AI we can trust--in our homes, our cars, and our doctors' offices. Rebooting AI provides a lucid, clear-eyed assessment of the current science and offers an inspiring vision of how a new generation of AI can make our lives better. (shrink)

This book challenges the conventional wisdom that improving democratic politics requires keeping emotion out of it. Marcus advances the provocative claim that the tradition in democratic theory of treating emotion and reason as hostile opposites is misguided and leads contemporary theorists to misdiagnose the current state of American democracy. Instead of viewing the presence of emotion in politics as a failure of rationality and therefore as a failure of citizenship, Marcus argues, democratic theorists need to understand that emotions (...) are in fact a prerequisite for the exercise of reason and thus essential for rational democratic deliberation and political judgment. Attempts to purge emotion from public life not only are destined to fail, but ultimately would rob democracies of a key source of revitalization and change. Drawing on recent research in neuroscience, Marcus shows how emotion functions generally and what role it plays in politics. In contrast to the traditional view of emotion as a form of agitation associated with belief, neuroscience reveals it to be generated by brain systems that operate largely outside of awareness. Two of these systems, "disposition" and "surveillance," are especially important in enabling emotions to produce habits, which often serve a positive function in democratic societies. But anxiety, also a preconscious emotion, is crucial to democratic politics as well because it can inhibit or disable habits and thus clear a space for the conscious use of reason and deliberation. If we acknowledge how emotion facilitates reason and is "cooperatively entangled" with it, Marcus concludes, then we should recognize sentimental citizens as the only citizens really capable of exercising political judgment and of putting their decisions into action. (shrink)

This manuscript departs strongly from conventional accounts that ascribe a central role to war and the threat of war in Third World state building. Similarly, it challenges the conventional wisdom that abundant exportable natural resource wealth is likely to provoke institutional atrophy. Instead, it argues that a set of logically prior conditions—the social relations that govern the principal economic sectors and the pattern or intraelite conflict or compromise—launch path-dependent processes that help determine when, and if, either strategic conflict or resource (...) wealth contribute to, or impede, institutional development. The argument is tested in the comparative analysis of the state-building process in two Andean neighbors, both of which are situated in similar strategic and natural resource environments but which produced qualitatively different outcomes in terms of state capacity or “strength.”. (shrink)

This article shows how, in recent works of cultural analysis, the concept of ‘assemblage’ has been been derived from key sources of theory and put to work to provide a structure-like surrogate to express certain prominent values of a modernist sensibility in the discourse of description and analysis. Assemblage is a sort of anti-structural concept that permits the researcher to speak of emergence, heterogeneity, the decentred and the ephemeral in nonetheless ordered social life. There are other related concepts, like collage, (...) which have been used to give these values substance in research, but currently assemblage is enjoying a popularity perhaps because of the continuing fascination of the work of Deleuze and Guattari. (shrink)

This collection of Marcus's non-technical essays include her earlier ground-breaking axiomatizations of quantified modal logic, and explore such topics as the necessity of identity, the directly referential role of proper names as "tags", the interplay of possibility and existence, and others viewed as iconoclastic when Marcus first addressed them, but now long incorporated into current discussion.

Four questions are raised about the semantics of Quantified Modal Logic. Does QML admit possible objects, i.e. possibilia? Is it plausible to admit them? Can sense be made of such objects? Is QML committed to the existence of possibilia? The conclusions are that QML, generalized as in Kripke, would seem to accommodate possibilia, but they are rejected on philosophical and semantical grounds. Things must be encounterable, directly nameable and a part of the actual order before they may plausibly enter into (...) the identity relation. QML is not committed to possibilia in that the range of variables may be restricted to actual objects. Support of the conclusions requires some discussion of substitution puzzles; also, the semantical distinction between proper names which are directly referring, and descriptions even where the latter are "rigid designators". Views of W.V. Quine, B. Russell, K. Donnellan, D. Kaplan as well as S. Kripke are invoked or evaluated in conjunction with these issues. (shrink)

It has been a common claim that surrogacy is morally problematic since it involves harm to the child or the surrogate—the harm argument. Due to a growing body of empirical research, the harm argument has seen a decrease in popularity, as there seems to be little evidence of harmful consequences of surrogacy. In this article, two revised versions of the harm argument are developed. It is argued that the two suggested versions of the harm argument survive the current criticism against (...) the standard harm argument. The first version argues that the child is harmed by being separated from the gestational mother. The second version directs attention to the fact that surrogacy involves great incentives to keep the gestational mother’s level of maternal-fetal attachment low, which tend to increase the risk of harm to the child. While neither of the two arguments is conclusive regarding the moral status of surrogacy, both constitute important considerations that are often ignored. (shrink)

I argue that zombies are inconceivable. More precisely, I argue that the conceivability-intuition that is used to demonstrate their possibility has been misconstrued. Thought experiments alleged to feature zombies founder on the fact that, on the one hand, they _must_ involve first-person imagining, and yet, on the other hand, _cannot_. Philosophers who take themselves to have imagined zombies have unwittingly conflated imagining a creature who lacks consciousness with imagining a creature without also imagining the consciousness it may or may not (...) possess. (shrink)

Margaret Cavendish is widely known as a materialist. However, since Cavendishian matter is always in motion, “matter” and “motion” are equally important foundational concepts for her natural philosophy. In Philosophical Letters (1664), she takes to task her materialist rival Thomas Hobbes by assaulting his account of accidents in general and his concept of “rest” in particular. In this article, I argue that Cavendish defends her continuous-motion view in two ways: first, she claims that her account avoids seeing accidents as capable (...) of generation and annihilation, which she argues is inconceivable; and second, she contends that according to Hobbes’s own view “rest” is an absurd conception since it cannot be drawn from experience. Beyond its function as a defense, I claim that Cavendish’s focused criticism of “rest” shows that she is a perceptive reader of Hobbes’s natural philosophy, insofar as her criticisms undercut the two a priori principles of Hobbesian physics. Finally, I show how her views developed in more detail in Philosophical and Physical Opinions (1663) and Observations upon Experimental Philosophy ([1666] 2001) avoid the worries she raises for Hobbesian materialism. (shrink)

If a woman in the audience at a presentation raises her hand, we would take this as evidence that she intends to ask a question. In normal circumstances, we would be right to say that she raises her hand because she intends to ask a question. We also expect that there could, in principle, be a causal explanation of her hand’s rising in purely physiological terms. Ordinarily, we take the existence and compatibility of both kinds of causes for granted. But (...) this can come to seem strange. When we imagine tracking the physiological process that culminates in her hand’s rising, it is hard to find a purchase for her intention. The physiological process seems not to need assistance from her intention in order to get where it’s going, chugging along as it does according to principles that appear to have very little in common with ordinary psychological ones. The presumed self-sufficiency of physiological processes can, in a similar fashion, appear to muscle psychological states quite generally out of the causal picture. (shrink)

This papers gives a survey of recent results about simulations of one class of modal logics by another class and of the transfer of properties of modal logics under extensions of the underlying modal language. We discuss: the transfer from normal polymodal logics to their fusions, the transfer from normal modal logics to their extensions by adding the universal modality, and the transfer from normal monomodal logics to minimal tense extensions. Likewise, we discuss simulations of normal polymodal logics by normal (...) monomodal logics, of nominals and the difference operator by normal operators, of monotonic monomodal logics by normal bimodal logics, of polyadic normal modal logics by polymodal normal modal logics, and of intuitionistic modal logics by normal bimodal logics. (shrink)

This article introduces a new, performative framework for analysing intellectuals and intellectual interventions. It elaborates on the strengths of this theoretical perspective vis-à-vis rival approaches and develops this frame of reference by exploring key constituent concepts, including positioning, script and staging. The article then exemplifies the framework and demonstrates its applicability by exploring a public intellectual performance by Jean-Paul Sartre. To conclude, the article reflects on recent shifts in public intellectual performances, especially changes that are relatively durable and connected to (...) the rise of new media. (shrink)

In a couple of classical studies, Keeney proposed two sets of variables labelled as value focused thinking (VFT) and alternative-focused thinking (AFT). Value-focused thinking (VFT), he argued, is a creative method that centres on the different decision objectives and how as many alternatives as possible may be generated from them. Alternative-focused thinking (AFT), on the other hand, is a method in which the decision maker takes notice of all the available alternatives and then makes a choice that seems to fit (...) the problem best. The impact of these two methods on idea generation was measured using a sample of employees. The results revealed that employees in the value-focused thinking condition (VFT) produced fewer ideas. Thus, value-focused thinking (VFT) is not only able to facilitate ideation fluency but also to constrain it. Factors such as cognitive effort and motivation may play a part here. However, the quality of the ideas was judged to be higher in terms of creativity and innovativeness. Hence, value-focused thinking (VFT) seems to have a positive impact on the quality of ideas in terms of creativity and innovativeness regardless of ideation fluency. Implications for the design of idea management systems are discussed. (shrink)

Speech unfolds over time, and the cues for even a single phoneme are rarely available simultaneously. Consequently, to recognize a single phoneme, listeners must integrate material over several hundred milliseconds. Prior work contrasts two accounts: (a) a memory buffer account in which listeners accumulate auditory information in memory and only access higher level representations (i.e., lexical representations) when sufficient information has arrived; and (b) an immediate integration scheme in which lexical representations can be partially activated on the basis of early (...) cues and then updated when more information arises. These studies have uniformly shown evidence for immediate integration for a variety of phonetic distinctions. We attempted to extend this to fricatives, a class of speech sounds which requires not only temporal integration of asynchronous cues (the frication, followed by the formant transitions 150–350 ms later), but also integration across different frequency bands and compensation for contextual factors like coarticulation. Eye movements in the visual world paradigm showed clear evidence for a memory buffer. Results were replicated in five experiments, ruling out methodological factors and tying the release of the buffer to the onset of the vowel. These findings support a general auditory account for speech by suggesting that the acoustic nature of particular speech sounds may have large effects on how they are processed. It also has major implications for theories of auditory and speech perception by raising the possibility of an encapsulated memory buffer in early auditory processing. (shrink)

Originally published in 1984, this book broke new ground in assessing Freud as both an exemplary late-Victorian and as a pivotal figure in the creation of modern thought and culture. In his close reading of various of Freud’s theoretical and clinical texts, including two of the most famous case histories, Steven Marcus uncovers the steps in the development of Freud’s thought, the dynamics and contradictions and ‘the intellectual and emotional urgings, forces and conflicts that were at work… as the (...) first original insights and discoveries that constituted the inception of psychoanalysis as a theory, discipline of inquiry, and new kind of therapy, came suddenly, often unexpectedly and without being bidden, upon Freud’. Central to Professor Marcus’ inquiry is the relationship of Freud’s work to cultural change and to the very process of disclosure, formation and construction in the transition to modernity. Freud’s writings, and the psychoanalytic discipline of which they are the foundations, are placed in the context of their contribution to modern modes of thought, and of their influence on our notions of the centres of significance of each existence as a whole. Freud and the Culture of Psychoanalysis is a major contribution to our understanding of how ideas and theories become internalized into the intellectual framework of our lives and affect the way we think about the world. By moving backward and forward from pre-Freudian to post-Freudian thinkers, Professor Marcus takes us on a journey through cultural transition that is also an exploration of how the individual interacts with his own moment in history to forge new modes of consciousness. (shrink)

It is argued that God cannot be a fitting target of prepositional gratitude. The first premise is that if someone cannot be benefited, then they cannot be a fitting target of prepositional gratitude. The second premise is that God cannot be benefited. Concerning the first premise, it is argued that a necessary component of prepositional gratitude is the desire to benefit one’s benefactor. Then it is argued that such a desire is fitting only if one’s benefactor can in fact be (...) benefited. Concerning the second premise, it is noted that classical theism widely attributes blessedness to God. It is argued that if God is blessed then God necessarily has as much well-being as it is possible for God to have, and hence God cannot be benefited. Also noted are some ways in which God’s blessedness is compatible with less orthodox ideas about God’s passibility. The argument is then defended against eight objections. (shrink)

Hermann Heller war ein herausragender Teilnehmer der Staatslehrerdebatte zur Zeit der Weimarer Republik. Diese Schlüsselphase für die Entwicklung des modernen Staatsverständnisses diskutiert so grundlegende Probleme wie das Verhältnis von Staatlichkeit und Gesellschaft, Staatlichkeit und Politik sowie von Staatlichkeit und Demokratie. Heller sah frühzeitig die Herausforderungen der modernen gesellschaftlichen und politischen Entwicklungen auf den klassischen Staatsbegriff zukommen. Er wollte nicht überhastet auf klassische Attribute des Staates wie die Souveränität verzichten, sie vielmehr auf demokratische Verhältnisse übertragen. Ihm widerstrebte sowohl eine künstliche Abgrenzung (...) des Staatsrechts von der Gesellschaft als auch die vorschnelle Identifikation beider Begriffe; er war vielmehr um eine Vermittlung von Staat und Gesellschaft bemüht und formulierte hierzu das Modell des sozialen Rechtsstaats. Die Weimarer Staatslehrerdebatte und Heller in ihr sind für ein besseres Verständnis der gegenwärtigen Umbildung des Staatsbegriffs in einer sich verändernden sozialen und politischen Umwelt von größtem Aufschluss. Herausgeber: Marcus Llanque, Professor für Politische Theorie an der Universität Augsburg. (shrink)

The book approaches law from the legal-linguistic perspective. Its aim is to clarify the processes in which the meaning of law emerges in legal discourses. In order to enable the understanding of law as a discursive practice, professional and non-professional discourses are analyzed. With this aim in mind, the author focuses on the epistemological consequences of the discursiveness of law. Other relevant legal-linguistic operations such as legal interpretation or legal translation are scrutinized in terms of their theoretical prerequisites and their (...) practical consequences. Their analysis also shows the potential and the limits of law as a social and as a linguistic phenomenon that is determined by its discursiveness. Finally, the book demonstrates how the discursiveness as the distinctive feature of law establishes the connection between the science of law and other social sciences. (shrink)

The topics of language and subaltern social groups appear throughout Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks. Although Gramsci often associates the problem of political fragmentation among subaltern groups with issues concerning language and common sense, there are only a few notes where he explicitly connects his overlapping analyses of language and subalternity. We build on the few places in the literature on Gramsci that focus on how he relates common sense to the questions of language or subalternity. By explicitly tracing out these (...) relations, we hope to bring into relief the direct connections between subalternity and language by showing how the concepts overlap with respect to Gramsci's analyses of common sense, intellectuals, philosophy, folklore, and hegemony. We argue that, for Gramsci, fragmentation of any social group's 'common sense', worldview and language is a political detriment, impeding effective political organisation to counter exploitation but that such fragmentation cannot be overcome by the imposition of a 'rational' or 'logical' worldview. Instead, what is required is a deep engagement with the fragments that make up subaltern historical, social, economic and political conditions. In our view, Gramsci provides an alternative both to the celebration of fragmentation fashionable in liberal multiculturalism and uncritical postmodernism, as well as other attempts of overcoming it through recourse to some external, transcendental or imposed worldview. This is fully in keeping with, and further elucidates Gramsci's understanding of the importance of effective 'democratic centralism' of the leadership of the party in relation to the rank and file and the popular masses. (shrink)

David Sobel has recently argued that libertarian theories that accept full and strict self-ownership as foundational confront what he calls the conflation problem: if transgressing self-ownership is strictly and stringently forbidden, it is implied that the normative protection against one infringement is precisely as strong as against any other infringement. But this seems to be an absurd consequence. In defense of libertarianism, I argue that the conflation problem can be handled in a way that allows us to honor basic libertarian (...) commitments. It is suggested libertarianism should be characterized as presumptive libertarianism, treating self-ownership as an assumption the content of which remains to be worked out when applied, rather than as a dogma ready for application: a proposal that relies on a standard market model. Since such a proposal is likely to appear to many philosophers—libertarians in particular—as inherently flawed, a considerable part of this article defends it against possible criticisms. It is argued that presumptive libertarianism is not only a coherent and theoretically elegant notion, but a version of libertarianism that honors pre-theoretical commitments to self-ownership and liberty better than some mainstream versions of libertarianism. (shrink)

Summary In this paper some claims of Professor Ricoeur are challenged. It is pointed out on historical grounds that counter to Professor Ricoeur's claim, most past philosophies are displaced, or ignored. The surviving canon is small and very selective. There is, therefore, substantial agreement on the large corpus which is rejected. It is also argued that Professor Ricoeur's contrast between philosophy and the sciences is too sharp since in the history of modern sciences there are always conflicting theories existing in (...) parallel. However, it is the case that in philosophy standards of “acceptability” are looser and not the rigorous ones of science. A philosophical theory may be appreciated for the problems it discloses, the richness and subtlety of its arguments, its strategies and the like despite acknowledged failings. Appreciation of incompatible theories is not irrational. The claim is rejected that the seeming irrationality is resolved by viewing each system as wholly autonomous. The apparent restriction of philosophy by Professor Ricoeur to global systems is also questioned.RésuméL'auteur conteste quelques affirmations du prof. Ricoeur. Elle montre, sur des bases historiques, que beaucoup de philosophies passées sont écartées ou ignorées. Le canon retenu est petit et très sélectif. Il y a donc un accord substantiel quant au vaste corpus qui est rejeté. Elle montre aussi que le contraste que le professeur Ricoeur établit entre philosophie et sciences est trop abrupt, puisqu'il y a toujours eu, dans l'histoire de la science moderne, des théories opposées qui coexistaient. Toutefois, il est vrai qu'en philosophie, les standards d' »acceptabilité« sont plus lǎches et diffèrent de ceux, plus rigoureux, de la science. Une philosophie peut ětre appréciée pour les problèmes qu'elle pose, pour la richesse et la subtilité de ses arguments, ses stratégies ou d'autres choses semblables et ceci en dépit de ses insuffisances notoires. Il n'est pas irrationnel d'apprécier des théories incompatibles. Elle rejette la thèse selon laquelle le fait de considérer chaque système comme totalement autonome supprime l'irrationalité. Elle conteste enfin la restriction — apparemment faite par le professeur Ricoeur — de la philosophie à des systèmes globaux.ZusammenfassungEs werden einige Behauptungen von Professor Ricoeur in Frage gestellt. Es wird gezeigt, dass aus historischen Gründen entgegen Ricoeurs Behauptung die meisten vergangenen Philosophien tatsächlich verdrängt oder ignoriert werden. Der überlebende Kanon ist gering und selektiv. Deshalb gibt es eine wichtige Übereinstimmung hinsichtlich des grossen Korpus', der verworfen wird. Es wird argumentiert, dass Ricoeur den Kontrast zwischen der Philosophie und den Wissenschaften zu extrem sieht, da in der Geschichte der modernen Wissenschaften immer rivalisierende Theorien nebeneinander existiert haben. Es stimmt allerdings, dass die Massstäbe für Akzeptierbarkeit in der Philosophie lockerer sind als die strengen der Wisschenschaft. Eine philosophische Theorie mag wegen der Probleme, die sie entwickelt, wegen des Reichtums und der Subtilität ihrer Argumente, ihrer Strategien etc. gewürdigt werden, obschon sie anerkanntermassen versagt hat. Die Würdigung unvereinbarer Theorien ist nicht irrational. Die scheinbare Irrationalität kann nicht dadurch aufgelöst werden, dass jedes System als völlig autonom betrachtet wird. Es wird ebenfalls Ricoeurs Einschränkung der Philosophie auf globale Systeme in Frage gestellt. (shrink)

A biography of the Spanish-born Jewish philosopher, rabbi, and physician of the Middle Ages who spent a good deal of his life in Egypt and whose works influenced the thinking of Jews, Christians, and Moslems.