In a wide variety of contexts, individuals face a risk of being physically harmed by the conduct of others in the community. The extent to which the government protects individuals from such harmful behavior largely depends on the combined effect of administrative regulation, criminal law, and tort law. Unless these different departments are coordinated, the government cannot ensure that individuals are adequately secure from the cumulative threat of physical harm. What is adequate for this purpose depends on the underlying entitlement (...) to physical security. What one has lost for purposes of legal analysis depends on what one what was entitled to in the first instance. Consequently, any mode of safety regulation that requires an assessment of losses or costs ultimately depends on a prior specification of entitlements. For reasons of history and federalism, the entitlement in the United States can be derived from the common law of torts. In addition to establishing how costs should be measured, the tort entitlement also quantifies any distributive inequities that would be created by a safety standard and shows how they can be redressed within the safety regulation. When applied in this manner, the tort entitlement to physical security promotes substantive consistency across the different departments of law by serving as the distributive basis for environmental, health, and safety regulations that operate entirely outside of the tort system. (shrink)

This paper describes and defends the view that minimal chemical life essentially involves the chemical integration of three chemical functionalities: containment, metabolism, and program (Rasmussen et al. in Protocells: bridging nonliving and living matter, 2009a ). This view is illustrated and explained with the help of CMP and Rasmussen diagrams (Rasmussen et al. In: Rasmussen et al. (eds.) in Protocells: bridging nonliving and living matter, 71–100, 2009b ), both of which represent the key chemical functional dependencies among containment, metabolism, and (...) program. The CMP model of minimal chemical life gains some support from the broad view of life as open-ended evolution, which I have defended elsewhere (Bedau in The philosophy of artificial life, 1996 ; Bedau in Artificial Life, 4:125–140, 1998 ). Further support comes from the natural way the CMP model resolves the puzzle about whether life is a matter of degree. (shrink)

Therehasbeenevidencefortheverybrief,temporalquantizationofperceptualexperienceatregularintervalsbelo w100msforseveraldecades.Webrieflydescribehowearlierstudiesledtotheconceptof“psychologicalmoment”ofbe tween50and60msduration.Accordingtohistoricaltheories,withinthepsychologicalmomentalleventswouldbepro cessedasco-temporal.Morerecently,alinkwithphysiologicalmechanismshasbeenproposed,accordingtowhichthe 50–60mspsychologicalmomentwouldbedefinedbytheupperlimitrequiredbyneuralmechanismstosynchronizeandthe rebyrepresentasnapshotofcurrentperceptualeventstructure.However,ourownexperimentaldevelopmentsalsoid entifyamorefine-scaled,serializedprocessstructurewithinthepsychologicalmoment.Ourdatasuggeststhatnot alleventsareprocessedasco-temporalwithinthepsychologicalmomentandinstead,someareprocessedsuccessivel y.Thisevidencequestionstheanalogrelationshipbetweensynchronizedprocessandsimultaneousexperienceandop ensdebateontheontologyandfunctionof“moments”inpsychologicalexperience.

The Companion begins with a section-by-section overview of Being and Time and a chapter reviewing the genesis of this seminal work. The final chapter situates Being and Time in the context of Heidegger's later work.

Hubert L. Dreyfus's engagement with other thinkers has always been driven by his desire to understand certain basic questions about ourselves and our world. The philosophers on whom his teaching and research have focused are those whose work seems to him to make a difference to the world. The essays in this volume reflect this desire to "make a difference"--not just in the world of academic philosophy, but in the broader world.Dreyfus has helped to create a culture of reflection--of questioning (...) the deep premises that inform and shape work in artificial intelligence and cognitive science. He has also been the primary introducer and interpreter of Martin Heidegger's work to the world of information technology. The essays in this volume represent the fruitful application of deep philosophical analysis to the concerns of our modern technological world.The sections are Coping and Intentionality; Computers and Cognitive Science; and "Applied Heidegger." In addition to cognitive science and artificial intelligence, topics include everyday skills, religion, business practices, and medical care. The book concludes with Dreyfus's responses to the essays.Contributors : Daniel Andler, Patricia Benner, Albert Borgmann, Harry Collins, George Downing, Fernando Flores, Sean Kelly, Joseph Rouse, Theodore R. Schatzki, John Searle, Robert C. Solomon, Charles Spinosa, David Stern, Charles Taylor, Terry Winograd, Mark Wrathall. (shrink)

Prompted by the development of the Theory of Challenge and Threat States in Athletes (Jones et al, 2009), recent years has witnessed a considerable increase in research examining challenge and threat in sport. This manuscript provides a critical review of the literature examining challenge and threat in sport, tracing its historical development and some of the current empirical ambiguities. In an attempt to reconcile some of these ambiguities, and utilising neurobiological evidence associated with approach- and avoidance-motivation (cf. Elliot & Covington, (...) 2001), this paper draws upon the Evaluative Space Model (ESM: Cacioppo et al., 1997) and considers the implications for understanding challenge and threat in sport. For example, rather than see challenge and threat as opposite ends of a single bipolar continuum, the ESM implies that individuals could be (1) challenged, (2) threatened, (3) challenged and threatened, or (4) neither challenged or threatened by a particular stimulus. From this perspective it could be argued that the appraisal of some sport situations as both challenging and threatening could be advantageous, whereas the current literature seems to imply that the appraisal of stress as a threat is maladaptive for performance. In drawing upon the ESM, we outline the Evaluative Space Approach to Challenge and Threat and provide several testable hypotheses for advancing understanding of challenge and threat (in sport). We also outline a number of cardiovascular and experiential measures that can be used to examine these hypotheses. In sum, this paper provides a significant theoretical, empirical and practical contribution to our understanding of challenge and threat (in sport). (shrink)

Professor Weil’s thesis seems largely correct with respect to the United States, whose law on religious establishment I regularly teach. Funding is central to American debates over religious establishment. The fight over religious establishments in Virginia, which inspired both James Madison’s “Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments” and Thomas Jefferson’s “An Act for Establishing Religious Freedom,” was over whether persons could be forced to pay taxes to support religious instruction. Financial concerns were at the root of church-state debates in the (...) nineteenth century, when Protestants repeatedly rebuffed Catholics who wanted funding for Catholic private schools. Many state constitutions still have what are known as mini-Blaine Amendments that forbid public funding for religious institutions. Whether proponents of a strong separation between church and state in the United States are fighting the same battles as proponents of a strong separation of church and state in France is nevertheless problematic. The French revolutionaries had to subordinate a reactionary church. The American revolutionaries merely had to negotiate peace treaties among the different sects that supported the Declaration of Independence. Separation of church and state in the United States is best conceptualized as a division of labor among liberal institutions rather than a means for purging anti-liberal religion from the liberal public sphere. (shrink)

Dasein and being-in-the-world -- The world -- The structure of being-in-the-world, pt. 1: Disposedness and moods -- The structure of being-in-the-world, pt. 2: Understanding and interpretation -- Everydayness and the 'one' -- Death and authenticity -- Truth and art -- Language -- Technology -- Our mortal dwelling with things.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 38.2 (2004) 20-37 [Access article in PDF] Aesthetic Teaching Mark A. Pike I think aesthetic teaching is the highest of all teaching because it deals with life in its highest complexity. But if it ceases to be purely aesthetic — if it lapses anywhere from the picture to the diagram — it becomes the most offensive of all teaching.1George Eliot asserts that "the (...) highest of all teaching" which "deals with life in its highest complexity" is essentially aesthetic in character for it has features of the "picture" or work of art rather than the more straightforwardly instructional "diagram." Yet, George Eliot not only ascribes greatest worth to teaching that is aesthetic but considers teaching that is merely diagrammatic to be "the most offensive of all teaching." Evidently, there are similarities between pictures and diagrams but essential features present in the former are conspicuously absent from the latter. The current obsession with effectiveness in teaching and repeated attempts to reduce that which should be aesthetic and inspired to the wholly rational, diagrammatic and instrumental make George Eliot's views remarkably pertinent. Consequently, features of aesthetic teaching will be explored in this essay. In doing so it will be suggested that Martin Heidegger's ontology (theory of existence) offers a philosophical foundation for conceiving teaching in the arts as a form of engagement with students which is unreservedly aesthetic in character. As such, Heidegger provides us with a valuable position from which to counter forces that militate against the aesthetic in our schools and also provokes us to eschew all that is diagrammatic in our approach to that which is rightly aesthetic. Teaching: Drawing the Diagram or Painting the Picture? Teaching is currently being construed, in both the United Kingdom and the United States, as a technology with which to get something done or as a [End Page 20] vehicle which "delivers" a subject in an efficient or effective manner, or even as a science where the analytical approach is the method for problem solving. Even as I write, I find myself part of a proposed "delivery team" for literature education. It appears that this is the sort of language policy makers in a rational economy like to hear. Any dissenting voices, those subscribing to a view of teaching as an art itself, are considered dangerous as they jeopardize progress in our brave new world. For example, in their introduction to Effective Teaching — Evidence and Practice, Daniel Muijs and David Reynolds articulate the view that construing teaching as an art rather than a technology may be responsible for the lack of excellent teachers in our schools.2 In marked contrast to George Eliot, they suggest "the view that teaching is an 'art,' not a science" results in attention being devoted to "personal factors and qualities" which are "often idiosyncratic and difficult to influence by educational policies."3 Further, they suggest that the placing of education within the humanities tradition — is clearly wrong and probably condemns societies where it is prevalent to having only those small number of excellent teachers who inherit the "art," rather than the larger number who could acquire the applied science of a teaching methodology.4It is difficult to conceive of a position further removed from George Eliot's ideal of aesthetic teaching. There are, of course, a number of problems with reducing teaching to a technology, or an applied science, as Muijs and Reynolds prefer to call it. Such argument betrays the assumption that the world can be known in a rational, analytical and scientific way. The concomitant of this view is the misguided belief that teaching about such a world can be precisely planned, implemented and assessed. Elliot Eisner is surely more accurate when he explains that "teaching is a form of human action in which many of the ends achieved are emergent" and that these ends are often "found in the course of interaction with students rather than preconceived."5 Clearly, allowing "for the creation of ends in process" necessitates "a model of teaching akin to other arts."6 This is more... (shrink)

Artificial life uses computer models to study the essential nature of the characteristic processes of complex adaptive systems proceses such as self-organization, adaptation, and evolution. Work in the field is guided by the working hypothesis that simple computer models can capture the essential nature of these processes. This hypothesis is illustrated by recent results with a simple population of computational agents whose sensorimotor functionality undergo open-ended adaptive evolution. These might illuminate three aspects of complex adaptive systems in general: punctuated equilibrium (...) dynamics of diversity, a transition separating genetic order and disorder, and a law of adaptive evolutionary activity. (shrink)

In this paper I hope to demonstrate that, despite dramatic differences in approach, Analytic and Continental philosophers can be brought into a productive dialogue with one another on topics central to the philosophical agenda of both traditions. Their differences tend to obscure the fact that both traditions have as a fundamental project the critique of past accounts of language, intentionality, and mind. Moreover, writers within the two traditions are frequently in considerable agreement about the failings of past accounts. Where they (...) tend to differ is in the sorts of positive accounts they give. By exploring the important areas of disagreement against the background of agreement, however, it is possible to gain insights unavailable to those rooted in a single tradition. (shrink)

Over the history of the study of visual perception there has been great success at discovering countless visual illusions. There has been less success in organizing the overwhelming variety of illusions into empirical generalizations (much less explaining them all via a unifying theory). Here, this article shows that it is possible to systematically organize more than 50 kinds of illusion into a 7 × 4 matrix of 28 classes. In particular, this article demonstrates that (1) smaller sizes, (2) slower speeds, (...) (3) greater luminance contrast, (4) farther distance, (5) lower eccentricity, (6) greater proximity to the vanishing point, and (7) greater proximity to the focus of expansion all tend to have similar perceptual effects, namely, to (A) increase perceived size, (B) increase perceived speed, (C) decrease perceived luminance contrast, and (D) decrease perceived distance. The detection of these empirical regularities was motivated by a hypothesis, called “perceiving the present,” that the visual system possesses mechanisms for compensating neural delay during forward motion. This article shows how this hypothesis predicts the empirical regularity. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Phenomenology Existentialism The Organization of the Book.

The Rationality Principle says that people act adequately to their situation, but does not specify how they must act in order to do so. Situational Analysis uses the Rationality Principle, together with a model of the social situation, to explain actions in the past. Unlike Rational Choice Theory, Situational Analysis does not try to predict or influence actions in the future. Popper regarded the Rationality Principle as false, but thought that we should use it nonetheless. This poses a problem for (...) understanding his views about conjecture and refutation. Popper, however, thought that all scientific models are false, and that whether or not we should reject a model depends on the problem that we are trying to solve. (shrink)

How should we understand religion, and what place should it hold, in an age in which metaphysics has come into disrepute? The metaphysical assumptions which supported traditional theologies are no longer widely accepted, but it is not clear how this 'end of metaphysics' should be understood, nor what implications it ought to have for our understanding of religion. At the same time there is renewed interest in the sacred and the divine in disciplines as varied as philosophy, psychology, literature, history, (...) anthropology, and cultural studies. In this volume, leading philosophers in the United States and Europe address the decline of metaphysics and the space which this decline has opened for non-theological understandings of religion. The contributors include Richard Rorty, Charles Taylor, Jean-Luc Marion, Gianni Vattimo, Hubert Dreyfus, Robert Pippin, John Caputo, Adriaan Peperzak, Leora Batnitzky, and Mark Wrathall. (shrink)

The robust behavior of the patent citation network is a complex target of recent bottom-up models in science. This paper investigates the purpose and testing of three especially simple bottom-up models of the citation count distribution observed in the patent citation network. The complex causal webs in the models generate weakly emergent patterns of behavior, and this explains both the need for empirical observation of computer simulations of the models and the epistemic harmlessness of the resulting epistemic opacity.

Contemporary arguments for scientific realism are typically based on some form of inference to the best explanation. Sometimes such arguments concern the methods of science: given the success of scientific methodology, realism offers the best explanation of this success. Sometimes such arguments concern the content of scientific theories: given observed regularities in nature, explanations must be given of those regularities; the best such explanations will be realist. One forceful explanationist argument about the content of science can be based on Hans (...) Reichenbach’s Principle of the Common Cause. Roughly, CC says that whenever an enduring correlation between two events is observed, there must be some preceding event which is the common cause of the two, and is the explanation for the correlation. Rigid adherence to this demand for a common cause, however, supposedly goes beyond the instrumentalist explanatory resources available to the antirealist, and hence CC is taken to be a sufficient condition for realism. Further, one might claim that any argument that realism has greater explanatory power than antirealism depends either explicitly or implicitly on CC, and hence CC is also a necessary condition for realism. (shrink)

Some critics have understood environmental egalitarianism to imply that human and animal lives are generally equal in value, so that killing a human is no more objectionable than killing a dog. This charge should be troubling for anyone with egalitarian sympathies. I argue that one can distinguish two distinct versions of equality, one based on the idea of equal treatment, the other on the idea of equally valuable lives. I look at a lifeboat case where one must choose between saving (...) a human and saving a dog, and using the work of Peter Singer and Tom Regan, I show why equality understood as equal treatment does not entail that lifeboat cases are moral toss-ups. But the view that all lives are equally valuable does entail this, and so egalitarians should reject this alternative account of equality. The upshot is that egalitarians need to be more careful about distinguishing between these two versions of equality. The failure to insist on this distinction has led many to believe that egalitarianism generally has counter-intuitive implications when in fact only one version of egalitarianism has this problem. (shrink)

Personal identity is critical to provider–patient interactions. Patients and doctors tend to self-select, ideally forming therapeutic units that maximise the patients' benefit. Recently, however, ‘reality’ has changed. The internet and virtual worlds such as Second Life allow models of identity and provider–patient interactions that go beyond the limits of mainstream personal identity. In this paper some of the ethical implications of virtual patient–provider interactions, especially those that have to do with personal identity, are explored.

Since the critique of psychologism initiated by Gottlob Frege and championed by Edmund Husserl, logicians and psychologists alike have adhered to a strict division of labour. This has created a gap between reasoning as a psychological phenomenon and logic. However, reasoning involves logic, and logic is the benchmark of rationality; intuitively at least, reasoning and logic are connected. Recently, attempts have been made to bridge the gap, but the strict division of labour is often eroded. Jean Piaget conceived genetic epistemology (...) as a science of the growth of knowledge, and since logical knowledge is in its purview the accusation of psychologism was omnipresent. In this paper, I outline Piaget's psychological account of the development of logic and argue that he successfully navigated the hazards of psychologism. In essence, he minds the gap by preserving the division of labour; however, by making logic the mirror of thought, he also intimated at a bridge. Concrete correspondences between logic and psychological structures of thought lie at the heart of Piaget's metaphor, and, by building on these foundations, I illustrate how an axiom schema for sentential logic can be derived from the interpropositional grouping, Piaget's psychological model of the operational structure characterising hypothetico-deductive reasoning. (shrink)

Surveillance capitalism companies, such as Google and Facebook, have substantially increased the amount of information collected, analyzed, and monetized, including health information increasingly used in precision medicine research, thereby presenting great challenges for health privacy.

Over the last thirty years, personal debt loads have increased dramatically. Lower income earners borrow money to purchase basic goods and services, so their debt is frequently non-discretionary. The impact of non-discretionary personal debt on debtors can be as, if not more, harmful than government regulations that have been declared unconstitutional. In this regard, the impact of personal debt is tantamount to the impact of a civil rights violation. What separates the impact of unconstitutional state action from that of personal (...) debt is the assumption that only the latter are the result of consensual transactions. Consent, however, is not a dyadic phenomenon, it exists in gradations. The quality of consent is weakened when the agent is making choices in response to pressures, and the empiricalquestion of the extent to which a consent transaction is unforced is distinct from the normative question of whether a transaction is legitimate, or fair. It is necessary to devise a new taxonomy of language to clearly distinguish the empirical and normative questions. This elucidates the fact that lower income people are under more pressure to borrow money than are upper income individuals to pay progressive rates of income tax. To argue that the latter are ‘coerced,’ is to admit that the low income individual’s decision to borrow is similarly forced. This admission suggests that a significant portion of citizens of market-based economies (notably Canada and the U.S.) are being forced to endure harms tantamount to civil rights violations. The admission also suggests that free markets harbour forces that undermine individual autonomy, and the absence of corrective state regulation exacerbates the problem. (shrink)

Huston Smith has argued that the universal source of wholeness, which he refers to as the primordial tradition, is essential to a meaningful life. Indeed embracing this tradition is, said Smith, an act of rejoining the human race. Our current forms of organized religion offer us ritualized expressions of this tradition, yet often fail to provide us with transpersonal growth; it is this transpersonal growth that reconnects us with the source of religion. This essay differentiates mainstream religion from a way (...) that we can begin to construct a physical theory of the primordial tradition–a necessary first step toward reclaiming the source of religion. (shrink)

This book includes ten essays that trace the notion of unconcealment as it develops from Heidegger's early writings to his later work, shaping his philosophy of truth, language and history. 'Unconcealment' is the idea that what entities are depends on the conditions that allow them to manifest themselves. This concept, central to Heidegger's work, also applies to worlds in a dual sense: first, a condition of entities manifesting themselves is the existence of a world; and second, worlds themselves are disclosed. (...) The unconcealment or disclosure of a world is the most important historical event, and Heidegger believes there have been a number of quite distinct worlds that have emerged and disappeared in history. Heidegger's thought as a whole can profitably be seen as working out the implications of the original understanding of unconcealment. (shrink)

Researchers increasingly rely on large data sets of health information, often linked with biological specimens. In recent years, the argument has been made that obtaining informed consent for conducting records-based research is unduly burdensome and results in ?consent bias.? As a type of selection bias, consent bias is said to exist when the group giving researchers access to their data differs from the group denying access. Therefore, to promote socially beneficial research, it is argued that consent should be unnecessary. After (...) analyzing the biostatistics evidence and bioethics arguments, the article concludes that (1) claims about the amount of consent bias are overstated; (2) commonly used statistical methods usually can account for consent bias; and (3) any residual effects of consent bias are below an acceptable level of imprecision and constitute a reasonable social cost for conducting ethically responsible research. (shrink)

It was a happy surprise when, overcoming partisan divisions and interest‐group lobbying, Congress enacted the No Surprises Act, which bans unfair out‐of‐network “balance billing.” Although this is only a modest legislative victory, key efforts by the health policy community made a real difference in a time of legislative gridlock.

Boehl Chair of Law and Medicine and Director of the Institute for Bioethics, Health Policy and Law, University of Louisville School of Medicine, 501 East Broadway # 310, Louisville, Kentucky 40202, USA. Tel.: 502 852 4980; Fax: 502 852 4963; Email: mark.rothstein{at}louisville.edu ' + u + '@' + d + ' '//--> Abstract In his article in this issue, Daniel Goldberg advocates a broad definition of public health and expressly rejects the narrow definition of public health I proposed in (...) a 2002 article. Goldberg asserts that public health should include all of the root causes of ill health in populations. Such a definition, however, would include within public health war, famine, crime, illiteracy and numerous other conditions on which public health professionals and agencies lack the resources, expertise and public support to act. The appropriate definition explicitly recognizes that public health is a legal term of art referring to specifically authorized activities by public officials to protect, promote and improve population health. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

Fenomenološka tradicija dugo je smatrala da prirodna percepcija nije ni konceptualno artikulirana niti upravljana determinističkim zakonima, već je radije organizirana prema praktično artikuliranoj strukturi tjelesnog bitka-u-svijetu. Ali to ostavlja problem objašnjavanja kako percepcija može omogućiti opravdavajuću podršku mišljenju. Odgovor fenomenologa jest taj da nam značenjska struktura prirodne percepcije omogućuje da mislimo o objektima motivirajući pojedinačne misli o objektima kakvima se oni predstavljaju u percepciji. Pokazujem kako takvo gledište omogućuje izlaz iz briga koje more suvremenu filozofiju uma.The phenomenological tradition has long (...) contended that natural perception is neither conceptually articulatednor governed by deterministic laws, but rather organized according to the practically articulatedstructure of bodily being-in-the-world. But this leaves the problem of explaining how perceptioncan provide justificatory support to thought. The phenomenologists’ answer is to say thatthe meaningful structure of natural perception makes it possible for us tothink about objects by motivating particular thoughts about the objects as they present themselvesin perception. I show how this view provides a way out of worries that plague contemporary philosophyof mind. (shrink)

This paper is an indirect critique of the practice of American liberal education. I show that the liberal, integrative model that American colleges and universities have adopted, with one key exception, is essentially an approach to education proposed some 2400 years ago by Stoic philosophers. To this end, I focus on a critical sketch of the Stoic model of education—chiefly through the works of Seneca, Epictetus, and Aurelius—that is distinguishable by these features: education as self‐knowing, the need of logic and (...) critical thinking for informed decision‐making, learning as preparation for life, and knowledge for integration in private, local, and global affairs. Such a critical sketch may not only help institutions instantiate their own similar aims more effectively, but also help them assess those aims with apposite normative force, which today they lack. (shrink)

Teaching graduate students how to do research can be a challenge for many instructors because "research education" is not an established field of research like other areas of teaching such as mathematics education, nursing education, science education, and statistics education. There are no scholarly journals devoted solely to teaching research methods; these sources are instead scattered across disciplines and journals (e.g., Nurse Researcher, Volume 13, Number 2, 2005; Sociology, Volume 15, Issue 4, 1981; and Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, Volume (...) 49, Issue 1, 2005). Furthermore, even though research methods courses are a staple in most graduate training programs, instructors were rarely taught how to teach research methods as part of their own graduate programs. Left to their own devices, instructors of research courses must rely on a network of peers, scattered research literature, and much trial-and-error as they develop and improve upon their own research methods courses. (shrink)

Individual differences in ethical ideology are believed to play a key role in ethical decision making. Forsyths (1980) Ethics Position Questionnaire (EPQ) is designed to measure ethical ideology along two dimensions, relativism and idealism. This study extends the work of Forsyth by examining the construct validity of the EPQ. Confirmatory factor analyses conducted with independent samples indicated three factors – idealism, relativism, and veracity – account for the relationships among EPQ items. In order to provide further evidence of the instruments (...) nomological and convergent validity, correlations among the EPQ subscales, dogmatism, empathy, and individual differences in the use of moral rationales were examined. The relationship between EPQ measures of idealism and moral judgments demonstrated modest predictive validity, but the appreciably weaker influence of relativism and the emergence of a veracity factor raise questions about the utility of the EPQ typology. (shrink)