The young women had survived the car crash, after a fashion. In the five months since parts of her brain had been crushed, she could open her eyes but didn't respond to sights, sounds or jabs. In the jargon of neurology, she was judged to be in a persistent vegetative state. In crueler everyday language, she was a vegetable.

v. 1. A doctrine of divine illumination -- v. 2. God at the core of cognition.

How might we change ourselves without ending our existence? What could we become, if we had access to an advanced form of bioengineering that allowed us dramatically to alter our genome? Could we remain in existence after ceasing to be alive? What is it to be human? Might we still exist after changing ourselves into something that is not human? What is the significance of human extinction? Steven Luper addresses these questions and more in this thought-provoking study. He defends (...) an animalist account, which says that we are organisms, but claims that we are also material objects. His book goes to the heart of the most complex questions about what we are and what we might become. Using case studies from the life sciences as well as thought experiments, Luper develops a new way of thinking about the nature of life and death, and whether and how human extinction matters. (shrink)

In this paper I focus on the impact on structuralism of the quantum treatment of objects in terms of symmetry groups and, in particular, on the question as to how we might eliminate, or better, reconceptualise such objects in structural terms. With regard to the former, both Cassirer and Eddington not only explicitly and famously tied their structuralism to the development of group theory but also drew on the quantum treatment in order to further their structuralist aims and here I (...) sketch the relevant history with an eye on what lessons might be drawn. With regard to the latter, Ladyman has explicitly cited Castellani's work on the group-theoretical constitution of quantum objects and I indicate both how such an approach needs to be understood if it is to mesh with Ladyman's 'ontic' form of structural realism and how it might accommodate permutation symmetry through a consideration of Huggett's recent account. (shrink)

Decision making is the physician's major activity. Every day, in doctors' offices throughout the world, patients describe their symptoms and com plaints while doctors perform examinations, order tests, and, on the basis of these data, decide what is wrong and what should be done. Although the process may appear routine-even to the physicians in volved-each step in the sequence requires skilled clinical judgment. Physicians must decide: which symptoms are important, whether any laboratory tests should be done, how the various items (...) of clinical data should be combined, and, finally, which of several treatments (including doing nothing) is indicated. Although much of the information used in clinical decision making is objective, the physician's values (a belief that pain relief is more important than potential addiction to pain-killing drugs, for example) and subjectivity are as much a part of the clinical process as the objective findings of laboratory tests. In recent years, both physicians and psychologists have come to realize that patient management decisions are not only subjective but also prob abilistic (although this is not always acknowledged overtly). When doc tors argue that an operation is fairly safe because it has a mortality rate of only 1 %, they are at least implicitly admitting that the outcome of their decision is based on probability. (shrink)

Issues that arise in using game theory to model national security problems are discussed, including positing nation-states as players, assuming that their decision makers act rationally and possess complete information, and modeling certain conflicts as two-person games. A generic two-person game called the Conflict Game, which captures strategic features of such variable-sum games as Chicken and Prisoners'' Dilemma, is then analyzed. Unlike these classical games, however, the Conflict Game is a two-stage game in which each player can threaten to retaliate (...) — and carry out this threat in the second stage — if its opponent chose noncooperation in the first stage.Conditions for the existence of different pure-strategy Nash equilibria, or stable outcomes, are found, and these results are extended to situations in which the players can select mixed strategies (i.e., make probabilistic threats or choices). Although the Conflict Game sheds light on the rational foundations underlying arms races, nuclear deterrence, and other strategic situations, more detailed assumptions are required to tie this generic game to specific conflicts. (shrink)

Having shown previously how a culture type can be given a unitary description in terms of a semiotic “lens” constrained by one of the Peircean Categories (“Shamanic” culture, by Firstness), we apply this methodology to a more “fine-grained” level of analysis, by comparing the Tamil and Sinhalese cultures under the assumption that one of them (Sinhalese) is in fact a “hybrid” culture-sign. Having shown in previous work that the greater South Asian microculture may be characterized as a Firstness of Thirdness (...) (13), in this paper we provide evidence from a variety of semiotic contexts, including language, art, and religion, that the novel or “intrusive” sign in Sinhalese culture is Firstness of Secondness (12), resulting in a hybrid culture sign that may be described as 12 × 13. (shrink)

New natural law advocates are somewhat notorious for their loose action theory, having a track record of counterintuitive claims. In response to criticisms, advocates have entrenched, further defending their questionable action theory. This paper first rehearses the basic criticism against the new natural law action theory. It then examines four recent attempts to revive this action theory and finds these attempts wanting. Within these attempts, certain patterns arise. Given a certain means A to a goal C, a search is made (...) to determine whether any middle means B is implied by A. The standards of this search vary wildly, however. By some standards, a middle means can be found; by others, every middle means can be easily swept aside. The same author will sometimes use both kinds of standards, depending upon the situation. One great weakness of the action theory, then, is a lack of consistency in applying a universal standard. (shrink)

In a previous article in _Philosophia, I claim that one can be a metaphysical relativist without being a truth relativist. One premise my argument for this claim relies on is (R2) truth relativism is inconsistent with the deflationary theory of truth. Peter Davson-Galle criticizes my argument for (R2), and also argues directly for the falsity of (R2). I try to show that Davson-Galle's effort to undermine (R2) founders due to his blurring the distinction between a taxonomy or classification system on (...) the one hand, and on the other, a conceptual framework in the sense use by truth relativists. (shrink)

For better or for worse, I find myself in the company of the `misers' of Galen Strawson's portrayal who, in response to the question, `Is there such a thing as the self?' rejoin: `Well, there is something of which the sense of the self is an accurate representation, but it does not follow that there is any such thing as the self'. Far from representing a form of `metaphysical excess', the rejoinder seems faithfully and reliably phenomenological. We need not assume (...) that reflection is mere fabrication, or that it crucially distorts the thematic posit that funds our sense of self. The focus, recognition and contextual sensitivity that condition perception may, and admittedly do, limit and modify the activity of reflection as well. Observation disturbs the observed. And likewise, reflection may well compromise its object. But the product of this `compromise', the object as disturbed, the reflective posit as distorted, is nonetheless `there', for reflection. If the way a given object appears to us is a function of our perspectival insertion into the visible world, we need not deny that the world still appears to us in just this way. And analogously, our `sense of self' may represent -- in fact, faithfully represent -- the resultant `distortion', but it would be a breach of logic to infer from this that our `sense of self' therefore represents a self untouched by distortion, an independent, `undistorted' self. Indeed, if reflection distorts, we would have no reflective access to an undistorted self, and would thus have no phenomenological warrant for assuming its existence. Pace Strawson, however, the `something' represented by our `sense of self' is not some thing. It is not `as much a thing or object as any... grain of salt', but rather, as we shall see, an atmospheric haze, or at best, an adventitious `sheen'. (shrink)

This volume contains new translations of the essential philosophical writings of Thomas Aquinas, from the _Summa Theologiae_ and _The Principles of Nature_. The included texts represent the breadth of Aquinas’s thought, addressing causality, the fundamental principles of nature, the existence of God, how God can be known, how language can be used to describe God, human nature, happiness, ethics, and natural law. The goal of these translations is twofold: to allow Aquinas to speak for himself, but also to make his (...) thought accessible to the contemporary reader without the burden of unnecessary adherence to convention. A thorough introduction to Aquinas and his ideas is included, as is a series of useful appendices connecting Aquinas’s arguments to those of Anselm, Scotus, Ockham, and others. (shrink)

Virtue epistemologists like Ernest Sosa and John Greco have attempted to explain why knowledge is more valuable than mere true belief. In this talk I demonstrate that both of their accounts fail so profoundly that it is difficult to see how virtue epistemology alone contains the resources to explain the value of knowledge. According to the virtue theoretic approach, knowledge is a kind of success from ability. Knowledge constitutes a competent epistemic performance, and some performances are better than others; not (...) better because they are more accurate, but better because they exhibit the skill of the performer. It is in this way that the performance of knowledge is better than the lucky success of mere true belief. I will show that the Sosa/Greco model entails the false result that the blind review of scholarship should be abolished. This entailment is, by modus tollens, a counterexample to their view. Since it is often held that a comprehensive theory of knowledge ought to explain the value question, the failure of virtue epistemology to do so is a black mark against the virtue approach altogether. (shrink)

The Work of Politics advances a new understanding of how democratic social movements work with welfare institutions to challenge structures of domination. Klein develops a novel theory that depicts welfare institutions as “worldly mediators,” or sites of democratic world-making fostering political empowerment and participation within the context of capitalist economic forces. Drawing on the writings of Weber, Arendt, and Habermas, and historical episodes that range from the workers' movement in Bismarck's Germany to post-war Swedish feminism, this book challenges us to (...) rethink the distribution of power in society, as well as the fundamental concerns of democratic theory. Ranging across political theory and intellectual history, The Work of Politics provides a vital contribution to contemporary thinking about the future of the welfare state. (shrink)

In this paper I compare and contrast the reproduction of elite strata in Randall Collins’s path-breaking book, The Credential Society, with Pierre Bourdieu’s important discussion found in The State Nobility. Although both approaches draw on Weber and Durkheim, focus on the interaction between material and cultural processes, subscribe to a relational form of analysis, and share a similar political world-view – social democrat and radical republican respectively – they also differ. These differences relate to their respective philosophical anthropology, the nature (...) of their long-term analysis, the different contexts within which their work emerged – Algeria and the post-war constellation and early Cold War period – and the divergent nature of the broader substantive sociological problems they are engaged with. In terms of their dissimilarities, not only is each approach useful for criticizing the other, but it will be argued that these divergences need to be synthesized into a broader, more powerful explanatory theory. (shrink)

Many human beings have considered the powers and the limits of human knowledge, but few have wondered about the power that the idea of knowledge has over us. Steven Connor's The Madness of Knowledge is the first book to investigate this emotional inner life of knowledge - the lusts, fantasies, dreams, and fears that the idea of knowing provokes. There are in-depth discussions of the imperious will to know, of Freud's epistemophilia (or love of knowledge), and the curiously insistent (...) links between madness, magical thinking, and the desire for knowledge. Connor also probes secrets and revelations, quarreling and the history of quizzes and "general knowledge," charlatanry and pretension, both the violent disdain and the sanctification of the stupid, as well as the emotional investment in the spaces and places of knowledge, from the study to the library. In an age of artificial intelligence, alternative facts, and mistrust of truth, The Madness of Knowledge offers an opulent, enlarging, and sometimes unnerving psychopathology of intellectual life. -- From Publisher, page 2 of cover. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 33.1 (2003) 3-22 [Access article in PDF] Rationalism in History Steven Crowell Mark Bevir. The Logic of the History of Ideas. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. [L] When Hegel spoke of history as the "slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of states, and the virtue of individuals have been sacrificed" [27], he wished his hearers to find satisfaction in the contemplation of a "reason" in (...) history that would redeem those sacrifices by explaining their necessity. A "logic" of history in this sense—a logic of the events themselves (res gestae) and not merely of discourses about them (historia rerum gestarum)—does not merely relate events to one another by means of a narrative in which they can be seen to make sense, but, going further, attributes necessity to these events by relating them to the (absolute) Idea. That this "Idea or Reason is the True," that "nothing but it... manifests itself in the world," is not, Hegel reminds us, something established historically but "has been proved in philosophy" [11]. Seen thus, post-Hegelian historicism begins the moment that the Idea of history becomes the "history of ideas"—that is, the moment when reason becomes merely the thematic object, rather than the generative subject, of history. In its many forms—Begriffsgeschichte, intellectual history, history of worldviews, Ideologiekritik, history of mentalités, and so on—the history of ideas bears the traces of its birth in the retreat of speculative philosophy of history's robust rationalism, whether of the idealistic Hegelian or the materialist Marxian variety. Under such conditions, to announce a "logic" of the history of ideas is to link historiography with philosophy in a way that might surprise those many who have grown accustomed to thinking that the latter is dead and the former is anything but logical.For "history" has been the shibboleth under which contemporary critical discourse has sought to free itself from the "philosophical" model of knowing that dominated earlier times. If at the outset of the twentieth century the new currents in European philosophy—Husserlian phenomenology and Russellian analysis—were militantly antihistorical, by century's end only the latter remained so. The former very quickly spawned or influenced a host of offshoots (existentialism, hermeneutics, deconstruction, genealogy) with little in common but the belief that philosophy is thoroughly historical. When, in the guise of "theory," critical discourse in fields such as literature, cultural studies, feminism, or postcolonial studies draws close to philosophy, then, it is generally a philosophy that sees itself entangled in history, no longer capable of "master narratives" or logics because suspicious of its own past. Significantly, this skepticism has made itself felt in the discipline of history itself, where the theory of historiography is increasingly integrated into a general postmodern, postphilosophical, model of cultural production that emphasizes politics or poetics over reason, rhetoric over cognition.1 Mark Bevir's proposal for a logic of the history of ideas is a protest against such [End Page 3] integration: historical inquiry—whose principles provide the basis not only for a "general logic of history" but also for a "theory of culture" as such [L 316]—is a rational enterprise that yields objective knowledge guided by the regulative idea of truth as correspondence to a fixed historical reality.There is scarcely a debate in historiography—and in the philosophy of mind, language, and science, as it pertains to such debates—about which Bevir does not have something important to say, but reduced to its bare outline Bevir's book lays out the elements, modes of justification, and modes of explanation that are normative for the practice of the history of ideas. At its basis is the philosophical view, introduced in chapter one and successively developed in subsequent chapters, that the "folk-psychological" concepts we use to understand and explain human behavior—above all, the concept of rationality—are indispensable in the history of ideas as well. A central element of the practice of intellectual history, for example, is the concept of "meaning," and in chapter two, against challenges from contextualists, conventionalists, and others who reject intentionalism, Bevir argues that... (shrink)

Autonomous weapons systems, often referred to as ‘killer robots’, have been a hallmark of popular imagination for decades. However, with the inexorable advance of artificial intelligence systems (AI) and robotics, killer robots are quickly becoming a reality. These lethal technologies can learn, adapt, and potentially make life and death decisions on the battlefield with little-to-no human involvement. This naturally leads to not only legal but ethical concerns as to whether we can meaningful control such machines, and if so, then how. (...) Such concerns are made even more poignant by the ever-present fear that something may go wrong, and the machine may carry out some action(s) violating the ethics or laws of war. -/- Researchers, policymakers, and designers are caught in the quagmire of how to approach these highly controversial systems and to figure out what exactly it means to have meaningful human control over them, if at all. -/- In Designed for Death, Dr Steven Umbrello aims to not only produce a realistic but also an optimistic guide for how, with human values in mind, we can begin to design killer robots. Drawing on the value sensitive design (VSD) approach to technology innovation, Umbrello argues that context is king and that a middle path for designing killer robots is possible if we consider both ethics and design as fundamentally linked. Umbrello moves beyond the binary debates of whether or not to prohibit killer robots and instead offers a more nuanced perspective of which types of killer robots may be both legally and ethically acceptable, when they would be acceptable, and how to design for them. (shrink)

An original metaphysical proposal building on classical and contemporary sources. In Centering and Extending, Steven G. Smith retrieves and refashions some of the best ideas of classical and early modern metaphysics to support insight into the natures of mental and material beings and their relations. Avoiding what he critiques as distortive paths of idealism, materialism, repressive monism, and overly permissive pluralism, Smith builds his framework on centering and extending as universal principles of formation. Identifying the basic consistency of being (...) with these principles in symmetrical partnership enables a naturalist process view that, unlike Whitehead’s, does not overbalance toward the subjective and teleological and, unlike Deleuze and Guattari’s, does not overbalance toward the material and chaotic. This view supports useful conceptions of mind and matter, form and energy, reason and cause, and a layered world order without relying on a blind concept of supervenience or emergence. It also respects and reinforces a division of roles between metaphysical sense-making and spiritual determinations of meaningfulness. Steven G. Smith is Jennie Carlisle Golding Professor of Philosophy at Millsaps College. He is the author of several books, including Worth Doing, also published by SUNY Press. (shrink)

This article, translated by Jose ARNOZ, examines the role of number in Augustine's philosophy. While the analysis focuses on the sixth book of De musica and the second book of De libero arbitrio, it does include some of Augustine's other works. I argue that number plays many roles for Augustine including forming notions of ordinary arithmetic, describing meter and rhythm, but most importantly, forming every created object. As a result, every created thing has within it a residual number which could (...) serve to draw the intellect toward God whom Augustine identifies as unity or One. (shrink)

A fair number of recent monographs and essay collections on Descartes cover the same old ground, rehashing well-worn problems and taking us for another tour in Cartesian circles. Much to be preferred are those studies that go beyond the familiar and truly advance our understanding of Cartesian metaphysics, epistemology, science, ethics, and philosophical theology, especially with new insights into their complex relationships. The best anthologies will also contain original essays by both well-established scholars and new colleagues, thus providing a nice (...) snapshot of the state of the art at the time of publication. There is much to be learned about the development of the field by comparing.. (shrink)

The present paper complements the publications of Gerard L'E. Turner on Mercator's astrolabes by presenting an account of an astrological disc which Mercator published at Louvain in May 1551. This instrument, of which only one copy is known, is described, and a transcription of its instruction sheet, with commentary and English translation, is provided. My preliminary study of the astrological content and context of the instrument indicates that it is connected with John Dee's astrological studies at Louvain from 1548 to (...) 1550. The didactic functions of the instrument are discussed, as well as the relationship between astrological theory and practice in Mercator's work. (shrink)

Most evidence for the role of regular inflection as a default operation comes from languages that confound the morphological properties of regular and irregular forms with their phonological characteristics. For instance, regular plurals tend to faithfully preserve the base’s phonology, whereas irregular nouns tend to alter it. The distinction between regular and irregular inflection may thus be an epiphenomenon of phonological faithfulness. In Hebrew noun inflection, however, morphological regularity and phonological faithfulness can be distinguished: Nouns whose stems change in the (...) plural may take either a regular or an irregular suffix, and nouns whose stems are preserved in the plural may take either a regular or an irregular suffix. We use this dissociation to examine two hallmarks of default inflection: its lack of dependence on analogies from similar regular nouns, and its application to nonroots such as names. We show that these hallmarks of regularity may be found whether or not the plural form preserves the stem faithfully: People apply the regular suffix to novel nouns that don’t resemble existing nouns, and to names that sound like irregular nouns, regardless of whether the stem is ordinarily preserved in the plural of that family of nouns. Moreover, when they pluralize names, they do not apply the stem changes that are found in their homophonous nouns, replicating an effect found in English and German. These findings show that the distinction between regular and irregular phenomena cannot be reduced to differences in the kinds of phonological changes associated with those phenomena in English. Instead, regularity and irregularity must be distinguished in terms of the kinds of mental computations that effect them: symbolic operations versus memorized idiosyncrasies. A corollary is that complex words are not generally dichotomizable as “regular” or “irregular”; different aspects of a word may be regular or irregular depending on whether they violate the rule for that aspect and hence must be stored in memory.. (shrink)

From at least 1925 to the present, science and technology have been depicted largely negatively in popular films of all genres. The images of science and technology in films reflect consistent public anxiety over the linkage between science, technology, and corporate power; the complacency of government agen cies and scientists toward new knowledge and artifacts; the insensitivity of scientists toward the moral implications of their research and its applications; and the co-option of technical knowledge by vested corporate and government interests. (...) Public conservatism is reflected in the suspicion toward new knowledge and new artifacts and in questioning whether science and technology truly improve the human condition. (shrink)