This article will rework the classical question ‘Can a machine think?’ into a more specific problem: ‘Can a machine think anything new?’ It will consider traditional computational tasks such as prediction and decision-making, so as to investigate whether the instrumentality of these operations can be understood in terms of the creation of novel thought. By addressing philosophical and technoscientific attempts to mechanise thought on the one hand, and the philosophical and cultural critique of these attempts on the other, I will (...) argue that computation’s epistemic productions should be assessed vis-à-vis the logico-mathematical specificity of formal axiomatic systems. Such an assessment requires us to conceive automated modes of thought in such a way as to supersede the hope that machines might replicate human cognitive faculties, and to thereby acknowledge a form of onto-epistemological autonomy in automated ‘thinking’ processes. This involves moving beyond the view that machines might merely simulate humans. Machine thought should be seen as dramatically alien to human thought, and to the dimension of lived experience upon which the latter is predicated. Having stepped outside the simulative paradigm, the question ‘Can a machine think anything new?’ can then be reformulated. One should ask whether novel behaviour in computing might come not from the breaking of mechanical rules, but from following them: from doing what computers do already, and not what we might think they should be doing if we wanted them to imitate us. (shrink)

This volume continues the examination of issues of life and death which F.M. Kamm began in 'Morality, Mortality, ' Volume I (1993). Kamm continues her development of a non-consequentialist ethical theory and its application to practical ethical problems.

"Neuroscience and Philosophy" begins with an excerpt from "Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience," in which Maxwell Bennett and Peter Hacker question the ...

There is a perplexing transition in Dr. Reza Davari's thought, when he problematizes the relation between Iranian and Western history/cultures, on which this paper is focusing. The interperative objective is to clarify this transition on the basis of the implicit relation between the two most fundamental concepts in his earlier and later thought respectively westernization and underdevelopment. Although, by this transition, the level of discussion transits from an ontologico-philosophical to an intellectualist one. So, there are two different levels of problematization (...) in his thought which differ deeply. Therefore, we are not just dealing with the substitution of fundamental concepts, but with different problematizations and different levels of discussion. Obviously, there will be new problems arising which are not just concerning with the justification of the transition but with the problematization of westernization itself. Finally, it's been concluded that in order to clarify these new problems, we should step back to the level of philosophical discussion, and first of all to the clarification of the I-not-I relation which has been neglected thoroughly in the whole project. (shrink)

Scholars who deal with Heidegger’s philosophy often remark the scarcity of his references to phenomenological reduction as a means to grant access to the point of view of the being-in-the-world of the Dasein, the central theme of his early philosophy. Also the role of phenomenological reduction in Heidegger’s philosophy makes problem, as he criticizes Husserl for making of reduction a mere tool to reveal a pure, timeless and extra-worldly conscience – an untenable claim, according to Heidegger, for Dasein’s being-in-the-world, as (...) his most original way of being, can never be put out of play by any reduction. The role of transcendental reduction in Heidegger’s phenomenology is the theme of the present paper. (shrink)

Descartes' methodical doubt is being criticized by naïve realists and others who don't find doubt as a good starting point for metaphysical thought, however, the philosophical achievements of his method have been absorbed in all later philosophies. The objective of this paper is to demonstrate how an inevitable question concerning the foundation of Descartes' mathesis universalis, which led him to investigate this foundation by applying this very method in Metaphysics, has finally enabled him to discover his most important philosophical principle, (...) i.e., the necessary relation between being and reason in the identity of the "I". To demonstrate this, after summarizing the fundamental ideas of mathesis uneversalis, and showing the inner necessity of introducing the methodical doubt to fortify these ideas, the decisive role of metaphysical doubt as the third step of the methodical doubt, and malicious demon as its second phase would be highighted. It would also become clear that the metaphysical doubt has a great importance as a turning point from different aspects: as a knot that ties mathesis universalis with its underlying Metaphysics; as a bridge from within the psychological "I" to the metaphysical "I". (shrink)

The wish to extend the human lifespan has a long tradition in many cultures. Optimistic views of the possibility of achieving this goal through the latest developments in medicine feature increasingly in serious scientific and philosophical discussion. The authors of this paper argue that research with the explicit aim of extending the human lifespan is both undesirable and morally unacceptable. They present three serious objections, relating to justice, the community and the meaning of life.

_Background:_ Cognitive biases play an important role in the formation and maintenance of delusions. These biases are indicators of a weak reflective mind, or reduced engaging in reflective and deliberate reasoning. In three experiments, we tested whether a bias to accept non-sense statements as profound, treat metaphorical statements as literal, and suppress intuitive responses is related to psychotic-like experiences. _Methods:_ We tested deliberate reasoning and psychotic-like experiences in the general population and in patients with a former psychotic episode. Deliberate reasoning (...) was assessed with the bullshit receptivity scale, the ontological confabulation scale and the cognitive reflection test (CRT). We also measured algorithmic performance with the Berlin numeracy test and the wordsum test. Psychotic-like experiences were measured with the Community Assessment of Psychic Experience (CAPE-42) scale. _Results:_ Psychotic-like experiences were positively correlated with a larger receptivity toward bullshit, more ontological confabulations, and also a lower score on the CRT but not with algorithmic task performance. In the patient group higher psychotic-like experiences significantly correlated with higher bullshit receptivity. _Conclusion:_ Reduced deliberate reasoning may contribute to the formation of delusions, and be a general thinking bias largely independent of a person's general intelligence. Acceptance of bullshit may be facilitated the more positive symptoms a patient has, contributing to the maintenance of the delusions. (shrink)

Objective: To assess the opinions and practice patterns of obstetrician-gynaecologists on acceptance and use of free drug samples and other incentive items from pharmaceutical representatives.Methods: A questionnaire was mailed in March 2003 to 397 members of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists who participate in the Collaborative Ambulatory Research Network.Results: The response rate was 55%. Most respondents thought it proper to accept drug samples , an informational lunch , an anatomical model or a well-paid consultantship from pharmaceutical representatives. A (...) third of the respondents thought that their own decision to prescribe a drug would probably be influenced by accepting drug samples. Respondents were more likely to think the average doctor’s prescribing would be influenced by acceptance of the items than theirs would be . Respondents who distributed drug samples to patients indicated doing so because of patients’ financial need and for their convenience and less so as a result of knowledge of the efficacy of the sample product . A third of respondents agreed that interactions with industry should be more strictly regulated.Conclusion: Obstetrician-gynaecologists largely indicated that they would act in accordance with what they think is proper regarding accepting incentive items from pharmaceutical representatives. Although accepting free drug samples was considered to be appropriate more often than any other item, samples were most commonly judged to be influential on prescribing practices. The widely accepted practice of receiving and distributing free drug samples needs to be examined more carefully. (shrink)

Legendary director, actor, author, and provocateur Werner Herzog has incalculably influenced contemporary cinema for decades. This essay collection by professional philosophers and film theorists from around the globe offers a diversity of perspectives on how the thinking behind the camera is revealed in the action Herzog captures in front of it.

L’émergence d’un capitalisme financier et décentralisé questionne le schéma traditionnel de la lutte de classes tout en brouillant les traits d’un « ennemi » commun contre lequel il faudrait lutter. Le mouvement devient ainsi un atout essentiel de l’économie tandis que se fait jour un peu partout un enfermement progressif des populations, enfermement qui se traduit aussi par une vraie difficulté à concevoir des modes de vie alternatifs au niveau de l’imaginaire. Nous présentons ainsi quelques réflexions sur les avantage stratégiques (...) existants à fuir à travers des exemples philosophiques, sociologiques et contemporains, dans l’objectif de tracer les contours théoriques d’un contre-pouvoir efficace au néolibéralisme. (shrink)

Based on detailed descriptions of human–machine ensembles, this article explores how humans and machines work together to see specific things and unsee others, and how they come to co-configure one another. For seeing is not an automated function; whether one is a human or a machine, vision is gradually enskilled and mutually co-constituted. The analysis intersects three different ways of human–machine seeing to shed further light on the workings of each one: an airport, where facial recognition algorithms collaborate with border (...) guards to grant passage to particular travellers and not to others; a luggage-scanning system, where potential security threats are assessed by a complex of X-rays and human intro-spection; and a hospital operating room, where human–machinic surgical robots find their way and operate on the insides of human bodies, touching only by seeing. In these examples, human and machine ways of seeing merge together, seeing in particular apparatuses of material, political, organisational, economic and fleshy components. The article analyses the practical work of human–machinic collaboration and explores how the different material and social constituents, not necessarily always working from the same agenda, come to configure what can be seen and sensed and what cannot. (shrink)

Formulation of the problem. The clock of antiquity "to our era" is full of values in the occurrence of the pre-Ukrainian religious culture. Therefore, there is a need to manifest the foundations of the Divine. Analysis of recent research and publications. Ukrainian religious scholars, while actualizing the national scientific heritage, see the continuation of their culture in the cultures of other peoples.The purpose of this publication is seen in the search for possible guidelines for determining the essence of the Divine (...) as a certain experiencing equilibrium in human condition. (shrink)

"M. F. Simone Roberts's A Poetics of Being-Two is animated by a lively and engaging voice, drawing readers in with a sense of serious purpose working (delightfully) in tandem with a sense of humor. Roberts's aesthetics and her close readings of Yves Bonnefoy, St-John Perse, and Jorie Graham clearly demonstrate the literary effectiveness of Irigarayan sexual difference as an analytic trope, even as they emphasize the philosophical and political possibilities sexual difference opens up for feminism, environmentalism, and all levels of (...) contemporary cultural critique and activism."—Gail M. Schwab, Hofstra University -/- In An Ethics of Sexual Difference, Irigaray calls for a new poetics in the sense of both art and life. Rather than a critique from within philosophy, A Poetics of Being-Two tests Irigaray's ethics by extending it to other sites of cultural production. Where Irigaray's method finds stirrings and repressions of sexual difference in philosophy, this project explores that tension in poetics. Building from Irigaray's ethics, the book describes a poetics of being-two as concerns gendered subjectivity in literary poetics and then traces the on-going emergence of a poetics of being-two in the post-symbolist poetic tradition. Irigaray scholars will be interested in the sustained interpolation of Irigaray's ethical concepts as principles for a critical aesthetics and in their hermeneutic application in reading a literary tradition. Readers in comparative literature will find the first sustained feminist engagements with the major French poets Bonnefoy and Perse and an elucidation of their influence on the Pulitzer Prize winning poet Jorie Graham. (shrink)

Scholars offer several options for Matthew’s value of the leper’s story in his narrative that range from revealing Jesus’ attributes of compassion and sympathy, manifesting God’s empire, to portraying Jesus’ function as a temple. Although these suggestions aptly portray Matthew’s rhetorical use of the leper’s healing in his narrative to address societal concerns of his time, for lack of referring to the social setting of the narrative, they do not capture the holistic healthcare system embodied by Jesus in Matthew’s narrative (...) that portrays Jesus as a superior healer to the rest of the other healers in the Roman Empire. The findings of the research for this article establish the argument that employing ethnomedical anthropology as a lens to read the leper’s healing narrative in Matthew 8:1–4 in the context of Matthew’s social setting reveals Matthew’s ideology for a transcendent and immanent Christology. The aim of the article is to demonstrate the effectiveness of medical anthropological theory in explaining the dynamics of health and healing reflected in biblical texts.Contributions: This article contributes to the interdisciplinary approach to the study of religion by employing a ethnomedical anthropological perspective to read the leper’s healing in Matthew 8.1–4 in reference to the first century CE health systems in the Roman Empire. This approach procured that Matthew’s immanent and transcendent perspectives of Christology is crucial in demonstrating the text’s function in constructing and sustaining the identity of Matthew’s community in antiquity. (shrink)

Malthus did not leave us with a systematic treatment of colonization, but from remarks scattered throughout his publications and correspondence it is possible to assemble a fairly coherent account of his views on the advantages and disadvantages of colonies, and on the reasons why some have failed and others succeeded. Included in these scattered remarks are some comparisons between his own views on colonies and those of Adam Smith. The question of the relationship between Malthus and Adam Smith is a (...) rather complex and subtle one, and cannot be given the full consideration it deserves in one short paper. But, as a general summary, it can be said that Malthus had a high regard for Smith and considered himself a follower and disciple of Smith, by contrast with Ricardo, James Mill, and McCulloch etc., whom he considered as exponents of a ‘New System of Political Economy”. His own Principles of Political Economy was conceived as a collection of ‘tracts or essays”, not as a new systematic treatise replacing the Wealth of Nations, Joseph Gamier in his article ‘Malthus” in the Dictionnaire de l'Economie Politique, 1852, saw that the title of the Principles was in fact a misnomer: ‘Malgré son titre, le livre sur les Principes n'est point un traité complet, mais seulement une collection de dissertations.” In what was probably intended as a criticism of Ricardo's Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, 1817, Malthus stated that the ‘present period … seems to be unpropitious to the publication of a new systematic treatise on political economy”, and, referring to Smith's work, stated that ‘the treatise which we already possess is still of the very highest value”. Nevertheless, despite professing his affiliation, Malthus did not hesitate to criticize Smith when he disagreed with him. He recognized that the Wealth of Nations contained ‘controverted points” and that it would require some ‘additions … which the more advanced stage of the science has rendered necessary”. (shrink)

According to the ‘fact-plus-value’ model of pathology propounded by K. W. M. Fulford, ‘disease’ is a value term that ought to reflect a ‘balance of values’ stemming from patients and doctors and other ‘stakeholders’ in medical nosology. In the present article I take issue with his linguistic-analytical arguments for why pathological status must be relative to such a kind of medico-ethical normativity. Fulford is right to point out that Boorse and other naturalists are compelled to utilize evaluative terminology when they (...) characterize the nature of diseases and biological dysfunctions. But the relevant ‘biofunctional judgements’ are no less factual and empirical for that. While it is indeed evaluative to say that biological dysfunctions involve failures to execute naturally selected functions, such judgments are not bound to entail anything about what is good or bad for us, and what should be treated or not. In the last part of the paper I ruminate briefly on the relationship between ‘biological evaluationism’, on my construal, and descriptions of ‘causal biology’. As I note in my conclusion, a strict bioevaluative concept of disease can be valid for every species on earth, and thus be of particular usefulness in general biological contexts. (shrink)

The purpose of this article should become plain during the reading of it, but perhaps some prior explanation is needed. Almost from the beginning of my study of the paṭiccasamuppāda I have had the notion that it could not have come into existence in the form the usual twelvefold formulation takes. For reasons which I try to make clear this twelvefold formulation is not a satisfactory statement of what it is supposed to explain, namely the reasons for each individual's continued (...) rebirths. I feel - and sadly I have to emphasize, before someone else does it for me, that in the final analysis I am relying more or less on intuition for my attitude towards the twelvefold formulation - that if one person alone had been responsible for the usually referred to formulation, and especially if that one person had been the Buddha, then those anomalies that now prevail would never have existed. (shrink)

Taylor, R. A tribute.--Epistemology: Cornman, J. W. Chisholm on sensing and perceiving. Ross, J. F. Testimonial evidence. Lehrer, K. Reason and consistency. Keim, R. Epistemic values and epistemic viewpoints. Hanen, M. Confirmation, explanation, and acceptance. Canfield, J. V. "I know that I am in pain" is senseless. Steel, T. J. Knowledge and the self-presenting.--Metaphysics: Cartwright, R. Scattered objects. Duggan, T. J. Hume on causation. Arnaud, R. B. Brentanist relations. Johnson, M. L., Jr. Events as recurrables.--Ethics: Stevenson, J. T. On doxastic (...) responsibility. Feldman, F. World utilitarianism. Lamb, J. W. Some definitions for the theory of rules. Donnelly, J. Suicide: some epistemological considerations. (shrink)

Philosophy of science is the organized expression of a growing intent among philosophers and scientists to clarify, perhaps unify, the programs, methods and results of the disciplines of philosophy and of science. The examination of fundamental concepts and presuppositions in the light of the positive results of science, systematic doubt of the positive results, and a thorough-going analysis and critique of logic and of language, are typical projects for this joint effort. It is not necessary to be committed to a (...) belief that science and philosophy are or should be one, or else that “never the twain shall meet.” If anything, there is to be expected a wholesome regard for the value of established science in furnishing a foil for philosophy and a check on its old extravagances. This does not mean that even the best-established science may not be subject to most devastating criticism by analysis of its foundations. In fact, despairing of the philosophy of the schools, science has done it largely for itself. The theories of gravitation, atomicity, electro-magnetism, evolution, relativity and quanta have all arisen through drastic revisions of complacent fundamental “truths.”. (shrink)

Uncertainty replaces the conviction that rationality may be founded, ultimately. Comments on and exemplified by Zygmunt Bauman's "Intimations of postmodernity" (1992), the Quality-of-life discussion (Nussbaum & Senn (eds.) 1993) and "reflexive modernization" (Ulrich Beck, 1994). Uncertainty as a principle leads to the "imperative of responsibility" (Hans Jonas, 1984).

This book examines the ideology of elite lawyers and judges from the Gilded Age through the New Deal. Between 1866 and 1937, a coherent outlook shaped the way the American bar understood the sources of law, the role of the courts, and the relationship between law and the larger society. William M. Wiecek explores this outlook--often called "legal orthodoxy" or "classical legal thought"--which assumed that law was apolitical, determinate, objective, and neutral. American classical legal thought was forged in the heat (...) of the social crises that punctuated the late nineteenth century. Fearing labor unions, immigrants, and working people generally, American elites, including those on the bench and bar, sought ways to repress disorder and prevent political majorities from using democratic processes to redistribute wealth and power. Classical legal thought provided a rationale that assured the legitimacy of the extant distribution of society's resources. It enabled the legal suppression of unions and the subordination of workers to management's authority. As the twentieth-century U.S. economy grew in complexity, the antiregulatory, individualistic bias of classical legal thought became more and more distanced from reality. Brittle and dogmatic, legal ideology lost legitimacy in the eyes of both laypeople and ever-larger segments of the bar. It was at last abandoned in the "constitutional revolution of 1937", but--as Wiecek argues in this detailed analysis--nothing has arisen since to replace it as an explanation of what law is and why courts have such broad power in a democratic society. (shrink)

There is a long-standing claim within feminist literature that women speak with a 'different voice' (Gilligan 1982), that it is both possible and desirable to have an ethics from the standpoint of women (Noddings 1990), that the standpoint of women is a better starting point for adequate knowledge of the world (Harding 1993). This claim is central to ecofeminist politics, that women have a particular perspective on the relationship between humanity and nature and have a moral/political calling to reweave the (...) world (Diamond and Orenstein 1990) or heal the wounds of an ecologically destructive social order (Plant 1989). In this essay I will not be making the claim that women per se have a superior vision or a higher moral authority, but that an ethics that does not take account of the gendered nature of society is doomed to failure as it will confront neither the material structure of human society or the way in which that structure impacts on the materiality of the relationship between humanity and nature. (shrink)