A modified version of the SEIR model with the effects of vaccination and inter-state movement is proposed to simulate the spread of COVID-19 in Malaysia. A mathematical analysis of the proposed model was performed to derive the basic reproduction number. To enhance the model’s forecasting capabilities, the model parameters were estimated using the Nelder–Mead simplex method by fitting the model outputs to the observed data. Our results showed a good fit between the model outputs and available data, where the model (...) was then able to perform short-term predictions. In line with the rapid vaccination program, our model predicted that the COVID-19 cases in the country would decrease by the end of August. Furthermore, our findings indicated that relaxing travel restrictions from a highly vaccinated region to a low vaccinated region would result in an epidemic outbreak. (shrink)

This study aims to investigate the impact of stakeholders’ views on the practices of green innovation (GI), consequent effect on environmental and organizational performance (OP), and moderating influence of innovation orientation. A quantitative method was employed for the sample size of 515 responses. To accumulate the data from the respondents, convenient random sampling was used. Data were collected from manufacturing and services firms through a field survey by using a closed-ended questionnaire based in the Punjab province of Pakistan. The analysis (...) was done using the structural equation model of the partial least square analysis method. Our findings proved a positive and significant link between stakeholders’ views on GI practices. A significant association has been found between GI practices and environmental and OP. The moderating effect was found to be negative but statistically significant. This research offers numerous contributions and provides decision-making insinuations. (shrink)

The focus of this paper is to develop a comprehensive conceptual framework for the relationship between internal employer brand image and talent retention. An extensive and semi-systematic literature review identified a number of antecedents and consequences that have been empirically tested in various cutting-edge research studies that were conducted around the world. The existing literature is reviewed using a topical approach, and 66 research studies, most recent from various repositories, were carefully chosen and reviewed based on the criteria. Such studies (...) have been discerned and synthesized in order to establish a complete and accurate understanding of the phenomenon. Finally, a comprehensive and relatively rich conceptual framework has been proposed for future empirical explanations in various social settings via prospective research. (shrink)

Essays on linguistics in Malaysia; festschrift in honor of Asmah Haji Omar, a doctor in linguistics at Universiti Malaya.

Philosophy of biology is often said to have emerged in the last third of the twentieth century. Prior to this time, it has been alleged that the only authors who engaged philosophically with the life sciences were either logical empiricists who sought to impose the explanatory ideals of the physical sciences onto biology, or vitalists who invoked mystical agencies in an attempt to ward off the threat of physicochemical reduction. These schools paid little attention to actual biological science, and as (...) a result philosophy of biology languished in a state of futility for much of the twentieth century. The situation, we are told, only began to change in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when a new generation of researchers began to focus on problems internal to biology, leading to the consolidation of the discipline. In this paper we challenge this widely accepted narrative of the history of philosophy of biology. We do so by arguing that the most important tradition within early twentieth-century philosophy of biology was neither logical empiricism nor vitalism, but the organicist movement that flourished between the First and Second World Wars. We show that the organicist corpus is thematically and methodologically continuous with the contemporary literature in order to discredit the view that early work in the philosophy of biology was unproductive, and we emphasize the desirability of integrating the historical and contemporary conversations into a single, unified discourse. (shrink)

It is extraordinary, when one thinks about it, how little attention has been paid by theorists of the nature and justification of punishment to the idea that punishment is essentially a matter of self-defense. H. L. A. Hart, for example, in his famous “Prolegomenon to the Principles of Punishment,” is clearly committed to the view that, at bottom, there are just three directions in which a plausible theory of punishment can go: we can try to justify punishment on purely consequentialist (...) grounds, which for Hart, I think, would be to try to construct a purely utilitarian justification of punishment; we can try to justify punishment on purely retributive grounds; or we can try to justify punishment on grounds that are some sort of shrewd combination of consequentialist and retributive considerations. Entirely absent from Hart's discussion is any consideration of the possibility that punishment might be neither a matter of maximizing the good, nor of exacting retribution for a wrongful act, nor of some imaginative combination of these things, but, rather, of something altogether different from either of them: namely, the exercise of a fundamental right of self-protection. Similarly, but much more recently, R. A. Duff, despite the fact that he himself introduces and defends an extremely interesting fourth possibility, begins his discussion by writing as though, apart from his contribution, there are available to us essentially just the options previously sketched by Hart. Again, there is no mention here, any more than in Hart's or any number of other recent discussions, of the possibility that we might be able to justify the institution of punishment on grounds that are indeed forward-looking, to use Hart's famous term, but that are not at all consequentialist in any ordinary sense of the word. (shrink)

Why does someone, S, deserve blame or reproach for an action or event? One part of a standard answer since Aristotle: the event was caused, at least in part, by S’s bad will. But recently there’s been some insightful discussion of cases where the event’s causes do not include any bad will from S and yet it seems that S is not off the hook for the event. Cheshire Calhoun, Miranda Fricker, Elinor Mason, David Enoch, Randolph Clarke, and others include (...) in this category some cases of glitches, forgetfulness, inattentiveness, the actions of one’s children or one’s country, and certain instances of explicit bias and implicit bias. Enoch and Mason argue that in these cases S should extend the realm of S’s responsibility. Drawing on Aristotle’s emphases on retrospective attitudes and the non-voluntary, this paper attempts to clarify the relation between quality of will and blameworthiness. I analyze cases where (1) S is clearly not morally responsible for an action or event, E, yet (2) S deserves reproach for E unless S has the appropriate retrospective attitudes (such as regret) or the absence of inappropriate attitudes toward E. (shrink)

The research addresses the effect of sense of control on perceived stress by controlling for the intervening effects of Religiosity and Materialism. A total of 609 emerging adults living in Dhaka city participated in the survey; surveyors used a 48-item structural closed-ended questionnaire to collect the responses. The elicited responses were quantified, and structural equation models were formulated to identify any associations among the variables of interest. The findings suggest that sense of control is a strong determinant of perceived stress; (...) neither religiosity nor materialism mediate the association. The study advances the transactional model of stress and coping. (shrink)

ExcerptThe title of Carl Schmitt's Hamlet or Hecuba: The Intrusion of the Time into the Play enacts a complex collision between politics and aesthetics.1 The titular colon divides two oppositions from each other, thus producing a couple of couples. If the “either/or” of Hamlet or Hecuba mandates an absolute decision between opposed terms, a frame familiar to us from this theorist of the sovereign decision and the friend/enemy distinction, the logic of the “both/and” within The Intrusion of the Time into (...) the Play insists upon the messy fact of lived historical interpenetration between the seemingly disjunctive spheres of politics and…. (shrink)

Within Muslim communities, the ‘ulama are considered the most crucial corporate social agency that drives the ideological and spiritual energy to the members of the society who find religious teachings necessary for their individual and social, if not always political, lives. However, when the ‘ulama of Bangladesh gathered under the umbrella platform of Hefazat-e-Islam in 2010, agitated by the numerous upheavals of the government’s policies, scholars and members of the civil society often dubbed them as regressive, reactionary, and insensitive to (...) modern changes. While anthropologists have challenged this dichotomy, this article aims to understand the HI ‘ulama’s views on modern changes and how the ‘ulama safeguard the traditional integrity in legal, educational, and gender aspects within the domain of the Bangladeshi state mechanism. Based on anthropological notions of tradition and piety, this article argues that the ‘ulama’s position on education, woman, and legal questions is neither monolithic nor static; rather there is always discussion, debate, and dynamism within the ‘ulama itself. (shrink)

In the philosophy of language, conceptual role semantics (hereafter CRS) is a theory of what constitutes the meanings possessed by expressions of natural languages, or the propositions expressed by their utterance. In the philosophy of mind, it is a theory of what constitutes the contents of psychological attitudes, such as beliefs or desires. CRS comes in a variety of forms, not always clearly distinguished by commentators. Such versions are known variously as functional/causal/computational role semantics, and more broadly as use-theories of (...) meaning. Nevertheless, all are united in seeking the meaning or content of an item, not in what it is made of, nor in what accompanies or is associated with it, but in what is done with it, the use it is put to. Roughly, according to CRS, the meaning or propositional content of an expression or attitude is determined by the role it plays in a person’s language or in her cognition. Currently, many view CRS as the main rival to theories that take notions such as truth or reference as central (for example, Davidson 2001), although the relationship between the two is not straightforward. The following outlines the main varieties of CRS, provides a cursory survey of its history, introduces the central arguments offered in its favor, and provisionally assesses how the variants fair against a number of prominent criticisms. (shrink)

Students and teachers of Chinese history and philosophy will not want to miss Daniel Gardner's accessible translation of the teachings of Chu Hsi —a luminary of the Confucian tradition who dominated Chinese intellectual life for centuries. Homing in on a primary concern of our own time, Gardner focuses on Chu Hsi's passionate interest in education and its importance to individual development. For hundreds of years, every literate person in China was familiar with Chu Hsi's teachings. They informed the curricula (...) of private academies and public schools and became the basis of the state's prestigious civil service examinations. Nor was Chu's influence limited to China. In Korea and Japan as well, his teachings defined the terms of scholarly debate and served as the foundation for state ideology. Chu Hsi was convinced that through education anyone could learn to be fully moral and thus travel the road to sagehood. Throughout his life, he struggled with the philosophical questions underlying education: What should people learn? How should they go about learning? What enables them to learn? What are the aims and the effects of learning? Part One of _Learning to Be a Sage_ examines Chu Hsi's views on learning and how he arrived at them. Part Two presents a translation of the chapters devoted to learning in the _Conversations of Master Chu_. (shrink)

This book is a study of the philosophy of the early 18th century Irish philosopher George Berkeley in the intellectual context of his times, with a particular focus on how, for Berkeley, mind is related to its ideas. It does not assume that thinkers like Descartes, Malebranche, or Locke define for Berkeley the context in which he develops his own thought. Instead, he indicates how Berkeley draws on a tradition that informed his early training and that challenges much of the (...) early modern thought with which he is often associated. Specifically, the book indicates how Berkeley's distinctive treatment of mind (as the activity whereby objects are differentiated and related to one another) highlights how mind neither precedes the existence of objects nor exists independently of them. This distinctive way of understanding the relation of mind and objects allows Berkeley to appropriate ideas from his contemporaries in a manner that transforms the issues with which he is engaged. The resulting insights--for example, about how God creates the minds that perceive objects--are only now starting to be fully appreciated. (shrink)

My partner loves the experiences she gets from eating olives. I, on the other hand, hate the experiences I get from eating olives. We differ in tastes. But how exactly do we differ? In particular: do our taste experiences differ phenomenologically—that is, do my olive-experiences feel different than my partner’s olive-experiences? Some philosophers have assumed that the answer is “no,” and have advanced important arguments which turn on this assumption. I argue that, contrary to what these philosophers assume, ordinary taste (...) differences do involve differences in phenomenology. My olive-experiences feel different than my partner’s olive-experiences. I argue for this phenomenal thesis in stages. First, I argue that there is a link between our attitudes and our pleasures; second, I argue that there is a link between our pleasures and our phenomenology. Together, my conclusions link our attitudes and phenomenology in a way that vindicates the phenomenal thesis. Along the way, I fend off various worries about what the phenomenal thesis might entail. I show that it does not entail any form if radical subjectivism, nor does it entail that there is a “distinctive feeling of pleasure.” I close by considering how opponents of the phenomenal thesis might retreat to a weaker thesis: one which concerns extraordinary taste differences, as opposed to ordinary taste differences. I argue that there are no obviously sound arguments for even this weaker thesis, which should make us all the more confident in the phenomenal thesis. (shrink)

Daniel Sutherland - Kant on Arithmetic, Algebra, and the Theory of Proportions - Journal of the History of Philosophy 44:4 Journal of the History of Philosophy 44.4 533-558 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Kant on Arithmetic, Algebra, and the Theory of Proportions Daniel Sutherland Kant's philosophy of mathematics has both enthralled and exercised philosophers since the appearance of the Critique of Pure Reason. Neither the Critique nor any other work provides a sustained and focused account of his (...) mature views on mathematical cognition, forcing readers to glean what they can from disparate contexts. Despite these hurdles, Kant's views have been of great interest to philosophers of mathematics. They have also been of interest to philosophers wishing to understand Kant's philosophy more generally, since Kant maintains that mathematical judgments are synthetic a priori and that the type of synthesis underlying mathematics is the same as that underlying the perception of objects . Our understanding of Kant's views has been greatly improved during the last four decades by work on Kant's philosophy of mathematics. Despite these advances, however, I think the recent work has largely neglected the importance of Kant's theory of magnitudes and the extent to which that theory is influenced by the Eudoxian theory of proportions presented in Euclid's Elements. As a consequence, an important feature of Kant's.. (shrink)

What is the true worth of Wittgenstein's contribution to philosophy? Answers to this question are strongly divided. However, most assessments rest on certain popular misreadings of his purpose. This book challenges both "theoretical" and "therapeutic" interpretations. In their place, it seeks to establish that, from beginning to end, Wittgenstein regarded clarification as the true end of philosophy. It argues that, properly understood, his approach exemplifies rather than betrays critical philosophy and provides a viable alternative to other contemporary offerings.

In the third of his Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, Reid devotes the fourth chapter to the concept of‘identity’, and the sixth chapter to Locke’s theory of ‘personal identity’. This latter chapter is widely regarded as a definitive refutation of the thesis that personal identity is no more than memories of a certain sort. It is interesting that the terms ‘identity’ and ‘personal identity’ do not appear as chapter or section titles elsewhere in any of Reid’s works; and (...) Hume is neither mentioned nor his theory of personal identity discussed in the two chapters specifically addressed to the matter. Moreover, while Locke, Reid, and Hume are often anthologized in works on personal identity, Reid is always presented as replying only to Locke. (shrink)

As critics, a vital part of our task is to examine the ways in which language mystifies and reveals, serves and disserves human desires and aspirations. In that spirit we feel that engaging the leading Palestinian intellectual in the United States in a critical dialogue is a vital task. Although this reply takes issue with several points in Edward Said’s paper, “An Ideology of Difference” , our critique is intended as part of the struggle for increased mutual empathy. We in (...) no way wish to deny Said’s claims regarding the legitimacy of Palestinian aspirations, nor the validity of Said and other Palestinian intellectuals’ efforts to counter the destructive military, political, and ideological forces that stand in the way of the Palestinians’ achievement and self-determination. Said’s critiques of the idea that Israel is somehow above criticism, and of the elimination of the Palestinians from “Western” discourse, are both valid.2We wish to make our own perspective clear at the start. We are both Jewish nationalists. We believe that it’s a good thing to be Jewish. We believe that those of Jewish heritage who fail to explore and re-create that heritage lose something of themselves. We think that Judaism still has a role to play in the healing of the world. By making this statement, we are not claiming that our views are identical,3 nor that they are the same from day to day, nor, a fortiori, that they are identical or even similar to those of many or most other people who would define themselves in that way. This, we note, touches on one of the aspects of Said’s paper of which we are most critical: The statements that he makes at several points, which seem to reify Zionists and Zionism into one model of theory and social practice, as well as his occlusion of the fact that other options for Jewish self-renewal were obviated by genocide or Soviet repression. 2. We are hardly alone among Jewish intellectuals in concurring with this point. Compare the recent comments by the American Jewish leader Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg:In memory of the Holocaust we have been reminded by you that silence is a sin. You have spoken out against indifference and injustice. Why are you making a special exception of Israel? Do you think that our silence will help Israel? The texts that we study and restudy teach the contrary. Daniel Boyarin is associate professor of midrash at Bar-Ilan University. His articles on midrash and theory have appeared in Poetics Today and Representations, and a monograph on the subject is forthcoming this year. Jonathan Boyarin is a fellow of the Max Weinreich Center at the VIVO Institute for Jewish Research. He edited and translated, with Jack Kugelmass, From a Ruined Garden: The Memorial Books of Polish Jewry, and is currently completing an ethnography of Polish Jews in Paris. He is active in the International Jewish Peace Union. (shrink)

This is an exploration of the political thought of the American transcendentalists focusing on Emerson, Thoreau, and Fuller. They were writing at a time when the American state was thought of as sacred, the two cities of Augustine, the City of God and the City of Man, combined as one. Indeed the Augustinian metaphor was a powerful one, frequently invoked in this period. American republican democracy in the City of Man enabled citizens through their participation in the state to achieve (...) something close to the spiritual status of the City of God. The transcendentalists, with their emphasis on the importance of individual freedom, did not accept this analysis, according to Daniel Malachuk. They looked at American democracy and saw much that did not support individual pursuit of goodness nor a society that approached the status of the City of God. For example, the continued existence of slavery hardly fit with a godly place. Malachuk argues that the separation between the City of God and the City of Man remains important to transcendentalists who thought that individuals needed to be given space by the state to pursue their individual development. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Popular Culture in the Houses of Poe and CortázarDaniel Bautista (bio)"[…]at the age of nine I read Edgar Allan Poe for the first time. That book I stole to read because my mother didn't want me to read it, she thought I was too young and she was right. The book scared me and I was ill for three months, because I believed in it."…—Julio Cortázar1In interviews and essays, (...) Julio Cortázar, the famous Argentine author, often expressed a lifelong fascination with Edgar Allan Poe (Berg 227–32). Moreover, as a young man Cortázar spent two years translating the American author's prose into Spanish, making irresistible the search for traces of Poe in his own work. His description of Poe as a youthful and guilty pleasure reflects a common reaction to the American author that has led some critics to rue Poe's influence. Jonathan Elmer points out that "Poe's connection with juvenile tastes, and hence with a time when reading and acquiring 'culture' were actually enjoyable […] has been insistently and disapprovingly stressed by the Anglo-American literary-historical tradition" (3). Although Poe himself often liked to "advertise [his work] as ethereal and otherworldly, or avowedly timeless," critics who found elements of the vulgarly popular in his writing regarded the author as a true "stumbling block" in the American literary landscape (Rosenheim and Rachman xii; Eliot 205). In a similar vein, Elmer observes,It has puzzled many critics, sometimes to the point of vituperation, that Poe stands simultaneously as the germinal figure of a central modernist trajectory (leading via Baudelaire to French Symbolism and thence to the high modernism of Eliot and others) and as the much-acknowledged pioneer of several durable mass-cultural genres: detective fiction and science fiction, as well as certain modes of sensational or gothic horror, which are today, to use one of Poe's coinages, "omniprevalent."(2)In the past, such critics tended to dismiss Poe to the fringes of the American canon for what they saw as his highbrow pretensions and lowbrow taste. More recently, critics like Elmer and others have argued that Poe's ability to straddle the high/low cultural divide is precisely what makes him such a perennially fascinating writer and one of the most revealing about American culture in general.Considering Poe's high standing in Latin America, one might assume that the question of his low or popular status was not as much of a stumbling block there.2 Cortázar himself blamed American discomfort with Poe on his use of "baroque" language, an issue that Cortázar's own background as a native Spanish speaker allowed him to ignore: [End Page 1] "since I'm neither English nor American, I see it with another perspective. I know there are aspects which have aged a lot, that are exaggerated, but that hasn't the slightest importance next to his genius" (Weiss 73). The idea that an author's "genius" could rise above the demands of his countrymen was important to Cortázar. Questions about his own cultural status also significantly affected the reception of Cortázar's work, though in many ways he suffered from just the opposite charges made against Poe. The style and themes of his work, and the political context in Argentina during the early part of his career (characterized most conspicuously by the rise of Perónism), led some in the literary establishment of his own country to accuse Cortázar of being too European or elitist.3 Looking at Poe and Cortázar together, this essay compares how both authors negotiated such cultural issues in their writing and the way that Cortázar reworks some of Poe's particular strategies in a modern Argentine setting. Focusing on two of these authors' most well-known stories, "The Fall of the House of Usher" (published in 1839) and "Casa tomada" ("House Taken Over") (published in 1946), I argue that they both reflect some of the ways that Poe and Cortázar grappled with the rise and attraction of a popular culture that threatened to reconfigure their particular literary landscapes.In Keywords, Raymond Williams traces the... (shrink)

In this book, Daniel Herskowitz examines the rich, intense, and persistent Jewish engagement with one of the most important and controversial modern philosophers, Martin Heidegger. Contextualizing this encounter within wider intellectual, cultural, and political contexts, he outlines the main patterns and the diverse Jewish responses to Heidegger. Herskowitz shows that through a dialectic of attraction and repulsion, Jewish thinkers developed a version of Jewishness that sought to offer the way out of the overall crisis plaguing their world, which was (...) embodied, as they saw it, in Heidegger's life and thought. Neither turning a blind eye to Heidegger's anti-Semitism nor using it as an excuse for ignoring his philosophy, they wrestled with his existential analytic and what they took to be its religious, ethical, and political failings. Ironically, Heidegger's thought proved itself to be fertile ground for re-conceptualizing what it means to be Jewish in the modern world. (shrink)

Integrating concepts of maintenance and of origins is essential to explaining biological diversity. The unified theory of evolution attempts to find a common theme linking production rules inherent in biological systems, explaining the origin of biological order as a manifestation of the flow of energy and the flow of information on various spatial and temporal scales, with the recognition that natural selection is an evolutionarily relevant process. Biological systems persist in space and time by transfor ming energy from one state (...) to another in a manner that generates structures which allows the system to continue to persist. Two classes of energetic transformations allow this; heat-generating transformations, resulting in a net loss of energy from the system, and conservative transformations, changing unusable energy into states that can be stored and used subsequently. All conservative transformations in biological systems are coupled with heat-generating transformations; hence, inherent biological production, or genealogical proesses, is positively entropic. There is a self-organizing phenomenology common to genealogical phenomena, which imparts an arrow of time to biological systems. Natural selection, which by itself is time-reversible, contributes to the organization of the self-organized genealogical trajectories. The interplay of genealogical (diversity-promoting) and selective (diversity-limiting) processes produces biological order to which the primary contribution is genealogical history. Dynamic changes occuring on times scales shorter than speciation rates are microevolutionary; those occuring on time scales longer than speciation rates are macroevolutionary. Macroevolutionary processes are neither redicible to, nor autonomous from, microevolutionary processes. (shrink)

After sketching familiar pragmatist arguments that seem to show that relations of reference and meaning shed no light on the role of language in our claims to knowledge, an alternative conception (inspired by Kripke's work on proper names and Sellars' conception of concepts and causal laws) is outlined. Neither relations of reference nor meanings are given; instead both essentially involve commitments that are different in kind from the sorts of propositional commitments made in judgment. If so, the pragmatist is mistaken (...) in concluding that meaning is a philosopher's fiction and reference nothing more than a technical notion of formal semantics. (shrink)

In Star Wars: Rebels, Sabine Wren's paintings are more than mere decoration that she slaps onto whatever surface happens to be available, and the Syndulla family's Kalikori is hardly some trinket, as it's passed down generations in memory of a long dead ancestor. Sabine's paintings and the Syndulla's Kalikori have a peculiar quality that people only find in works of art, and yet they don't seem to fit traditional accounts of art in terms of representation, expression, or institutional recognition. Neither (...) Sabine's graffiti nor the Kalikori is representational; collaborative works like the Kalikori are difficult to classify as “expressive”; and both works are excluded from the institutions of the Star Wars artworld. So, according to these accounts, Sabine's graffiti and the Kalikoris are not art. Art is a complex social and psychological phenomenon, depending in equal parts on the intentions and talents of the artist and its reception by audiences in the broader social world. (shrink)

Recent medical and bioethics literature shows a growing concern for practitioners’ emotional experience and the ethical environment in the workplace. Moral distress, in particular, is often said to result from the difficult decisions made and the troubling situations regularly encountered in health care contexts. It has been identified as a leading cause of professional dissatisfaction and burnout, which, in turn, contribute to inadequate attention and increased pain for patients. Given the natural desire to avoid these negative effects, it seems to (...) most authors that systematic efforts should be made to drastically reduce moral distress, if not altogether eliminate it from the lives of vulnerable practitioners. Such efforts, however, may be problematic, as moral distress is not adequately understood, nor is there agreement among the leading accounts regarding how to conceptualize the experience. With this article I make clear what a robust account of moral distress should be able to explain and how the most common notions in the existing literature leave significant explanatory gaps. I present several cases of interest and, with careful reflection upon their distinguishing features, I establish important desiderata for an explanatorily satisfying account. With these fundamental demands left unsatisfied by the leading accounts, we see the persisting need for a conception of moral distress that can capture and delimit the range of cases of interest. (shrink)

One of the most important aspects of human life is the role of ethics and value judgments, which are unavoidable in everyday life. On the other hand, belief in the afterlife significantly influences various human affairs. This article explores the impact of belief in resurrection on moral values and judgments using a descriptive and analytical method. In this context, it critiques and analyzes the school of ethical utilitarianism, one of the most prominent ethical schools of the contemporary era. Several issues (...) arise when attempting to calculate the outcomes of actions both quantitatively and qualitatively. These include the conflict between profiteering and moral conscience in specific responsibilities, the conflict with justice in many instances, and the contrast between quantitative and qualitative criteria in the pursuit of pleasure. There is also a conflict between human intention and will, and a conflict between supporting the interests of the minority and those of the majority. Furthermore, utilitarianism fails to account for eternal life and how to live in the next world, and it neglects the spiritual dimensions and growth of humanity. Even without considering the afterlife, utilitarianism relies solely on quantitative and material calculations as criteria. Therefore, the moral system and profit-oriented logic, along with its various forms, are neither reliable nor practical. If we do not believe in the Return, we lack a complete rational justification for moral rules and value systems. From the perspective of the afterlife, the ideal and intrinsic good is happiness in its most comprehensive sense, encompassing both worldly happiness and happiness in the hereafter. When voluntary actions and attributes are connected to this intrinsically good and desirable end, their positive or negative moral judgments are determined. A system of political ethics that focuses on the hereafter possesses all the advantages and virtues of other systems, but it does not suffer from their shortcomings and faults. (shrink)

As many as two million people in the United Kingdom repeatedly see people, animals, and objects that have no objective reality. Hallucinations on the border of sleep, dementing illnesses, delirium, eye disease, and schizophrenia account for 90% of these. The remainder have rarer disorders. We review existing models of recurrent complex visual hallucinations (RCVH) in the awake person, including cortical irritation, cortical hyperexcitability and cortical release, top-down activation, misperception, dream intrusion, and interactive models. We provide evidence that these can neither (...) fully account for the phenomenology of RCVH, nor for variations in the frequency of RCVH in different disorders. We propose a novel Perception and Attention Deficit (PAD) model for RCVH. A combination of impaired attentional binding and poor sensory activation of a correct proto-object, in conjunction with a relatively intact scene representation, bias perception to allow the intrusion of a hallucinatory proto-object into a scene perception. Incorporation of this image into a context-specific hallucinatory scene representation accounts for repetitive hallucinations. We suggest that these impairments are underpinned by disturbances in a lateral frontal cortex–ventral visual stream system. We show how the frequency of RCVH in different diseases is related to the coexistence of attentional and visual perceptual impairments; how attentional and perceptual processes can account for their phenomenology; and that diseases and other states with high rates of RCVH have cholinergic dysfunction in both frontal cortex and the ventral visual stream. Several tests of the model are indicated, together with a number of treatment options that it generates. Key Words: Blindness; Charles Bonnet; cholinergic; cortical release; delirium; dementia; dream intrusion; hallucination; Perception and Attention Deficit (PAD) model; schizophrenia. (shrink)

This paper argues that deciding on whether the cognitive sciences need a Representational Theory of Mind matters. Far from being merely semantic or inconsequential, the answer we give to the RTM-question makes a difference to how we conceive of minds. How we answer determines which theoretical framework the sciences of mind ought to embrace. The structure of this paper is as follows. Section 1 outlines Rowlands’s argument that the RTM-question is a bad question and that attempts to answer it, one (...) way or another, have neither practical nor theoretical import. Rowlands concludes this because, on his analysis, there is no non-arbitrary fact of the matter about which properties something must possess in order to qualify as a mental representation. By way of reply, we admit that Rowlands’s analysis succeeds in revealing why attempts to answer the RTM-question simpliciter are pointless. Nevertheless, we show that if specific formulations of the RTM-question are stipulated, then it is possible, conduct su... (shrink)

Ethologists and others studying animal behavior in a spirit are in need of a descriptive language and method that are neither anachronistically bound by behaviorist scruples nor prematurely committed to particular Just such an interim descriptive method can be found in intentional system theory. The use of intentional system theory is illustrated with the case of the apparently communicative behavior of vervet monkeys. A way of using the theory to generate data - including usable, testable data - is sketched. The (...) underlying assumptions of this approach can be seen to ally it directly with theorizing in evolutionary biology, which has recently come under attack from Stephen Gould and Richard Lewontin, who castigate it as the Their arguments, which are strongly analogous to B. F, Skinner's arguments against point to certain pitfalls that attend the careless exercise of such thinking (and rival varieties of thinking as well), but do not constitute a fundamental objection to either adaptationist theorizing or its cousin, intentional system theory. (shrink)

Notorious for advancing a strict dichotomy between the masculine “demiurgic father” and the feminine “nurse/receptacle of becoming” as the “natural” origin of the cosmos, Plato's Timaeus has become a site for feminist interrogation. Most critics easily deem the text a masculine fantasy that projects feminine impotence and obligatory heterosexuality, reinforcing patriarchal power structures that are blindly reproduced in their historical reception. Consequently, this article analyzes the Neoplatonic replication of this framework, but with special attention given to Proclus's challenges to this (...) gendered and sexual context. In this late, sometimes forgotten figure, we find, rather surprisingly, a Platonist who neither sequesters the feminine to the domain of the passive receptacle nor charges her simply with being a bastard image of the masculine. Rather, for Proclus, the feminine becomes the site of lived, erotic power that produces and sustains the value of authentic otherness. Furthermore, Proclus offers a challenge to the naturalness of the sex binary, suggesting a radical queerness as the basis of all identity. Overall, we shall see how classical patriarchal thinkers may, despite themselves, offer subversive models that might present readers with possibilities for troubling the sexual prejudices of ancient metaphysical schemas. (shrink)

In his article "Reassurance via Translation" Marcel Crabbe proposed a formalism to obtain reassurance and classical recapture in the setting of minimal FDE. His formalism proved to be general enough to be extended in order to formalize other forms of non-monotonic systems based on preference relations. It is the aim of this article to show how his result can be extended in a natural way by combining two different reasoning systems, namely minimal FDE and circumscription, in order to get a (...) paraconsistent and paracomplete version of circumscription, which we will call paracomplistent circumscription, which has the advantages of FDE and circumscription but is neither explosive nor lacks modus ponens in consistent contexts. Furthermore, we will complete a proof Crabbe left unfinished. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger was a central figure in 20th century Western philosophy. In evaluating his work from the perspective of the early 21st century it is clear that his influence crossed disciplinary lines. This work aims to address one area where Heidegger's thinking has had tremendous impact---theology. Specifically, Heidegger's later writings are selectively examined in order to determine the bearing they have on the issue of God. ;The route to God, in a strict confessional sense, is neither easy nor direct in (...) the Heideggerian corpus. As a result, the first methodological tack used throughout this study establishes Heidegger's abiding thematic interests. Only after appreciating the continuity and context of his work can tentative and cautious theological applications be made as the second methodological tack. This approach simultaneously upholds the integrity of Heidegger's thought and protects the theological discipline from speculative forays antithetical to its mission. The hope is that the later Heidegger will be seen as a productive and engaging dialogue partner for theology. His voice deepens theology's traditional discourse about God as well as challenges modes of expression that are exclusivistic and ineffectual in the postmodern era. ;The following structure exposes the outreach of the later Heideggerian oeuvre to theological thought regarding God. The first two chapters contextualize Heidegger. Chapter one situates Heidegger on the stage of Western philosophy with the distinction of having creatively raised the question of the meaning of Being to a new level of urgency. Chapter two identifies two formative influences from Heidegger's very early career---phenomenology and a course load involving religious topics. ;The third and fourth chapters make connections between the later texts and God. Chapter three introduces the importance of poetry and the dynamics of poetics. The venturesome poet inhabits the "between" and restores authentic human dwelling as measured against the Godhead. Chapter four further develops Holderlin's significance and introduces Nietzsche's importance for exposing the challenge of godlessness during the needy time: the gods have fled and God is dead. ;The Reprise recapitulates the salient themes presented and recommends promising areas for future research. (shrink)

In numerous essays over the years, and most recently in his Meaning, Paul Horwich has worked to articulate and defend a version of the use theory of meaning. At the heart of his project is the idea that the meaning of a word is constituted by a regularity in speakers’ use of it — i.e., by a regularity in speakers’ dispositions to accept as true, to reject as false, or neither to accept nor to reject sentences containing it. A ‘use (...) regularity,’ thus construed, is a dispositional acceptance property distinctive of a particular word and, derivatively, of sentences containing the word. For example, the use regularity constituting the meaning of ‘red’ can be very roughly characterized as speakers’ disposition to accept the application of ‘red’ to observed surfaces if and only if they are clearly red. Of course, the use regularity constituting the meaning of a word can be described in different ways; in particular, in describing a use regularity we might merely mention, and not use, the corresponding word. Furthermore, not every regularity in the use of a word is meaning-constituting. The use regularity that constitutes the meaning of the word ‘tall,’ for example, does so in virtue of the fact that, taken together with general psychological laws and the use regularities governing other words, it is basic to the explanation of speakers’ overall pattern of use of ‘tall.’ Hence, a central claim of Horwich’s use theory is that linguistic use is in general to be ‘unified and explained in terms of a relatively small and simple body of factors and principles including, for each word, a basic use regularity’. (shrink)

In Mexico the skeleton of the danse macabre, the skeleton of the “triumph of death,” has become a sugar candy. It has become a plaything, a caricature.Why this caricature? The reasons for the contemporary Mexican's feeling about death must not be sought in some psychological defense mechanism consisting of macabre humor in face of an unhappy fate. One must not invoke the consequences of a pseudo-catholicism more or less colored by mystical masochism. Nor must one reduce it to the simple (...) pagan heritage of a poorly defined indigenous past. One must go much further, because, after all, what is dying? (shrink)

The generic overgeneralization effect is an attested tendency to accept false universal generalizations such as “all eagles fly” or “all snakes lay eggs” as true. In this paper, we discuss the generic overgeneralization effect demonstrated by Polish adult speakers. We asked 313 native speakers of Polish to evaluate universal quantified generalizations such as “all eagles fly” or “all snakes lay eggs” as true or false. The control group of 107 respondents provided data on the acceptance rates of the corresponding generic (...) generalizations such as “eagles fly” or “snakes lay eggs”. By determining the impact of test fillers on the participants’ acceptance rates, the study aimed to identify the scope of the generic overgeneralization effect. We manipulated four conditions: the universal negative, positive, neutral, and generic control conditions. The results showed significant differences between the first two conditions, but neither the negative nor the positive condition differed from the neutral one. The overall acceptance rates of universal statements were 63% for the negative condition, 49% for the positive condition, 55% for the neutral condition, and 90% for the control group. Overall, the participants accepted universal quantified statements at high rates even when they were prompted to reject them. The results may be interpreted as another piece of evidence in support of the generic overgeneralization effect. (shrink)

This paper traces the development of transcendental philosophy in the 20th century back to the strongly perceived need to preserve an exclusive area of a priori research for philosophy. It will argue that a genuine sort of aprioristic philosophical inquiry does not in fact require the step from descriptive psychology to transcendental phenomenology taken by Husserl and well attested in his works from at least his 1911 essay "Philosophy as Strict Science", nor does it require the "detranscendentalization" of Husserlian phenomenology (...) carried out in the work of Heidegger. On the contrary, as I will show, recent work in philosophy connected to the development of the cognitive sciences suggests how it is possible to obtain significant a priori knowledge, by a sort of "wide reflexive equilibrium", consistently with the empirical impugnability of knowledge required by Quinean empiricism. (shrink)

Ever since the now infamous comments made by Hermann Minkowski in 1908 concerning the proper way to view space-time, the debate has raged as to whether or not the universe should be viewed as a four-dimensional, unified whole wherein the past, present, and future are equally real or whether the views espoused by the possibilists, historicists, and presentists regarding the unreality of the future (and, for presentists, the past) are best. Now, a century after Minkowski’s proposed blockworld first sparked debate, (...) we seek a more conclusive argument in favor of the eternalist picture of space-time. Utilizing an argument based on the relativity of simultaneity in the tradition of Putnam and Rietdijk and novel but reasonable assumptions as to the nature of “reality”, we will show that the past, present, and future are equally real, thus ruling out presentism and other theories of time that bestow special ontological status to the past, present, or future as untenable. Finally, we will respond to our critics who would suggest that: 1) there is no metaphysical difference between the positions of eternalism and presentism, 2) the present must be defined as the “here” as well as the “now”, or 3) presentism is correct and our understanding of relativity is incomplete because it does not incorporate a preferred frame. We call eternalist response 1 deflationary since it purports to dissolve or deconstruct the age-old debate between the two views and response 2 compatibilist because it does nothing to alter special relativity (SR) arguing instead that SR unadorned has the resources to save presentism. Response 3 we will call incompatibilism because it adorns SR in some way in order to save presentism a la some sort of preferred frame. We will show that neither move 1 nor 2 can save presentism and move 3 is not well motivated at this juncture except as an ad hoc device to refute eternalism. (shrink)

In this essay, I explore the relationship between the kabbalistic Tree of Life and that of Logic. I begin defining my terms, then analyze the question posed through that of science; philosophy; art and the concept of knowledge in general. I conclude that while a unified and complete account of knowledge cannot be gained, one can get a semblance of this knowledge. This I call a tending towards infinity or more precisely – a calculus of infinity. I conjecture that this (...) may lead to world-bettering, a wise kind of knowledge if you like that is neither of the Tree of Life nor that of the Tree of Knowledge as such, but the light itself which remains unnamable, that is to say beyond the realm of human knowledge. (shrink)

RELIGIOUSNESS WITHOUT GOD AND FAITH. INSPIRED BY JERZY GROTOWSKI The purpose of this article is to present a certain idea of religiousness. It could be called religiousness without God and without faith. I found its premises in the work of the Polish theatre reformer Jerzy Grotowski. He was neither a prophet nor the founder of the religion; primarily, he was a man of theatre. But for him, in the age of “God’s death” the theatre was a substitute of religion and (...) religious experience. He understood his “poor theatre” as a search for sense of life, an authentic life and the world’s salvation. At various stages of his artistic way, which I present in the first unit of this article, he tried to reach to deeper dimensions of reality. In the end, he went far beyond the theatre. In the second unit, I show the features of religiousness without God and faith. In this religiousness, God exists and does not exists, he is a question, or doubtfulness. The Faith is a physical action, instead of seriousness, we have irony, grotesque, buffo. Keywords: GOD, FAITH, RELIGIOUSNESS, JERZY GROTOWSKI. (shrink)

Secondary commentators on Emile Durkheim have interpreted his ontology in conflicting and contradictory ways. Some have claimed that he treats social entities as mysterious substances which exist over andabove individuals. Others claim he is ontologically committed to exactly nothing more than individuals. Few studies have carefully analyzed his ontological commitments in detail, and the conventional wisdom on the issue leaves much to be desired. I argue Durkheim holds neither a substance nor an individualist view of social ontology. Instead, he is (...) committed to the reality of emergent social relations which form the proper subject matter of sociology. (shrink)

Kierkegaard’s distinction of chatter from silence gives forgiveness a linguistic spin. How can forgiveness be spoken? Is forgiveness something to be said and heard? Is saying it aloud saying too much, or too little? What is said when (and if) forgiveness is said? Should forgiveness be chatted away, or reserved in silence? For Kierkegaard, the answer(s) is (are) neither/nor: forgiveness can only be said indirectly, kept (almost) indistinguishable from resentment or indifference, as if discarded in the face of offense—if it (...) is to happen. (shrink)

The concept of the singular thing and its ethical-political footprints, in Spinoza’s philosophy, guide the following text, which proposes to think together education and civility. With the Dutch philosopher, we learn that union and conflict are not contradictory terms, neither ethically nor politically; framing, therefore, an educational field of action poses the question of democracy as the foundation of a daily fight against fear and servitude. Thus, dealing with destruction - which is not in singular beings but arises in encounters (...) - and Spinoza’s idea of an exemplar of human nature open up space for us to characterize the political intensity of virtue as an effort to act freely and which passes through education. The text therefore points out times of education from the diversity of temporalities that act in the social and political body. (shrink)

Ignorance and Imagination advances a novel way to resolve the central philosophical problem about the mind: how it is that consciousness or experience fits into a larger naturalistic picture of the world. The correct response to the problem, Stoljar argues, is not to posit a realm of experience distinct from the physical, nor to deny the reality of phenomenal experience, nor even to rethink our understanding of consciousness and the language we use to talk about it. Instead, we should view (...) the problem itself as a consequence of our ignorance of the relevant physical facts, Stoljar shows that this change of orientation is well motivated historically, empirically, and philosophically, and that it has none of the side effects it is sometimes thought to have. The result is a philosophical perspective on the mind that has a number of far-reaching consequences: for consciousness studies, for our place in nature, and for the way we think about the relationship between philosophy and science. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume's Moral Sentimentalism Daniel Shaw In chapter 7 ofhis book, Hume, Barry Stroud considers and rejects a number of standard interpretations of Hume's sentimentalism and then argues for his own 'projectionist' interpretation.1 In this paper I shall commentbriefly on all thesereadings, raise objectionsto Stroud's proposal, and, finally, argue in favour of what I shall call the 'power* interpretation ofHume's sentimentalism. Hume maintains that the vice or virtue ofan (...) action is not a matter offact about the action that can be inferred from anything, by causal orinductive reasoningalone, nor afact that canbe discovered by direct perception ofan action, but that, rather, vice and virtue are matters of moral sentiment. Hume writes, Take any action allow'd to be vicious: Wilful murder, for instance. Examine it in all lights, and see ifyou can find that matter of fact, or real existence, which you call vice. In which-ever way you take it, you find only certain passions, motives, voUtions and thoughts. There is no other matter of fact in the case. The vice entirely escapes you, as long as you consider the object. You never can find it, till you turn your reflexion into your own breast, and find a sentiment of disapprobation which arises in you, towards this action. Here is a matter of fact; but 'tis the object of feeling, not of reason. It lies in yourself, not in the object. So that when you pronounce any action or character to be vicious, you mean nothing, but thatfrom the constitution ofyour nature youhave a feeling or sentiment ofblame from the contemplation of it. Vice andvirtue, therefore, maybe compar'd to sounds, colours, heat and cold, which, according to modern philosophy, are not quaUties in objects, but perceptions in the mind.2 Stroud gives the following explanation ofthis passage: [W]hat we believe or 'pronounce' when we regard an action as vicious is different from and more than anything we can discover by perception of the action or by inference from its observed characteristics to other matters of fact about it. Hume grants that there are certain observable characteristics an action can be known to possess such that when we know Volume XIX Number 1 31 DANIEL SHAW that the action has them we inevitably regard it as vicious. (H 178) In a case of wilful murder, for example, we can discover by (roughly) causal reasoning that one man deliberately and unnecessarily destroyed a human life, and caused great suffering, pain and hardship both to the victim and to others. (H 177) And Hume would grant that when we know that the man's action has these characteristics we inevitably regard it as vicious. But, he quiterightlyinsists that that does notimply thatregarding that action as vicious is simply believing that it has those observable [and inferrable] characteristics. He thinks that pronouncing an action to be vicious is something different and that is why he says that the vice entirely escapes you as long as you consider only the object thought to be vicious. (H 178) Why does Hume think that, for example, believing an act of wilful murder to be vicious cannot consist simply and entirely in beUeving it to possess the observable and inferrable characteristics of being a deliberate and unnecessary destruction of human life which caused great suffering, pain, etc.? Surely, one might think, to believe all that ofan action is all there need be for believing the action to be a morally vicious action. But, of course, Hume would argue that since the above beliefis itselfmerely a conclusion ofperception and causal reasoning, which in itself has no motivating power, and since, by contrast, the judgement that the act is morally vicious, being a moral judgement, must in itselfbe capable ofmotivating us to act, that is, to refrain from murder and do all we can to prevent murder, the latter active motivational moraljudgement must involve something over and above the former inert conclusion ofreason. I would agree with Stroud that Hume is right about this. Imagine a case ofa psychopath whose ability to argue and draw valid inferences is in perfectly good working order but whose motivational and emotional derangement is so severe that... (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article advances a novel way of understanding humor and stand-up comedy. I propose that the relationship between the comedian and her audience is understood by way of trust, where the comedian requires the trust of her audience for her humor to succeed. The comedian may hold the trust of the audience in two domains. She may be trusted as to the form of the humor, such as whether she is joking. She may also be trusted as to the (...) content of the joke. This approach has two distinct virtues. The first is that it makes sense of partial successes. These are cases where the humor neither completely succeeds nor fails because the audience does not fully trust the comedian. The second is that it explains intuitions about ethically dubious humor and why certain classes of humor, especially those dealing in racialized and gendered identities, are more readily accepted from humorists of those identities. (shrink)