Analyzes Schelling's arguments for his idealism and pieces together a description of his theory of nature from among the large number of his writings in this area. It also traces the influence of Naturphilosophie on 19th-century science and connects it with recent System Theory.

SummaryPhilosophically speaking, invention is the mother of necessity. This means that Hume's analysis of the idea of necessity utilizing the notion of power, when properly qualified, is essentially sound and not at all a discouraging prospect. The task of the paper, then, is to specify in what respect it is possible to claim, for the various important senses of ‘necessary’, that such a notion is applicable whenever successful control has been exercised.RésuméDu point de vue philosophique, I'invention est la mère de (...) la nécessité. En effet, l'analyse qu'a faite Hume de l'idée de nécessité en recourant à la notion de pouvoir est, lorsqu'elle est con‐venablement nuancée, essentiellement correcte et ne constitue pas du tout une perspective décourageante. Le but de cet article est done de montrer que la notion de »ntcessaire«, prise dans les divers sens importants du mot, est applicable partout ou un contrôle efficace a été obtenu.ZusammenfassungPhilosophisch betrachtet ist die Erfindung der Ursprung der Notwendigkeit. Das bedeutet, dass Humes Analyse der Vorstellung der Notwendigkeit auf Grund des Begriffes der Kraft im Wesentlichen richtig und vielversprechend ist, sofern sie korrekt formuliert wird. In der vorliegenden Arbeit wird gezeigt, in welcher Beziehung es für die verschiedenen wichtigen Bedeutungen von »notwendig« möglich ist, die Anwendung eines derartigen Begriffes tiberall dort zu garantieren, wo eine erfolgreiche Kontrolle durchgeführt worden ist. (shrink)

A philosophical yet detailed history of the American party battle explaining why partisan debate is so perverse and how it could be made less so. Building upon the heritage of American pragmatism, from Peirce to Rorty and the new pragmatists, as well as the work of historian Charles Beard, the book identifies that battle as a struggle between nation state and market state, with special emphasis on the perversity of Civil War politics.

It is generally remarked by critics and proponents alike that over the years Wilfrid Sellars has given us a broad philosophical system integrating a great many of the enduring concerns of philosophy. However, what the nature of that system is has not at all been clear. As with Peirce, upon whom Sellars often builds, a variety of positions can be ascribed to him by a careful selection of certain remarks from among his widely ranging articles. Cornman, for example, has argued (...) that Sellars’ claim that persons’ propositional attitudes and conceptual representations cannot be reduced to statements in neurophysiology commits him to a rejection of materialism. Yet, Sellars rejects “materialism” only as a crude form of philosophical typing not capable of characterizing the subtle evolution of conceptual structures embodied in our changing theories of the world, and in fact has himself articulated what he calls a “neo-Hobbesian” view on various occasions. Generally, he has been closely associated with materialism in its most recent and respectable form as Scientific Realism. (shrink)

It is argued that the ethical neutrality of science could be undermined in one or more of the following ways: by the discernment of a tychistic factor in nature, By incorrigible observer-Introduced indeterminacy, By the discovery of neurophysiological limits to knowing, Or by the discovery of an unacceptable neurophysiological cost of learning. At this point science would have to confront the moral choice either to maintain or reject certain classical assumptions upon which its self-Identity currently rests.

The Supernatural universe consists of both supernatural and natural beings and elements. The spernatural beings include God, archangels, minor gods, leviathans, angels, reapers, demons, and spirits. The natural beings are humans and other organic life. To see the differences between naturalist thinking and supernaturalist thinking, two possible explanations of a mental illness should be compared. A naturalist explanation would use neurobiology to explain mental illness as driven by brain anomalies either in structure or chemistry. By contrast, a supernatural explanation of (...) mental illness might involve the possession of the person by an evil spirit or demon. Due to the fact that organisms are self‐replicating, and replication cannot be perfect in the material world, genetic codes must evolve. A naturalist could hypothesize that souls self‐replicate through the very same biological process that delivers all our children, since whenever we replicate we tend to also increase the total number of souls. (shrink)

This book presents a new, powerful, and practical way of making final decisions on the hard, complex, uncertain problems of life and work. What if you have looked at the data, talked with trusted colleagues, and applied all the relevant managerial and ethical frameworks, but you still don't know what is right. How should you make your final decision? This crucial question is rarely asked or answered. And some standard answers – follow your moral compass, your conscience, or your values (...) – offer more inspiration than practical guidance. This book argues that, when we make final, hard decisions, we learn what is right by defining – personally – what is right. We find moral clarity by creating it. The book presents a fresh, challenging, and practical perspective on our hardest decisions. It offers a new conceptual approach for teachers and scholars and practical guidance for leaders and managers. (shrink)

The tendency to test outcomes that are predicted by our current theory (the confirmation bias) is one of the best-known biases of human decision making. We prove that the confirmation bias is an optimal strategy for testing hypotheses when those hypotheses are deterministic, each making a single prediction about the next event in a sequence. Our proof applies for two normative standards commonly used for evaluating hypothesis testing: maximizing expected information gain and maximizing the probability of falsifying the current hypothesis. (...) This analysis rests on two assumptions: (a) that people predict the next event in a sequence in a way that is consistent with Bayesian inference; and (b) when testing hypotheses, people test the hypothesis to which they assign highest posterior probability. We present four behavioral experiments that support these assumptions, showing that a simple Bayesian model can capture people's predictions about numerical sequences (Experiments 1 and 2), and that we can alter the hypotheses that people choose to test by manipulating the prior probability of those hypotheses (Experiments 3 and 4). (shrink)

Generalization is a fundamental problem solved by every cognitive system in essentially every domain. Although it is known that how people generalize varies in complex ways depending on the context or domain, it is an open question how people learn the appropriate way to generalize for a new context. To understand this capability, we cast the problem of learning how to generalize as a problem of learning the appropriate hypothesis space for generalization. We propose a normative mathematical framework for learning (...) how to generalize by learning inductive biases for which properties are relevant for generalization in a domain from the statistical structure of features and concepts observed in that domain. More formally, the framework predicts that an ideal learner should learn to generalize by either taking the weighted average of the results of generalizing according to each hypothesis space, with weights given by how well each hypothesis space fits the previously observed concepts, or by using the most likely hypothesis space. We compare the predictions of this framework to human generalization behavior with three experiments in one perceptual (rectangles) and two conceptual (animals and numbers) domains. Across all three studies we find support for the framework's predictions, including individual‐level support for averaging in the third study. (shrink)

Everyone has mistaken one thing for another, such as a stranger for an acquaintance. A person who has mistaken two things, Joseph Camp argues, even on a massive scale, is still capable of logical thought. In order to make that idea precise, one needs a logic of confused thought that is blind to the distinction between the objects that have been confused. Confused thought and language cannot be characterized as true or false even though reasoning conducted in such language (...) can be classified as valid or invalid. To the extent that philosophers have addressed this issue at all, they take it for granted that confusion is a kind of ambiguity. Camp rejects this notion; his fundamental claim is that confusion is not a mental state. To attribute confusion to someone is to take up a paternalistic stance in evaluating his reasoning. Camp proposes a novel characterization of confusion, and then demonstrates its fruitfulness with several applications in the history of philosophy and the history of science. (shrink)

To attribute confusion to someone is to take up a paternalistic stance in evaluating his reasoning.

In challenging Marxist theorists to confront the radical rebirth at the core of the fascist revolution, Roger Griffin has carried fascist studies to a new and valuable plateau. Likewise, David D. Roberts’s elaboration of Griffin’s model offers a provocative and fruitful avenue to rethink fascist political culture. This article seeks to advance the dialogue to the next level by considering what an international approach can add to these primarily nationalist interpretations of generic fascism. Drawing on examples from the history of (...) the United States, I argue that fascism is a fundamentally cosmopolitan process and that it needs to be placed on a broader continuum with the histories of slavery, racism and nationalism. (shrink)

In 1968, the Harvard criteria equated irreversible coma and apnea with human death and later, the Uniform Determination of Death Act was enacted permitting organ procurement from heart-beating donors. Since then, clinical studies have defined a spectrum of states of impaired consciousness in human beings: coma, akinetic mutism, minimally conscious state, vegetative state and brain death. In this article, we argue against the validity of the Harvard criteria for equating brain death with human death. Brain death does not disrupt somatic (...) integrative unity and coordinated biological functioning of a living organism. Neurological criteria of human death fail to determine the precise moment of an organism’s death when death is established by circulatory criterion in other states of impaired consciousness for organ procurement with non-heart-beating donation protocols. The criterion of circulatory arrest 75 s to 5 min is too short for irreversible cessation of whole brain functions and respiration controlled by the brain stem. Brain -based criteria for determining death with a beating heart exclude relevant anthropologic, psychosocial, cultural, and religious aspects of death and dying in society. Clinical guidelines for determining brain death are not consistently validated by the presence of irreversible brain stem ischemic injury or necrosis on autopsy; therefore, they do not completely exclude reversible loss of integrated neurological functions in donors. The questionable reliability and varying compliance with these guidelines among institutions amplify the risk of determining reversible states of impaired consciousness as irreversible brain death. The scientific uncertainty of defining and determining states of impaired consciousness including brain death have been neither disclosed to the general public nor broadly debated by the medical community or by legal and religious scholars. Heart-beating or non-heart-beating organ procurement from patients with impaired consciousness is de facto a concealed practice of physician-assisted death, and therefore, violates both criminal law and the central tenet of medicine not to do harm to patients. Society must decide if physician-assisted death is permissible and desirable to resolve the conflict about procuring organs from patients with impaired consciousness within the context of the perceived need to enhance the supply of transplantable organs. (shrink)