Étude historique et critique des principaux courants qui témoignent de la réflexion morale en Grande-Bretagne : l'intuitionnisme, l'utilitarisme et l'idéalisme au 19e siècle; les conceptions métaéthiques, le réalisme moral et les théories de la vertu au 20e siècle. [SDM].

In this paper I argue against the view of G.E.L. Owen that the second version of the Third Man Argument is a sound objection to Plato's conception of Forms as paradigms and that Plato knew it. The argument can be formulated so as to be valid, but Plato need not be committed to one of its premises. Forms are self-predicative, but the ground of self-predication is not the same as that of ordinary predication.

Part I: The Life of Cognitive Science:. William Bechtel, Adele Abrahamsen, and George Graham. Part II: Areas of Study in Cognitive Science:. 1. Analogy: Dedre Gentner. 2. Animal Cognition: Herbert L. Roitblat. 3. Attention: A.H.C. Van Der Heijden. 4. Brain Mapping: Jennifer Mundale. 5. Cognitive Anthropology: Charles W. Nuckolls. 6. Cognitive and Linguistic Development: Adele Abrahamsen. 7. Conceptual Change: Nancy J. Nersessian. 8. Conceptual Organization: Douglas Medin and Sandra R. Waxman. 9. Consciousness: Owen Flanagan. 10. Decision Making: J. Frank (...) Yates and Paul A. Estin. 11. Emotions: Paul E. Griffiths. 12. Imagery and Spatial Representation: Rita E. Anderson. 13. Language Evolution and Neuromechanisms: Terrence W. Deacon. 14. Language Processing: Kathryn Bock and Susan M. Garnsey. 15. Linguistics Theory: D. Terence Langendoen. 16. Machine Learning: Paul Thagard. 17. Memory: Henry L. Roediger III and Lyn M. Goff. 18. Perception: Cees Van Leeuwen. 19. Perception: Color: Austen Clark. 20. Problem Solving: Kevin Dunbar. 21. Reasoning: Lance J. Rips. 22. Social Cognition: Alan J. Lambert and Alison L. Chasteen. 23. Unconscious Intelligence: Rhianon Allen and Arthur S. Reber. 24. Understanding Texts: Art Graesser and Pam Tipping. 25. Word Meaning: Barbara C. Malt. Part III: Methodologies of Cognitive Science:. 26. Artificial Intelligence: Ron Sun. 27. Behavioral Experimentation: Alexander Pollatsek and Keith Rayner. 28. Cognitive Ethology: Marc Bekoff. 29. Deficits and Pathologies: Christopher D. Frith. 30. Ethnomethodology: Barry Saferstein. 31. Functional Analysis: Brian Macwhinney. 32. Neuroimaging: Randy L. Buckner and Steven E. Petersen. 33. Protocal Analysis: K. Anders Ericsson. 34. Single Neuron Electrophysiology: B. E. Stein, M.T. Wallace, and T.R. Stanford. 35. Structural Analysis: Robert Frank. Part IV: Stances in Cognitive Science:. 36. Case-based Reasoning: David B. Leake. 37. Cognitive Linguistics: Michael Tomasello. 38. Connectionism, Artificial Life, and Dynamical Systems: Jeffrey L. Elman. 39. Embodied, Situated, and Distributed Cognition: Andy Clark. 40. Mediated Action: James V. Wertsch. 41. Neurobiological Modeling: P. Read Montague and Peter Dayan. 42. Production Systems: Christian D. Schunn and David Klahr. Part V: Controversies in Cognitive Science:. 43. The Binding Problem: Valerie Gray Hardcastle. 44. Heuristics and Satisficing: Robert C. Richardson. 45. Innate Knowledge: Barbara Landau. 46. Innateness and Emergentism: Elizabeth Bates, Jeffrey L. Elman, Mark H. Johnson, Annette Karmiloff-Smith, Domenico Parisi, and Kim Plunkett. 47. Intentionality: Gilbert Harman. 48. Levels of Explanation and Cognition Architectures: Robert N. McCauley. 49. Modularity: Irene Appelbaum. 50. Representation and Computation: Robert S. Stufflebeam. 51. Representations: Dorrit Billman. 52. Rules: Terence Horgan and John Tienson. 53. Stage Theories Refuted: Donald G. Mackay. Part VI: Cognitive Science in the Real World:. 54. Education: John T. Bruer. 55. Ethics: Mark L. Johnson. 56. Everyday Life Environments: Alex Kirlik. 57. Institutions and Economics: Douglass C. North. 58. Legal Reasoning: Edwina L. Rissland. 59. Mental Retardation: Norman W. Bray, Kevin D. Reilly, Lisa F. Huffman, Lisa A. Grupe, Mark F. Villa, Kathryn L. Fletcher, and Vivek Anumolu. 60. Science: William F. Brewer and Punyashloke Mishra. Selective Biographies of Major Contributors to Cognitive Science: William Bechtel and Tadeusz Zawidzki. (shrink)

During the 1840s and 1850s the British embryologist and histologist Martin Barry (1802-1855) propounded a bold and original thesis about the microscopic structure of animal and vegetable tissue. He maintained that minute double spirals were virtually ubiquitous in the makeup of a wide range of structures. This paper considers how a claim of this kind was consonant with a romantic image of scientific creativity with which Barry identified. It describes his partially successful strategies to convince contemporaries of the veracity of (...) his claims. Major figures in the field, such as Richard Owen and Jan Evangelista Purkyně, affirmed that Barry's spirals were real objects in nature. Others, notably William Sharpey, became convinced that the spirals were mere artefacts and that Barry was deeply flawed as a scientific investigator. The ultimate rejection of his hypothesis had much to do with the moral repugnance that Barry's attempts to gain credit for a major discovery evoked among influential medical scientists. This negative assessment of Barry as an investigator reveals the lineaments of an alternative ethic of scientific practice. (shrink)

The present collection brings together for the first time Rowe's most significant contributions to the philosophy of religion. This diverse but representative selection of Rowe's writings will provide students, professional scholars as well as general readers with stimulating and accessible discussions on such topics as the philosophical theology of Paul Tillich, the problem of evil, divine freedom, arguments for the existence of God, religious experience, life after death, and religious pluralism.

This paper uses Popper's treatment of probability and an epistemic constraint on probability assignments to conditionals to extend the Bayesian representation of rational belief so that revision of previously accepted evidence is allowed for. Results of this extension include an epistemic semantics for Lewis' theory of counterfactual conditionals and a representation for one kind of conceptual change.

The conceptual framework of religion is more like the frame of a picture than the frame of a house; and what goes on within the frame is other than conceptual. This is the hypothesis motivating the analysis which follows. Given the hypothesis, the problem is to conceive what religion is - this other-than-conceptual enterprise which tends to attract conceptual frames. A possible answer is available in Wittgensteinian ‘seeing-as’. A number of philosophers of religion have recently exercised this option. The present (...) paper adds to their work by comparing a number of types of religious seeing-as with the instances of visual ambiguity drawn on by Wittgenstein. (shrink)

This book comprises a selection of William McBride's essays on theory and practice in the former Yugoslavia, 1989 - 1999. It continues the critical assessment of neoliberal globalization from the vantage point of its effects on East-Central and Southern Europe that McBride presented in Philosophical Reflections. Unlike the earlier book, it situates discussions of globalization and neonationalist wars against the backdrop of the history, development, and demise of Praxis Philosophy — the one-time bridge between the progressive forces of former (...) Yugoslavia and various East-West initiatives. (shrink)

Baker argues that quantitative parsimony—the principle that hypotheses requiring fewer entities are to be preferred over their empirically equivalent rivals—is a rational methodological criterion because it maximizes explanatory power. Baker lends plausibility to his account by confronting it with the example of postulating of the neutrino in order to resolve a discrepancy in Beta decay experiments. Baker’s account is initially attractive, but I argue that its details are problematic and that it yields undesirable consequences when applied to the case of (...) astrophysical dark matter. Baker has not succeeded in showing why quantitative parsimony is a theoretical virtue. (shrink)

Background: Locke's Conception of Freedom For how can we think any one freer than to have the power to do what we will. — John Locke n his chapter on power ...

ExcerptNow a century old, Carl Schmitt’s The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy still provides useful training for historians in the necessary task of making distinctions between “liberalism” and “democracy,” two movements that arose with overlapping but distinct core principles in eighteenth-century Europe, often competed with each other, and sometimes came into bloody conflict. Schmitt makes one highly controversial assertion, however, near the beginning of this book. After agreeing with Alexis de Tocqueville that the spread of democracy was the most powerful political (...) trend of the nineteenth century, a trend that became almost irresistible,1 Schmitt declares that there is a crucial flaw in the argument of Jean-Jacques Rousseau that exposes a major problem with democratic theory in general. Democracy has taken so many different forms, according to Schmitt, that it can only be defined according to the basic principle that political decisions are only binding for those who participated in making them. This belief presupposes “that the will of the outvoted minority is in truth identical with the will of the majority. Rousseau’s frequently cited arguments in the Contrat social are fundamental [emphasis added] for democratic thought and ultimately conform to an old tradition.”2 Schmitt refers here to Rousseau’s argument in On the Social Contract (book IV, ch. 2) that if the proposition you supported fails to gain a majority in a referendum, you should acknowledge that you had been mistaken when you voted, because the question posed to citizens was not exactly whether they personally approved of the proposition, but “whether or not it conforms to the general will that is theirs.”3 Schmitt observes caustically that “with this Jacobin logic one can, it is well known, justify the rule of a minority over the majority, even while appealing to democracy.” The first democratic movement of the modern era, the Levellers in the English Civil War, had already attempted this, Schmitt argues, when they proclaimed in 1649 that only the “well-affected” deserved the right to vote in parliamentary elections.4 Schmitt concludes that democracy is therefore highly vulnerable to the emergence of dictatorship, and that the Bolsheviks had just as strong an argument in 1923 that their brutal dominion by an “enlightened” minority was truly democratic as did the Jacobins of 1793. “Theoretically, and in critical times also practically, democracy is helpless [emphasis added] before the Jacobin argument, that is, when faced with the authoritative identification of a minority as the people.” The meaning here of “authoritative identification” (entscheidenden Identifikation) is unclear; Schmitt does not seek to explain why the majority in a democracy should ever accept a minority’s claim that it alone possesses civic virtue or wisdom.5 A very similar argument about Rousseau was made nevertheless by J. L. Talmon in The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (published in 1952), which has in turn influenced some recent scholars who, like Talmon, do not acknowledge any intellectual debt to Schmitt.6. (shrink)

Numerous U.S. cities suffered immense fiscal strain following the subprime mortgage crisis and financial crash of 2007–8. Diminished revenues, tightened credit, and speculative financing that went bad in the aftermath fueled widespread fiscal distress on the local scale. Although the current moment resembles fiscal crises that crested in cities in the 1970s–90s, two factors distinguish the current period. First, municipal affairs have become thoroughly financialized—dominated by speculative securities and volatile debt arrangements—such that local crisis can no longer be understood apart (...) from financial market instability. Second, local fiscal politics have become increasingly removed from democratic oversight and control. This de-democratization hinders the capacity of political communities to reregulate markets and rebuild urban communities. An analytic model derived from the work of Hyman Minsky and Karl Polanyi emphasizes how cities become ensnared in a “financial instability” cycle and how communities seek to protect themselves by way of the “double movement.”. (shrink)

Two Community Development Corporations in Oakland, California, anchor the following analysis. These legally homogenous organizations have implemented similar “low-income” redevelopment projects widely hailed as representing a single successful blueprint for urban revitalization. Despite their similarities, however, these entities have produced starkly different socio-economic outcomes—a phenomenon traced to the CDCs' divergent internal structures and the contrasting external contexts of their development activities. These variations generated competing “logics” of redevelopment. On one hand, we find a CDC dominated by market-oriented interests and the (...) economic logic of exchange-values, while on the other, we find a CDC dominated by community-oriented interests and the social logic of neighborhood use-values. (shrink)

Recent work has led to the discovery that two severe hereditary human pathologies are caused by biotin deficiency. Significantly, administration of pharmacologic doses of biotin can provide clinically effective treatment. Both diseases are autosomal recessive in inheritance but differ in their associated enzymatic deficiencies. The clinical, enzymatic, and genetic characteristics of these pathologies are reviewed here.