Nash is famous for many inventions, but it is less known that he, simultaneously with Marschak, also was the first to axiomatize expected utility for risk. In particular, these authors were the first to state the independence condition, a condition that should have been but was not stated by von Neumann and Morgenstern. Marschak’s paper resulted from interactions with several people at the Cowles Commission. We document unique letters and personal communications with Nash, Samuelson, Arrow, Dalkey, and others, making plausible (...) that Nash made his discovery independently from the others. (shrink)

Diagnostic tests allow better informed medical decisions when there is uncertainty about a patient’s health status and, therefore, about the desirability to undertake treatment. This paper studies the relation between the expected value of diagnostic information and a patient's risk aversion. We show that the ex ante value of diagnostic information increases with risk aversion for diseases with low prevalence, but decreases with risk aversion for diseases with high prevalence. On the other hand, the ex post value of diagnostic information (...) always increases with the patient's degree of risk aversion. (shrink)

Prospect theory is increasingly used to explain deviations from the traditional paradigm of rational agents. Empirical support for prospect theory comes mainly from laboratory experiments using student samples. It is obviously important to know whether and to what extent this support generalizes to more naturally occurring circumstances. This article explores this question and measures prospect theory for a sample of private bankers and fund managers. We obtained clear support for prospect theory. Our financial professionals behaved according to prospect theory and (...) violated expected utility maximization. They were risk averse for gains and risk seeking for losses and their utility was concave for gains and convex for losses. They were also averse to losses, but less so than commonly observed in laboratory studies and assumed in behavioral finance. A substantial minority focused on gains and largely ignored losses, behavior reminiscent of what caused the current financial crisis. (shrink)

This study offers a new and stimulating interpretation of Theophrastus' "De sensibus, a treatise unique in content and method, as it reports and criticizes the ...

The present study aimed to develop effective moral educational interventions based on social psychology by using stories of moral exemplars. We tested whether motivation to engage in voluntary service as a form of moral behavior was better promoted by attainable and relevant exemplars or by unattainable and irrelevant exemplars. First, experiment 1, conducted in a lab, showed that stories of attainable exemplars more effectively promoted voluntary service activity engagement among undergraduate students compared with stories of unattainable exemplars and non-moral stories. (...) Second, experiment 2, a middle school classroom-level experiment with a quasi-experimental design, demonstrated that peer exemplars, who are perceived to be attainable and relevant to students, better promoted service engagement compared with historic figures in moral education classes. (shrink)

The present study aimed to examine how to improve the effectiveness of moral exemplar-applied interventions based on the pillars of the Self-Determination Theory (SDT) framework, autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Past research has mainly focused on the relatedness and attainability of moral exemplars for predicting motivation outcomes. The data for this study consisted of synthesized data sets from previous studies examining the motivational impacts of distinct moral exemplars and intervention methods. The main syntheses for these data sets used Multilevel Modeling (MLM) (...) focusing on relatability, attainability, and intervention methods, corresponding to relatedness, competence, and autonomy in the SDT, respectively, as predictors. In general, there was a significant interaction effect between the attainability or relatability, and the intervention method. Autonomous instruction methods, which support autonomy, were demonstrated to boost motivational outcomes. Implications from this study support the employment of SDT to examine the use of moral exemplars in moral education and were consistent with previous exemplar studies. (shrink)

I explored the association between components constituting the basis for moral and optimal human functioning, i.e., moral reasoning, moral identity, empathy, and purpose, via network analysis. I employed factor scores instead of composite scores that most previous studies used for better accuracy in score estimation in this study. Then, I estimated the network structure among collected variables and centrality indicators. For additional information, the structure and indicators were compared between two groups, participants who engaged in civic activities highly versus lowly. (...) The results demonstrated significant intra- and inter-scale associations in the network. The network structure was invariant across the two groups. Despite the network invariance, I found that the global connectivity between and centrality indicators of examined factors were higher among the high civic engagement group in general. I discussed the implications of the findings in research on moral functioning based on moral psychology and virtue ethics. (shrink)

activity” has been considered to play a major role in the short-term maintenance of memories. Many studies since then have provided support for this view and greatly advanced our knowledge of the effects of stimulus type and modality on delay activity and its temporal dynamics. In humans, working memory has also been a subject of intense investigation using scalp and intracranial electroencephalography as well as magnetoencephalography, which provide estimates of local population activity. The published findings include reports of systematic changes (...) in signal amplitude during working memory in the theta, alpha, beta. (shrink)

The present study aims to examine the relationship between the cortical midline structures (CMS), which have been regarded to be associated with selfhood, and moral decision making processes at the neural level. Traditional moral psychological studies have suggested the role of moral self as the moderator of moral cognition, so activity of moral self would present at the neural level. The present study examined the interaction between the CMS and other moral-related regions by conducting psycho-physiological interaction analysis of functional images (...) acquired while 16 subjects were solving moral dilemmas. Furthermore, we performed Granger causality analysis to demonstrate the direction of influences between activities in the regions in moral decision-making. We first demonstrate there are significant positive interactions between two central CMS seed regions—i.e., the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) and posterior cingulate cortex (PCC)—and brain regions associated with moral functioning including the cerebellum, brainstem, midbrain, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, orbitofrontal cortex and anterior insula (AI); on the other hand, the posterior insula (PI) showed significant negative interaction with the seed regions. Second, several significant Granger causality was found from CMS to insula regions particularly under the moral-personal condition. Furthermore, significant dominant influence from the AI to PI was reported. Moral psychological implications of these findings are discussed. The present study demonstrated the significant interaction and influence between the CMS and morality-related regions while subject were solving moral dilemmas. Given that, activity in the CMS is significantly involved in human moral functioning. (shrink)

Though there is a wide and varied literature on ethical supererogation, there has been almost nothing written about its epistemic counterpart, despite an intuitive analogy between the two fields. This paper seeks to change this state of affairs. I will begin by showing that there are examples which intuitively feature epistemically supererogatory doxastic states. Next, I will present a positive theory of epistemic supererogation that can vindicate our intuitions in these examples, in an explanation that parallels a popular theory of (...) ethical supererogation. Roughly, I will argue that a specific type of epistemic virtue—the ability to creatively think up plausible hypotheses given a body of evidence—is not required of epistemic agents. Thus, certain exercises of this virtue can result in supererogatory doxastic states. In presenting this theory, I will also show how thinking about epistemic supererogation can provide us a new way forward in the debate about the uniqueness thesis for epistemic rationality. (shrink)

Our competitive, service-oriented societies are taking a toll on the late-modern individual. Rather than improving life, multitasking, "user-friendly" technology, and the culture of convenience are producing disorders that range from depression to attention deficit disorder to borderline personality disorder. Byung-Chul Han interprets the spreading malaise as an inability to manage negative experiences in an age characterized by excessive positivity and the universal availability of people and goods. Stress and exhaustion are not just personal experiences, but social and historical phenomena as (...) well. Denouncing a world in which every against-the-grain response can lead to further disempowerment, he draws on literature, philosophy, and the social and natural sciences to explore the stakes of sacrificing intermittent intellectual reflection for constant neural connection. (shrink)

Lorsque Socrate dit : " Connais-toi toi-même ", il veut que je me connaisse, non pas métaphysiquement, non pas dans mon essence, non pas dans ce qui est insaisissable, mais dans ce qui est saisissable ; il veut que je sache ce que je suis, ce que je veux et ce que je peux. La connaissance individualiste de moi-même comprend la double critique de ma volonté et de ma puissance.

Will a "Cultural Revolution" occur in the United States? What I mean is, will the American media employ political means of the type used during China's Cultural Revolution? Based on my understanding of the United States, the answer is yes.

Aristotle's Heirs explores the development of Peripatetic thought from Theophrastus and Strato to the work of the commentator Alexander of Aphrodisias. The book examines whether the internal dynamics of this philosophical school allowed for a unity of Peripatetic thought, or whether there was a fundamental tension between philosophical creativity and the notions of core teachings and canonisation. The book discusses the major philosophical preoccupations of the Peripatetics, interactions with Hellenistic schools of thought, and the shift in focus among Greek philosophers (...) in a changing political landscape. It is the first book of its kind to provide a survey of this important philosophical tradition. (shrink)

First analysis of the whole treatise On the sense by Theophrastus in the English language. Uses Aristotle's dialectic in its applied sense as analytical and heuristic tool to characterise the argumentative and polemical strategy on the Presocratic and Platonic views on perception and cognition.

This book begins with a survey of various readings of Locke as a materialist, as a substance dualist, and as a property dualist, and demonstrates that these inconsistent interpretations result from a general failure of modern commentators to notice the significance of Locke’s ‘mind-body nominalism’. By illuminating this largely overlooked aspect of Locke’s philosophy, this book reveals a common mistake of previous interpretations: that of treating what Locke conceives to be ‘nominal’ as real. The nominal symmetry that Locke posits between (...) mind and body is distinct from any form of metaphysical dualism, whether substance dualism or property dualism. It is a brand of naturalism, but does not insist that the material is ontologically more basic than the mental or that the former determines the latter. On this view, the material and the mental both relate solely to a certain set of functional roles, rather than to an intrinsic property that plays these roles. The term ‘matter’ is thus rendered vague, and materialism is conceived as a precariously grounded ontological doctrine. Elaborating on this interpretation of Locke’s Essay, this book examines the insightful readings of Locke developed by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thinkers such as Richard Burthogge, William Carroll, and Joseph Priestley. This book also seeks to clarify what Locke’s position would look like in a modern setting by noting some significant parallels with the ideas of leading contemporary philosophers such as Donald Davidson, David Lewis, and Colin McGinn. (shrink)

This book uncovers and explores the constant tension between the historical and the transcendental that lies at the heart of Michel Foucault's work. In the process, it also assesses the philosophical foundations of his thought by examining his theoretical borrowings from Kant, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, who each provided him with tools to critically rethink the status of the transcendental. Given Foucault's constant focus on the question of the possibility for knowledge, the author argues that his philosophical itinerary can be understood (...) as a series of attempts to historicize the transcendental. In so doing, he seeks to uncover a specific level that would identify these conditions without falling either into an excess of idealism or of materialism. The author concludes that, although this problem does unify Foucault's work and gives it its specifically philosophical dimension, none of the concepts successively provided manages to name these conditions without falling into the pitfalls that Foucault originally denounced as characteristic of the "anthropological sleep"--various forms of confusion between the historical and the transcendental. Although Foucault's work provides us with a highly illuminating analysis of the major problems of post-Kantian philosophies, ultimately it remains aporetic in that it also fails to overcome them. (shrink)

Sui Han geht von der Mehrdeutigkeit des Begriffs des Nichtseienden – die der von Aristoteles in einer berühmten Formulierung festgestellten Mehrdeutigkeit des Seienden teilweise, aber nicht völlig analog ist – und der „Aussageverflechtung von Sein und Nichtsein“ aus. Sie legt dar, dass bei Plotin mit Blick auf sämtliche Seinsebenen vom Einen-Guten bis hinab zur Materie in jeweils unterschiedlichem Sinn sowohl von deren Sein als auch von deren Nichtsein gesprochen werden kann. Diesem unterschiedlichen Sinn jeweils auf die Spur zu kommen, ist (...) das eigentliche Anliegen der Autorin. (shrink)

Rationality is intrapersonally permissive just in case there are multiple doxastic states that one agent may be rational in holding at a given time, given some body of evidence. One way for intrapersonal permissivism to be true is if there are epistemic supererogatory beliefs—beliefs that go beyond the call of epistemic duty. Despite this, there has been almost no discussion of epistemic supererogation in the permissivism literature. This paper shows that this is a mistake. It does this by arguing that (...) the most popular ways of responding to one of the major obstacles to any intrapersonally permissive all fall prey to the same problem. This problem is most naturally solved by positing a category of epistemically supererogatory belief. So intrapersonal epistemic permissivists should embrace epistemic supererogation. (shrink)

Some stories of moral exemplars motivate us to emulate their admirable attitudes and behaviors, but why do some exemplars motivate us more than others? We systematically studied how motivation to emulate is influenced by the similarity between a reader and an exemplar in social or cultural background (Relatability) and how personally costly or demanding the exemplar’s actions are (Attainability). Study 1 found that university students reported more inspiration and related feelings after reading true stories about the good deeds of a (...) recent fellow alum, compared to a famous moral exemplar from decades past. Study 2A developed a battery of short moral exemplar stories that more systematically varied Relatability and Attainability, along with a set of non-moral exemplar stories for comparison. Studies 2B and 2C examined the path from the story type to relatively low stakes altruism (donating to charity and intentions to volunteer) through perceived attainability and relatability, as well as elevation and pleasantness. Together, our studies suggest that it is primarily the relatability of the moral exemplars, not the attainability of their actions, that inspires more prosocial motivation, at least regarding acts that help others at a relatively low cost to oneself. (shrink)

The uniqueness thesis states that for any body of evidence and any proposition, there is at most one rational doxastic attitude that an epistemic agent can take toward that proposition. Permissivism is the denial of uniqueness. Perhaps the most popular form of permissivism is what I call the Epistemic Standard View, since it relies on the concept of epistemic standards. Roughly speaking, epistemic standards encode particular ways of responding to any possible body of evidence. Since different epistemic standards may rationalize (...) different doxastic states on the same body of evidence, this view gives us a form of permissivism if different agents can have different epistemic standards. Defenders of the ESV, however, have not paid sufficient attention to what it means to have a particular epistemic standard. I argue that any theory of epistemic standard possession must satisfy two criteria to adequately address the broader needs of the ESV. The first criterion is the normative criterion: a theory of standard-possession should explain why agents are rationally required to form beliefs in accordance with their own epistemic standard, rather than any other standard. The second criterion is the applicability criterion: a theory of standard-possession should rule that agents have the epistemic standards we intuitively think they have. I then argue that no extant theories of standard-possession can satisfy both these criteria. I conclude by diagnosing why these criteria are so hard to jointly satisfy. Defenders of the ESV are thus left with a serious obstacle to forming a complete and plausible version of their view. (shrink)

The question of whether humans represent grammatical knowledge as a binary condition on membership in a set of well-formed sentences, or as a probabilistic property has been the subject of debate among linguists, psychologists, and cognitive scientists for many decades. Acceptability judgments present a serious problem for both classical binary and probabilistic theories of grammaticality. These judgements are gradient in nature, and so cannot be directly accommodated in a binary formal grammar. However, it is also not possible to simply reduce (...) acceptability to probability. The acceptability of a sentence is not the same as the likelihood of its occurrence, which is, in part, determined by factors like sentence length and lexical frequency. In this paper, we present the results of a set of large-scale experiments using crowd-sourced acceptability judgments that demonstrate gradience to be a pervasive feature in acceptability judgments. We then show how one can predict acceptability judgments on the basis of probability by augmenting probabilistic language models with an acceptability measure. This is a function that normalizes probability values to eliminate the confounding factors of length and lexical frequency. We describe a sequence of modeling experiments with unsupervised language models drawn from state-of-the-art machine learning methods in natural language processing. Several of these models achieve very encouraging levels of accuracy in the acceptability prediction task, as measured by the correlation between the acceptability measure scores and mean human acceptability values. We consider the relevance of these results to the debate on the nature of grammatical competence, and we argue that they support the view that linguistic knowledge can be intrinsically probabilistic. (shrink)

In this paper, I examined whether evidence from the neuroscience of morality supports the standard models of phronesis, i.e., Jubilee and Aretai Centre Models. The standard models explain phronesis as a multifaceted construct based on interaction and coordination among functional components. I reviewed recent neuroscience studies focusing on brain networks associated with morality and their connectivity to examine the validity of the models. Simultaneously, I discussed whether the evidence helps the models address challenges, particularly those from the phronesis eliminativism. Neuroscientific (...) evidence supported the importance of brain networks, i.e., the default mode, salience, and central executive functioning networks, in moral functioning in general. The findings favorably supported the multifaceted and integrative nature of phronesis proposed by the standard models. Finally, I considered how the two models could explain the mechanisms of phronesis more integratively based on neuroscientific findings. At the end of this paper, with the evidence, I proposed several practical ideas to promote the cultivation of phronesis, e.g., the consideration of coordination among components for moral functioning and the use of moral exemplars. (shrink)

The belief in free will has been frequently challenged since Benjamin Libet published his famous experiment in 1983. Although Libet’s experiment is highly dependent upon subjective reports, no study has been conducted that focused on a first-person or introspective perspective of the task. We took a neurophenomenological approach in an N = 1 study providing reliable and valid measures of the first-person perspective in conjunction with brain dynamics. We found that a larger readiness potential is attributable to more frequent occurrences (...) of self-initiated movements during negative deflections of the slow cortical potentials . These negative deflections occur in parallel with an inner impulse reported by an expert meditator which may in turn lead to a voluntary act. We demonstrate in this proof-of-principle approach that the first-person perspective obtained by an expert meditator in conjunction with neural signal analysis can contribute to our understanding of the neural underpinnings of voluntary acts. (shrink)

In the Essay, Locke refers to the ordinary-sized natural things as ‘particular sorts of Substances’ (2.23), whereas the ‘three sorts of Substances’ (2.27) are more metaphysically laden sorts: God, finite spirits, and fundamental material particles. He posits the much-contested ‘substratum’ in each particular sort of substance but not any of the three sorts. It should also be noted that his list of the particular sorts includes ‘men’. In regard to this nobler sort, he refers to a further classification – viz., (...) ‘the Substance of spirit’ and ‘the Substance of the body’ – only in terms of their nominal essence. A naturalistic, nominalist approach is deeply entrenched in his account of the human-related sorts as well. In this chapter, I shall explore how Locke develops a theory of substance in the Essay that is less metaphysical, more naturalistic, and epistemically humbler than those of his rationalist contemporaries. (shrink)

Transparency is the order of the day. It is a term, a slogan, that dominates public discourse about corruption and freedom of information. Considered crucial to democracy, it touches our political and economic lives as well as our private lives. Anyone can obtain information about anything. Everything—and everyone—has become transparent: unveiled or exposed by the apparatuses that exert a kind of collective control over the post-capitalist world. Yet, transparency has a dark side that, ironically, has everything to do with a (...) lack of mystery, shadow, and nuance. Behind the apparent accessibility of knowledge lies the disappearance of privacy, homogenization, and the collapse of trust. The anxiety to accumulate ever more information does not necessarily produce more knowledge or faith. Technology creates the illusion of total containment and the constant monitoring of information, but what we lack is adequate interpretation of the information. In this manifesto, Byung-Chul Han denounces transparency as a false ideal, the strongest and most pernicious of our contemporary mythologies. (shrink)

What Heidegger means by “freedom” in Being and Time is somewhat mysterious: while the notion crops up repeatedly in the book, there is no dedicated section or study, and the concept is repeatedly connected to a new and opaque idea – that of the “choice to choose oneself.” Yet the specificity of Being and Time’s approach to freedom becomes apparent when the book is compared to other texts of the same period, in particular The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, The Fundamental (...) Concepts of Metaphysics, The Essence of Grounds, and The Essence of Freedom. Although there are some differences, the definition of freedom that can be found there identifies it with “existence” or “transcendence,” Dasein’s ek-static opening onto the world. Thus “being in the world must also be primordially bound up with or derived from the basic feature of Dasein’s existence, freedom… Dasein’s transcendence and freedom are identical! Freedom provides itself with intrinsic possibility: a being is, as free, necessarily in itself transcending” (GA 26: 238; Heidegger’s italics). Note the apodictic modality of the claim: it is not simply the case that Dasein, as transcending, is free. Anything that has the structure of being in the world must be free: freedom is co-extensive with Dasein. Yet Dasein is often pictured in Being and Time as anything but free: it “ensnares itself” (268), is “lost” (264), “alienated” (178), and needs to be “liberated” (264, 303). Thus comparison between Being and Time and other texts on freedom yields an important paradox: although by definition it transcends toward the world, the Dasein of Division I is deprived of freedom. It must be free, and yet phenomenological analysis shows that it is not free. To understand the specific meaning of freedom in Being and Time, one has to square this circle. (shrink)

In this empirical study, we present two new models that are corporate ethics based. The first model numerically quantifies the corporate value index (CV-Index) based on a set of predefined parameters and the second model estimates the market-to-book values of equity in relation to the CV-Index as well as other parameters. These models were applied to Canadian companies listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX). Through our analysis, we found statistically significant evidence that corporate values (CV-Index) positively correlated with firm (...) performance. The results are even more significant for firms with low market-to-book values. Our empirical findings suggest that corporate ethics is vital for management, employees, shareholders, stakeholders, and the community at large. In addition, we have tested and confirmed five hypotheses that are used to illustrate corporate ethics behavior and performance. (shrink)

Aristotle's Heirs explores the development of Peripatetic thought from Theophrastus and Strato to the work of the commentator Alexander of Aphrodisias. The book examines whether the internal dynamics of this philosophical school allowed for a unity of Peripatetic thought, or whether there was a fundamental tension between philosophical creativity and the notions of core teachings and canonisation. The book discusses the major philosophical preoccupations of the Peripatetics, interactions with Hellenistic schools of thought, and the shift in focus among Greek philosophers (...) in a changing political landscape. It is the first book of its kind to provide a survey of this important philosophical tradition. (shrink)

Panpsychism claims that the vast majority of conscious subjects in our world are inanimate and physical. Ensemble explanations account for striking phenomena by placing them within an ensemble of outcomes, most of which are not striking. This paper develops an explanatory problem for panpsychism: panpsychism renders two appealing ensemble explanations unsatisfactory. Specifically, we argue that panpsychism renders unsatisfactory the multiverse explanation of why a universe supports life and the many-planets explanation of why a planet supports life.

This essay develops a new conceptual framework of science and engineering ethics education based on virtue ethics and positive psychology. Virtue ethicists and positive psychologists have argued that current rule-based moral philosophy, psychology, and education cannot effectively promote students’ moral motivation for actual moral behavior and may even lead to negative outcomes, such as moral schizophrenia. They have suggested that their own theoretical framework of virtue ethics and positive psychology can contribute to the effective promotion of motivation for self-improvement by (...) connecting the notion of morality and eudaimonic happiness. Thus this essay attempts to apply virtue ethics and positive psychology to science and engineering ethics education and to develop a new conceptual framework for more effective education. In addition to the conceptual-level work, this essay suggests two possible educational methods: moral modeling and involvement in actual moral activity in science and engineering ethics classes, based on the conceptual framework. (shrink)