The fact that the standard probabilistic calculus does not define probabilities for sentences with embedded conditionals is a fundamental problem for the probabilistic theory of conditionals. Several authors have explored ways to assign probabilities to such sentences, but those proposals have come under criticism for making counterintuitive predictions. This paper examines the source of the problematic predictions and proposes an amendment which corrects them in a principled way. The account brings intuitions about counterfactual conditionals to bear on the interpretation of (...) indicatives and relies on the notion of causal (in)dependence. (shrink)

Kant seems to have been the first to notice that there is something peculiar about the difference between right and left, but he failed to say exactly what the peculiarity is. His clearest account of the matter is in his inaugural lecture (see Bibliography at the end of the paper): We cannot describe [in general terms] the distinction in a given space between things which lie towards one quarter, and things which are turned towards the opposite quarter. Thus (...) if we take solids which are completely equal and similar but incongruent, such as the right and left hands . . . . although in every respect which admits of being stated in terms intelligible to the mind through a verbal description they can be substituted for one another, there is yet a diversity which makes it impossible for their boundaries to coincide. (shrink)

INTRODUCTION TO THE ARGUMENT OF 1768 Some ordinary facts about the world we live in can be readily explained by other ordinary facts. One can, for example, explain the fact that when we are facing north the sun rises on the right and ...

This book has appeared in the Italian Literature and Thought Series of Yale University Press, and not by chance the cover bears the green, white, and red of the Italian flag. The book is on political philosophy, although its subject matter is restricted to the role of culture. Finocchiaro investigates two Italian thinkers: the conservative Gaetano Mosca, author of The Ruling Class, and the communist Antonio Gramsci, founding father of the Italian Communist Party and author of the Prison Notebooks. While (...) Mosca is a classic source for the elitist school in political sociology, Gramsci is the originator of a cultural version of Marxism that proved to be immune to the intellectual criticism and economic failures that have rendered other versions obsolete. The point Finocchiaro makes is that Mosca and Gramsci belong to the same tradition of political theory, namely “democratic elitism” and that their differences are eventually far smaller than assumed. According to Finocchiaro, Gramsci is much less of a political revolutionary, and Mosca much closer to the political center and Gramsci and Mosca are closer to each other than commonly supposed. Besides, Finocchiaro’s interpretation also implies that “theoretically, intellectually, and conceptually they are much more radical than is ordinarily believed because democratic elitism represents an extremely distinctive orientation in political theory”. Hence Finocchiaro’s interpretation “also undermines the viability of the dichotomy between the Left and the Right,” which also explains the reference to what is “beyond right and left” in the title. (shrink)

Sidgwick's seminal textThe Methods of Ethicsleft off with an unresolved problem that Sidgwick referred to as the dualism of practical reason. The problem is that employing Sidgwick's methodology of rational intuitionism appears to show that there are reasons to favour both egoism and utilitarianism. Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer offer a solution in the form of an evolutionary debunking argument: the appeal of egoism is explainable in terms of evolutionary theory. I argue that like rational prudence, rational benevolence is (...) subject to debunking arguments and so problematic, but also – and more importantly – that debunking arguments are irrelevant in the debate over the dualism of practical reason on the view of reason and rational intuitionism that Lazari-Radek and Singer embrace. Either both egoism and utilitarianism are debunked, or neither are. If I am right, Sidgwick's dualism is left standing. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to synthesize as well as to analyze the conceptual evolution of 1860s Russian nihilism in general and its notion of negation in particular. The fictitious characters that traditionally have been informing the popular notion of “Russian nihilism” mainly refer to an antinihilistic genre. By analyzing nihilism also on the basis of primary sources, the antinihilistic notion of nihilism is nuanced, enabling a more comprehensive analysis of the movement’s different aspects. In some instances, Russian nihilism (...) has been taken out of context and portrayed as a monolith; its pursuit of “negation” interpreted literally. In this essay, a dialectical relation emerges, between affirmation and negation on the one hand as well as between the nihilist “children” and their idealist “fathers” on the other. Despite its radical stance, nihilism consists of a reconciliation of opposites. Although nihilists fought for autonomy, revolution and a new society, the movement was ironically stuck in a continuous negation of its inspirers and forerunners. (shrink)

This paper explores, analyzes, and investigates how the political ideologies of American citizens and their elected representatives interact with views put forth by corporate media to help shape various ideologies about environmental issues in contemporary America. I specifically enter into this area of exploration by focusing on one variable, the variable of religion. Therefore, in this paper I seek to help elucidate broad patterns and understandings of environmental issues in America as they have developed since the beginning of the modern (...) environmental movement, focusing especially on the role religion has and is playing in this process. The paper is driven by identifying two major groups in American society, Liberal/nurturant parent, and Conservative/strict father, and how the core values of each group influence their ideological approaches to religion, environmentalism, and politics. The investigation is undertaken in the larger context of worsening climate change, suggesting that the interplay of religious, political, and environmentalist ideology of the past few decades presages further ideological shifts in the coming decades about our changing biosphere. (shrink)

Except for the work of Hiralal Haldar published in 1927, Pucelle's book is the first systematic account of the influence of German idealism in England. On the flyleaf he quotes Muirhead's remark in his study of Coleridge that "the history in England of what at the present day is known as idealistic philosophy still remains to be written". The implication may seem somewhat unfair to Muirhead's own subsequent effort to fill the gap in The Platonic Tradition in Anglo-Saxon Philosophy. But (...) this is not the case. Muirhead characterized his own work as "studies" and made no attempt to write a complete history, whereas Pucelle gives a full account of the idealist "school" and even sketches in the related currents of thought in poetry and theology. Careful comparison reveals that he has tried as far as possible to avoid going over the ground that Muirhead had already covered. Thus he gives a full account of the work of Ferrier, where Muirhead was only interested in Ferrier's abortive struggle to understand Hegel; but when he comes to the Essays in Philosophical Criticism he is content simply to indicate their nature and the reason for their importance, and to refer his readers to Muirhead's full analysis. Even in the case of Bradley, who is treated at length by both authors, the two discussions are complementary in that Muirhead was concerned with the development of Bradley's thought while Pucelle treats it as a system. (shrink)

Brain–machine interfaces are systems that allow the control of a device such as a robot arm through a person’s brain activity; such devices can be used by disabled persons to enhance their life and improve their independence. This paper is an extended version of a work that aims at discriminating between left and right imagined hand movements using a support vector machine classifier to control a robot arm in order to help a person to find an object in (...) the environment. The main focus here is to search for the best features that describe efficiently the electroencephalogram data during such imagined gestures by comparing two feature extraction methods, namely the continuous wavelet transform and the empirical modal decomposition, combined with the principal component analysis that were fed through a linear and radial basis function kernel SVM classifier. The experimental results showed high performance achieving an average accuracy across all the subjects of 92.75% with an RBF kernel SVM classifier using CWT and PCA compared to 80.25% accuracy obtained with EMD and PCA. The proposed system has been implemented and tested using data collected from five male subjects and it enabled the control of the robot arm in the right and the left direction. (shrink)

A set of routine academic controversies has recently been fanned into a cause célèbre. I call the controversies 'routine' because they concern the design of curricula and syllabi, the regulation of campus life, and the recruitment of faculty and students. These are important but ordinary affairs for a college or university. They call for choices that arise from fundamental convictions on the purpose of education, the nature of knowledge, the firmness of standards, the value of community, and the mission of (...) the institution. So dealing with these routine affairs is routinely attended with controversy. What is new is that the public is watching closely as academics thrash through these controversies nowadays. At least some journalists and politicians are watching closely and talking loudly about what they see. These conflicts would be what they ought to be, occasions for self-examination and growth, if they were not absolutized by observers who have raised the stakes by raising their voices and simplifying the issues. (shrink)

Background and Objective: Understanding how trauma impacts the self-structure of individuals suffering from the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) symptoms is a complex matter and despite several attempts to explain the relationship between trauma and the “Self”, this issue still lacks clarity. Therefore, adopting a new theoretical perspective may help understand PTSD deeper and to shed light on the underlying psychophysiological mechanisms. Methods: In this study, we employed the “three-dimensional construct model of the experiential selfhood” where three major components of selfhood (...) (phenomenal first-person agency, embodiment, and reflection/narration) are related to three Operational Modules (OMs) of the self-referential brain network. These modules can be reliably estimated through operational synchrony analysis of the Electroencephalogram (EEG). Six individuals with PTSD symptoms and twenty-nine sex-, age- and demographic- (race, education, marital status) matched healthy controls underwent resting state EEG signal acquisition with the following estimation of the synchrony strength within every OM. Results: Our results indicate that subjects with PTSD symptoms had significantly stronger EEG operational synchrony within anterior and right posterior OMs as well as significantly weaker EEG operational synchrony within left posterior OM compared to healthy controls. Moreover, increased the functional integrity of the anterior OM was positively associated with hyperactivity symptoms, reduced synchrony of the left posterior OM was associated with greater avoidance, and increased right posterior OM integrity was positively correlated with intrusion and mood symptoms. Conclusion: The results are interpreted in light of the triad model of selfhood and its theoretical and clinical implications (including a new treatment approach) are discussed. (shrink)

Marxists should reconsider their usual attitude to universal human rights. On the Jewish Question did not reject the entire French Declaration of 1791. In 1843 Marx and Engels were close to Babouvism, the continuation of French rights. Nor was their view that the 1791 Declaration must be completed by economic and social rights; rather, their criticism concerned the reduction of universal rights to citizen rights because it left the state the final arbiter of justice, denying the ‘voice from below’. (...) The source of human rights cannot be the state or its hegemonic rule of law. The article concludes that a politics of human rights would return justice to individuals and create a counter-hegemony. (shrink)

Many of America's political debates stem from media-constructed opposition between the religious right and secular left. However, the contentious dialogue between two seemingly-contrasting camps is based upon assumptions and stereotypes, rather than facts: the Christian right misrepresents the left as a movement inspired by moral relativism, while the left erroneously frames the Christian right as theocratically-driven. Beyond Religious Right and Secular Left Rhetoric uncovers the actual differences between these groups, examining how both (...) movements have similar conceptual histories. By stressing their oft-ignored similarities, the book seeks to better inform partisans and the public at-large in order to move the debate beyond assumptions. (shrink)

The seven volumes of Nietzsche translated to Hebrew by Israel Eldad 91910-1996) in the 1960's and 1970's established him as a major Israeli scholar of Nietzsche. Not only was Eldad a brilliant translator, he was also an innovative commentator. His instructive reading of Nietzsche made a decisive contribution to the propogation of Nietzschean discourse in Israel. As one of the leaders of LEHI, the Hebrew underground against the British before the founding of the Sate of Israeli, Eldad was considered a (...) radical intellectual of the Israeli right and had a Messianic vision of the future of Israel. His outlook was influenced deeply by the Nietzschean Lebensphilosophie. In this article I will trace the role of Nietzsche in Eldad's political biography, Messianic philosophy and intellectual enterprise.Die von ihm in den 1960er und 1970er Jahren ins Hebräische übersetzten sieben Bände von Nietzsche haben Israel Eldad zu einem der wichtigsten israelischen Nietzscheforscher gemacht. Nicht nur als brillanter Übersetzer und innovativer Kommentator, sondern auch durch seine erhellende Nietzschelektüre leistete er einen entscheidenden Beitrag zur intensivierung des Nietzschediskurses in Israel. Als einer der führer der LEHI, des hebräischen Untergrundkampfes gegen die Briten vor der Gründung des israelischen Staates, wurde Eldad als ein radikaler Intellektueller der israelischen Rechten angeschen und hatte eine messianische Vision für die Zukunft Israels. Seine Sichtweise wurde von der Lebensphilosophie Nietzsches stark beeinflusst. In diesem Beitrag wird der Rolle Nietzsches in Eldads politischer Biographie, messiansischer Philosophie und intellektuellen Unternchmungen nachgegangen. (shrink)

Milton Friedman and Amartya Sen have a lot in common. Both are Nobel Prize-winning economists who venture beyond the more technical questions of positive economics to demonstrate the relevance of their expertise to philosophy and public policy. Their social and political philosophy, including normative theorizing from their work and the work of other economists, comprises arguably the most influential part of their corpus. Like most Americans, both Friedman and Sen are liberals, in the sense that they argue that social arrangements (...) should be assessed according to their tendency to further the liberty of individuals. In addition, both demonstrate the deep link between political and economic institutions, and articulate the ways in which an individual’s freedom (or lack thereof) in one sphere impacts her freedom in other spheres. -/- Despite these and other similarities, there is an immense partisan divide between the followers of their work in American politics (in particular). Friedman’s work is championed by so-called neo-liberals – a group that has come to dominate the political and economic right in the United States - providing the philosophical foundation for demands for limited government and free markets. Both critics and plaudits regard Friedman as the “intellectual architect” of the free-market policies of the Republican Party, from Ronald Reagan forward. Sen’s work, on the other hand, is frequently utilized to defend so-called progressive policies in the U.S. and abroad. Such policies, many argue, further the effective or substantive freedom of individuals (an idea associated with early socialist thought). This essay begins an overdue systematic analysis of their social and political philosophy, focusing on the central driving concept for both theorists: the idea of freedom. With this study in hand, I recommend a pragmatic, pluralist understanding of freedom in the United States and elsewhere. (shrink)