Citizen event reporting (CER) attempts to leverage the eyes and ears of a large population of citizen sensors to increase the amount of information available to decision makers. When deployed in an environment that includes hostile elements, foes can exploit the system to exert indirect control over the response infrastructure. We use an agent-based model to relate the utility of responses to population composition, citizen behavior, and decision strategy, and measure the result in terms of a force multiplier. We show (...) that CER can lead to positive force multipliers even with a majority of hostile elements in the population. When reporter identity is known, a reputation system that keeps track of trustworthy reporters can further increase the force multipliers. (shrink)

In this first of two articles on chanting and enchantment we introduce the problem of mass synchronisation via collective communicative action that works to eliminate or lessen independent and critical assessment. Chanting forges a singular ‘collective’ identity with little to no structure that would allow for logical tests such as falsifiability. We argue that this problem can be a fundamental threat to democratic polity, and we offer the Neo-Kantian theory of dimensional accrual and dissociation as an explanation. In Part 2, (...) we will continue with examples and a discussion of the confluence of philosophical examination and social scientific explanations. (shrink)

According to Manuel Davenport, “The best humorists--Mark Twain, Will Rogers, Bob Hope, and Mort Sahl--share [a] mixture of detachment and desire, eagerness to believe, and irreverence concerning the possibility of certainty. And when they become serious about their convictions--as Twain did about colonialism…they cease to be humorous” (p. 171). I agree with the first part, but not the second. Humor does require disengagement, but not completely such that one has no emotional interest in the subject of the humor. Humor (...) does require some degree of commitment to value, but, as Davenport rightly notes, it “despairs of absolutes.” Following Bertrand Russell, “humorous” and “serious” are not antonyms. Davenport does not provide examples of Twain’s attempts at satire that fail to be humorous due to being serious. I will examine some of the very serious issues Twain addresses through irony and humor, and make the case that his commentary and argument, though serious, is still funny while not falling into frivolity. There is a philosophical thread running through his scathing humor, and it largely centers around his raising awareness about, and then deflating, what I would call a “spirit of seriousness”, borrowing from Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone De Beauvoir. For De Beauvoir, expanding on Sartre’s conception, a spirit of seriousness manifests from serious people who attempt to find comfort in the firm, unchanging foundations and values that are seen to be pre-determined, and thus unquestionable. In Twain’s case, it is arrogance and a presumed sense of certitude. This destructive combination sustains many of the institutions (some of them quite “peculiar”) that he attacks: racism, slavery, colonialism, excesses of capitalism, and the often dogmatic and oppressive nature of organized religion: “What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know; it’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.” Complacency, self-satisfaction, disinclination to self-monitoring, all lead to closed mode, or rather, to sustaining a serious mode which can spillover into a “spirit of seriousness” if not checked. The quickest path to a feeling of being certain is cultivated ignorance, where doubt and confusion, ambiguity and fluidity are glossed over. This feeling or attitude, the “spirit of seriousness”, is what Twain confronts with serious humor, motivating his readers to consider where their ideals and reality contradict. (shrink)

This article discusses the significance of international borders in Europe and Northeast Asia during the Cold War (1945–1989) and after. Using the concept of ‘moral hazard’, the article examines what happens when great powers frequently violate the borders of neighboring countries without suffering adverse repercussions. Norms of sovereignty and territorial integrity are viable only if large countries are willing to uphold them most of the time. The Soviet Union used or threatened to use military force against East European countries on (...) numerous occasions (1953, 1956, 1968, and 1980–1981) with impunity. The Russian Federation adopted a broadly similar policy toward neighboring countries that had been republics of the Soviet Union until 1991. Russian forces in Georgia, Moldova, Tajikistan, Belarus, and Ukraine served as instruments of Russian hegemony in those countries. Until 2014, Western governments made little or no effort to deter or counter Russian military encroachments in neighboring republics. By the principle of moral hazard, leaders in the Kremlin came to believe that they could act with a free hand in the former USSR. (shrink)

Communism is not a reaction against the failure of the nineteenth century to organize optimal economic output. It is a reaction against its comparative success. It is a protest against the emptiness of economic welfare, an appeal to the ascetic in us all... The idealistic youth play with Communism because it is the only spiritual appeal which feels to them contemporary.

Despite the urgency of this issue, AI still struggles to represent social life. This article presents a comprehensive agent-based model that investigates status-power dynamics in groups. Kemper’s sociological status–power theory of social relationships, and a literature review on school children in middle youth, is its basis. The model allows us to investigate causation of the near-ubiquitous phenomenon that females have lower social status on average than males. Possible causes included in the model are children’s dispositional traits (kindness, beauty, and physical (...) power), schoolyard culture (social acceptability of fighting), behavioural strategy (amount of rough-and-tumble play) and the balance between public and dyadic sources of status. An agent-based model of a virtual schoolyard was created in which the children assemble in changing groups and mutually confer status. The status conferred upon a child modifies the status it holds. Rough-and-tumble is modelled as ambiguous: it is intended as a status conferral, but may be perceived as a power move. Running many trials of the model we found that in time, depending on the parameter settings, a gender-based status gap emerged. Rough-and-tumble play had more impact on emergent status differences than did physical power differences. Social acceptability of fighting also strongly moderated the resulting status gap. Placing more weight on dyadic relationship could alleviate status loss. All these model behaviours are in line with empirical findings of child behaviour studies at schools. They have face validity for social status issues in the adult world. We conclude from this that this kind of agent-based model merits use in studying the status–power dynamics of other issues in child behaviour, or indeed in social behaviour in general. (shrink)

Professor Matthew Kramer is one of the most important legal philosophers of our time - even if the label 'legal philosopher' does not do justice to the breadth of his work. This collection of essays brings together esteemed philosophers, as well as junior scholars, to critically assess Kramer's philosophy. The contributions focus on Kramer's work on legal philosophy, metaethics, normative ethics, and political philosophy. The volume is divided into six parts, each focusing on different aspect of (...) class='Hi'>Kramer's work. The first part, Rights and Right-holding, contains five essays addressing Kramer's work on rights and right-holding, including the Hohfeldian analysis and the interest theory of right-holding. The four essays in the second part, General Jurisprudence, focus on Kramer's work in general jurisprudence, from the compatibility of legal positivism with universal legal error, to his robust defense of inclusive legal positivism, concluding with reflections on his writings on the rule of law. The third part, General Matters of Ethics, contains two essays addressing Kramer's metaethical work on moral realism as a moral doctrine. The fourth and fifth parts, Freedom and Liberalism, have four essays falling within political philosophy, probing Kramer's work on negative freedom and political liberalism, respectively. The sixth part, Applied Ethics, contains two essays on Kramer's work on capital punishment and freedom of expression. The collection is rounded off by reflections on, and replies to, the contributions by Kramer himself. (shrink)

We define a notion of difference-making for partial grounds of a fact in rough analogy to existing notions of difference-making for causes of an event. Using orthodox assumptions about ground, we show that it induces a non-trivial division with examples of partial grounds on both sides. We then demonstrate the theoretical fruitfulness of the notion by applying it to the analysis of a certain kind of putative counter-example to the transitivity of ground recently described by Jonathan Schaffer. First, we show (...) that our conceptual apparatus of difference-making enables us to give a much clearer description than Schaffer does of what makes the relevant instances of transitivity appear problematic. Second, we suggest that difference-making is best seen as a mark of good grounding-based explanations rather than a necessary condition on grounding, and argue that this enables us to deal with the counter-example in a satisfactory way. Along the way, we show that Schaffer's own proposal for salvaging a form of transitivity by moving to a contrastive conception of ground is unsuccessful. We conclude by sketching some natural strategies for extending our proposal to a more comprehensive account of grounding-based explanations. (shrink)

During the past several decades, political philosophers have frequently clashed with one another over the question whether governments are morally required to remain neutral among reasonable conceptions of excellence and human flourishing. Whereas the numerous followers of John Rawls have maintained that a requirement of neutrality is indeed incumbent on every system of governance, other philosophers -- often designated as 'perfectionists' -- have argued against the existence of such a requirement. Liberalism with Excellence enters these debates not by plighting itself (...) unequivocally to one side or the other, but instead by reconceiving each of the sides and thus by redirecting the debates that have occurred between them. On the one hand, the book rejects the requirement of neutrality by contending that certain subsidies for the promotion of excellence in sundry areas of human endeavour can be proper and vital uses of resources by governments. Advocating such departures from the constraint of neutrality, the book presents a version of liberalism that can rightly be classified as 'perfectionist'. On the other hand, the species of perfectionism espoused in Liberalism with Excellence diverges markedly from the theories that have usually been so classified. Indeed, much of the book assails various aspects of those theories. What is more, the aspirational perfectionism elaborated in the closing chapters of the volume is reconcilable in most key respects with a suitably amplified version of Rawlsianism. Hence, by reconceiving both the perfectionist side and the neutralist side of the prevailing disputation, Liberalism with Excellence combines and transforms their respective insights. (shrink)

This book is the product of a major British Academy Symposium held in 2007 to mark the centenary of the birth of H.L.A. Hart, the most important legal philosopher and one of the most important political philosophers of the twentieth century. -/- The book brings together contributions from seventeen of the world's foremost legal and political philosophers who explore the many subjects in which Hart produced influential work. Each essay engages in an original analysis of philosophical problems that were (...) tackled by Hart, some essays including extended critical discussions of his major works: The Concept of Law, Punishment and Responsibility, Causation in the Law and Law, Liberty and Morality. All the main topics of Hart's philosophical writings are featured: general jurisprudence and legal positivism; criminal responsibility and punishment; theories of rights; toleration and liberty; theories of justice; and causation in the law. (shrink)

Preview: 2020, the year the coronavirus pandemic spread globally, marked the twenty-fifth year since the publication of Pierre Hadot’s work Philosophy as a Way of Life. In that time, what began as the research specialization of just a few scholars has become a growing area of philosophical and metaphilosophical inquiry, bringing together researchers from around the globe. Hadot’s key ideas of spiritual exercises, and the very idea of PWL, have been applied to a host of individual thinkers from across the (...) history of philosophy: from the Hellenistic and Roman-era philosophers of direct concern to Hadot, through renaissance thinkers like Petrarch, Lipsius, Montaigne, Descartes, or Bacon, into nineteenth-century thinkers led by Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche.In more recent years, more global reflections on the “very idea” of PWL have begun to emerge, as well as dedicated journal editions. In these more recent PWL studies, some of the manifold research questions have begun to be explored, which were opened up by the studies of Pierre and Ilsetraut Hadot, as well as its reception in Michel Foucault’s later work. What implications, after all, does understanding the history of PWL, and the predominance of this metaphilosophical conception in the history of Western thought, have for how we understand the practice of philosophy today? Does recovering the alternative understandings of philosophy as a practice in history necessarily lead to a criticism of contemporary, solely academic or theoretical modes of philosophizing, or is the idea of PWL one which has only historiographical force? (shrink)

Porter and Kramer's “creating shared value” (CSV) proposal has achieved significant penetration into both the academic and corporate communities. Building on other critiques of CSV, this paper assesses whether the CSV framework, notwithstanding its popularity, currently possesses an appropriate and adequate theoretical foundation to represent an overarching normative framework for the entire business and society field. The analysis does so by comparing CSV with a series of other dominant business and society approaches including corporate social responsibility, business ethics, stakeholder (...) management, sustainability, and corporate citizenship. The analysis finds that while CSV does address the fundamental business and society normative requirement that business activities should contribute to sustainable net societal value, it currently fails to adequately incorporate the equally important notions of (i) appropriately balancing stakeholder interests with those of the corporation's shareholders, as well as (ii) demonstrating sufficient accountability (i.e., taking responsibility) by properly reporting on and addressing any negative impacts resulting from the firm's activities. The paper concludes with a revised and expanded restatement of the CSV concept, which attempts to take into account and address its current theoretical limitations in order to enhance its appeal as an overarching business and society normative paradigm. (shrink)

Notable in cross-cultural comparisons is the variable span of time between when children become economically self-sufficient and when they initiate their own reproductive careers. That variation is of interest because it shapes the age range of children reliant on others for support and the age range of children available to help out, which in turn affects the competing demands on parents to support multiple dependents of different ages. The age at positive net production is used as a proxy to estimate (...) the close of juvenile economic dependence among a group of Maya subsistence agriculturalists. Maya children produce more than they consume by their early to mid teens but remain in their natal households for a number of years before leaving home and beginning families of their own. The Maya results contrast markedly with those from several groups of hunter-gatherers and horticulturalists for whom we have similar data. Even in the Maya case, where children are self-sufficient at a relatively young age, parents are unable to support their children without help from others. The production surplus of older children appears to help underwrite the cost of large Maya families and subsidize their parents’ continued reproduction. (shrink)

In the mid 1970s labor-saving technology was introduced into a Maya subsistence agricultural community that markedly increased the efficiency with which maize could be ground and water collected. This increased efficiency introduces a possible savings in the time that women allocate to work, which can be reapportioned to child care, food production, domestic work, or leisure. An earlier study suggested that this labor-saving technology had a positive effect in decreasing the age at which these Maya women begin their reproductive careers. (...) Although there is a statistical association between the age at which women bear their first child and the introduction of modern technology, this association does not demonstrate that the decline in age at first birth is causally related to the presence of technology. This paper pursues two objectives to evaluate this potential causal relationship in greater detail. First, a theory relating technological change to the initiation of a reproductive career is briefly developed in order to make qualitative predictions about behavioral changes as a response to changing technology. Second, these predictions are then tested against time allocation data recently collected in this same Maya community.We suggest that both of the conditions necessary to initiate reproduction—fecundity and access to mates—fundamentally depend on the amount of help that a girl provides to her family. Further, the help that a girl provides can be affected by technological changes. Analyses show that when modern technology is available, unmarried young women do not change the time allocated to domestic tasks and child care, and allocate more time to low-energy leisure activities. This lack of perceived benefit to working more and a potential concomitant shift towards a positive energy balance may in part explain why Maya women leave home and initiate reproduction at a younger age after labor-saving technology is introduced. (shrink)

Ronald Dworkin has long criticized legal positivists for their efforts to distinguish between legal and non-legal standards of conduct that are incumbent on people. Recently, Dworkin has broached this criticism in his hostile account of the debates between Incorporationist Legal Positivists and Exclusive Legal Positivists. Specifically, he has maintained that Incorporationists cannot avoid the unpalatable conclusion that the axioms and theorems of arithmetic are legal norms. This article shows why such a conclusion is indeed avoidable and why Dworkin's criticism is (...) therefore wide of the mark. (shrink)

One of the most common ways of morphological marking is affixation, morphemes are classified according to their position. In languages with affixal morphology, suffixes and prefixes are the most common types of affixes. Despite several proposals, it has been impossible to identify solid generalisations about the behaviour of prefixes, in opposition to suffixes. This article argues that the reason is that our traditional definitions of suffix and prefix are based on pre-theoretical, surface criteria that have been given up in other (...) areas of linguistics: defining a morpheme as a prefix does not tell us anything about its grammatical nature, as that label does not take into consideration the structural configuration underlying the morpheme. Once the structural configuration is taken into account, solid generalisations begin to emerge. The article illustrates the advantages of this approach through a study of the interaction between vowel harmony and affixes. (shrink)

Moral error theory is the doctrine that our first-order moral commitments are pervaded by systematic error. It has been objected that this makes the error theory itself a position in first-order moral theory that should be judged by the standards of competing first-order moral theories :87–139, 1996) and Kramer. Kramer: “the objectivity of ethics is itself an ethical matter that rests primarily on ethical considerations. It is not something that can adequately be contested or confirmed through non-ethical reasoning” (...) [2009, 1]). This paper shows that error theorists can resist this charge if they adopt a particular understanding of the presuppositions of moral discourse. (shrink)

In Liberalism with Excellence, Matthew Kramer makes an argument for how excellence may enter in into liberalism, despite liberalism’s strong commitment to neutrality. Kramer seeks to challenge not only the uncompromising rejection of this position by liberals such a Jonathan Quong, but also the so-called “blended” approach of “soft-perfectionist” scholars such as Joseph Raz and George Sher. In this essay, I do not so much challenge Kramer’s approach as offer an alternative for accomplishing the same thing. Under (...) my proposal, certain forms of excellence and neutrality can both be accommodated as long as state support for the form of excellence at issue is proportional to the support for such a form of excellence within the relevant polity, competing forms of excellence are non-rivalrous, and no one is forced to embrace a form of excellence with which they disagree. My proposal is therefore not what Ronald Dworkin derogatively characterized as “a checkerboard solution.” Rather than allowing the state to support contrary moral positions at one and the same time, it is a solution that takes morally compatible but nevertheless competing conceptions of excellence seriously, and exhibits neutrality by giving them proportional rather than full support. This neither forces anyone to pursue the particular forms of excellence the state supports nor prevents them from pursuing some other form of excellence entirely or, if they wish, no form of excellence at all. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Schopenhauer's Pessimism and the Unconditioned Good MARK MIGOTTI SCHOPENHAUERTOOK PESSIMISMtO be a profound doctrine that had long been accepted by the majority of humanity, albeit usually in the allegorical form given to it by one or another religious creed. Accordingly, he credited himself, not with the discovery of pessimism, but with the provision of a satisfactory philosophical exposition and defense of its claims. It was, he contended, only (...) within the context of his philosophy, animated by the "single thought" that "the world is the self-knowledge of the will,"' that the ultimate significance of pessimism and the arguments demonstrating its inescapability can be brought to light. If, nevertheless, he sometimes appears to protest too much, to defend pessimism as if it were a striking and novel affair, he would have attributed this to the fact that he was, unfortunately, writing in the midst of one of the most naively optimistic cultures known to world history. 2 The philosophical reception of Schopenhauer's pessimism since the publication of The World as Will and Representation in 1818 would, one suspects, have been taken by him as further evidence of modern Western philosophy's optimistic somnambulance. For while other, comparably fundamental aspects of his thought--for example, his theories of action, of the self, and his criticisms of Kant--have received a welcome amount of fruitful, critical attention, his I would like to thank John Atwell, David Schmidtz, Susan Haack, Rudolf Makkreel and, especially,two anonymous referees, for prompting me to make substantial improvements to an earlier draft of this paper. ' Arthur Schopenhauer, Der handschrifllicher Nachlass 1, ed. Arthur Hiibscher (Frankfurt-amMain : Kramer, 1967),462; Manuscript Remains 1, trans. E. F.J. Payne(NewYork: Berg Publishing, 1988), 512. 'See, for example, Arthur Schopenhauer, D/e Welt als Wille und VorsteUung II. In Arthur Schopenhauer. Ziircher Ausgabe, ed. Arthur Hiibscher et. al. (Zurich: DiogenesVerlag, 1977),w 4:721, 732-33; The World as Will and Representation II, trans. E. F. J. Payne(New York: Dover Press, 1969),615, 625-26. Future references to this work willbe made within the text, by the abbreviation WW followed by section number, German edition volume and page number and English translation page number. [643] 644 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 33:4 OCTOBER ~995 pessimism has not. Amongst enthusiastic followers it has sometimes been swallowed more or less whole, but from more independent-minded readers it has generally met with disdainful mockery or well-intentioned neglect.3 The aim of this paper is to help rectify' this imbalance. In the first of its four sections, I present an account of Schopenhauerian pessimism that can claim a good measure of textual support, and the essential features of which are found often enough in the secondary literature to warrant calling it the mainstream interpretation.4 In section 2 I show that, as critics have charged, the arguments for pessimism on this interpretation suffer from a pair of fatal ambiguities, and in section 3 I sketch an alternative argument for pessimism, one not so obviously open to the sort of knock-down refutation to which the first argument succumbs. In the paper's final section l explore further the philosophical consequences of this alternative argument for pessimism. 3Gyorg'yLukacs, "Schopenhauer," chapter ~,section 4 of The Destruction of Reason, trans. Peter Palmer (London: Merlin Press, 1979), 19~-243, isthe locusclassicusof an attitude of superior scorn. Bryan Magee, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer (Oxford: "the Clarendon Press, 1983), z3-14, D. W. Hamlyn, Schopentmuer (London: Routledge, z98o), *43, Michael Fox, "Schopenhauer on Death, Suicide, and Renunciation." in Schopenhauer: His Philosophical Achievement, ed. Michael Fox (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble Books, 198o), ]47-7o, and David Cartwrigh*, "Schopenhauer on Suffering, Death, Guilt, and the Consolation of Metaphysics,"in Schopenhauer: New Essays in Hotwr ofHis 2ooth Birthday, ed. Eric yon der Luft (Lewiston,NY: Edwin Mellen Press, t988), 66, all incline to the viewthat it was temperament, not argument, that drove Schopenhauer to pessimism, while Patrick Gardiner, Schopenhatwr (London: Penguin Books, ]963), does not discuss pessimism by name. Not even Nietzsche, the deepest and most astute of Schopenhauer'scritics,can resistbarbs of the following sort: "Schopenhauer, although a pessimist, in ]act played the flute... (shrink)

This article critically examines Porter and Kramer’s shared value concept to identify its boundaries and limits as a framework for understanding the role of philanthropy and CSR relative to the role of business in society. Cases of implementation and alternative perspectives on innovation reveal that, despite its appeal and uptake in corporate and philanthropic circles, shared value merely advances the conventional rhetoric that what is good for business is good for society. The shared value approach narrows what counts as (...) social value and avoids the friction between business and society. The consequence is that the approach is problematic as a framework for addressing sustainability and development, and an insufficient basis for decision-making about philanthropy and CSR. (shrink)

This original collection of jurisprudential essays furthers our understanding of the nature of rights. In Part 1, Halpin considers the value of Hohfeldian neutrality when theorising about law in general, and legal rights in particular, and Kurki focuses on Hohfeld's operative notion of power. In Part 2, Kramer rebuts Wenar's objections to his Interest Theory of rights, and May provides a comparative defence of the Interest Theory against Wenar's Kind-Desire theory of claim-rights. Penner then pursues legal doctrine, focusing on (...) whether judges hold the powers of their office as rights, an issue over which Wenar and Kramer have clashed. Sreenivasan, utilising a novel test case involving pure public goods, argues that the third party beneficiary objection to the Interest Theory is fatal. McBride builds on Sreenivasan's Hybrid Theory of claim-rights to construct his new Tracking Theory of rights. Cruft then argues that the best extant versions of the Interest and Will Theories of rights cannot avoid a form of circularity, and Van Duffel argues that meeting four adequacy constraints, which he proposes, counts in favour of any theory of rights. In Part 3, Andersson proposes a tie breaking procedure for rights conflicts in the applied realm of politics, and Steiner concludes by alleging that Kant's principle of right, a standard of corrective justice, has distributive implications. 'A fine collection of cutting-edge essays on the most important normative concept of modernity.' Professor Leif Wenar, King's College London 'This important collection proceeds much beyond the famous 1998 A Debate Over Rights which sets the stage for the debates concerning rights since then. It explores three aspects of rights. First it re-examines the Hohfeldian classification and highlights its importance and relevance. Second it investigates and develops the debates between the interest and the will theory. It includes essays by the main established proponents of these two positions as well as essays by newcomers to this field. The different essays in this part address each other in ways which sharpen and clarify the disagreements and provide new original arguments for the contending views. Last, it provides a new perspective on the debates concerning conflicts of rights and the ways to overcome them. This collection will no doubt dominate the future conceptual discussions concerning the nature of rights and their role in political theory.' Professor Alon Harel, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. (shrink)

Matthew Kramer has recently defended a novel justification for the death penalty, something he calls the purgative rationale. According to this rationale, the death penalty can be justifiably implemented if it is necessary in order to purge defilingly evil offenders from a moral community. Kramer claims that this rationale overcomes the problems associated with traditional rationales for the death penalty. Although Kramer is to be commended for carving out a novel niche in a well-worn dialectical space, I (...) argue that his rationale falls somewhat short of the mark. By his own lights, a successful justification of the death penalty must show that death is the minimally invasive, most humane means to some legitimate moral end. But even if we grant that his rationale picks out a legitimate moral end, there are at least three alternatives to death, either ignored or not fully considered by Kramer, which would seem to satisfy that end in a less invasive, more humane manner. (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)

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 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)

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)

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)

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)

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.

For fifty years Hubert Dreyfus has done pioneering work which brings phenomenology and existentialism to bear on the philosophical and scientific study of the mind. This is a selection of his most influential essays, developing his critique of the representational model of the mind in analytical philosophy of mind and mainstream cognitive science.

Recollections of humanistic and transpersonal psychology’s origin’s morph into the pros and cons of humanistic/transpersonal oriented schools developing APA accredited clinical programs. This discussion dovetails with the question will ATP ever become an APA division, raising an interesting alternative for those of us considering a career in counseling: becoming a spiritual coach. Enter the issue of psychedelic therapy and the Supreme Courts decision to allow ayahuasca as a sacrament by the Uniao Do Vegetal Church, and the importance of why humanistic (...) and transpersonal psychology need to clearly map out the territories and sub-divisions of science and religion. Finally this conversation raises a concern, that Maslow’s call for a “trans-human” psychology sought to encourage creating what we now call ecopsychology. (shrink)