Emerging technologies present a challenging but fascinating set of ethical, legal and regulatory issues. The articles selected for this volume provide a broad overview of the most influential historical and current thinking in this area and show that existing frameworks are often inadequate to address new technologies - such as biotechnology, nanotechnology, synthetic biology and robotics - and innovative new models are needed. This collection brings together invaluable, innovative and often complementary approaches for overcoming the unique challenges of emerging technology (...) ethics and governance. (shrink)

Health care is transitioning from genetics to genomics, in which single-gene testing for diagnosis is being replaced by multi-gene panels, genome-wide sequencing, and other multi-genic tests for disease diagnosis, prediction, prognosis, and treatment. This health care transition is spurring a new set of increased or novel liability risks for health care providers and test laboratories. This article describes this transition in both medical care and liability, and addresses 11 areas of potential increased or novel liability risk, offering recommendations to both (...) health care and legal actors to address and manage those liability risks. (shrink)

Like all technologies, nanotechnology will inevitably present risks, whether they result from unintentional effects of otherwise beneficial applications, or from the malevolent misuse of technology. Increasingly, risks from new and emerging technologies are being regulated at the international level, although governments and private experts are only beginning to consider the appropriate international responses to nanotechnology. In this paper, we explore both the potential risks posed by nanotechnology and potential regulatory frameworks that law may impose. In so doing, we also explore (...) the various rationales for international regulation including the potential for cross-boundary harms, sharing of regulatory expertise and resources, controlling protectionism and trade conflicts, avoiding a “race to the bottom” in which governments seek economic advantage through lax regulation, and limiting the “nano divide” between North and South. Finally, we examine some models for international regulation and offer tentative thoughts on the prospects for each. (shrink)

Risk management of nanotechnology is challenged by the enormous uncertainties about the risks, benefits, properties, and future direction of nanotechnology applications. Because of these uncertainties, traditional risk management principles such as acceptable risk, cost–benefit analysis, and feasibility are unworkable, as is the newest risk management principle, the precautionary principle. Yet, simply waiting for these uncertainties to be resolved before undertaking risk management efforts would not be prudent, in part because of the growing public concerns about nanotechnology driven by risk perception (...) heuristics such as affect and availability. A more reflexive, incremental, and cooperative risk management approach is required, which not only will help manage emerging risks from nanotechnology applications, but will also create a new risk management model for managing future emerging technologies. (shrink)

There is much we do not know about nanotechnology. Despite its tremendous promise, nanotechnology today is mostly forecast and fervent hope. Predictions that spending on nanotechnology will increase from current levels of $13 billion to more than $1 trillion by 2015 are no more than that – simply predictions. Hopes that nanotechnology will be an essential part of solving the globe's energy, food, and water problems should be tempered by recalling a century of revolutionary technologies that failed to live up (...) to their early promise such as nuclear energy, supersonic airplanes, or gene therapy. Many other questions continue to nip at nanotechnology's heels, not the least of which are debates about what is and is not technically feasible. Despite these uncertainties, we can have complete confidence in one aspect of nanotechnology's future – it will be subject to a host of regulations. (shrink)

Scientific research is subject to a number of regulations which impose incidental (time, place), rather than substantive (type of research), restrictions on scientific research and the knowledge created through such research. In recent years, however, the premise that scientific research and knowledge should be free from substantive regulation has increasingly been called into question. Some have suggested that the law should be used as a tool to substantively restrict research which is dual-use in nature or which raises moral objections. There (...) are, however, some problems with using law to restrict or prohibit certain types of scientific research, including (i) the inherent imprecision of law for regulating complex and rapidly evolving scientific research; (ii) the difficulties of enforcing legal restrictions on an activity that is international in scope; (iii) the limited predictability of the consequences of restricting specific branches of scientific research; (iv) inertia in the legislative process; and (v) the susceptibility of legislators and regulators to inappropriate factors and influence. Rather than using law to restrict scientific research, it may be more appropriate and effective to use a combination of non-traditional legal tools including norms, codes of conduct, restrictions on publication, and scientist-developed voluntary standards to regulate problematic scientific research. (shrink)

As policy makers struggle to develop regulatory oversight models for nanotechnologies, there are important lessons that can be drawn from previous attempts to govern other emerging technologies. Five such lessons are the following: public confidence and trust in a technology and its regulatory oversight is probably the most important factor for the commercial success of a technology; regulation should avoid discriminating against particular technologies unless there is a scientifically based rationale for the disparate treatment; regulatory systems need to be flexible (...) and adaptive to rapidly changing technologies; ethical and social concerns of the public about emerging technologies need to be expressly acknowledged and addressed in regulatory oversight; and international harmonization of regulation may be beneficial in a rapidly globalizing world. (shrink)

For many innovations, oversight fits nicely within existing governance mechanisms; nevertheless, others pose unique public health, environmental, and ethical challenges. Synthetic artemisinin, for example, has many precursors in laboratory‐developed drugs that emulate natural forms of the same drug. The policy challenges posed by synthetic artemisinin do not differ significantly in kind from other laboratory‐formulated drugs. Synthetic biofuels and gene drives, however, fit less clearly into existing governance structures. How many of the new categories of products require new forms of regulatory (...) oversight, or at least extensive forms of testing, remains unclear.Any effort to improve the governance of synthetic biology should start with a rich understanding of the different possible science‐policy interfaces that could help to inform governance. CBA falls into a subset of the overall range of possibilities, and which interface is appropriate may turn out to depend on context, on the demands of the decision at hand. In what follows, we lay out a typology of interfaces. After that, we turn to the question of how to draw upon the range of possible interfaces and effectively address the factual and moral complexities of emerging technologies. We propose a governance model built around structures that we call “governance coordinating committees.” GCCs are intended to be mechanisms for accommodating the complexities of innovations that have far‐ranging societal impacts. The production of biofuels, for example, could contaminate water supplies and have a destructive environmental impact if not managed correctly. The introduction of a gene drive could have economic and environmental impacts that are not restricted to one nation. Forging appropriate means for determining and evaluating those societal impacts, to the best of a corporation's, industry's, or government's ability, is central to responsible research and innovation. Public policy must be shaped in a manner that accommodates as many concerns as possible and minimizes risks. (shrink)

Nanotechnology is the latest in a growing list of emerging technologies that includes nuclear technologies, genetics, reproductive biology, biotechnology, information technology, robotics, communication technologies, surveillance technologies, synthetic biology, and neuroscience. As was the case for many of the technologies that came before, a key question facing nanotechnology is what type of regulatory oversight is appropriate for this emerging technology. As two of us wrote several years ago, the question facing nanotechnology is not whether it will be regulated, but when and (...) how.Yet, appropriate regulation of nanotechnology will be challenging. The term “nanotechnology” incorporates a broad, diverse range of materials, technologies, and products, with an even greater spectrum of potential risks and benefits. This technology slashes across the jurisdiction of many existing regulatory statutes and regulatory agencies, and does so across the globe. Nanotechnology is developing at an enormously rapid rate, perhaps surpassing the capability of any potential regulatory framework to keep pace. Finally, the risks of nanotechnology remain largely unknown, both because of the multitude of variations in the technology and because of the limited applicability of traditional toxicological approaches such as structure-activity relationship to nanotechnology products. (shrink)

As the health care system transitions to a precision medicine approach that tailors clinical care to the genetic profile of the individual patient, there is a potential tension between the clinical uptake of new technologies by providers and the legal system's expectation of the standard of care in applying such technologies. We examine this tension by comparing the type of evidence that physicians and courts are likely to rely on in determining a duty to recommend pharmacogenetic testing of patients prescribed (...) the oral anti-coagulant drug warfarin. There is a large body of inconsistent evidence and factors for and against such testing, but physicians and courts are likely to weigh this evidence differently. The potential implications for medical malpractice risk are evaluated and discussed. (shrink)

Clinical trials of nanotechnology medical products present complex risk management challenges that involve many uncertainties and important risk-risk trade-offs. This paper inquires whether the precautionary principle can help to inform risk management approaches to nanomedicine clinical trials. It concludes that prudent precaution may be appropriate for ensuring the safety of such trials, but that the precautionary principle itself, especially in its more extreme forms, does not provide useful guidance for specific safety measures.

Medical technologies, including nanomedicine products, are intended to improve health but in many cases may also create their own health risks. Medical products that create their own health risks differ from most other risk-creating technologies in that the very purpose of the medical technology is to prevent or treat health risks. This paradox of technologies intended to reduce existing risks that may have the effect of creating new risks has two conflicting implications. On one hand, we may be more tolerant (...) of health risks from medical technologies because these products are intended to, and often do, reduce overall health risks and improve our health. The health benefits of a medical technology may outweigh the unavoidable adverse effects of that same technology in an individual patient or in the overall treated population. (shrink)

Nanomedicine is yielding new and improved treatments and diagnostics for a range of diseases and disorders. Nanomedicine applications incorporate materials and components with nanoscale dimensions where novel physiochemical properties emerge as a result of size-dependent phenomena and high surface-to-mass ratio. Nanotherapeutics and in vivo nanodiagnostics are a subset of nanomedicine products that enter the human body. These include drugs, biological products, implantable medical devices, and combination products that are designed to function in the body in ways unachievable at larger scales. (...) Nanotherapeutics andin vivonanodiagnostics incorporate materials that are engineered at the nanoscale to express novel properties that are medicinally useful. These nanomedicine applications can also contain nanomaterials that are biologically active, producing interactions that depend on biological triggers. Examples include nanoscale formulations of insoluble drugs to improve bioavailability and pharmacokinetics, drugs encapsulated in hollow nanoparticles with the ability to target and cross cellular and tissue membranes and to release their payload at a specific time or location, imaging agents that demonstrate novel optical properties to aid in locating micrometastases, and antimicrobial and drug-eluting components or coatings of implantable medical devices such as stents. (shrink)

For tragedy is a representation, not of man, but of actions and of life; the good or evil condition of men lies in action; and the telos is an action, not a characteristic. “The way people are” means their makeup; whether they are good or happy or the opposite means what they do. It is not in order to represent the human characteristics that performances are put on: characteristics, rather, are what are assumed in the dramatic performance of actions; since (...) the deeds or story is the telos of tragedy, the telor being the most important thing. (shrink)

Jean-Paul Sartre is an undisputed giant of twentieth-century philosophy. His intellectual writings popularizing existentialism combined with his creative and artistic flair have made him a legend of French thought. His tumultuous personal life - so inextricably bound up with his philosophical thinking - is a fascinating tale of love and lust, drug abuse, high profile fallings-out and political and cultural rebellion. This substantial and meticulously researched biography is accessible, fast-paced, often amusing and at times deeply moving. Existentialism and Excess covers (...) all the main events of Sartre's remarkable seventy-five-year life from his early years as a precocious brat devouring his grandfather's library, through his time as a brilliant student in Paris, his wilderness years as a provincial teacher-writer experimenting with mescaline, his World War II adventures as a POW and member of the resistance, his post-war politicization, his immense amphetamine fueled feats of writing productivity, his harem of women, his many travels and his final decline into blindness and old age. Along the way there are countless intriguing anecdotes, some amusing, some tragic, some controversial: his loathing of crustaceans and his belief that he was being pursued by a giant lobster, his escape from a POW camp, the bombing of his apartment, his influence on the May 1968 uprising and his many love affairs. Cox deftly moves from these episodes to discussing his intellectual development, his famous feuds with Aron, Camus, and Merleau-Ponty, his encounters with other giant figures of his day: Roosevelt, Hemingway, Heidegger, John Huston, Mao, Castro, Che Guevara, Khrushchev and Tito, and, above all, his long, complex and creative relationship with Simone de Beauvoir. Existentialism and Excess also gives serious consideration to Sartre's ideas and many philosophical works, novels, stories, plays and biographies, revealing their intimate connection with his personal life. Cox has written an entertaining, thought-provoking and compulsive book, much like the man himself. (shrink)

I argue for an alternative to Quine’s conception of observation sentences, one that better satisfies the roles Quine envisages for them, and that otherwise respects Quinean constraints. After reviewing a certain predicament Quine got into in balancing the needs of the intersubjectivity of observation sentences with his notion of the stimulus meaning of an observation sentence, I push for replacing the latter with what I call the ‘stimulus field’ of an observation sentence, a notion that remains ‘proximate’ but is shared (...) between different language users. Throughout, I emphasize the epistemological role of observation sentences. (shrink)

Moral emotions are evolved mechanisms that function in part to optimize social relationships. We discuss two moral emotions— disgust and the “cuteness response”—which modulate social-engagement motives in opposite directions, changing the degree to which the eliciting entity is imbued with mental states (i.e., mentalized). Disgust-inducing entities are hypo-mentalized (i.e., dehumanized); cute entities are hyper-mentalized (i.e., “humanized”). This view of cuteness—which challenges the prevailing view that cuteness is a releaser of parental instincts (Lorenz, 1950/1971)—explains (a) the broad range of affiliative behaviors (...) elicited by cuteness, (b) the marketing of cuteness to children (by toy makers and animators) to elicit play, and (c) the apparent ease and frequency with which cute things are anthropomorphized. (shrink)

Gary Ebbs shows that this appearance is illusory.

This book is about a twenty- to forty- year life journey. It recounts ten randomly selected personal quotes, saved in a cookie jar, and creates a life-learning narrative using the origin of the quote. Each story evolves by looking back at the signposts and hints of wisdom sprinkled along the author's life path. Many of these evens whispered subtle quotes of wisdom to his conscience. It was up to the author to make sense of them or proceed on life's path, (...) having missed an opportunity to obtain wisdom. All of us are on a similar journey cluttered with obstacles of the human condition. It is the author's desire that this little book of hope and inspiration will serve as a torchlight to illuminate the way on the reader's journey toward a more joyful life -- one filled with knowledge, truth, and wisdom. (shrink)

I argue for the moral relevance of a category of individuals I characterize as far-persons. Following Gary Varner, I distinguish near-persons, animals with a " robust autonoetic consciousness " but lacking an adult human's " biographical sense of self, " from the merely sentient, those animals living "entirely in the present." I note the possibility of a third class. Far-persons lack a biographical sense of self, possess a weak autonoetic consciousness, and are able to travel mentally through time a (...) distance that exceeds the capacities of the merely sentient. Far-persons are conscious of and exercise control over short-term cognitive states, states limited by their temporal duration. The animals in question, human and nonhuman, consciously choose among various strategies available to them to achieve their ends, making them subjects of what I call "lyrical experience:" brief and potentially intense pleasures and pains. But their ends expire minute-by-minute, not stretching beyond, I say metaphorically, the present hour. I conclude by discussing the moral status of far-persons. (shrink)

Dallas Willard was a personal mentor and inspiration to hundreds of pastors, philosophers, and average churchgoers. In Gary W. Moon’s candid and inspiring biography, we read about the development of Willard's personal character, philosophical writing, and spiritual teaching, and how he has inspired some of the most influential books on spirituality of the last generation.

The late 20th century saw a remarkable flourishing of philosophy in France. The work of French philosophers is wide ranging, historically informed, often reaching out beyond the boundaries of philosophy; they are public intellectuals, taken seriously as contributors to debates outside the academy. Gary Gutting tells the story of the development of a distinctively French philosophy in the last four decades of the 20th century. His aim is to arrive at an account of what it was to 'do philosophy' (...) in France, what this sort of philosophizing was able to achieve, and how it differs from the analytic philosophy dominant in Anglophone countries. -/- His initial focus is on the three most important philosophers who came to prominence in the 1960s: Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Derrida. He sets out the educational and cultural context of their work, as a basis for a detailed treatment of how they formulated and began to carry out their philosophical projects in the 1960s and 1970s. He gives a fresh assessment of their responses to the key influences of Hegel and Heidegger, and the fraught relationship of the new generation to their father-figure Sartre. He concludes that Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze can all be seen as developing their fundamental philosophical stances out of distinctive readings of Nietzsche. The second part of the book considers topics and philosophers that became prominent in the 1980s and 1990s, such as the revival of ethics in Levinas, Derrida, and Foucault, the return to phenomenology and its use to revive religious experience as a philosophical topic, and Alain Badiou's new ontology of the event. Finally Gutting brings to the fore the meta-philosophical theme of the book, that French philosophy since the 1960s has been primarily concerned with thinking the impossible. (shrink)

There is no doubt science is currently suffering from a credibility crisis. This thought-provoking book argues that, ironically, science's credibility is being undermined by tools created by scientists themselves. Scientific disinformation and damaging conspiracy theories are rife because of the internet that science created, the scientific demand for empirical evidence and statistical significance leads to data torturing and confirmation bias, and data mining is fuelled by the technological advances in Big Data and the development of ever-increasingly powerfulcomputers. Using a wide (...) range of entertaining examples, this fascinating book examines the impacts of society's growing distrust of science, and ultimately provides constructive suggestions for restoring the credibility of the scientific community. (shrink)

The view, in Quine, that all there are are pure sets is presented and endorsed.

Descartes is widely regarded to be the father of modern philosophy and his Meditations is among the most important philosophical texts ever written. _The Routledge Guidebook to Descartes’ Meditations_ introduces the major themes in Descartes’ great book and acts as a companion for reading this key work, examining: The context of Descartes’ work and the background to his writing; Each separate part of the text in relation to its goals, meanings and impact; The reception the book received when first seen (...) by the world; The relevance of Descartes’ work to modern philosophy, it’s legacy and influence. With further reading included throughout, this text follows Descartes’ original work closely, making it essential reading for all students of philosophy, and all those wishing to get to grips with this classic work. This edition revises the earlier guidebook entitled _Descartes and the Meditations_ (2003). It has been thoroughly revised, and contains expanded treatment of the method of doubt, theory of ideas, and new discussion of Descartes' theory of vision. (shrink)

In the early modern period, many authors held that sensation or sensory reception is in some way passive and that perception is in some way active. The notion of a more passive and a more active aspect of perception is already present in Aristotle: the senses receive forms without matter more or less passively, but the “primary sense” also recognizes the salience of present objects. Ibn al-Haytham distinguished “pure sensation” from other aspects of sense perception, achieved by “discernment, inference and (...) recognition,” which included perception of properties such as size and distance as well as similarity, difference, and beauty. Descartes regarded light and color as experiences passively caused in the mind by bodily processes, but he also included distance, perceived through accommodation and convergence, as an immediately caused sensory idea. On the perception side, most theorists held that size and distance perception occurs through unnoticed psychological operations, whether mediated by judgment or associative processes. Association is, in a sense, passive, as it occurs through nonreflective habit formation. But such habits mark a contribution of the subject to perception and are in that way active. The decision of whether sensation and perception are active or passive is highly sensitive to what counts as activity and to what is included as sensation or perception. There is no simple formula, but the generalization that sensation is for the most part passive and perception for the most part active may stand as an imprecise summary of early modern thought on the topic. (shrink)

Volume XXIX contains papers and commentaries presented to the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy during academic year 2012-13. The papers feature Plato's Republic and Timaeus, examine Aristotle on generation, analogy and method, and analyze Proclus on first principles.

Laying foundations -- Rejecting aggression -- Safeguarding cooperation -- Enforcing law -- Rectifying injury -- Liberating society -- Situating liberation.

This chapter finds two versions of the distinction between primary and secondary qualities in Galileo, Descartes, Boyle, and Locke. Although agreeing that primary qualities are physically basic properties of extended particles (including size, shape, position, and motion), these authors differed on whether secondary qualities such as color exist only in the mind as sensations or belong to bodies as powers to cause sensations. Kant was initially a metaphysical realist about primary qualities as spatialized forces (vs. bare extended particles), before placing (...) space among the appearances in his critical period. Space becomes the subjective form in which transcendently real forces and relations appear. Kant viewed color as a subjective sensation in the mind, whereas Helmholtz treated color as a power to cause sensations. Helmholtz was initially a realist about primary qualities as spatialized masses and forces, but he later adopted the epistemically modest view of space as the subjective form in which forces and relations appear. (shrink)

What is cognition? What makes a process cognitive? These questions have been answered differently by various investigators and theoretical traditions. Even so, there are some commonalities, allowing us to specify a few contrasting answers to these questions. The main commonalities involve the notion that cognition is information processing that explains intelligent behavior. The differences concern whether early perceptual processes are cognitive, whether representations are needed to explain cognition, what makes something a representation, and whether cognitive processes are limited to the (...) nervous system and brain or include other bodily structures or the environment itself. After unearthing some root notions of cognition in the development of cognitive psychology and cognitive science, this chapter considers the commonalities and differences just scouted, examines Wheeler’s (2005) reference to Descartes’ works in describing “Cartesian” cognitive theory, finds the real target of situated approaches in classical symbolic cognitive science, and suggests that instead of revisiting that target attention should turn to the varieties of intelligent (adaptive, appropriate, flexible) behavior. (shrink)

Einstein's General Theory of Relativity links the metrical structure of the cosmic order (or "cosmology") to the contingent distributions of matter and energy throughout the universe, one of the chief areas of investigation in astrophysics. However, presently we have neither devised nor discovered system of uniform relations whereby we can make our cosmological measurements intelligible. This is "the measurement problem of cosmology." Using both historical ideas (such as A.N. Whitehead's work in the 1920s) and contemporary evidence and theories, argue that (...) the measurement problem has neither been fully understood nor rightly interpreted. With better grasp of this problem, such as am attempting to provide, the prospects for solution look brighter. (shrink)

I make a Quinean case that Quine’s ontological relativity marked a wrong turn in his philosophy, that his fundamental commitments point toward the classical view of ontology that was worked out in most detail in hisWord and Object. This removes the impetus toward structuralism in his later philosophy.

The chapter focuses on attributions of the transparency of thought to early modern figures, most notably Descartes. Many recent philosophers assume that Descartes believed the mind to be “transparent”: since all mental states are conscious, we are therefore aware of them all, and indeed incorrigibly know them all. Descartes, and Berkeley too, do make statements that seem to endorse both aspects of the transparency theses (awareness of all mental states; incorrigibility). However, they also make systematic theoretical statements that directly countenance (...) “unnoticed” thoughts or mental states, that is, thoughts or mental states of which the subject is unaware and has no knowledge. Descartes, having identified the essence of mind with thought or representation, distinguishes bare states of mind from states of which we have reflective awareness, thereby providing a theoretical tool for understanding both his seeming endorsement of transparency and his actual denial of it: Descartes distinguished between a basic perceptual state, or a basic awareness, and reflectively conscious states that involve explicit noticing and cognizing on the part of the subject. Leibniz (as is better known) directly endorsed a similar distinction between bare perception and reflective consciousness, using the term “perception” for the first and “apperception” for the second. In these cases, bare perceptions are not transparently available to the subject, and so in fact the subject does not have knowledge, hence does not have incorrigible knowledge, of all its occurrent mental states. This chapter gives evidence to support these claims; elaborates the complex psychology of the subject found in Descartes and other early moderns; and notes some ways in which these early moderns contributed to the genesis of the modern subject. Finally, it compares McDowell’s conception of the Cartesian mind with the conceptions of mind found in the writings of Descartes, Berkeley, and Leibniz, finding that his characterization caricatures the positions of early modern philosophers. McDowell's characterization has four elements: consciousness as essence of mind; intentionality as exclusively mental; the veil of perception; and the transparency of mind. Only the second point, about intentionality, fully fits Descartes. As a consequence of his own misdirection, McDowell misses the actual basis of his difficulty in connecting mind with world, which arises from a point of agreement between him and Descartes: the removal of intentionality from material sensory systems. But whereas Descartes could relocate (nonconceptual) sensory intentionality in mental states, McDowell is left to account for it with his overly cognitivized scheme of perceptual content as exclusively conceptual. (Paper first given at the European Society for Early Modern Philosophy, 2007.). (shrink)

In this essay, I want to explore one of the most ironic episodes in the history of propaganda, the attempt by various federal agencies to moderate American WWII anti-Japanese propaganda films. My texts will be four films, two produced by the military, and two by Hollywood: December 7th (1943), directed by Gregg Toland and revised by John Ford; Air Force (1943), directed Howard Hawks; Know Your Enemy: Japan (1945), directed by Frank Capra; and Betrayal for the East (1945), directed by (...) William Berke. As all of these films are readily available on YouTube, I will be brief in my description of them. Instead, I will focus on how they served to intensify racial hatred of Japanese in general and Japanese-Americans in particular, and how the federal government tried to control that propaganda—but was limited by its own policies regarding Japanese-Americans. (shrink)

Descartes set for himself the ambitious program of accounting for the functions of the Aristotelian vegetative and sensitive souls without invoking souls or the faculties or powers of souls in his explanations. He rejects the notion that the soul is hylomorphically present in the organs of the body so as to carry out vital and sensory functions. Rather, the body’s organs operate in a purely mechanical fashion. That is what is involved in “mechanizing” these phenomena. The role of the soul (...) is restricted to properly mental functions: to the conscious aspects of sensations and other mental operations; to intellectual acts; and to acts of volition. In effect, soul becomes mind. In order to understand the extent of Descartes’ ambition, this chapter first considers more fully the functions attributed to the soul or to the vital faculties in the Aristotelian and Galenic traditions, and especially the functions of the sensitive soul or power. It draws attention to the cognitive aspects of these functions, beyond the mere operation of the external senses. Then it turns to Descartes’ mechanistic explanations for these cognitive functions. Finally, it situates Descartes’ new mechanistic psychology within the larger context of his novel anthropology, or theory of the human being. (shrink)

With its unique combination of depth, clarity, and humor that has enchanted millions, this beloved classic by bestselling author Gary Zukav opens the fascinating world of quantum physics to readers with no mathematical or technical background. "Wu Li" is the Chinese phrase for physics. It means "patterns of organic energy," but it also means "nonsense," "my way," "I clutch my ideas," and "enlightenment." These captivating ideas frame Zukav's evocative exploration of quantum mechanics and relativity theory. Delightfully easy to read, (...) The Dancing Wu Li Masters illuminates the compelling powers at the core of all we know. (shrink)