In recent years, neuroscience has been a particularly prolific discipline stimulating many innovative treatment approaches in medicine. However, when it comes to the brain, new techniques of intervention do not always meet with a positive public response, in spite of promising therapeutic benefits. The reason for this caution clearly is the brain’s special importance as “organ of the mind”. As such it is widely held to be the origin of mankind’s unique position among living beings. Likewise, on the level of (...) the individual human being, the brain is considered the material substrate of those traits that in combination render each person unique. In view of this preeminent significance of the brain, it is understandable that, in general, interventions into the brain are considered a delicate issue and that new techniques of intervention are scrutinised with particular care. However, in doing so it is important not to go to the opposite extreme and shy away from promising new therapeutic approaches for debilitating disorders of the brain. With respect to the new techniques of brain intervention a broad interdisciplinary perspective is required to discern irrational fear from justified concern. Hence, the Europäische Akademie established a project group consisting, on the one hand, of experts from different fields of medicine who have got first-hand experience of applying the techniques at issue and, on the other hand, of philosophers and a legal expert. The task of this team was to review the state of the art with respect to each single technique of intervening in the brain, to indicate future developments, and to address the ethical and legal issues common to all of them. The project’s outcome is the book at hand. (shrink)

One effect of information technology is the increasing need to present information visually. The trend raises intriguing questions. What is the logical status of reasoning that employs visualization? What are the cognitive advantages and pitfalls of this reasoning? What kinds of tools can be developed to aid in the use of visual representation? This newest volume on the Studies in Logic and Computation series addresses the logical aspects of the visualization of information. The authors of these specially commissioned papers explore (...) the properties of diagrams, charts, and maps, and their use in problem solving and teaching basic reasoning skills. As computers make visual representations more commonplace, it is important for professionals, researchers and students in computer science, philosophy, and logic to develop an understanding of these tools; this book can clarify the relationship between visuals and information. (shrink)

Does philosophical critique have a future? What are its possibilities, limits, and presuppositions? Bringing together outstanding scholars from various traditions, this collection of essays is the first to examine the forms of critique that have shaped modern and contemporary continental thought. Through critical analyses of key texts by, among others, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Adorno, Habermas, Foucault, and Rancière, it traces the way critique has time and again geared itself towards new cultural, social, and political problems, shedding those of its (...) assumptions no longer deemed tenable. It is our hope that the many voices of critique that arise from the present volume will produce effects – new doubts, new insights, new challenges, or new resources – that none could have achieved on their own. (shrink)

The late 20th century saw great movement in the philosophy of language, often critical of the fathers of the subject-Gottlieb Frege and Bertrand Russell-but sometimes supportive of (or even defensive about) the work of the fathers. Howard Wettstein's sympathies lie with the critics. But he says that they have often misconceived their critical project, treating it in ways that are technically focused and that miss the deeper implications of their revolutionary challenge. Wettstein argues that Wittgenstein-a figure with whom the critics (...) of Frege and Russell are typically unsympathetic-laid the foundation for much of what is really revolutionary in this late 20th century movement. The subject itself should be of great interest, since philosophy of language has functioned as a kind of foundation for much of 20th century philosophy. But in fact it remains a subject for specialists, since the ideas are difficult and the mode of presentation is often fairly technical. In this book, Wettstein brings the non-specialist into the conversation (especially in early chapters); he also reconceives the debate in a way that avoids technical formulation. The Magic Prism is intended for professional philosophers, graduate students, and upper division undergraduates. (shrink)

Die Autoren dieses Buches befassen sich mit dem Verhältnis der Wissenschaftstheorie zu den Wissenschaften. Vertreter verschiedener Natur- und Geisteswissenschaften kommen hier nach folgendem Anordnungsprinzip zu Worte: Von den »hard sciences« zu den »soft sciences«, von den empirisch leichter prüfbaren zu den empirisch schwerer prüfbaren Wissenschaften. Die klassischen Naturwissenschaften, Physik, Chemie und Biologie, machen den Anfang. Dann folgen Ökonomie, Soziologie und Geschichte.Fast alle Beiträge sind aus Vorträgen hervorgegangen, die im Juni 1989 während eines wissenschaftlichen Kolloquiums an der Universität Trier gehalten und (...) diskutiert wurden.Das Thema der Trierer Tagung lautete: »Der Kritische Rationalismus und die Wissenschaften«. Die jeweiligen Vertreter ihres Faches waren also eingeladen, insbesondere ihr Verhältnis zur Wissenschaftstheorie des Kritischen Rationalismus darzulegen. Das Tagungsthema war vor dem Hintergrund der in demselben Jahr erfolgenden Emeritierung von Gerard Radnitzky, einem der renommiertesten Vertreter des Kritischen Rationalismus, gewählt worden. (shrink)

An argument is developed at some length to show that any semantical theory which treats superficially nonperformative sentences as being governed by performative prefaces at some level of underlying structure must either leave those sentences semantically uninterpreted or assign them the wrong truth-conditions. Several possible escapes from this dilemma are examined; it is tentatively concluded that such hypotheses as the Ross-Lakoff-Sadock “Performative Analysis” should be rejected despite their attractions.

We present a Kripke model for Girard's Linear Logic (without exponentials) in a conservative fashion where the logical functors beyond the basic lattice operations may be added one by one without recourse to such things as negation. You can either have some logical functors or not as you choose. Commutatively and associatively are isolated in such a way that the base Kripke model is a model for noncommutative, nonassociative Linear Logic. We also extend the logic by adding a coimplication operator, (...) similar to Curry's subtraction operator, which is resituated with Linear Logic's contensor product. And we can add contraction to get nondistributive Relevance Logic. The model rests heavily on Urquhart's representation of nondistributive lattices and also on Dunn's Gaggle Theory. Indeed, the paper may be viewed as an investigation into nondistributive Gaggle Theory restricted to binary operations. The valuations on the Kripke model are three valued: true, false, and indifferent. The lattice representation theorem of Urquhart has the nice feature of yielding Priestley's representation theorem for distributive lattices if the original lattice happens to be distributive. Hence the representation is consistent with Stone's representation of distributive and Boolean lattices, and our semantics is consistent with the Lemmon-Scott representation of modal algebras and the Routley-Meyer semantics for Relevance Logic. (shrink)

although mostly known to specialists nowadays, Kenelm Digby was a remarkable figure on the intellectual scene of the early seventeenth century. He has been described as “one of the most influential natural philosophers” of his time,1 and corresponded with many of the great scholars of his days, including Descartes, and the French pioneer of atomism, Pierre Gassendi. In the later years of his life, Digby, alongside men like Robert Boyle, became one of the founding members of the Royal Society.2Digby authored (...) one major work of philosophy: the Two Treatises of 1644. This work consisted of a long First Treatise on bodies, and a shorter, Second Treatise on the human soul. In the First Treatise, Digby argued... (shrink)

In light of the general lack of awareness of the long history of Western-Marxist fascination with the Bible, this article offers a synopsis of part of that history. After showing how the Bible was an important element in the work of Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, it the offers a critique of the current engagements with it by Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, Terry Eagleton and Giorgio Agamben. The third section deals with the most significant element of the religious (...) Left in recent years, namely liberation theology. It closes with some comments concerning the growth of Marxist biblical studies and some suggestions for the way Marxism might reconnect with a non-reified biblical tradition. (shrink)

This paper shows in detail how the formal semiotic of M. J. Cresswell [6] may be extended to provide an account of indirect question clauses in English. The resulting account is compared at various points with the theory recently propounded by Karttunen [12] and is argued to have two major advantages over the latter in that (i) it accommodates the manifest teleological relativity of ‘who’-clauses, and (ii) it avoids the need for categorial segregation of sentence-taking verbs from wh-clause-taking verbs while (...) offering a uniform explanation of various apparent semantic differences between them. (shrink)

Resumo Não há dúvida que tanto Kant como Hegel viram os seus respectivos trabalhos, como contribuições para aquilo que consideravam ser a “metafísica”. No entanto, a autora argumenta, que isto só deve ser compreendido, tendo presente, as concepções de metafísica de cada um dos autores. A autora, começando pela distinção implícita entre metafísica geral e metafísica especial na Crítica da Razão Pura, argumenta que Kant, Fichte, Schelling e Hegel comprometeram-se com uma investigação que, até essa altura, era do domínio da (...) metafísica geral. A autora, concentrando-se na noção de sistema de razão pura, tal como aludido na Crítica da Razão Pura, mostra, que os sucessores de Kant, interpretaram erroneamente a distinção kantiana entre crítica e sistema, o que permitiu elaborarem um sistema completo de razão pura, contrário àquilo que era intenção de Kant. Palavras-chave : Fichte, Hegel, idealismo alemão, Kant, metafísica, sistemaThere is no doubt that both Kant and Hegel saw their work as contributions to what they considered metaphysics proper. Yet what they meant by this, I argue, can only be understood by taking into account their own conception of metaphysics. Starting from Kant’s implicit distinction between general metaphysics and special metaphysics in the Critique of Pure Reason, I argue that Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel engaged in the investigation that used to be carried out in general metaphysics. Focusing on the notion of a system of pure reason intimated in the Critique of Pure Reason, I show, moreover, that Kant’s successors, while misinterpreting the Kantian distinction between critique and system, elaborated a method that made it possible to produce a complete system of pure reason, albeit one that differed from the system Kant had in mind. Keywords : Fichte, german idealism, Hegel, Kant, metaphysics, system. (shrink)

At the start of the 21st century, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) seems to have great potential for innovating business practices with a positive impact on People, Planet and Profit. In this article the differences between the management systems approach of the nineties, and Corporate Social Responsibility are analysed.An analysis is structured around three business principles that are relevant for CSR and management systems: (1) doing things right the first time, (2) doing the right things, and (3) continuous improvement and innovation. (...) Basically CSR is focussing on the second principle, and management systems focus on the first. However, CSR is very likely to build on the management systems as well.From a CSR point of view, the existing generation of management systems with their focus on rational control (= doing things right) can only be of limited use in the development of CSR. However, the preventive rationalities of management systems are important. Values and the principle doing the right things is extremely relevant for CSR. This goes far beyond the present generation of ISO type management systems; opportunities stem from building on TQM approaches like the EFQM Business Excellence model. Continuous improvement and innovation is a permanent challenge underlying the two other business principles, and requires both individual and organisational learning processes. In the present generation of management systems, continuous improvement mainly addresses rational prevention, barely the value aspects of business.For the further development and implementation of CSR, each of the three business management principles are vital. There is a need for a new generation of management systems that addresses the values at stake in strategic decision-making, both at company level and in the behaviour of individuals, while the rationalities of prevention and anticipation are still relevant. In both directions more emphasis for continuous learning and innovation will be needed.CSR is likely to trigger the development of management systems in the directions mentioned. This will support companies to be credible and transparent in improving the performance with respect to people, planet and profit. (shrink)

This paper presents a theory of the syntactic aspects of human sentence production. An important characteristic of unprepared speech is that overt pronunciation of a sentence can be initiated before the speaker has completely worked out the meaning content he or she is going to express in that sentence. Apparently, the speaker is able to build up a syntactically coherent utterance out of a series of syntactic fragments each rendering a new part of the meaning content. This incremental, left‐to‐right mode (...) of sentence production is the central capability of the proposed Incremental Procedural Grammar (IPG). Certain other properties of spontaneous speech, as derivable from speech errors, hesitations, self‐repairs, and language pathology, are accounted for as well.The psychological plausibility thus gained by the grammar appears compatible with a satisfactory level of linguistic plausibility in that sentences receive structural descriptions which are in line with current theories of grammar. More importantly, an explanation for the existence of configurational conditions on transformations and other linguistics rules is proposed.The basic design feature of IPG which gives rise to these psychologically and linguistically desirable properties, is the “Procedures + Stack” concept. Sentences are built not by a central constructing agency which overlooks the whole process but by a team of syntactic procedures (modules) which work—in parallel—on small parts of the sentence, have only a limited overview, and whose sole communication channel is a stack.IPG covers object complement constructions, interrogatives, and word order in main and subordinate clauses. It handles unbounded dependencies, crossserial dependencies and coordination phenomena such as gapping and conjunction reduction. It is also capable of generating self‐repairs and elliptical answers to questions. IPG has been implemented as an incremental Dutch sentence generator written in LISP. (shrink)

"Bartley and Radnitzky have done the philosophy of knowledge a tremendous service. Scholars now have a superb and up-to-date presentation of the fundamental ideas of evolutionary epistemology." --Philosophical Books.

Despite hundreds of definitions, no consensus exists on a definition of life or on the closely related and problematic definitions of the organism and death. These problems retard practical and theoretical development in, for example, exobiology, artificial life, biology and evolution. This paper suggests improving this situation by basing definitions on a theory of a generalized particle hierarchy. This theory uses the common denominator of the “operator” for a unified ranking of both particles and organisms, from elementary particles to animals (...) with brains. Accordingly, this ranking is called “the operator hierarchy”. This hierarchy allows life to be defined as: matter with the configuration of an operator, and that possesses a complexity equal to, or even higher than the cellular operator. Living is then synonymous with the dynamics of such operators and the word organism refers to a select group of operators that fit the definition of life. The minimum condition defining an organism is its existence as an operator, construction thus being more essential than metabolism, growth or reproduction. In the operator hierarchy, every organism is associated with a specific closure, for example, the nucleus in eukaryotes. This allows death to be defined as: the state in which an organism has lost its closure following irreversible deterioration of its organization. The generality of the operator hierarchy also offers a context to discuss “life as we do not know it”. The paper ends with testing the definition’s practical value with a range of examples. (shrink)

Fast moving classical variables can generate quantum mechanical behavior. We demonstrate how this can happen in a model. The key point is that in classically evolving systems one can still define a conserved quantum energy. For the fast variables, the energy levels are far separated, such that one may assume these variables to stay in their ground state. This forces them to be entangled, so that, consequently, the slow variables are entangled as well. The fast variables could be the vacuum (...) fluctuations caused by unknown super heavy particles. The emerging quantum effects in the light particles are expressed by a Hamiltonian that can have almost any form. The entire system is ontological, and yet allows one to generate interference effects in computer models. This seemed to lead to an inexplicable paradox, which is now resolved: exactly what happens in our models if we run a quantum interference experiment in a classical computer is explained. The restriction that very fast variables stay predominantly in their ground state appears to be due to smearing of the physical states in the time direction, preventing their direct detection. Discussions are added of the emergence of quantum mechanics, and the ontology of an EPR/Bell Gedanken experiment. (shrink)

This paper elaborates on conceptual, empirical and practical arguments why corporations need to focus on their social dimensions, in order to further enhance organizational performance. The paper starts with an introduction on the general trend towards inclusiveness and connectedness. It then elaborates on the phase-wise development of cultures and organizational structures. Managing corporate improvement by building cultures of trust is the central focus of this contribution. By showing the cultural dimensions of Great Places to Work and their workplace practices, worthwhile (...) experiences leading to organizational improvement and superior financial performance are demonstrated. (shrink)

This paper elaborates on conceptual, empirical and practical arguments why corporations need to focus on their social dimensions, in order to further enhance organizational performance. The paper starts with an introduction on the general trend towards inclusiveness and connectedness. It then elaborates on the phase-wise development of cultures and organizational structures. Managing corporate improvement by building cultures of trust is the central focus of this contribution. By showing the cultural dimensions of Great Places to Work and their workplace practices, worthwhile (...) experiences leading to organizational improvement and superior financial performance are demonstrated. (shrink)

Arif Ahmed has recently argued that causal decision theory is dynamically inconsistent and that we should therefore prefer evidential decision theory. However, the principal formulation of the evidential theory, Richard Jeffrey’s Logic of Decision, has a mixed record of its own when it comes to evaluating plans consistently across time. This note probes that neglected record, establishing the dynamic consistency of evidential decision theory within a restricted class of problems but then illustrating how evidentialists can fall into sequential incoherence outside (...) of this class. Uncovering the evidentialist’s own dynamic inconsistencies reveals, contra Ahmed, that sequential choice considerations do not significantly favor the evidentialist’s theory over the causalist’s. (shrink)

Women intimately interact with various medical technologies and prosthetic artifacts in the context of breast cancer. While extensive work has been done on the agency of technological artifacts and how they affect users’ perceptions and experiences, the agency of users is largely taken for granted hitherto. In this article, we explore the agency of four women who engage with breast cancer technologies and artifacts by analyzing their narrative accounts of such engagements. This empirical discussion is framed within the tradition of (...) science and technology studies, philosophy of technological mediation and phenomenology of embodied agency as ‘I can/not’. This approach leads to the conclusions that women’s technologically mediated agencies range from being restricted to extended, take place on different bodily levels, within complex temporal structures, and are determined by certain socio-cultural contexts. Furthermore, it reveals that such agency shaping does not imply a one-way conditioning relationship between technologies and users, but rather involves a reciprocal relationship in which both subject and object are co-constituted. We therefore suggest that the ‘material turn’ in philosophy of technology also needs to take into account technologically mediated, material human beings in order to gain a better understanding of human existence. (shrink)

Gelfand quantales are complete unital quantales with an involution, *, satisfying the property that for any element a, if a b a for all b, then a a* a = a. A Hilbert-style axiom system is given for a propositional logic, called Gelfand Logic, which is sound and complete with respect to Gelfand quantales. A Kripke semantics is presented for which the soundness and completeness of Gelfand logic is shown. The completeness theorem relies on a Stone style representation theorem for (...) complete lattices. A Rasiowa/Sikorski style semantic tableau system is also presented with the property that if all branches of a tableau are closed, then the formula in question is a theorem of Gelfand Logic. An open branch in a completed tableaux guarantees the existence of an Kripke model in which the formula is not valid; hence it is not a theorem of Gelfand Logic. (shrink)

This paper notes the apparent ineffectiveness of the critical response to competence-based education and training (CBET) and suggests that this results from a failure to correctly isolate CBET's unique, identifying features. It is argued that the prevailing tendency to identify CBET with ‘competence’ is fundamentally mistaken and that the competence approach is more properly characterised in terms of its philosophically naïve methodological strategy. It is suggested that this strategy is based upon untenable assumptions relating to the semantic status of statements (...) of outcome and the epistemological and ontological constructs to which such statements are intended to correspond. (shrink)

It has become widely recognized that religiousness has a predictable pattern of small associations with Big Five personality dimensions, and has some intersections with cultural psychology. But just how large are those culture-religiosity intersections, and are there additional associations with personality when one extends beyond the restricted spectrum represented by Big Five traits? Moreover, do the answers to these questions depend on how religiousness is defined and measured? I argue that, both conceptually and empirically, religiousness itself meets the criteria for (...) a personality dimension (including stability, heritability, and other grounds), and is simultaneously for the most part a cultural phenomenon reflecting often widely shared sets of beliefs, values, worldviews, and norms. The patterns of modest associations with other personality dimensions, from the Big Five and beyond, are consistent with both arguments. A distributive model of culture, under which culture is aggregated personalities (and especially mindsets) helps make sense of these relations. Tradition-oriented religiousness tends to have a prominent position in enduring-order (as contrasted with evolving-order) cultures, which helps account for its occasional expressions in political religion. In contrast, mystical spirituality is more prone to manifest as a sub-cultural phenomenon peripheral to mainstream culture. But for either conception—religiousness or spirituality—the same personality-and-culture propositions appear to hold. Nonetheless, religiousness seems not totally reducible to a variable for personality or cultural psychology, and considerations are introduced regarding what that irreducible element is most likely to be. (shrink)

Current research findings on metaphor in language and thought may be interpreted as producing a paradox of metaphor; that is, most metaphor is not processed metaphorically by a cross-domain mapping involving some form of comparison. This paradox can be resolved by attending to one crucial aspect of metaphor in communication: the question whether metaphor is used as deliberately metaphorical or not. It is likely that most deliberate metaphor is processed metaphorically (by comparison), as opposed to most nondeliberate metaphor, which may (...) be assumed to be typically not processed metaphorically (that is, by categorization). This resolves the paradox of metaphor because it suggests that all “metaphor in communication” (all deliberate metaphor) is processed metaphorically. Detailed comments are offered on the notion of metaphor deliberateness and on the nature of a three-dimensional model of metaphor in discourse involving metaphor in language, thought, and communication. (shrink)