All that we see, all that we touch, all that we perceive, are naught but ideas. There are trees and rivers, to be sure, but these are simply collections of ideas. Is everything, then, in this world an idea or made up of ideas? No. I, for one, am not an idea. Besides ideas there are spirits. I know that I, an active being, exist. It would seem that to know this and to know God exists, nay even for there (...) to be any meaning in what I say when I use the words “I,” “God,” and “spirit,” I would have to have an idea of myself, an idea of God, and an idea of spirit. But this cannot be. Ideas are essentially passive and inert. Spriits are essentially active. How, then, could an idea represent or be an image of a spirit? And what sense is there to something being an idea if it does not represent its object? How, then, can my discourse about spirits have any meaning at all? I have a notion of spirit. (shrink)

Elephants show a rich social organization and display a number of unusual traits. In this paper, we analyse reports collected over a thirty-five year period, describing behaviour that has the potential to reveal signs of empathic understanding. These include coalition formation, the offering of protection and comfort to others, retrieving and 'babysitting' calves, aiding individuals that would otherwise have difficulty in moving, and removing foreign objects attached to others. These records demonstrate that an elephant is capable of diagnosing animacy and (...) goal directedness, and is able to understand the physical competence, emotional state and intentions of others, when they differ from its own. We argue that an empathic understanding of others is the simplest explanation of these abilities, and discuss reasons why elephants appear to show empathy more than other non-primate species. (shrink)

Previous work suggests that threat-related stimuli are stored to a greater degree in working memory compared to neutral stimuli. However, most of this research has focused on stimuli with physically salient threat attributes, failing to account for how a “neutral” stimulus that has acquired threat-related associations through differential aversive conditioning influences working memory. The current study examined how differentially conditioned safe and threat stimuli are stored in working memory relative to a novel, non-associated stimuli. Participants completed a differential fear conditioning (...) task followed by a change detection task consisting of three conditions across two loads. Results revealed individuals successfully learned to distinguishing CS+ from CS– conditions during the differential aversive conditioning task. Our working memory outcomes indicated successful load manipulation effects, but no statistically significant differences in accuracy, response time, or Pashler’s K measures of working memory capacity between CS+, CS–, or N conditions. However, we observed significantly reduced RT difference scores for the CS+ compared to CS– condition, indicating greater RT differences between the CS+ and N condition vs. the CS– and N condition. These findings suggest that differentially conditioned stimuli have little impact on behavioral outcomes of working memory compared to novel stimuli that had not been associated with previous safe of aversive outcomes, at least in healthy populations. (shrink)

This anthology of classic essays focuses on the philosophy of Edmund Husserl and the philosophical movement to which his writings gave impetus: phenomenology. Sixty contributions from a wide variety of scholars provide an introduction to phenomenology and existentialist phenomenology. Among the contributors are Frege, Chisholm, Merleau-Ponty, Schmitt, Tillman, Gendlin, Sellars, Linsky, Dreyfus, Ryle, Solomon, Schlick, Ricoeur, Marcel, Heidegger, Sartre, Brentano, Olafson, Camus, and de Beauvoir.

This article provides current Schwartz Values Survey data from samples of business managers and professionals across 50 societies that are culturally and socioeconomically diverse. We report the society scores for SVS values dimensions for both individual- and societallevel analyses. At the individual- level, we report on the ten circumplex values sub- dimensions and two sets of values dimensions. At the societal- level, we report on the values dimensions of embeddedness, hierarchy, mastery, affective autonomy, intellectual autonomy, egalitarianism, and harmony. For each (...) society, we report the Cronbach' s? statistics for each values dimension scale to assess their internal consistency as well as report interrater agreement analyses to assess the acceptability of using aggregated individual level values scores to represent country span sp. (shrink)

Contents/Inhalt: Preface. Vorwort. Abbreviations/Siglen. I. JASPERS ON WORLD PHILOSOPHY AND WORLD HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY/JASPERS ÜBER WELT-PHILOSOPHIE UND WELTGESCHICHTE DER PHILOSOPHIE. Nekrolog von Karl Jaspers selbst verfaßt. Obituary by Karl Jaspers himself. Karl JASPERS: Weltgeschichte der Philosophie - Zweites Buch: Geschichte der Gehalte: Einleitung. Karl JASPERS: World History of Philosophy - Second Volume: History of the Substantive Contents of Philosophic Thought. Introduction. II. INTRODUCTION/EINLEITUNG. Leonard H. EHRLICH: Opening Remarks. Introduction of Jeanne Hersch, Honorary President of the Conference. Jeanne HERSCH: Von der (...) Wirkung einer "philosophia negativa". III. LEGACY AND TASK. VERMÄCHTNIS UND AUFGABE. Leonard H. EHRLICH: Ausblick: Vernunft, Geist, Geschichte. Sawako HANYU: the Concept of the "Encompassing" in World Philosophy. Andreas RINOFNER: Periechontologie und Weltgeschichte der Philosophie. Systematische Bemerkungen zu einem aufschlußreichen Verhältnis. Richard WISSER: Projekt und Vision einer "Weltgeschichte der Philosophie" und "Weltphilosophie" als Folgen der "Grundverfassung" von Karl Jaspers. IV. DIMENSIONS OF COMMUNICATION/RÄUME DER KOMMUNIKATION. Andreas CESANA: Grenzen der Rationalität und Kommunikation. Brenio ONETTO-BÄCHLER: Existentielle Kommunikation bei Jaspers. Czes_awa PIECUCH: Es ist gleichgültig, wer die Wahrheit ausspricht. Über die Uneigennützigkeit der existentiellen Kommunikation. Oswald O. SCHRAG: Existence, Existenz, and Social Organization. Vladimir KATASONOV: The Gadfly, Stinging the Sluggish Horse: The Socratic Mission of Jaspers's Philosophy. V. COMMUNICATIVE WORLD HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY/KOMMUNIKATIVE WELTGESCHICHTE DER PHILOSOPHIE. Albrecht KIEL: Die Weisen des Umgreifenden, die der Mensch ist: Wege zu Jaspers' Periechontologie. Maria Luisa BASSO: K. Jaspers - N. Berdiaeff: une confrontation entre deux philosophies de l'histoire. Convergence et divergence d'affirmations. Inigo BOCKEN: Kommunikation und Mutmaßung. Versuch eines Vergleichs zwischen Jaspers' Idee einer Philosophie der Kommunikation und Nikolaus von Kues' Kunst der Mutmaßungen. Boles_aw ANDRZEJEWSKI: Jaspers' Stellung zur Romantik im Lichte seiner Sprachphilosophie. Endre KISS: Karl Jaspers' Auslegung Nietzsches als eines Metaphysikers der Immanenz. Danièle MOYAL-SHARROCK: Genie et Folie selon Jaspers. Milan UZELAC: The World and Existence. Pablo LÓPEZ-LÓPEZ: Das Studium der Philosophie als Studium der Weltgeschichte der Philosophie. VI. COMMUNICATIVE WORLD PHILOSOPHY: EAST AND WEST/KOMMUNIKATIVE WELTPHILOSOPHIE: OST UND WEST. Wonjae LEE: Karl Jaspers und das Weltproblem des interreligiösen Dialogs. Silvia MARZANO: Comunicazione mondiale, kantismo e frattura dell'essere in Karl Jaspers. Una "terza via" fra Occidente e Oriente? Indu SARIN: Jaspers's Quest for Existential Communication. Mohammed MARUF: Jaspers and Iqbal on Self, Freedom and Communication. Subhadr PANYADEEP: Ich und Nicht-Ich bei Jaspers und im Buddhismus. Kazuteru FUKUI: Das Wesen des Buddhismus und Jaspers' Philosophie. Yukio MASUBUCHI: Jaspers und Nishida. Eine Theorie des "Topos" in der Lehre von der Kommunikation. Hans SANER: Weltphilosophie und Globalkultur im interkulturellen Vergleich mit den Konzepten "Weltmusik" und "Weltkunst". Gerhard RAUCHE: The Paradox of " Das Scheitern " as a World Formula. VII. COMMUNICATIVE WORLD PHILOSOPHY: FREEDOM AND TOLERANCE/KOMMUNIKATIVE WELTPHILOSOPHIE: FREIHEIT UND TOLERANZ. Anna MASÓ-MONCLÚS: Libertad y autoridad en Hannah Arendt y Karl Jaspers. Otmar KLEIN: "Weltverabsolutierung" und Verantwortungsverlust. Kurt SALAMUN: Grenzen der Toleranz. Zum Offenheits- und Toleranzparadigma in der Philosophie von Karl Jaspers. Giorgio PENZO: Politik als Ethos und das Problem der Freiheit bei Jaspers. Gerhard KNAUSS: Von der Weimarer Republik zur Weltpolitik. Wandlungen in Jaspers' Auffassung und Wertung der Politik von der Heidelberger Frühschrift "Die geistige Situation der Zeit" bis zu den Basler Spätschriften. Hermann-Josef SEIDENECK: Freiheit und Wiedervereinigung auf dem Prüfstand. Prognose und Ergebnis unter dem Blickwinkel von existentieller Kommunikation im Welthorizont. Appendix/Anhang. (shrink)

It is widely assumed that selection history accounts of function can support a fully reductive naturalization of functional properties. I argue that this assumption is false. A problem with the alternative causal role account of function in this context is that it invokes the teleological notion of a goal in analysing real function. The selection history account, if it is to have reductive status, must not do the same. But attention to certain cases of selection history in biology, specifically those (...) involving meiotic drive, shows that selection historical explanations are available in the case of items without any plausible function. Making contributions to goals, here fitness, must be introduced as an additional constraint in the analysis, either explicitly, or implicitly by appeal to individual functions or the selection-of/selection-for distinction. (shrink)

From the neurophysiological perspective, thinking in dreaming and the quality of dream thought have been considered hallucinatory, bizarre, illogical, improbable, or even impossible. This empirical phenomenological research concentrates on testing whether dream thought can be defined as rational in the sense of an intervening mental process between sensory perception and the creation of meaning, leading to a conclusion or to taking action. From 10 individual dream journals of male participants aged 22–59 years and female participants aged 25–49 years, we delimited (...) four dreams per journal and randomly selected five thought units from each dream for scoring. The units provided a base for testing a hypothesis that the thought processes of dream construction are rational. The results support the hypothesis and demonstrate that eight fundamental rational thought processes can be applied to the dreaming process. (shrink)

The paper argues that Israel Kirzner’s theory of entrepreneurship has been influential on a number of related “dynamic” theories of organization. Kirzner’s theory is animated by a dual concern – the process of rentseeking behavior and the fundamental incompletness of knowledge. Placed in a technological and institutional context, this theory points to the importance of dynamic transaction costs: the coordination costs of acting upon an innovative rent-seeking opportunity. In some contexts, this kind of cost can explain vertical integration; in other (...) contexts, it can explain the reverse phenomenon: vertical disintegration.Cet article soutient que la théorie de l’entrepreneur d’Israel Kirzner a influencé un grand nombre de théories dynamiques de l’organisation. La théorie kirznerienne est animée par un objectif double : – le processus de comportement de recherche de rente et l’incomplétude fondamentale de la connaissance. Replacée dans un contexte technologique et institutionnel, cette théorie souligne l’importance des coûts de transaction dynamiques : les coûts de transaction liés à une opportunité dans la recherche de rente innovante. Dans certaines situations, cette catégorie de coûts peut expliquer l’intégration verticale ; dans d’autres, elle peut expliquer le phénomène inverse : la désintégration verticale. (shrink)

Donald Davidson infamously claims that belief is in its nature veridical, and that skepticism is for this reason fundamentally incoherent. To those who take the issue of external world skepticism seriously, Davidson's arguments may seem to involve a conjuring trick. In particular, his invocation of an ‘omniscient interpreter’, whose intelligibility supposedly ensures that our beliefs must be largely true, has the air of incense and lantern-rubbing about it. Davidson's claim has received considerable critical response in the literature, almost all of (...) it negative. In my view, some commentators have indeed lit on a critical and controversial lemma in Davidson's argument, but this basic result has been obscured by being presented amidst an array of other criticisms that simply make no sense from a Davidsonian point of view. The aim of this paper is to clear away some of the confusion that stands in the way of a more productive evaluation of Davidson's important claim. (shrink)

I examine the arguments Donald Davidson has offered through the years concerning the ontological bona fides of facts. In “Truth and Meaning”, Davidson uses the so-called “slingshot” argument to the effect that if true sentences refer, then they are all coreferential. Through a detailed examination of the assumptions underlying this argument, I show that, while it is effective as part of a reductio of bottom-up, reference based semantics, it has no tendency to establish the truth of its negative conclusion concerning (...) the existence of facts. Davidson also argues against facts by claiming they are of no help in the explication of truth. I claim that his repeated invocation of the slingshot in this context, as well as of arguments from other authors employing assumptions similar to the slingshot's, is inappropriate, especially in light of his own commitment to a top-down semantics — a committment inspired, ironically, by the reductio offered in “Truth and Meaning”. Davidson's other argument against truth as correspondence, namely that our grasp of facts is no better than our grasp of truths, is sound. But this argument does not show that there are no facts; it shows only that no theory of truth in terms of corre- pondence to facts can genuinely illuminate its explanandum. (shrink)

PLATO'S UNIVERSE by Gregory Vlastos. Clarendon Press: O.U.P., 1975. xiii+130 pp. £3.75.

This article reviews current methods for evaluating models in the cognitive sciences, including theoretically based approaches, such as Bayes factors and minimum description length measures; simulation approaches, including model mimicry evaluations; and practical approaches, such as validation and generalization measures. This article argues that, although often useful in specific settings, most of these approaches are limited in their ability to give a general assessment of models. This article argues that hierarchical methods, generally, and hierarchical Bayesian methods, specifically, can provide a (...) more thorough evaluation of models in the cognitive sciences. This article presents two worked examples of hierarchical Bayesian analyses to demonstrate how the approach addresses key questions of descriptive adequacy, parameter interference, prediction, and generalization in principled and coherent ways. (shrink)

In this book, Della Rocca traces out the conceptual links between key concepts and principles of Spinoza's system bearing on representation and the mind-body problem. In the course of doing so, he presents and defends a number of new, interesting theses about Spinoza's thought on these matters. The arguments are presented with impressive clarity and in great detail. All in all, the book is a significant contribution to the literature on Spinoza's metaphysics and epistemology, and should be read by anyone (...) with a serious interest in its historical subject or in the two perennial philosophical problems on which it focuses. (shrink)