ETUDES DE PHILOLOGIE ET D'HISTOIRE Bertram Eugene Schwarzbach Voltaire's Old Testament Criticism 1971 - LIBRAIRIE DROZ- GENEVE ...

(2000). Receptiveness to an Idea: A Search for Relatively Positive Representations of the Jew in Enlightenment France. The European Legacy: Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 7-27.

New insight into the religious dimension of Bruegel’s art. With a number of highly original case studies, the volume illuminates Bruegel’s multifaceted engagement with the contemporary religious concepts and practices of his era.

A central theme in recent research on attitudes is the distinction between deliberate, "explicit" attitudes and automatic, "implicit" attitudes. The present article provides an integrative review of the available evidence on implicit and explicit attitude change that is guided by a distinction between associative and propositional processes. Whereas associative processes are characterized by mere activation independent of subjective truth or falsity, propositional reasoning is concerned with the validation of evaluations and beliefs. The proposed associative-propositional evaluation model makes specific assumptions about (...) the mutual interplay of the 2 processes, implying several mechanisms that lead to symmetric or asymmetric changes in implicit and explicit attitudes. The model integrates a broad range of empirical evidence and implies several new predictions for implicit and explicit attitude change. (shrink)

By way of conclusion, I have tried to show that rights do not come from nowhere, that is, rights are not sui generis. They come from claims. Rights do not make claims possible; rather claims make rights possible. For out of claims come claims to rights and from the welter of such claims to rights a legal system is established which, after sifting and refining, accepts some claims to rights and dignifies these as deeds, titles, rights and rejects others; and (...) provides rules enabling persons to exercise their rights. A system of rights and rules thus generated gives one the right to make strong claims. Although having a right is not a condition for making a claim, having a right is necessary to sustain and appraise a claim. Appealing to rights enables us to distinguish weak from strong claims. For rights may sustain or rebut claims though they are not themselves claims.How can we appraise claims? A claim to implies a claim that, the latter being an outcome of the former. If the resulting claim is open to appraisal of the sustain/reject or true/false kind, then it is a claim in a sense other than a primitive cry in the wild. If one can go on to say of a claim that is open to appraisal that one has a right to make such a claim or that one has a strong claim, this is to give favorable, initial appraisal to a claim thus made; and is a claim not in a primitive but in a secondary and ultimately more significant sense. (shrink)

In this provocative monograph, Bertram Malle describes behavior explanations as having a dual nature -- as being both cognitive and social acts -- and proposes...

A widespread assumption in recent research on attitudes is that self-reported evaluations reflect conscious attitudes, whereas indirectly assessed evaluations reflect unconscious attitudes. The present article reviews the available evidence regarding unconscious features of indirectly assessed “implicit” attitudes. Distinguishing between three different aspects of attitudes, we conclude that people sometimes lack conscious awareness of the origin of their attitudes, but that lack of source awareness is not a distinguishing feature of indirectly assessed versus self-reported attitudes, there is no evidence that people (...) lack conscious awareness of indirectly assessed attitudes per se, and there is evidence showing that, under some conditions, indirectly assessed attitudes influence other psychological processes outside of conscious awareness. Implications for the concept of “implicit attitudes” are discussed. (shrink)

How does experimental philosophy address philosophical questions and problems? That is: What projects does experimental philosophy pursue? What is their philosophical relevance? And what empirical methods do they employ? Answers to these questions will reveal how experimental philosophy can contribute to the longstanding ambition of placing philosophy on the ‘secure path of a science’, as Kant put it. We argue that experimental philosophy has introduced a new methodological perspective – a ‘meta-philosophical naturalism’ that addresses philosophical questions about a phenomenon by (...) empirically investigating how people think about this phenomenon. This chapter asks how this novel perspective can be successfully implemented: How can the empirical investigation of how people think about something address genuinely philosophical problems? And what methods – and, specifically, what methods beyond the questionnaire – can this investigation employ? We first review core projects of experimental philosophy and raise the question of their philosophical relevance. For ambitious answers, we turn to experimental philosophy’s most direct historical precursor, mid-20th century ordinary language philosophy, and discuss empirical implementations of two of its research programmes that use experimental methods from psycholinguistics and corpus methods from the digital humanities. (shrink)

The human ability to represent, conceptualize, and reason about mind and behavior is one of the greatest achievements of human evolution and is made possible by a “folk theory of mind” — a sophisticated conceptual framework that relates different mental states to each other and connects them to behavior. This chapter examines the nature and elements of this framework and its central functions for social cognition. As a conceptual framework, the folk theory of mind operates prior to any particular conscious (...) or unconscious cognition and provides the “framing” or interpretation of that cognition. Central to this framing is the concept of intentionality, which distinguishes intentional action (caused by the agent’s intention and decision) from unintentional behavior (caused by internal or external events without the intervention of the agent’s decision). A second important distinction separates publicly observable from publicly unobservable (i.e., mental) events. Together, the two distinctions define the kinds of events in social interaction that people attend to, wonder about, and try to explain. A special focus of this chapter is the powerful tool of behavior explanation, which relies on the folk theory of mind but is also intimately tied to social demands and to the perceiver’s social goals. A full understanding of social cognition must consider the folk theory of mind as the conceptual underpinning of all (conscious and unconscious) perception and thinking about the social world. (shrink)

Highlights the roles of intention and intentionality in social cognition.

Weltweit entstehen Eigenrechte der Natur. Ecuador verankert die Anerkennung von Rechten der Natur 2008 in der Verfassung (Art. 71-74, ECU Constitucion 2008). Gerichte in Kolumbien, Australien, Indien und Neuseeland sprechen Flüssen eigene Rechte zu (vgl. Gutmann 2021). Seit 2022 verleiht ein spanisches Gesetz auch in Europa der Lagune „Mar Menor“ rechtlichen Eigenstatus (ESP Ley 30.09.2022, 237 BOE I 135131). Diese Entwicklung resultiert aus starken kollektiven Protesten und interveniert tiefgreifend in bestehende soziale Strukturen und Weltsichten: (I) Was ist das Verhältnis des (...) Menschen zur Natur und zum Recht? (II) Wo knüpfen Rechte der Natur an bestehende rechtliche Formen an? (III) Welches Verhältnis besteht zwischen Recht und Natur? (IV) Wie lassen sich Rechte der Natur ausgestalten und ausüben? (V) Warum sind Rechte der Natur begründet? (VI) Wann verändern solche Rechte die Natur oder uns? Die vorliegende Gedankenskizze will theoretische Linien der Figur von „Rechten der Natur“ abstecken. Philosophische und juristische Ansatzpunkte werden nur angerissen. Der Wert des Abrisses ist nicht vertiefte Argumentation, sondern Abtasten von Zusammenhängen und Fragen. Eigen-Rechte der Natur rütteln an Grundpfeilern des modernen, subjektiv geprägten Rechtsverständnisses (mindestens westlicher Kultur) und gehen konstruktiv gleichzeitig genau daraus hervor. Dieses strukturelle Paradox lässt sich durch ein auch kollektives Verständnis dieser Rechte auflösen oder mindestens systemisch produktiv aushalten und entfalten. (shrink)

Robot ethics encompasses ethical questions about how humans should design, deploy, and treat robots; machine morality encompasses questions about what moral capacities a robot should have and how these capacities could be computationally implemented. Publications on both of these topics have doubled twice in the past 10 years but have often remained separate from one another. In an attempt to better integrate the two, I offer a framework for what a morally competent robot would look like and discuss a number (...) of ethical questions about the design, use, and treatment of such moral robots in society. Instead of searching for a fixed set of criteria of a robot’s moral competence I identify the multiple elements that make up human moral competence and probe the possibility of designing robots that have one or more of these human elements, which include: moral vocabulary; a system of norms; moral cognition and affect; moral decision making and action; moral communication. Juxtaposing empirical research, philosophical debates, and computational challenges, this article adopts an optimistic perspective: if robotic design truly commits to building morally competent robots, then those robots could be trustworthy and productive partners, caretakers, educators, and members of the human community. Moral competence does not resolve all ethical concerns over robots in society, but it may be a prerequisite to resolve at least some of them. (shrink)

Life and the living (on Aristotelian biohorror) -- Supernatural horror as the paradigm for life -- Aristotle's De anima and the problem of life -- The ontology of life -- The entelechy of the weird -- Superlative life -- Life with or without limits -- Life as time in Plotinus -- On the superlative -- Superlative life I: Pseudo-Dionysius -- Negative vs. affirmative theology -- Superlative negation -- Negation and preexistent life -- Excess, evil, and non-being -- Superlative life II: (...) Eriugena -- Negation in the periphyseon -- The quaestio de nihilo: on nothing -- The quaestio de nihilo: superlative nothing -- Dark intelligible abyss -- Apophasis -- The apophatic logic -- Negation in Frege and Ayer -- Negation vs. subtraction in Badiou -- Negation and contradiction in Priest -- The dialetheic vitalism of negative theology -- Ellipses: Suhraward and the luminous void -- Univocal creatures -- On spiritual creatures -- Life as form in Aristotle -- The concept of the creature -- Univocity I: Duns Scotus vs. Aquinas -- Univocity in Aquinas' Summa theologica -- Univocity in Duns Scotus' Opus oxoniense -- The common nature of the creature -- Univocity II: Duns Scotus vs. Henry of Ghent -- Univocity in Henry of Ghent -- Negative vs. privative indetermination -- Absolute indetermination -- Univocity III: Deleuze's scholasticism three variations -- Spinoza et le problème de l'expression -- Différence et répétition -- Cours de Vincennes -- Univocal creatures -- Ellipses: Dgen and uncreated univocity -- Dark pantheism -- Everything and nothing -- Life as spirit in Aquinas -- The concept of the divine nature -- Immanence I: Eriugena's periphyseon -- Natura and the unthought -- Universal life -- Four statements on pantheism -- Immanence II: Duns Scotus' reportatio Ia -- Univocal immanence -- Actual infinity -- The pathology of the triple primacy -- Immanence III: Nicholas of Cusa's De docta ignorantia -- The coincidence of opposites -- The folds of life -- Absolute vs. contracted pantheism -- Speculative pantheism (Deleuze's interlocutors) -- Pantheism and pure immanence -- The insubordination of immanence in Deleuze -- Scholia I: the isomorphism of univocity and immanence -- Scholia II: the vitalist logic of common notions -- Scholia III: the life of substance -- Dark pantheism -- Ellipses: Wang Yangming and idealist naturalism -- Logic and life (on Kantian teratology) -- The wandering line from Aristotle to Kant -- Critique of life -- Spectral life and speculative realism -- Ontotheology in Kant, atheology in Bataille -- The night land. (shrink)

This work approaches international law as more than merely information contained in international legal norms, & does not view international law as a body of ...

This article explores several entanglements between human judgments of intentionality and morality (blame and praise). After proposing a model of people’s folk concept of intentionality I discuss three topics. First, considerations of a behavior’s intentionality a ff ect people’s praise and blame of that behavior, but one study suggests that there may be an asymmetry such that blame is more affected than praise. Second, the concept of intentionality is constitutive of many legal judgments (e.g., of murder vs. manslaughter), and one (...) study illustrates people’s subtle considerations of intentionality in making those judgments. Third, controversial recent studies suggest that moral considerations can affect judgments of intentionality, and an asymmetry may exist such that blame a ff ects those judgments more than praise. I report two new studies that may shed light on these recent findings, and I discuss several theoretical models that might account for the impact of moral considerations on intentionality judgments and for the relationship between the two more generally. (shrink)

Even though morally competent artificial agents have yet to emerge in society, we need insights from empirical science into how people will respond to such agents and how these responses should inform agent design. Three survey studies presented participants with an artificial intelligence agent, an autonomous drone, or a human drone pilot facing a moral dilemma in a military context: to either launch a missile strike on a terrorist compound but risk the life of a child, or to cancel the (...) strike to protect the child but risk a terrorist attack. Seventy-two percent of respondents were comfortable making moral judgments about the AI in this scenario and fifty-one percent were comfortable making moral judgments about the autonomous drone. These participants applied the same norms to the two artificial agents and the human drone pilot. However, people ascribed different patterns of blame to humans and machines as a function of the agent’s decision of how to solve the dilemma. These differences in blame seem to stem from different assumptions about the agents’ embeddedness in social structures and the moral justifications those structures afford. Specifically, people less readily see artificial agents as embedded in social structures and, as a result, they explained and justified their actions differently. As artificial agents will perform many actions with moral significance, we must heed such differences in justifications and blame and probe how they affect our interactions with those agents. (shrink)

A long series of studies in social psychology have shown that the explanations people give for their own behaviors are fundamentally different from the explanations they give for the behaviors of others. Still, a great deal of uncertainty remains about precisely what sorts of differences one finds here. We offer a new approach to addressing the problem. Specifically, we distinguish between two levels of representation ─ the level of linguistic structure (which consists of the actual series of words used in (...) the explanation) and the level of conceptual structure (which consists of the concepts these words are used to express). We then formulate and test hypotheses both about self-other differences in conceptual structure and about self-other differences in the mapping from conceptual structure to linguistic structure. (shrink)

This volume provides an overview of recent research on the nature, causes, and consequences of cognitive consistency. In 21 chapters, leading scholars address the pivotal role of consistency principles at various levels of social information processing, ranging from micro-level to macro-level processes. The book's scope encompasses mental representation, processing fluency and motivational fit, implicit social cognition, thinking and reasoning, decision making and choice, and interpersonal processes. Key findings, emerging themes, and current directions in the field are explored, and important questions (...) for future research identified. (shrink)