Creations of the Mind presents sixteen original essays by theorists from a wide variety of disciplines who have a shared interest in the nature of artifacts and their implications for the human mind. All the papers are written specially for this volume, and they cover a broad range of topics concerned with the metaphysics of artifacts, our concepts of artifacts and the categories that they represent, the emergence of an understanding of artifacts in infants' cognitive development, as well as the (...) evolution of artifacts and the use of tools by non-human animals. This volume will be a fascinating resource for philosophers, cognitive scientists, and psychologists, and the starting point for future research in the study of artifacts and their role in human understanding, development, and behaviour.Contributors: John R. Searle, Richard E. Grandy, Crawford L. Elder, Amie L. Thomasson, Jerrold Levinson, Barbara C. Malt, Steven A. Sloman, Dan Sperber, Hilary Kornblith, Paul Bloom, Bradford Z. Mahon, Alfonso Caramazza, Jean M. Mandler, Deborah Kelemen, Susan Carey, Frank C. Keil, Marissa L. Greif, Rebekkah S. Kerner, James L. Gould, Marc D. Hauser, Laurie R. Santos, Steven Mithen. (shrink)

Over the last few years, intersectionality has become not only one of the most prominent topics of feminist theory in Europe, but also one of its most serious challenges, pressing us to acknowledge that European nations are not homogeneous entities and calling for more complex accounts of gender relations and forms of gender injustice. Currently, many scholars embrace intersectionality as a concept, but there is no consensus about what adequate theoretical accounts of intersectionality with regard to European contexts should look (...) like. Drawing on theoretical positions that have been put forward within the current intersectionality debate in German-speaking countries, this article addresses two questions that are currently at stake: the what-question of intersectionality, asking what it is, which forms of inequality we focus on as intersecting; and the how-question of intersectionality, focusing on how we should conceptualize what is happening when forms of inequality intersect. (shrink)

In this contribution, Andrew Arato and Jean Cohen’s Populism and Civil Society is confronted with current gender studies research on populism. This research mainly focuses on right-wing populism and highlights strong links between right-wing populists and the religious right, which are to a large degree organized by “anti-gender,” a stance both against social constructivist notions of gender and against basic gender rights, especially in the fields of reproduction and of LGBTIQ concerns. Against the backdrop of this literature, I argue that (...) in Populism and Civil Society, right-wing populist anti-gender politics are not addressed in a way that takes account of their full complexity; and that these politics furthermore suggest to treat right-wing populism and left-wing populism as phenomena that do not only differ in content, but also in form. (shrink)

Deepfakes are a new form of synthetic media that broke upon the world in 2017. Bringing photoshopping to video, deepfakes replace people in existing videos with someone else’s likeness. Currently most of their reach is limited to pornography, and they are also used to discredit people. However, deepfake technology has many epistemic promises and perils, which concern how we fare as knowers. Our goal is to help set an agenda around these matters, to make sure this technology can help realize (...) epistemic rights and epistemic justice and unleash human creativity, rather than inflict epistemic wrongs of any sort. Our project is exploratory in nature, and we do not aim to offer conclusive answers at this early stage. There is a need to remain vigilant to make sure the downsides do not outweigh the upsides, and that will be a tall order. (shrink)

Undertaking research involving vulnerable groups, such as those requiring resuscitation involves careful analysis during the ethical review process. When a person lacks the capacity to make an informed choice about their participation in a research study, a waiver of consent offers an alternative. This paper is based on a doctoral research study using ethnography to explore the resuscitative practices and experiences of rural nurses through observation and interviews. This paper aims to explore the ethical issues raised by the Human Research (...) Ethics Committee relating to consent of vulnerable patients requiring resuscitation within a rural context. In particular, the challenges of addressing risk (privacy) vs benefit (public) associated with a waiver of consent. This paper will consider why the rural context should be championed during the ethical review process, when decisions about public benefit are being deliberated. Utilising a communitarianism approach that advocates for greater rural representation during the ethical review processes will ensure that rural research involving vulnerable groups can be addressed safely and benefit not only the experiences and practices of rural nurses but also the wider rural communities they serve. (shrink)

Religious and Ethical Perspectives on Global Migration examines the complicated social ethics of migration in today's world. Editors Elizabeth W. Collier and Charles R. Strain bring the perspectives of an international group of scholars toward a theory of justice and ethical understanding for the nearly two hundred million migrants who have left their homes seeking asylum from political persecution, greater freedom and safety, economic opportunity, or reunion with family members.

A closely reasoned, although overly long study of the somewhat less than revolutionary contributions of Moore, Stevenson, Toulmin, and Hare to meta-ethical theorizing. The final chapter moves beyond commentary to a balanced analysis of the problems of analyzing moral language. Kerner argues, following Austin, that the bifurcation of moral language into description and evaluation is crude and misleading. Rather, moral judgments differ from descriptive utterances because of their characteristic "performative force," their use or function. Hence moral philosophy properly does (...) not offer pseudo-descriptive definitions, but rather explores in an empirical way the criteria of application and the performatory forces of moral utterances. However, Kerner recognizes that the relevant criteria of application, as well as the specification of the performative forces, are fixed only by our decisions, which in turn can be supported only by arguments which attempt to establish the competence of the person making such decisions. In other terms, Kerner argues that since moral principles are neither descriptions of a nonnatural world of values nor empirical generalizations, they must be treated as enunciations by a legislator. Unfortunately, as Kerner points out, the concept of being well qualified as a moral legislator lacks clear-cut applicability if developed outside a particular moral system.--S. A. S. (shrink)

Justinus Kerner's Reflections on Science. Justinus Kerner (1786–1862) was a physician as well as a poet. In his research, as well as his profession, he tried to reconcile empirical observation with dreams, mesmerism, and the unconscious. Like the romantic naturalists of his time, Kerner rejected the exclusive preoccupation with rational science as a restriction to epistemology, which he wanted to complement by considering the “nocturnal sides of nature” (“Nachtseiten der Natur”) as well. This article wants to show (...) how Kerner reflected on science, medicine, and nature, and how it became possible for a physician who became famous for the discovery of food poisoning by botulism to be ridiculed at the same time, or at least to be frowned upon, for writing about seeing ghosts and having visions. How could he combine empiric case studies and exact, detailed observation with his belief in the supernatural? And how could he, not only harmonize these apparently contradictory concepts in his writings, but also turn them into paradigms that are based on one another? To answer these questions, this article will refer to Kerner's works on “sausage poisonings” (1817–1842) in the early nineteenth century, as well as his case study of The Seeress of Prevorst (Die Seherin von Prevorst, 1829), in which he described the case of a female patient who was supposed to be a clairvoyant, and finally his literary writings, like The Homeless (“Die Heimatlosen”, 1816) and his autobiographic work Sketches from My Boyhood (Das Bilderbuch aus meiner Knabenzeit, 1849). His personal observations and experiences were the reason that Kerner did not simply deny positivist medicine, but expanded his concept of healing by adding dreams, mesmerism, and visions. For, in the end, the unconscious, as well as the “sausage poison”, evades determination by scientific empiricism alone. (shrink)

This article concerns a short but significant letter of April 1630 from the Bohemian prophet, alchemist and theosopher Paul Felgenhauer (1593-c. 1677) to the Leipzig alchemist and physician Arnold Kerner. The letter is presented in transcription, with an annotated English translation. It is prefaced by an introduction incorporating a new biographical account of Felgenhauer, which draws on overlooked or unknown manuscript material preserved in Germany and England. The letter itself shines a rare light on a variety of different areas (...) of interest concerning Felgenhauer's life and activities in the years prior to 1630. These areas include his immediate contacts and associates (such as with the Silesian prophet Christoph Kotter), interest and undertakings in alchemical experimentation, publishing and bibliographical activities, methods of communication, his circle of wider contacts and the nature and extent of broader interpersonal and epistolary networks in which he participated. However, it also illuminates tangential issues, such as the scale of social and informational economy in a heterodox correspondence network, the intricacies of dissident book production in the United Provinces, the history of trade in Leipzig, the role of commercial agents in facilitating contact between dissident personalities throughout the Holy Roman Empire, and the postal history of Bremen. (shrink)

Dirac’s identification of the quantum analog of the Poisson bracket with the commutator is reviewed, as is the threat of self-inconsistent overdetermination of the quantization of classical dynamical variables which drove him to restrict the assumption of correspondence between quantum and classical Poisson brackets to embrace only the Cartesian components of the phase space vector. Dirac’s canonical commutation rule fails to determine the order of noncommuting factors within quantized classical dynamical variables, but does imply the quantum/classical correspondence of Poisson brackets (...) between any linear function of phase space and the sum of an arbitrary function of only configuration space with one of only momentum space. Since every linear function of phase space is itself such a sum, it is worth checking whether the assumption of quantum/classical correspondence of Poisson brackets for all such sums is still self-consistent. Not only is that so, but this slightly stronger canonical commutation rule also unambiguously determines the order of noncommuting factors within quantized dynamical variables in accord with the 1925 Born-Jordan quantization surmise, thus replicating the results of the Hamiltonian path integral, a fact first realized by E.H. Kerner. Born-Jordan quantization validates the generalized Ehrenfest theorem, but has no inverse, which disallows the disturbing features of the poorly physically motivated invertible Weyl quantization, i.e., its unique deterministic classical “shadow world” which can manifest negative densities in phase space. (shrink)

Why do American ghettos persist? Decades after Moynihan’s report on the black family and the Kerner Commission’s investigations of urban disorders, deeply disadvantaged black communities remain a disturbing reality. Scholars and commentators today often identify some factor―such as single motherhood, joblessness, or violent street crime―as the key to solving the problem and recommend policies accordingly. But, Tommie Shelby argues, these attempts to “fix” ghettos or “help” their poor inhabitants ignore fundamental questions of justice and fail to see the urban (...) poor as moral agents responding to injustice. (shrink)

The outline of modern macroeconomics took shape in Britain in the early nineteenth century thanks, in part, to David Ricardo, one of the most influential economists of the time. Britain was challenged by monetary inflation, industrial unemployment and the loss of jobs abroad. Ricardo pointed the way forward. As a financier and Member of Parliament, he was well versed in politics and commercial affairs. His expertise is shown by the practicality of his proposals, including the resumption of the gold standard, (...) which was essential given the destabilizing policy of the Bank of England. Ricardo's expertise appears also in his debate with T. R. Malthus about whether an industrial economy can suffer a prolonged depression. Say's Law of Markets and the Quantity Theory of Money figure prominently in his works, but not in an extreme form. He was instead a subtle theorist, recognizing the non-neutrality of money, trade depressions and unemployment. (shrink)

Translation with notes of Ammonius' Commentary on Aristotle's Categories.

Revision of the author's thesis (Ph. D.--Kāśī Hindu Viśvavidyālaya, 1994) under title: Śaktiviśishṭādvaita Vedānta, eka samīkshātmka anuśīlana.

William James is famous for his investigations of the “Varieties of Religious Experience” in which people encounter (what they take to be) the divine. But in his essay, “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” his interest is in our experiences, not of anything purportedly supernatural, but of one another. He thinks we need to cultivate the capacity to apprehend the intrinsic value of others, even and especially of strangers. We do so in experiences of the wonder and beauty of (...) our fellow citizens, and of our harmony with them. Democratic societies require a sense of attraction to one another’s form of life if they are to inspire shared commitments to public goods. Whereas we shouldn’t reject the political significance of aversion, contestation, and dissonance, these negative attitudes do not suffice. Sustaining democratic engagement requires attractive attitudes, and among these are the wonder, beauty, and harmony that James promotes. (shrink)