"Neuroscience and Philosophy" begins with an excerpt from "Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience," in which Maxwell Bennett and Peter Hacker question the ...

Sustained attention, a key cognitive skill that improves during childhood and adolescence, tends to be worse in some emotional and behavioural disorders. Sustained attention is typically studied in non-affective task contexts; here, we used a novel task to index performance in affective versus neutral contexts across adolescence (N = 465; ages 11–18). We asked whether: (i) performance would be worse in negative versus neutral task contexts; (ii) performance would improve with age; (iii) affective interference would be greater in younger adolescents; (...) (iv) adolescents at risk for depression and higher in anxiety would show overall worse performance; and (v) would show differential performance in negative contexts. Results indicated that participants performed more poorly in negative contexts and showed age-related performance improvements. Those at risk of depression performed more poorly than those at lower risk. However, there was no difference between groups as a result of affective context. For anxiety there was no difference in performance as a function of severity. However, those with higher anxiety showed less variance in their reaction times to negative stimuli than those with lower anxiety. One interpretation is that moderate levels of emotional arousal associated with anxiety make individuals less susceptible to the distracting effects of negative stimuli. (shrink)

In the modern world, many important tasks have become too complex for a single unaided individual to manage. Teams conduct some safety-critical tasks to improve task performance and minimize the risk of error. These teams have traditionally consisted of human operators, yet, nowadays, artificial intelligence and machine systems are incorporated into team environments to improve performance and capacity. We used a computerized task modeled after a classic arcade game to investigate the performance of human–machine and human–human teams. We manipulated the (...) group conditions between team members; sometimes, they were instructed to collaborate, compete, or work separately. We evaluated players' performance in the main task (gameplay) and, in post hoc analyses, participant behavioral patterns to inform group strategies. We compared game performance between team types (human–human vs. human–machine) and group conditions (competitive, collaborative, independent). Adapting workload capacity analysis to human–machine teams, we found performance under both team types and all group conditions suffered a performance efficiency cost. However, we observed a reduced cost in collaborative over competitive teams within human–human pairings, but this effect was diminished when playing with a machine partner. The implications of workload capacity analysis as a powerful tool for human–machine team performance measurement are discussed. (shrink)

The underdetermination thesis poses a threat to rational choice of scientific theories. We discuss two arguments for the thesis. One draws its strength from deductivism together with the existence thesis, and the other is defended on the basis of the failure of a reliable inductive method. We adopt a partially subjective/objective pragmatic Bayesian epistemology of science framework, and reject both arguments for the thesis. Thus, in science we are able to reinstate rational choice called into question by the underdetermination thesis.

To meet the specific education needs of ethics committee members (primarily full-time healthcare professionals), the Regional Ethics Department of Kaiser Permanente Northern California (KPNCAL) and Washington State University’s Elson Floyd School of Medicine have partnered to create a one-academic year Medical Ethics Certificate Program. The mission-driven nature of the KPNCAL-WSU’s Certificate Program was designed to be a low-cost, high-quality option for busy full-time practitioners who may not otherwise opt to pursue additional education. This article discusses the specific competency-focused methodologies and (...) pedagogies adopted, as well as how the Certificate Program made permanent changes in response to the global pandemic. This article also discusses in detail one of the Program’s signature features, its Practicum—an extensive simulated clinical ethics consultation placing students in the role of ethics consultant, facilitating a conflict between family members played by paid professional actors. This article concludes with survey data responses from Program alumni gathered as part of a quality study. (shrink)

A landmark volume explores photographer Henry Hamilton Bennett's many-layered relationship with Wisconsin Dells Native peoples, the Ho-Chunk, places Bennett within the context of contemporary artists and photographers of American Indians, ...

This paper examines an issue that is becoming increasingly relevant as the pressures of a warming planet, changing climate and changing ecosystems ramp up. The broad context for the paper is the intragenerational, intergenerational, and interspecies equity implications of changing the climate and the value orientations of adapting to such change. In addition, the need to stabilize the planetary climate by urgent mitigation of change factors is a foundational ethical assumption. In order to avoid further animal and plant extinctions, or (...) at the very least, their increased vulnerability to becoming rare and endangered; the systematic assisted colonization of “at risk” species is being seriously considered by scientists and managers of biodiversity. The more practical aspects of assisted colonization have been covered in the conservation biology literature; however, the ethical implications of such actions have not been extensively examined. Our discussion of the value issues, using a novel case study approach, will rectify the limited ethical analysis of the issue of assisted colonization of species in the face of climate change pressures. Beyond sustainability ethics, both animal and environmental ethical approaches will be used and intrinsic versus instrumental value orientations in the literature shall form the basis of our discussion. After the application of all the ethical approaches to the case studies, we conclude that without mitigation and the prospect of a future stable climate, assisted colonization will be involved in an inherently unethical process and a “move and lose it” outcome. With mitigation, there is wide-ranging ethical support for assisted colonization. (shrink)

By nature we are all addicted to love... meaning we want it, seek it and have a hard time not thinking about it. We need attachment to survive and we instinctively seek connection, especially romantic connection. [But] there is nothing dysfunctional about wanting love.Throughout the ages, love has been rendered as an excruciating passion. Ovid was the first to proclaim: “I can’t live with or without you”—a locution made famous to modern ears by the Irish band U2. Contemporary film expresses (...) a similar sentiment: as Jake Gyllenhaal’s character famously says in Brokeback Mountain, “I wish I knew how to quit you.” And everyday speech, too, is rife with such expressions as “I need you” and “I’m addicted to you.”... (shrink)

This collection of recent articles by leading scholars is designed to illuminate one of the greatest and most influential philosophical books of all time. It includes incisive commentary on every major theme and argument in the Meditations, and will be valuable not only to philosophers but to historians, theologians, literary scholars, and interested general readers.

Jonathan Bennett has produced a sequel to his book on the first half of the Critique of Pure Reason. He does not try to cover all the rest of the Critique. He restricts himself to the Transcendental Dialectic. He rightly claims that his is the only book in English treating exclusively of the Dialectic as a whole. It is not written as a commentary dealing with passage by passage. Many passages are left untreated. A distinctive merit is his extensive (...) comparison of Kant with Descartes and Leibniz. (shrink)

DESCARTES was a dualist and Spinoza a monist. If this marks a contrast between them, there ought to be a question to which Descartes’s answer was “two” and Spinoza’s “one”. (a) How many substances are there? Spinoza: “One.” Descartes: “Strictly speaking, one; but if we relax the criteria for substantiality a little, millions.” On no interpretation of the question did Descartes answer, “Two.” (b) How many basic kinds of substance are there? Descartes: “Two.” Spinoza: “Two; though there is only one (...) substance, and it is of both kinds.” Descartes is usually called a dualist because he took thought and extension to be the two basic, logically independent ways of being; but in this sense Spinoza was a dualist, too. If we take seriously his talk of “infinite” attributes, we may call him a pluralist on this point, but certainly not a monist. (c) Of how many substances does an embodied person consist? Descartes (ignoring his views about the divisibility of matter): “Two: an embodied person is made up of a body and a mind, which are distinct substances.” Spinoza: “None: an embodied person is a mode (under two attributes) of the one and only substance, and is not made up of any number of substances.” Those are the questions which come most readily to mind, and none yields a dualist/monist contrast between Descartes and Spinoza. But: (d) Given that A and B are basic, logically independent attributes, what is the smallest number of substances needed to instantiate both A and B? To this Descartes does answer “Two” and Spinoza does answer “One.” I suspect that those who “contrast” Descartes and Spinoza as dualist and monist usually have in mind not the genuine contrast brought out by (d) but rather the fact that Descartes answered “Two” to (b) while Spinoza answered “One” to (a). Still, (d) is important in the thinking of both philosophers and in the philosophy of mind generally. Strawson's chapter, “Persons,” for example, is interesting partly for its Spinozist answer to (d): Strawson does not reduce mental predicates to physical or vice versa, but says that predicates of both kinds may apply to a single thing, namely a person.. (shrink)

This article is a selective review of David Lewis's Counterfactuals, a challenging, provocative, absorbingly interesting attempt to analyze statements of the form “If it were the case that P, then it would be the case that Q.” I shall follow Lewis in calling these “counterfactuals,” and shall nearly follow him in abbreviating them to the form P→Q.Chapter 1, which is nearly a third of the whole, gives the analysis and proves that it endows counterfactuals with some properties which they evidently (...) do have. Chapter 2 presents some “alternative formulations” of the analysis—a logical jeu d'esprit which I shall not discuss except for the section about “cotenability.”. (shrink)

Volume 11 Apollonius, or the Future of Psychical Research E N Bennett Originally published in 1927 "Admirably conceived, skilfully executed." Liverpool Post "His exposition of the case for psychic research is lucid and interesting." The Scotsman This volume summarizes the results secured by the scientific treatment of psychical phenomena, and to forecast the future developments of such research. 88pp ************** Socrates Or the Emancipation of Mankind H F Carlill Originally published in 1927 "One of the most brilliant and important (...) of a remarkable series." Westminster Gazette This volume examines the differences between humans and animals and discusses the freedom that a proper understanding of psychology will bring to the human race. The author argues that the whole psycho-physical organism will be regarded as what it is – a mechanism full of inherited tendencies and untapped energies which needs to be consciously adjusted and controlled. 90pp Morpheus or the Future of Sleep D F Fraser-Harris Originally published in 1928. "His arguments, clearly and ably presented, hold our interest." Clarion "Shows that the doctors do not as yet know much about the subject." Queen This volume discusses sleep and the part it plays in maintaining health. It contains suggestions for sufferers from insomnia, discusses dreams and their causes and suggests the probable line of investigation of sleep problems. 94pp Sisyphus or the Limits of Psychology M Jaeger Originally published in 1929. "Much acumen and knowledge. All students of psychology should read it." Manchester Guardian This volume argues that Psychology has just as an important role to play as Physics and Chemistry, because it affects the ordinary person and is not merely limited to the scientific community. The opportunities is provides, as well as its limits, are discussed. 88pp The Passing of The Phantoms A Study of Evolutionary Psychology and Morals C J Patten Originally published in 1924 "This bright and bracing little book." Literary Guide "Interesting and original." Medical Times This volume examines the evolution of the mental and moral faculties of animals. This knowledge, in the author’s opinion is critical for understanding the evolution of human mortality. 90pp. (shrink)

As a version of creationism—which claims that fictional charac- ters are created by authors who write characters into existence by penning their names in their works—abstract creationism claims that fictional objects are abstract entities. However, I want to modify the conception of what constitutes a fictional object. In short, I am going to give a defense of abstract creationism that offers answers to the questions, as outlined by Stuart Brock, of ontology, identity, and plenitude by developing a claim that—except for (...) rigidly referring proper names—fictional terms and nonfictional terms are all abstract objects.Working off the debates surrounding abstract creationism, and with a nod to D. M. Armstrong's... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Full Collection of Personal NarrativesJake Beery, Neethi Pinto, Marcia King, Laura Wachsmuth, Alisha, Katie L. Gholson, T.S. Moran, Calvin R. Gross, Joanne Alfred, Cindy Bitter, Jenna Bennett, Nadia Khan, Clarice Douille, Kristen Carey Rock, Adrienne Feller Novick, Andrea Eisenberg, Japmehr Sandhu, Katherine Bakke, Heer Hendry, Karan K. Mirpuri, and Katerina V. Liong• Being the Difference• Grieving One More Time• Echoes of Grief: Tales from an Emergency Medicine and (...) Critical Care Nurse• Searching for Peace in Death• “I’d Love to go Off the Grid and Never Come Back”• “A Mother’s Love”• Tiny Person, Big Impact• Night Shift• Cracked Armor• Who Tells the Story• Navigating Hard Situations that Medical School Cannot Prepare You For• The Wish• Break• Five More Minutes• I Saw My Reflection• The Aftermath• Where the Journey Begins• Lessons Learned in Room 208• Joint and Grief Aches• My First Loss: Carrying His Legacy• Grieving the Loss of What Medicine Was Supposed to BeCopyright © 2024 Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

Landauer’s principle is the loosely formulated notion that the erasure of n bits of information must always incur a cost of k ln n in thermodynamic entropy. It can be formulated as a precise result in statistical mechanics, but for a restricted class of erasure processes that use a thermodynamically irreversible phase space expansion, which is the real origin of the law’s entropy cost and whose necessity has not been demonstrated. General arguments that purport to establish the unconditional validity of (...) the law fail. They turn out to depend on the illicit formation of a canonical ensemble from memory devices holding random data. To exorcise Maxwell’s demon one must show that all candidate devices—the ordinary and the extraordinary—must fail to reverse the second law of thermodynamics. The theorizing surrounding Landauer’s principle is too fragile and too tied to a few specific examples to support such general exorcism. Charles Bennett’s recent extension of Landauer’s principle to the merging of computational paths fails for the same reasons as trouble the original principle. (shrink)

Landauer’s principle is the loosely formulated notion that the erasure of n bits of information must always incur a cost of k ln n in thermodynamic entropy. It can be formulated as a precise result in statistical mechanics, but for a restricted class of erasure processes that use a thermodynamically irreversible phase space expansion, which is the real origin of the law’s entropy cost and whose necessity has not been demonstrated. General arguments that purport to establish the unconditional validity of (...) the law fail. They turn out to depend on the illicit formation of a canonical ensemble from memory devices holding random data. To exorcise Maxwell’s demon one must show that all candidate devices—the ordinary and the extraordinary—must fail to reverse the second law of thermodynamics. The theorizing surrounding Landauer’s principle is too fragile and too tied to a few specific examples to support such general exorcism. Charles Bennett’s recent extension of Landauer’s principle to the merging of computational paths fails for the same reasons as trouble the original principle. (shrink)

Among the many tensions in Leibniz’s philosophical system is his tendency to invoke both mechanistic and teleological explanations. Jonathan Bennett, typicalof recent Leibniz commentators, attempts to relieve this difficulty by arguing that teleology for Leibniz is theological posturing and philosophically thin; such a doctrine does not serve to explain the relationship between teleology and mechanism. I argue that Leibniz’s appeal to final causality is both inextricably grounded in his wider metaphysic and helpful in understanding the preconditions for causality in (...) general. To this end I defend the two following claims: 1) It is in part Leibniz’s theory of contingency, and not exclusively theological concerns, that leads him to conclude that the laws of nature must admit of teleological explanations. 2) The finality of the laws of nature, coupled with one of Leibniz’s most promising arguments against occasionalism, are together sufficient to show that teleology must play a role in explanations of the activity of all genuine substances. (shrink)

IN a letter to the Editor of MIND, Mr. G. T. Bennett of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, points out a stupid slip which I made on page 499 of MIND, N.S., No. 124. In illustrating Mr. Johnson's analysis of the subsumptive syllogism in my review of his Logic, Part II., I took as a major premise the proposition “Everything with sides and angles is equiangular, if equilateral”. This is, of course, ridiculously false, as Mr. Bennett points out. A figure (...) made of four equal jointed rods could be pushed into many different shapes. I want to make it quite clear that this is a slip.of my own, and that nothing of the kind occurs in Mr. Johnson's book. Of course, for purposes of illustration, it is a matter of indifference whether we choose false propositions or true ones, so that no injustice has been done to Mr. Johnson's theory. But I am not going to pretend that I did not think this proposition to be true at the moment when I wrote it down. I am sorry to have been so careless, and I should be still more sorry if anyone should have ascribed the carelessness to Mr. Johnson himself and not to his reviewer. I must thank Mr. Bennett for pointing out the mistake. (shrink)

This book will be received ill-naturedly by those who think that a book with such a title ought, mainly anyway, to consist of critical exegesis of the work of its philosophical heroes and/or villains on the “central themes” which Professor Bennett selects for his attention. Such readers are likely to feel that when Bennett attributes this or that view, error, or insight to one of the protagonists, he ought usually t o put the man's name in quotation marks. (...) But such a reaction to this book would be at least churlish, for Bennett explicitly eschews both historical concerns and scholarship except in the limited sense that he sometimes pays close attention to textual details. (shrink)

This paper aims to show that the thought of Aristotle can shed much light on the irksome problems that lurk around the philosophical foundations of neuroscience. First, we will explore the ramifications of Aristotle’s mereological principle, namely, that it is not the eye that sees, but the human person that sees by the eye. Next, we shall draw upon the riches of Maxwell Bennett’s and Peter Hacker’s Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience in order to elucidate how Aristotle’s mereological principle can (...) be of service to contemporary neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers. In the third and fourth parts we aim to complement the project of PFN by showing how Aristotle’s philosophical anthropology and doctrine of pros hen equivocation can strengthen PFN’s response to eliminativists, reductionists, and other critics of “folk psychology.” Finally, our last section will investigate the kinds of correlations involved in brain scanning techniques, such as fMRI, so as to determine whether the most recent empirical discoveries do in fact support various critics’ rejection of “folk psychology.” We will show that the empirical evidence does not in fact favor eliminativist or reductionist views, and that we would do well to turn to the more Aristotelian approaches to neuroscience adopted by PFN and ourselves. (shrink)

(Mereological) nihilism states that there are no composite objects—there are only sub-atomic particles such as quarks. Nihilism’s biggest rival, (mereological) universalism, posits vast numbers of composite objects in addition to the sub-atomic particles, and so nihilism appears to be the more ontologically parsimonious of the two theories. If this is the case, it’s a significant result for the nihilist: ontological parsimony is almost always thought to be a theoretical virtue, so a nihilist victory in the parsimony stakes gives us a (...) defeasible reason to be nihilists. But things aren’t so straightforward. Karen Bennett (2009) has argued that nihilism is no more quantitatively parsimonious than universalism. Furthermore, her argument can be redirected so that it threatens the nihilist’s perceived advantage over universalism in the qualitative parsimony stakes too. I here argue that these arguments are flawed and that nihilism is indeed more quantitatively and qualitatively parsimonious than universalism. (shrink)

Published within weeks of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, Isabelle Duncan's Pre-Adamite Man (1860) is the first full-length treatment of preadamism by an evangelical. Intended as a reconciliation of Genesis and geology, Duncan's work gained immediacy when it was published shortly after the September 1859 revelations that men had walked among the mammoths. Written in the tradition of evangelical 'Christian philosophy', Pre-Adamite Man deploys innovative biblical hermeneutics and recent trends in geology to set out both a biblical preadamite theory, and (...) an unorthodox angelology. Duncan responded to contemporary secular interpretations of geology by pushing evangelical concordist strategies to new frontiers, filling out an acceptance of an ancient earth with new biblically informed catastrophist proposals and extensions of salvation history, while simultaneously retaining a firm commitment to plenary inspiration. The product is a highly readable book that operates both as an accessible treatment of geology and a theological discourse. Running through six printings between 1860 and 1866, the book was reviewed by many of the period's leading journals and created a minor controversy among evangelicals. This study both brings to life this previously neglected episode in scriptural geology, and adds to recent work on Victorian popular science writing. (shrink)

Different conceptions of social philosophy were divided and polarized in different variants: from biological reductionism (the attempt to explain social phenomena in terms of biology) to sociocentrism. The approach V. A. Vazulin’s conception of “The Logic of History” makes it possible to concretize the dialectic of the natural (including the biological) and the social. The creative development of the method of scientific investigation made it possible to reveal the inner systematic interconnection of laws and categories of social theory which reflect (...) the structure of developed society; it also made it possible to outline thetheoretical periodization of human history (the objective laws of its “ascent” from the very beginning, emergence, formation, to maturity) through a prism of interconnections of natural and social factors. The conception of “The Logic of History” opens a stage in the successive dialectical development of social philosophy by sublating historical materialism and the formation approach. The structure of society as a whole is a multi‐level, hierarchical and subordinated system, the organic whole of interconnected elements, relations and processes. The historical process is regarded as a gradual transformation of the natural (including the biological) by the social, i.e., as a social “sublation” of the latter by the former. The stages in the process of development are analyzed here: as theunity of the natural (including the biological) and the social; as a process of emergence of the social from the natural; as the transformation of thenatural by the social. (shrink)

This article begins from the assumption that what was once an integral dimension of progress—the development of literature and of art more generally—now lies outside its scope. The essay falls into three parts that juxtapose French with German intellectual history. The first part examines the notion of literary progress developed by Charles Perrault and Fontenelle, as well as the opposition to it by Boileau and other antiquarians, during the querelle des Anciens et des Modernes in the later seventeenth century. The (...) second part treats the reception of those arguments during the eighteenth century by J. C. Gottsched, J. J. Bodmer, and J. J. Breitinger. Special attention is given to the paradox that Gottsched, the leader of the German antiquarians, and Bodmer, the leader of the German progressives, were equally devoted to the Leibnizian-Wolffian philosophical system and thus that German Romanticism, heavily indebted to Bodmer's poetics, had roots in rationalist philosophy. The essay's third part discusses ideas of literary progress in the writings of the early Romantics J. G. Herder and Friedrich Schlegel. As these discussions show, the conception of general progress was formed in a field that has since dissociated itself from progress's march. (shrink)

In my previous article I argued that certain of the later MSS. of the Metamorphoses of Apuleius, and especially those which I call Class I., are to a large extent descended from a lost copy of F, made before the rent was torn in Book VIII., and therefore before the writing of ; and I inferred that it was likely that the evidence of these MSS. would prove a valuable addition to that of in places where F is now illegible. (...) In the following pages I shall prove that this hope has been fulfilled. (shrink)