As the author of the earliest secular account of the universe's formation, Anaximander of Miletus can lay a strong claim to the title of first Greek cosmologist. Tradition also credited him with invention of the first time-telling instruments: ‘He was the first to constructgnomonsfor the identification of solstices, time spans,horaiand the equinox’. This paper reconstructs the location, design and function of a γνώμων which he erected at Sparta, and moots some intriguing parallels with the Augustan Horologium on the Campus Martius. (...) Before we turn to the evidence, however, two points of terminology need to be clarified. The Greek term γνώμων can denote either a sundial—a pointer attached to a surface with marks for tracking its shadow—or the pointer itself, in English also called the gnomon; Eusebius’ reference to the identification of times suggests that what Anaximander created was in fact a sundial. Now, depending on its design, a sundial can tell either the hour of the day, the season of the year, or both; from Eusebius’ text it is not clear which function Anaximander's dial possessed, since the noun ὧραι can mean either ‘hours’ or ‘seasons’. But only one usage of the word would be appropriate for the sixth century: no authors refer to hours of the day prior to Herodotus and there is no evidence for Greek sundials displaying hours prior toc.350b.c.; by contrast, the use of ὥρα to mean ‘season of the year’ is as old as Homer and Hesiod, and the solstices and equinoxes mentioned by Eusebius demarcate the transitions between the seasons. Anaximander's device was a sundial, then, one which tracked seasons rather than hours. According to Diogenes Laertius, the cosmologist set up one such device at Sparta. (shrink)

© 2015, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.Genetic studies have identified single nucleotide polymorphisms associated with the risk of prostate cancer. It remains unclear whether such genetic variants are associated with disease aggressiveness. The NCI-SPORE Genetics Working Group retrospectively collected clinicopathologic information and genotype data for 36 SNPs which at the time had been validated to be associated with PC risk from 25,674 cases with PC. Cases were grouped according to race, Gleason score and aggressiveness. Statistical analyses were used to compare the frequency (...) of the SNPs between different disease cohorts. After adjusting for multiple testing, only PC-risk SNP rs2735839 was significantly and inversely associated with aggressive and high-grade disease in European men. Similar associations with aggressive and high-grade disease were documented in African-American subjects. The G allele of rs2735839 was associated with disease aggressiveness even at low PSA levels in both European and African-American men. Our results provide further support that a PC-risk SNP rs2735839 near the KLK3 gene on chromosome 19q13 may be associated with aggressive and high-grade PC. Future prospectively designed, case-case GWAS are needed to identify additional SNPs associated with PC aggressiveness. (shrink)

Philip Pettit offers a new insight into moral psychology. He shows that attachments such as love, and certain virtues such as honesty, require their characteristic behaviours not only as things actually are, but also in cases where things are different from how they actually are. He explores the implications of this idea for key moral issues.

ABSTRACT Many of our common-sense moral judgments seemingly imply the existence of moral luck. I attempt to avoid moral luck while retaining most of these judgments. I defend a view on which agents have moral equality of opportunity. This allows us to account for our anti-moral-luck intuitions at less cost than has been previously recognized.

This book presents views of the concept of intention and its relationship to communication from three perspectives: philosphy, linguistics, and artificial intelligence. The book is a record of a workshop held in 1987.

Husserl introduces a phenomenological concept called “motivation” early in the First Investigation of his magnum opus, the Logical Investigations. The importance of this concept has been overlooked since Husserl passes over it rather quickly on his way to an analysis of the meaningful nature of expression. I argue, however, that motivation is essential to Husserl’s overall project, even if it is not essen- tial for defining expression in the First Investigation. For Husserl, motivation is a relation between mental acts whereby (...) the content of one act make some fur- ther meaningful content probable. I explicate the nature of this relation in terms of “evidentiary weight” and differentiate it from Husserl’s notion of Evidenz, often translated as “self-evidence”. I elucidate the importance of motivation in Husserl’s overall phenomenological project by focusing on his analyses of thing-perception and empathy. Through these examples, we can better understand the continuity between the Logical Investigations and Husserl’s later work. (shrink)

We take ourselves to have an inner life of thought, and we take ourselves to be capable of linguistically expressing our thoughts to others. But what is the nature of this “inner life” of thought? Is conscious thought necessarily carried out in language? This paper takes up these questions by examining Merleau-Ponty’s theory of expression. For Merleau-Ponty, language expresses thought. Thus it would seem that thought must be independent of, and in some sense prior to, the speech that expresses it. (...) He also claims, however, that thinking just is linguistic expression, and thus that language constitutes thought. The primary aim of this paper is to make sense of this constitutive claim while maintaining that, for Merleau-Ponty, there is an inner life of thought that exists independently of linguistic expression, and that this inner life rightly deserves the label “thought”. The upshot of this account is twofold. First, it explains why the mainstream view of Merleau-Ponty’s theory of expression seems plausible, but is ultimately inadequate. Second, it functions as a corrective to contemporary debates about the nature and scope of phenomenal consciousness and the sense in which conscious experience has content. (shrink)

In social identity theory, the in-Christ identity is understood as primarily a socially directed process in which people categorise themselves relative to other groups. Intergroup behaviour would cause them to discriminate against the so-called ‘outgroup’, favouring the so-called ‘ingroup’. Although social identity complexity theory has moved beyond single ingroup-outgroup categorisation, it is a question if social identity theories can fully account for the in-Christ identity, especially within an African context. In African religious identity, identity is linked to both the community (...) and the ruling deities, which are perceived to be real entities that intervene in human affairs and identity, presupposing a supernaturalistic epistemology. Contribution: In this contribution, the naturalistic epistemological underpinnings of social identity theories are reconsidered in light of a supernatural aspect that is argued to be constitutive of the 1st century in-Christ identity as well as the African Christian identity. Amid current approaches to the in-Christ identity, which is mainly a Pauline concept, some of the main Pauline texts that have bearing on the in-Christ identity are revisited in light of current theories and epistemologies on identity. (shrink)

Four-month-old infants sometimes can perceive the unity of a partly hidden object. In each of a series of experiments, infants were habituated to one object whose top and bottom were visible but whose center was occluded by a nearer object. They were then tested with a fully visible continuous object and with two fully visible object pieces with a gap where the occluder had been. Pattems of dishabituation suggested that infants perceive the boundaries of a partly hidden object by analyzing (...) the movements of its surfaces: infants perceived a connected object when its ends moved in a common translation behind the occluder. Infants do not appear to perceive a connected object by analyzing the colors and forms of surfaces: they did not perceive a connected object when its visible parts were stationary, its color was homogeneous, its edges were aligned, and its shape was simple and regular. These findings do not support the thesis, from gestalt psychology, that object perception first arises as a consequence of a tendency to perceive the simplest, most regular configuration, or the Piagetian thesis that object perception depends on the prior coordination of action. Perception of objects may depend on an inherent conception of what an object is. (shrink)

Experiments in particle physics have hitherto failed to produce any significant evidence for the many explicit models of physics beyond the Standard Model (BSM) that had been proposed over the past decades. As a result, physicists have increasingly turned to model-independent strategies as tools in searching for a wide range of possible BSM effects. In this paper, we describe the Standard Model Effective Field Theory (SM-EFT) and analyse it in the context of the philosophical discussions about models, theories, and (bottom-up) (...) effective field theories. We find that while the SM-EFT is a quantum field theory, assisting experimentalists in searching for deviations from the SM, in its general form it lacks some of the characteristic features of models. Those features only come into play if put in by hand or prompted by empirical evidence for deviations. Employing different philosophical approaches to models, we argue that the case study suggests not to take a view on models that is overly permissive because it blurs the lines between the different stages of the SM-EFT research strategies and glosses over particle physicists' motivations for undertaking this bottom-up approach in the first place. Looking at EFTs from the perspective of modelling does not require taking a stance on some specific brand of realism or taking sides in the debate between reduction and emergence into which EFTs have recently been embedded. (shrink)

This paper brings together several strands of thought from both the analytic and phenomenological traditions in order to critically examine accounts of cognitive enhancement that rely on the idea of cognitive extension. First, I explain the idea of cognitive extension, the metaphysics of mind on which it depends, and how it has figured in recent discussions of cognitive enhancement. Then, I develop ideas from Husserl that emphasize the agential character of thought and the distinctive way that conscious thoughts are related (...) to one another. I argue that these considerations are necessary for understanding why forms of cognitive extension may diminish our cognitive lives in different ways. This does not lead to a categorical rejection of cognitive enhancement as unethical or bad for human flourishing, but does warrant a conservative approach to the design and implementation of cognitive artifacts. (shrink)

Philip Pettit has drawn together here a series of interconnected essays on three subjects to which he has made notable contributions. The first part of the book discusses the rule-following character of thought. The second considers how choice can be responsive to different sorts of factors, while still being under the control of thought and the reasons that thought marshals. The third examines the implications of this view of choice and rationality for the normative regulation of social behaviour. Rules, (...) Reasons, and Norms makes original and illuminating connections across a large swathe of territory, from metaphysics to philosophical psychology to the theory of rational regulation. (shrink)

This paper presents an account of empathy as the form of experience directed at embodied unities of expressive movement. After outlining the key differences between simulation theory and the phenomenological approach to empathy, the paper argues that while the phenomenological approach is closer to respecting a necessary constitutional asymmetry between first-personal and second-personal senses of embodiment, it still presupposes a general concept of embodiment that ends up being problematic. A different account is proposed that is neutral on the explanatory role (...) of the first-person sense of embodiment, which leads to an emphasis on the transformative nature of empathy and a broadening of the scope of possible targets of empathic awareness. (shrink)

The principle of alternative possibilities tells us that an agent is morally responsible for an action only if he could have done otherwise. Frankfurt-style cases provide an extremely influential challenge to the PAP . And Frankfurt-style compatibilists are motivated to accept compatibilism about responsibility and determinism in part due to FSCs. But there is a significant tension between our judgments about responsibility in FSCs and our judgments about responsibility in certain omissions cases. This tension has thus far largely been treated (...) as an internal puzzle for defenders of FSCs to solve. My goal here is to regiment this tension into a clear argument which undermines the FSC based critique of PAP. I will also argue that there is an in principle reason to doubt that Frankfurt-Style Compatibilists will be able to successfully respond to my argument. (shrink)

Panentheism is best understood as a philosophical research program. Identifying the core of the research program offers a strong response to the demarcation objection. It also helps focus both objections to and defenses of panentheism — and to show why common objections are not actually criticisms of the position we are defending. The paper also addresses two common criticisms: the alleged inadequacy of panentheism’s double “in” specification of the relationship between God and world, and the “double God” objection. Once the (...) research program framework is in place, topics like these become opportunities for panentheists to engage in the kind of careful constructive work in theology and philosophy — historical, analytic, and systematic — that is required for making long-term, positive contributions to our field. (shrink)

I explore several issues raised in John Martin Fischer’s Our Fate: Essays on God and Free Will. First I discuss whether an approach to the problem of freedom and foreknowledge that appeals directly to the claim that God’s beliefs depend on the future is importantly different from Ockhamism. I suggest that this dependence approach has advantages over Ockhamism. I also argue that this approach gives us good reason to reject the claim that the past is fixed. Finally, I discuss Fischer’s (...) proposal regarding God’s knowledge of future contingents. I suggest that it may be able to secure comprehensive foreknowledge. (shrink)

Michael Moore’s recent book Mechanical Choices: The Responsibility of the Human Machine is full of rich, insightful discussion of many important issues related to free will and moral responsibility. I will focus on one particular issue raised by Moore: the question of whether we can have control over the past. Moore defends a compatibilist account of moral responsibility on which there are some possible cases in which agents do have such control. But Moore seeks to avoid positing too much control (...) over the past. I will argue that Moore’s attempt is not successful. Furthermore, I will try to show that compatibilists in general face a serious challenge regarding control over the past. In sections 1 and 2 I will explore Moore’s views. In section 3 and 4 I will offer a general argument against compatibilism about moral responsibility and determinism. (shrink)

Husserlian phenomenology, as the study of conscious experience, has often been accused of solipsism. Husserl’s method, it is argued, does not have the resources to provide an account of consciousness of other minds. This chapter will address this issue by providing a brief overview of the multiple angles from which Husserl approached the theme of intersubjectivity, with specific focus on the details of his account of the concrete interpersonal encounter – “empathy.” Husserl understood empathy as a direct, quasi-perceptual form of (...) intentionality through which the sense of the Other is constituted. Furthermore, his account of empathy is holistically integrated with his overall theory of intersubjectivity, including his discussions of the objectivity of nature, and the social, historical, and communal aspects of subjectivity. Husserl’s theory of empathy continues to cast a long shadow, influencing both the analytic and continental approaches to the problem of other minds, as well as contemporary account of social cognition in the cognitive sciences. (shrink)

Modern technology has changed the way we live, work, play, communicate, fight, love, and die. Yet few works have systematically explored these changes in light of their implications for individual and social welfare. How can we conceptualize and evaluate the influence of technology on human well-being? Bringing together scholars from a cross-section of disciplines, this volume combines an empirical investigation of technology and its social, psychological, and political effects, and a philosophical analysis and evaluation of the implications of such effects.

Arendt Contra Sociology re-assesses the relationship between Hannah Arendt's work and the theoretical foundations of sociology, bringing her insights to bear on key themes within contemporary theoretical sociology. Departing from the view of Arendt as a political theorist who sought to rescue politics from society, and political theory from the social sciences, this book re-examines her distinctions between labour, fabrication and action as a theory of the fundamental ontology of human societies, revisiting her criticism of the tendency of many sociological (...) paradigms to conflate the activity of fabrication with that of action. (shrink)

Andrew Kania has attempted to argue for nihilistic fictionalism about musical works. This view combines an error theory about musical work discourse with the proposal that musical work discourse has a non-alethic value which warrants continued participation in it. In this paper, I argue that Kania fails to establish either component of nihilistic fictionalism. First, I elaborate and reject Kania’s attempt to establish fictionalism on the basis of a methodological proposal he calls ‘descriptivism’. I argue that the methodology is unpopular, (...) unappealing and that the interest in its implications is unclear. What is worse descriptivism does not support fictionalism. I then elaborate and reject Kania’s attempt to establish fictionalism as the best theory compatible with nominalism. I argue that, even by Kania’s standards, eliminativist nominalism, materialist nominalism and materialist fictionalism are preferable to nihilistic fictionalism. (shrink)

Philip Pettit; X*—Social Holism and Moral Theory: A Defence of Bradley's Thesis, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 86, Issue 1, 1 June 1986, Pages.

Introduction -- The univocity of being -- The modern predicament -- The problem of univocity in ancient and medieval philosophy -- From Heidegger to Aristotle -- Medieval philosophy -- Scholasticism -- Heidegger, Scotus, and univocity -- The question of being -- Analogy, the medieval experience of life -- Univocity and phenomenology -- Destruction and tradition -- Metaphysics -- Phenomenological philosophy and aletheia -- Descartes, scholasticism, and time -- The presupposition of the tradition -- Scholasticism, analogy, and the interpretation of Heidegger (...) -- The phenomena of beingness and time -- Beyond being -- The analogical interpretation of Heidegger's text -- Univocity and phenomenological philosophy -- Being and some other key terms -- The phenomenology of being and the question of Dasein -- Transcendental philosophy -- Univocity from 1916 to 1927 -- Cartesian connections and the medieval ontology -- Dasein, univocity, and the question of analogy -- Univocity and fundamental ontology -- Husserl and Heidegger -- Phenomenology, being, and univocity -- Univocity and analogy -- Univocity and Heidegger's later thought -- Mysticism -- The present age -- The later Heidegger -- A-letheia, ereignis, and epochal immanence -- A history of being -- The tradition -- The history of metaphysics -- The medieval and the modern -- A history of the modern : subjectivity -- Univocity and the problem of history -- History and civilization -- Art and history -- Fractured history -- Language and poetry -- The fate of univocity -- The re-enchanted forest -- Being mortal. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe aim of this paper is to challenge the reliabilist interpretation of William Ockham 's epistemology. The discussion proceeds as follows. First, I analyse the reliabilist interpretation into two theses: a negative thesis I call the Anti-Internalism Thesis, according to which, for Ockham, epistemic justification does not depend on any internal factors that are accessible by reflection; a positive thesis I call the Reliability Thesis, according to which epistemic justification in Ockham depends on the reliability of a causal process through (...) which a given judgment is produced. Secondly, I argue that the Anti-Internalism Thesis fails since Ockham's notion of evidentness, which is at the heart of his theory of justification, strongly suggests that he posits an indispensable, internalist element of justification. Lastly, I argue that the Reliability Thesis also fails since not only can there be a reliable but inevident judgment in Ockham's framework, his emphasis on causality is best read not as talk of reliability, but as his emphasis on the relation between reason and what is based on reason. (shrink)

Strong forms of dualism and eliminative materialism block any significant dialogue between the neurosciences and theology. The present article thus challenges the Sufficiency Thesis, according to which neuroscientific explanations will finally be sufficient to fully explain human behavior. It then explores the various ways in which neuroscientific results and theological interpretations contribute to an overall theory of the person. Supervenience theories, which hold that mental events are dependent on their physical substrata but not reducible to them, are explained. Challenging the (...) determinism of “strong” supervenience, I defend a version of “soft” supervenience that allows for genuine mental causation. This view gives rise in turn to an emergentist theory of the person. Still, I remain a monist: there are many types of properties encountered in the world, although it is only the one nature that bears all these properties. The resulting position, emergentist monism, allows for diversity within the context of the one world. This view is open at the top for theological applications and interpretations while retaining the close link to neuroscientific study and its results. Theology offers an interpretation of the whole world based on a yet higher order of emergence, although the notion of God moves beyond the natural order as a whole. It therefore supplements the natural scientific study of the world without negating it. (shrink)

The deposition of the political -- From paradox to partage : on citizenship and teletechnologies -- The disposition of being -- Being communist -- Seattle and the space of exposure.

On the question of the conclusion of a piece of practical reasoning, few have been willing to follow Aristotle's lead. He said the conclusion was an action. These days, the conclusion is usually described either as a proposition about what one ought to do, or as a psychological state or event, such as a decision to do something, an intention to do something, or a belief about what one ought to do. Why favor these options over the action-as-conclusion view? By (...) far the most oft-repeated answer is that these views, unlike Aristotle's, can accommodate the case in which a conclusion is drawn but not acted upon. The conclusion cannot be an action, it is said, because it is possible to reach a conclusion about what to do without doing the action. My thesis is that this objection fails, and that as a consequence no radical departure from Aristotle's proposal is warranted. (shrink)

There is debate over whether the content of an intuitive cognition is determined externally or internally in Ockham’s theory. According to the most common view, which I call the Strong Externalist Interpretation, intuitive content is wholly determined externally. Opposed to SE is the Strong Internalist Interpretation, according to which the content of an intuition is wholly determined by internal features of a cognizer. The aim of this paper is to argue against those interpretations, and to argue for a third kind (...) of interpretation which preserves interpretative advantages of SE and SI without falling into the difficulties that each faces. On this view, intuitive content is complex, and its complexity is analyzed into a mix of internalist and externalist elements. (shrink)

It is often argued that human emotions, and the cognitions that accompany them, involve refinements of, and extensions to, more basic functionality shared with other species. Such refinements may rely on common or on distinct processes and representations. Multi-level theories of cognition and affect make distinctions between qualitatively different types of representations often dealing with bodily, affective and cognitive attributes of self-related meanings. This paper will adopt a particular multi-level perspective on mental architecture and show how a mechanism of subsystem (...) differentiation could have allowed an evolutionarily “old” role for emotion in the control of action to have altered into one more closely coupled to meaning systems. We conclude by outlining some illustrative consequences of our analysis that might usefully be addressed in research in comparative psychology, cognitive archaeology, and in laboratory research on memory for emotional material. (shrink)

This article offers a vision for work at the intersection of science and religion over the coming seven years. Because predictions are inherently risky and are more often than not false, the text first offers an assessment of the current state of the science-religion discussion and a quick survey of the last 50 years of work in this field. The implications of the six features of this vision for the future of the field are then presented in some detail. Rather (...) than bemoaning the current diversity of approaches and conclusions as a negative result, I endorse it as a healthy sign—if acknowledged honestly and managed well. (shrink)

I. INTRODUCTION Twenty-five years is roughly the time that has elapsed since the exchange between H. L. A. Hart and Lon Fuller and the subsequent revival in this country of the natural law/positivism debate. During this time, a curious thing has happened to legal positivism. What began as a conceptual theory about the distinction between law and morality has now been turned, at least by some, into a moral theory. According to this theory, the reason we must see law and (...) morality as separate is not because of the logic of our language, but because of the practical implications of holding one or the other of the two traditional views in this area. The natural law theorist, it is said, can connect law and morality only at the cost of investing official directives with undeserved moral authority, thus encouraging obedience where there should be none. The natural law position should therefore be rejected – and the positivist's accepted – on moral grounds. (shrink)

In the late 1720s, Daniel Turner and James Blondel engaged in a pamphlet dispute over the power of the maternal imagination. Turner accepted the long-standing belief that a pregnant woman's imagination could be transferred to her unborn child, imprinting the foetus with various marks and deformities. Blondel sought to refute this view on rational and anatomical grounds. Two issues repeatedly received these authors' attention: the identity of imagination, and its power in pregnant women; and the process of generation and foetal (...) development. In their discussions of these issues, differences between the authors' acceptance of general medical theories and philosophies became apparent. Blondel invoked Newtonian matter theory, experimental philosophy, and iatro-mechanism, while Turner adhered more to the authority of the Ancients and advocated a more direct role for the Creator as an alternative to mechanism in explaining natural phenomena. Additionally, the authors held differing views of what they regarded as experience. The widespread contemporary interest in their dispute suggests that Turner and Blondel raised the phenomenon of the maternal imagination from an issue of folk belief to a concern of eighteenth-century medicine. (shrink)