Dans les Principia philosophiae, publies pour la premiere fois en latin en 1644, Descartes expose sous une forme synthetique ce que les analyses des Meditations et du Discours avaient mis a jour, a savoir l'articulation entre les principes generaux de la connaissance humaine, les principes des sciences et ses decouvertes sur la structure du monde physique. C'est dans la Lettre-preface a son traducteur francais, l'abbe Picot, qu'apparait aussi la celebre conception de la philosophie comme une arborescence, a partir des racines (...) metaphysiques, en un tronc de la physique puis trois branches principales que constituent la medecine, la mecanique et la morale. Filant la metaphore, Descartes vise le dernier degre de la sagesse comme le fruit ultime de cette croissance organique du savoir: Or comme ce n'est pas des racines, ni du tronc des arbres, qu'on cueille les fruits, mais seulement des extremites de leurs branches, ainsi la principale utilite de la philosophie depend de celles de ses parties qu'on ne peut apprendre que les dernieres. (shrink)

How do people judge the degree of causal responsibility that an agent has for the outcomes of her actions? We show that a relatively unexplored factor -- the robustness of the causal chain linking the agent’s action and the outcome -- influences judgments of causal responsibility of the agent. In three experiments, we vary robustness by manipulating the number of background circumstances under which the action causes the effect, and find that causal responsibility judgments increase with robustness. In the first (...) experiment, the robustness manipulation also raises the probability of the effect given the action. Experiments 2 and 3 control for probability-raising, and show that robustness still affects judgments of causal responsibility. In particular, Experiment 3 introduces an Ellsberg type of scenario to manipulate robustness, while keeping the conditional probability and the skill deployed in the action fixed. Experiment 4, replicates the results of Experiment 3, while contrasting between judgments of causal strength and of causal responsibility. The results show that in all cases, the perceived degree of responsibility increases with the robustness of the action-outcome causal chain. (shrink)

BackgroundMoral case deliberation as a form of clinical ethics support is usually implemented in health care institutions and educational programs. While there is no previous research on the use of clinical ethics support on the level of health care regulation, employees of regulatory bodies are regularly confronted with moral challenges. This pilot study describes and evaluates the use of MCD at the Dutch Health Care Inspectorate.The objective of this pilot study is to investigate: 1) the current way of dealing with (...) moral issues at the IGZ; 2) experience with and evaluation of MCD as clinical ethics support, and 3) future preferences and needs regarding clinical ethics support for dealing with moral questions at the IGZ.MethodsWe performed an explorative pilot study. The research questions were assessed by means of: 1) interviews with MCD participants during four focus groups; and 2) interviews with six key stakeholders at the IGZ. De qualitative data is illustrated by data from questionnaires on MCD outcomes, perspective taking and MCD evaluation.ResultsProfessionals do not always recognize moral issues. Employees report a need for regular and structured moral support in health care regulation. The MCD meetings are evaluated positively. The most important outcomes of MCD are feeling secure and learning from others. Additional support is needed to successfully implement MCD at the Inspectorate.ConclusionWe conclude that the respondents perceive moral case deliberation as a useful form of clinical ethics support for dealing with moral questions and issues in health care regulation. (shrink)

Betr. Diltheys Professur an der Universität Basel 1867-1868.

Each story is presented as a narrative, so readers can ponder: What would I do if this happened to me? When they've finished the book, they'll feel prepared with an array of theoretical and practical approaches for thinking on their feet.

The method of positron emission tomography illustrates the circular logic popular in subtractive neuroimaging and linear reductive cognitive psychology. Both require that strictly feed-forward, modular, cognitive components exist, before the fact, to justify the inference of particular components from images after the fact. Also, both require a "true" componential theory of cognition and laboratory tasks, before the fact, to guarantee reliable choices for subtractive contrasts. None of these possibilities are likely. Consequently, linear reductive analysis has failed to yield general, reliable, (...) componential accounts. (shrink)

Consciousness and Physicalism: A Defense of a Research Program explores the nature of consciousness and its place in the world, offering a revisionist account of what it means to say that consciousness is nothing over and above the physical. By synthesizing work in the philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and philosophy of science from the last twenty years and forging a dialogue with contemporary research in the empirical sciences of the mind, Andreas Elpidorou and Guy Dove advance and defend a novel (...) formulation of physicalism. Although physicalism has been traditionally understood to be a metaphysical thesis, Elpidorou and Dove argue that there is an alternative and indeed preferable understanding of physicalism that both renders physicalism a scientifically informed explanatory project and allows us to make important progress in addressing the ontological problem of consciousness. Physicalism, Elpidorou and Dove hold, is best viewed not as a thesis (metaphysical or otherwise) but as an interdisciplinary research program that aims to compositionally explain all natural phenomena that are central to our understanding of our place in nature. Consciousness and Physicalism is replete with philosophical arguments and informed, through and through, by findings in many areas of scientific research. It advances the debate regarding the ontological status of consciousness. It will interest students and scholars in philosophy of mind, metaphysics, philosophy of cognitive science, and philosophy of science. And it will challenge both foes and friends of physicalism. -/- . (shrink)

Brain damage may doubly dissociate cognitive modules, but the practice of revealing dissociations is predicated on modularity being true (T. Shallice, 1988). This article questions the utility of assuming modularity, as it examines a paradigmatic double dissociation of reading modules. Reading modules illustrate two general problems. First, modularity fails to converge on a fixed set of exclusionary criteria that define pure cases. As a consequence, competing modular theories force perennial quests for purer cases, which simply perpetuates growth in the list (...) of exclusionary criteria. The first problem leads, in part, to the second problem. Modularity fails to converge on a fixed set of pure cases. The second failure perpetuates unending fractionation into more modules. (shrink)

Two notions from philosophical logic and linguistics are brought together and applied to the psychological study of defeasible conditional reasoning. The distinction between disabling conditions and alternative causes is shown to be a special case of Pollock's (1987) distinction between ‘rebutting' and ‘undercutting' defeaters. ‘Inferential' conditionals are shown to come in two types, one that is sensitive to rebutters, the other to undercutters. It is thus predicted and demonstrated in two experiments that the type of inferential conditional used as the (...) major premise of conditional arguments can reverse the heretofore classic, distinctive effects of defeaters. (shrink)

It is commonly assumed that personalization technologies used by Google for the purpose of tailoring search results for individual users create filter bubbles, which reinforce users’ political views. Surprisingly, empirical evidence for a personalization-induced filter bubble has not been forthcoming. Here, we investigate whether filter bubbles may result instead from a searcher’s choice of search queries. In the first experiment, participants rated the left-right leaning of 48 queries (search strings), 6 for each of 8 topics (abortion, benefits, climate change, sex (...) equality, immigration, nuclear family, Islam, and taxation). An independent sample of participants were then asked to select one of these queries for each of the 8 topics. With the exception of the topic of Islam, participants were significantly more likely to select a query corresponding to their own political leaning, compared to other queries, explaining between 12% and 39% of the variance. A second experiment investigated the effect of the political leaning of the same queries on the overall political leaning of Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) in Google Search. The top six results of each SERP were rated collectively by a third group of participants, explaining 36.3% of the variance across all 48 search terms (p < .00001). That is, (1) participants in our experiments tended to select own-side search queries, and (2) using those queries tended to yield own-side search results when using the Google search engine. Our results are consistent with the notion of a self-imposed filter bubble in which query selection plays a salient role. (shrink)

Dans cet ouvrage, où il s'agit d'appréhender l'univers pascalien sur le plan apologétique, on suit le cheminement de la foi de Pascal à partir de fragments retrouvés après sa mort, textes à l'origine des différentes éditions des Pensées. La structure antithétique et paradoxale de son génie l'a conduit à une quête religieuse sans concession à l'égard de la société de son temps. La fonction dualiste de son écriture aboutit à mettre en valeur la béance séparant le fini de la nature (...) humaine de l'infini de la grâce de Dieu. Seule la médiation christique dans l'histoire a pu combler ce vide de l'homme dans l'humilité de la foi. L'aspect novateur de la quête pascalienne expliquerait alors en grande partie le côté inachevé des papiers. Cinq appendices visent à mettre le texte pascalien face aux modes de pensée du XVIIe siècle. La richesse du texte pascalien demeure malgré tout inépuisable. (shrink)

Comment l'idéologie nazie a-t-elle imprégné et corrompu jusqu'au plus intime de la pensée et du langage? Jargon de l'authenticité est l'une des charges les plus féroces écrites contre Heidegger et son jargon. Qu'est-ce que le jargon? C'est un maniement de la langue qui vise à exercer un charme magique sur les lecteurs grâce à une sacralisation du langage et à un pathos de l'authenticité. Nationalisme, repli sur soi, mépris de la réalité sociale sont dès lors autant de voies pour perdre (...) l'objet, le monde, les choses. Un livre qui mérite d'être confronté à la célèbre étude de Klemperer, LTI, qui porte sur le langage totalitaire sous le IIIe Reich. (shrink)

One of the most familiar traits of the part-horse, part-man creatures known as silens is their keen interest in women. In Athenian vase-painting, the female companions of the silens are characterized by a variety of attributes and items of dress, and exhibit mixed feelings toward the attentions of silens. The complexities of the imagery have resulted in disagreement in modern scholarship on several points, including the identity of these females, the significance of their attributes, and the explanation of a change (...) in their receptivity to the advances of the silens. One of the reasons for the lack of consensus in the scholarship is the fact that the imagery raises not one question but many: questions concerning iconographical method, mythology, ritual, and poetry. In what follows I have attempted to separate some of these entangled issues. I hope to show that the companions of the silens are nymphs and not maenads, and that a major change in the iconography of silens and nymphs, occurring in late sixth-century red-figure Attic vase-painting, reflects in some way developments in the Athenian dramatic genre of satyr-play. (shrink)

Einstein insisted that the only acceptable interpretation of the quantum theory was an ensemble interpretation, that this way of understanding the quantum formalism eliminated all the problems associated with interpreting the theory as a complete description of individual systems. But he never developed his ensemble interpretation in any detail or explained how it was supposed to resolve the difficulties with the individual interpretation. We offer a reconstruction of Einstein's position that is consonant with his other beliefs and examine the “prism” (...) reconstruction recently proposed by Arthur Fine. We show the plausibility of our reading, as an interpretation of Einstein, and criticize Fine's proposal, as an alternative interpretation and as an attempt to understand quantum theory. As we reconstruct it, Einstein's position is, nevertheless, problematic. We therefore conclude with a plausible, if unoriginal, suggestion as to the reason he failed to develop his remarks on ensembles more fully. (shrink)

RésuméCet article est consacréà la présentation et à l'examen critique des principes de la justice élaborés dans l'ouvrage du professeur John Rawls intituléA Theory of Justice. L'auteur examine notamment l'approche contractuelle utilisée par Rawls de même que son inspiration Kantienne et le type de rationalité qu'il met en œuvre pour construire sa théorie.

Le Cahier 18 est le dernier Cahier de Simone Weil écrit à Londres, commencé endécembre 1942 et s’étirant sur 1943, année où elle mourut le 24 août. Il n’a plus l’ampleurdes autres, mais, même exténuée et à distance de tout, son auteur poursuit ses explorationset creuse. Nous proposons quelques notes sur quelques annotations disant ce qui reste,quand on est sur la limite entre la vie et la mort, de la philosophie, de Dieu, du soi.

In a world in which globalisation has opened the access to Muslim countries, Muslim community having been identified as a distinctive high potential market, the question if businesses and corporations should set up a „Department of Islamic affairs" became more than pertinent.

Dans cet article, après avoir rappelé ce qu’est un revenu de base comme un droit humain universel et fait une analyse des failles du système actuel de distribution de la richesse créée par le travail et de la redistribution par l’État d’aides sociales, l’auteur en déduit les mesures systémiques à prendre pour garantir ce droit humain universel à une vie digne avec une allocation universelle d’existence, protectrice et émancipatrice qui permette de se libérer à la fois de la charité publique (...) qui assujettit et d’un emploi de survie aliénant. (shrink)

We examine conceptual and methodological problems that arise in the course of the scientific study of possible influences of religious belief on the experience of physical pain. We start by attempting to identify a notion of religious belief that might enter into interesting psychological generalizations involving both religious belief and pain. We argue that it may be useful to think of religious belief as a complex dispositional property that relates believers to a sufficiently thick belief system that encompasses both cognitive (...) and non-cognitive elements. Such a conception of religious belief is more likely to correlate with psychological properties of believers that are both sufficiently shared and sufficiently unique to distinguish their psychology from believers in another religion or from non-believers. If the dispositional psychological property that constitutes religious belief does influence pain, then our analysis suggests that it doesn’t do so directly but rather through one of its occurrent manifestations. We offer a taxonomy of the different ways in which occurrent states of belief or experience may interact with physical pain, and we try to identify those that are more interesting or promising. We then proceed to employ the conceptual framework we developed to some of the existing evidence about the neural and psychological correlates of religious belief and experience, and about the cognitive modulation of physical pain. Finally we turn to analyse two experiments that directly investigated the relation between religious belief and pain. We draw attention to the limitations of existing evidence and end by suggesting directions for future conceptual and empirical inquiry. (shrink)

In the early years of this century the debate as to the nature of judgment was a central issue dividing British philosophers. What a philosopher said about judgment was not independent of what he said about perception, the distinction between the a priori and empirical, the distinction between external and internal relations, the nature of inference, truth, universals, language, the reality of the self and so on.