A book of readings in Western intellectual history focusing on the role of reason in human action. Contents:^ Plato: Myth of the Cave; Plato: ^IThe Four Virtues; Aristotle: Knowledge of Causes; Aristotle: The Types of Governments; Epicurus: Epicureanism; Epictetus: Stoicism; St. Augustine: The Platonist; St. Augustine: The Nature of Sources of Evil; St. Thomas Aquinas: The Four Laws; St. Thomas Aquinas: The Nature of the Soul; Pico: The Oration on the Dignity of Man; John Calvin: Reason, Sin and Illumination; St. (...) Teresa of Avila: Interior Castle; Rene Descartes: Pens,s ; Thomas Hobbes: The State of Nature; John Locke: The State of Nature; Alexander Pope: Essay on Man; David Hume: Impressions and Ideas; Voltaire: Candide; Immanuel Kant: Space and Time; Immanuel Kant: The Good Will; Edmund Burke: Revolution in France; James Madison: The Federal Government; Soren Kierkegaard: Subjective Truth; Fyodor Dostoevsky: The Grand Inquisitor; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Communist Manifesto; Friedrich Nietzsche: The Will to Power; William James: Pragmatism; William James: Philosophical Temperaments; Sigmund Freud: The Ego and the Id; Ludwig Wittgenstein: Later Theory; Jean-Paul Sartre: Existentialism; Carol Gilligan: Women's Place in Man's World; Appendix: Programmed Text on Epistemology. (shrink)

In the past two decades, reinforcement learning has become a popular framework for understanding brain function. A key component of RL models, prediction error, has been associated with neural signals throughout the brain, including subcortical nuclei, primary sensory cortices, and prefrontal cortex. Depending on the location in which activity is observed, the functional interpretation of prediction error may change: Prediction errors may reflect a discrepancy in the anticipated and actual value of reward, a signal indicating the salience or novelty of (...) a stimulus, and many other interpretations. Anterior cingulate cortex has long been recognized as a region involved in processing behavioral error, and recent computational models of the region have expanded this interpretation to include a more general role for the region in predicting likely events, broadly construed, and signaling deviations between expected and observed events. Ongoing modeling work investigating the interaction between ACC and additional regions involved in cognitive control suggests an even broader role for cingulate in computing a hierarchically structured surprise signal critical for learning models of the environment. The result is a predictive coding model of the frontal lobes, suggesting that predictive coding may be a unifying computational principle across the neocortex. (shrink)

The medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) has been the subject of intense interest as a locus of cognitive control. Several computational models have been proposed to account for a range of effects, including error detection, conflict monitoring, error likelihood prediction, and numerous other effects observed with single-unit neurophysiology, fMRI, and lesion studies. Here, we review the state of computational models of cognitive control and offer a new theoretical synthesis of the mPFC as signaling response–outcome predictions. This new synthesis has two interacting (...) components. The first component learns to predict the various possible outcomes of a planned action, and the second component detects discrepancies between the actual and intended responses; the detected discrepancies in turn update the outcome predictions. This single construct is consistent with a wide array of performance monitoring effects in mPFC and suggests a unifying account of the cognitive role of medial PFC in performance monitoring. (shrink)

In several places we have argued that ‘fitness’ is a primitive term with respect to the theory of evolution properly understood. These arguments have relied heavily on the axiomatization of the theory provided by one of us. In contrast, both John Beatty and Robert Brandon have separately argued for a “propensity“ interpretation of “fitness” ; and in Brandon and Beatty they attack our view that “fitness“ is a primitive term in evolutionary theory, concluding that a definition by way of propensities (...) is possible and preferable. Here we reply to their criticisms, and argue that, at most, the view that fitness is a statistical propensity is a terminological variant on our thesis that it is a primitive in evolutionary theory. (shrink)

The text of Seneca's Letters, despite the attention it has received from scholars in the last fifty years, still leaves much to be desired in a large number of places. It is a field in which emendations can be proposed with rather more security than is often the case in classical Latin prose, because Seneca was a very prolific writer, exceeded only by Cicero and Livy in the bulk of his extant work. The absence of a special lexicon for this (...) eminent author constitutes a genuine difficulty of course, but it can be overcome in part at least by a constant reading and re-reading of his works, not excluding the dramas. The following suggestions are based on a more intense application to Seneca than Quintilian would be likely to have approved. (shrink)

ABSTRACTHow should judges reason in a well-ordered constitutional democracy? According to John Rawls’s famous remarks in Political Liberalism, they ought to do so in accordance with the idea of pub...

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 RECORDER'S PREFACE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (...) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 THE DISCUSSION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.. (shrink)

The authors conducted a baseline survey of baccalaureate and graduate degree health humanities programs in the United States and Canada. The object of the survey was to formally assess the current state of the field, to gauge what kind of resources individual programs are receiving, and to assess their self-identified needs to become or remain programmatically sustainable, including their views on the potential benefits of program accreditation. A 56-question baseline survey was sent to 111 institutions with baccalaureate programs and 20 (...) institutions with graduate programs. Respondents were asked about three areas: (1) program administration (managing unit, paid director, faculty lines, paid staff, funding sources); (2) educational program (curricular structure, CIP code usage, completion rates); and (3) views on accreditation for the field. A clear majority of respondents agreed that some form of accreditation or consultation service could address resource and sustainability issues. Overall, the survey responses to staffing, curricular structure, and support suggest the need for developing a sustainable infrastructure for health humanities. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger wrote one and only one preface for a scholarly work on his thinking, and it was for William J. Richardson’s study Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought, first published in 1963. Ever since, both Heidegger’s Preface and Richardson’s groundbreaking book have played an important role in Heidegger scholarship. Much has been discussed about these texts over the decades, but what has not been available to students and scholars up to this point is Richardson’s original comments and questions to (...) Heidegger that led to the famous Preface. These are published here for the first time both in the German original and in our English translation. In our commentary we 1) discuss how Heidegger’s Preface came about, 2) explain the source and status of the materials published here, and 3) pair selected passages from Richardson’s text with Heidegger’s reply in his Preface to highlight the consonance of their thinking. (shrink)

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

If you accept evolutionary theory, can you also believe in God? Are human beings superior to other animals, or is this just a human prejudice? Does Darwin have implications for heated issues like euthanasia and animal rights? Does evolution tell us the purpose of life, or does it imply that life has no ultimate purpose? Does evolution tell us what is morally right and wrong, or does it imply that ultimately 'nothing' is right or wrong? In this fascinating and intriguing (...) book, Steve Stewart-Williams addresses these and other fundamental philosophical questions raised by evolutionary theory and the exciting new field of evolutionary psychology. Drawing on biology, psychology and philosophy, he argues that Darwinian science supports a view of a godless universe devoid of ultimate purpose or moral structure, but that we can still live a good life and a happy life within the confines of this view. (shrink)

In this empirical paper, Jay, Stone, Meksin, Merck, Gordon and Hirst examine whether jury deliberations, in which individuals collaboratively recall and discuss evidence of a trial, shape the jurors’ memories. In doing so, Jay and colleagues provide a highly ecologically valid baseline for future investigation into why, how and when selective recall either facilitates remembering or leads to forgetting during jury deliberations. In particular, Jay et al. explore the specific social and cognitive mechanisms that might lead to either memory facilitation (...) (RIFA – Retrieval Induced Facilitation) and forgetting (RIF ‐ Retrieval Induced Forgetting) during jury deliberation. (shrink)

This collection of new papers on Scottish philosophy in the age of Hutcheson and Hume pays close attention to the study of context and the use of original historical sources as a key to philosophical interpretation. The book includes revolutionary new research on Hume's early reading in science and religion and its impact of his thought.

Achieving space domain awareness requires the identification, characterization, and tracking of space objects. Storing and leveraging associated space object data for purposes such as hostile threat assessment, object identification, and collision prediction and avoidance present further challenges. Space objects are characterized according to a variety of parameters including their identifiers, design specifications, components, subsystems, capabilities, vulnerabilities, origins, missions, orbital elements, patterns of life, processes, operational statuses, and associated persons, organizations, or nations. The Space Object Ontology provides a consensus-based realist framework (...) for formulating such characterizations in a computable fashion. Space object data are aligned with classes and relations in the Space Object Ontology and stored in a dynamically updated Resource Description Framework triple store, which can be queried to support space domain awareness and the needs of spacecraft operators. This paper presents the core of the Space Object Ontology, discusses its advantages over other approaches to space object classification, and demonstrates its ability to combine diverse sets of data from multiple sources within an expandable framework. Finally, we show how the ontology provides benefits for enhancing and maintaining longterm space domain awareness. (shrink)

To this circumstance is probably to be ascribed the little progress, which has hitherto been made in the PHILOSOPHY OF THE HUMAN MIND ; a, science, ...

This article starts from the assumption that there are various innate contributions to our view of the world and explores the epistemological implications that follow from this. Specifically, it explores the idea that if certain components of our worldview have an evolutionary origin, this implies that these aspects accurately depict the world. The simple version of the argument for this conclusion is that if an aspect of mind is innate, it must be useful, and the most parsimonious explanation for its (...) usefulness is that it accurately depicts the world. There are a number of important criticisms of this argument. These include the idea that evolutionary justifications are circular, that evolved mental content and principles are not necessarily accurate, and that, if the argument is taken seriously, it has some highly dubious consequences. These criticisms necessitate various qualifications to the initial argument. Nonetheless, it is argued that, in some cases, important conclusions can be drawn about the world from an analysis of evolved contributions to our view of the world. An evolutionary approach cannot provide an ultimate justification for any belief; however, in certain circumstances, it supports the conclusion that a given belief is a reasonable first approximation. To the extent that innate content and principles pertain to topics in metaphysics, they can be viewed as a naturalistic source of metaphysical knowledge. (shrink)

Investigating key issues in English philosophical, political, and religious thought in the second half of the seventeenth century, this book presents a set of new and intriguing essays on the topics. Particular emphasis is given to the interaction between philosophy and religion among leading political thinkers of the period; connections between philosophical debate on personhood, certainty, and the foundations of faith; and new conceptions of biblical exegesis.