ArgumentThe administration of mountain expeditions from the ground created special managerial problems. The Harvard College Observatory's Boyden Expeditions of 1887–1890 sent men and materiel to three sites: Pike's Peak, Colorado; Mount Wilson, California; and Chosica, Peru. Their goal was to test sites in order to find a suitable site for a permanent Boyden station to conduct astrophysical work in service of Harvard's preexisting projects. The logistical difficulties of living on the mountainside combined with the organizational difficulties of administrating a station (...) at a distance. The men who lived on the mountain were professionally vulnerable, and often cut off from their home observatory both by the weather conditions at their own altitude and local politics on the ground below them. Only when an unbroken line of communication could be established between the mountain station and the Harvard Observatory could the astronomers on both ends work together to create a successful expedition. (shrink)

In this paper, we examine the viability of avoiding value judgments encoded in thick concepts when these concepts are used in economic theories. We focus on what implications the use of such thick concepts might have for the tenability of the fact/value dichotomy in economics. Thick concepts have an evaluative and a descriptive component. Our suggestion is that despite attempts to rid thick concepts of their evaluative component, economists are often not successful. We focus on the strategy of explication to (...) remove the evaluative component of thick concepts and argue that often economists either have to make value judgments or are unable to individuate out the phenomenon under analysis. We support our claim with a case study, namely the concept of addiction in Gary Becker and Kevin Murphy’s Theory of Rational Addiction (1988). One consequence of our analysis is that theories containing thick concepts could commit economists to making value judgments and as such undermine the fact/value dichotomy. (shrink)

Shifting Stones, Shaping the Past: Sculpture from the Buddhist Stūpas of Andhra Pradesh. By Catherine Becker. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. xxiv + 321, 108 illustr. $35.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Why Socrates and Thrasymachus Become FriendsCatherine ZuckertIn the Platonic dialogues Socrates is shown talking to two, and only two, famous teachers of rhetoric, Thrasymachus of Chalcedon and Gorgias of Leontini.1 At first glance relations between Socrates and Gorgias appear to be much more courteous—they might even be described as cordial—than relations between Socrates and Thrasymachus. In the Gorgias Socrates explicitly and intentionally seeks an opportunity to talk to Gorgias (...) and treats him with great respect. Socrates shows that Gorgias’s claims concerning the power of his art are contradictory, but the philosopher does not press his advantage or embarrass the rhetorician (Stauffer 2006, 34). Although Gorgias indicates his interest in hearing what Socrates has to say by urging his young friends Polus and Callicles to continue the conversation, Gorgias never says that he is convinced by Socrates. And Socrates never announces that Gorgias has become his friend.2In the Republic Socrates reports that Thrasymachus burst into the conversation like a lion. Socrates even claims that he and his interlocutor (Polemarchus) were frightened. The initial exchange between Socrates and Thrasymachus thus appears to be hostile. In the argument that follows, Socrates embarrasses Thrasymachus; the famous teacher of rhetoric blushes. Nevertheless, Socrates declares later in the conversation (1900, 498d) that he and Thrasymachus have become friends.3 [End Page 163]The difference in the relations Socrates had—or at least thought that he could have—with the two teachers of rhetoric is important, because it indicates what sort of rhetoric Socrates thought was compatible not only with his philosophy but also with a just political order and what was not. The differences between the claims and arguments of the two teachers of rhetoric are not easy to pinpoint, however. Many of the charges that Gorgias’s associates Polus and Callicles make against Socrates, at least partly in defense of Gorgias, sound very much like charges Thrasymachus makes against Socrates. In order to discover the grounds of the difference in the relation between the philosopher and the two teachers of rhetoric, it thus becomes necessary to review and compare the claims Gorgias and his students make with those Thrasymachus levels against Socrates at the beginning of the Republic.Socrates’ Encounter with GorgiasAt the beginning of the Gorgias the famous rhetorician’s Athenian host Callicles expresses surprise that Socrates has come to hear Gorgias declaim. But Socrates is not interested in witnessing a demonstration of Gorgias’s prowess as a speaker; he wants to ask the rhetorician what the power of his art is and what he teaches. Since Gorgias had previously offered to answer any questions after his speech, he agrees to respond to Socrates’ queries.In order for them to converse, Socrates emphasizes, Gorgias will have to keep his responses short. Although Gorgias sensibly observes that all questions cannot be answered adequately with brief replies, his first responses to Socrates’ questions are very short. Since Gorgias claims to be a knower and practitioner of an art, Socrates asks what he does and makes others capable of doing. Gorgias replies that he gives speeches and teaches others how to orate. Socrates asks what the speeches are about. “The greatest of human affairs, and the best” (1998, 451d), Gorgias vaguely and rather evasively responds. Pressed to be more specific, he finally declares that his art provides “the greatest good and cause both of freedom for human beings themselves and rule over others in each man’s own city” by enabling them to make speeches that “persuade judges in the law court, councilors in the council, assemblymen in the assembly, and in every other... political gathering” (1998, 452d–e, translation slightly modified).The Grounds of Gorgias’s ClaimsIf Gorgias had not been restricted to brief replies by his agreement with Socrates, he might have explained the reasons for his vast claims with [End Page 164] arguments like those to be found in two of his remaining fragments. In his “Encomium to Helen” he explains the overwhelming power of speech, and in “On the Nonexistent” he demonstrates the reason or basis of this power by arguing that there is no form of “being” that exists independent of our... (shrink)

Psychologists and philosophers have argued that the capacity for perseverance or “grit” depends both on willpower and on a kind of epistemic resilience. But can a form of hopefulness in one’s future success also constitute a source of grit? I argue that substantial practical hopefulness, as a hope to bring about a desired outcome through exercises of one’s agency, can serve as a distinctive ground for the capacity for perseverance. Gritty agents’ “practical hope” centrally involves an attention-fuelled, risk-inclined weighting of (...) two competing concerns over action: when facing the decision of whether to persevere, hopeful gritty agents prioritize the aim of choosing a course of action which might go very well over that of choosing a course of action which is very likely to go fairly well. By relying on the notion of a “risk-inclined attentional pattern” as a dimension of gritty agents’ practical hope, we can explain that form of hope’s contribution to their motivation and practical rationality, especially on a risk-weighted expected utility framework. The upshot is a more pluralistic view of the sources of grit. (shrink)

I defend the thesis that friendship can constitutively require epistemic irrationality against a recent, forceful challenge, raised by proponents of moral and pragmatic encroachment. Defenders of the “encroachment strategy” argue that exemplary friends who are especially slow to believe that their friends have acted wrongly are simply sensitive to the high prudential or moral costs of falsely believing in their friends’ guilt. Drawing on psychological work on epistemic motivation (and in particular on the notion of “need for closure”), I propose (...) a different picture of what friendship requires in the doxastic realm. I argue that contrary to what the encroachment strategy suggests, exemplary friends’ belief formation ought not be guided by a concern with accuracy or error avoidance, but instead by a need to avoid a “specific closure” – namely, a need to avoid concluding in their friends’ guilt. I propose that exemplary friendship often generates a defeasible, doxastic obligation to exemplify such a need, despite its inherent corrupting effects on exemplary friends’ epistemic faculties. (shrink)

Hope is often seen as at once valuable and dangerous: it can fuel our motivation in the face of challenges, but can also distract us from reality and lead us to irrationality. How can we learn to “hope well,” and what does “hoping well” involve? Contemporary philosophers disagree on such normative questions about hope and also on how to define hope as a mental state. This article explores recent philosophical debates surrounding the concept of hope and the norms governing hope. (...) It also underlies hope's significance for the philosophy of emotion and the ethics of interpersonal relations. (shrink)

Tetris provides a difficult, dynamic task environment within which some people are novices and others, after years of work and practice, become extreme experts. Here we study two core skills; namely, choosing the goal or objective function that will maximize performance and a feature-based analysis of the current game board to determine where to place the currently falling zoid so as to maximize the goal. In Study 1, we build cross-entropy reinforcement learning models to determine whether different goals result in (...) different feature weights. Two of these optimization strategies quickly rise to performance plateaus, whereas two others continue toward higher but more jagged heights. In Study 2, we compare the zoid placement decisions made by our best CERL models with those made by 67 human players. Across 370,131 human game episodes, two CERL models picked the same zoid placements as our lowest scoring human for 43% of the placements and as our three best scoring experts for 65% of the placements. Our findings suggest that people focus on maximizing points, not number of lines cleared or number of levels reached. They also show that goal choice influences the choice of zoid placements for CERLs and suggest that the same is true of humans. Tetris has a repetitive task structure that makes Tetris more tractable and more like a traditional experimental psychology paradigm than many more complex games or tasks. Hence, although complex, Tetris is not overwhelmingly complex and presents a right-sized challenge to cognitive theories, especially those of integrated cognitive systems. (shrink)

When Artificial Intelligence (AI) is applied in decision-making that affects people’s lives, it is now well established that the outcomes can be biased or discriminatory. The question of whether algorithms themselves can be among the sources of bias has been the subject of recent debate among Artificial Intelligence researchers, and scholars who study the social impact of technology. There has been a tendency to focus on examples, where the data set used to train the AI is biased, and denial on (...) the part of some researchers that algorithms can also be biased. Here we illustrate the point that algorithms themselves can be the source of bias with the example of collaborative filtering algorithms for recommendation and search. These algorithms are known to suffer from cold-start, popularity, and homogenizing biases, among others. While these are typically described as statistical biases rather than biases of moral import; in this paper we show that these statistical biases can lead directly to discriminatory outcomes. The intuitive idea is that data points on the margins of distributions of human data tend to correspond to marginalized people. The statistical biases described here have the effect of further marginalizing the already marginal. Biased algorithms for applications such as media recommendations can have significant impact on individuals’ and communities’ access to information and culturally-relevant resources. This source of bias warrants serious attention given the ubiquity of algorithmic decision-making. (shrink)

Our understanding of human visual perception generally rests on the assumption that conscious visual states represent the interaction of spatial structures in the environment and our nervous system. This assumption is questioned by circumstances where conscious visual states can be triggered by external stimulation which is not primarily spatially defined. Here, subjective colors and forms are evoked by flickering light while the precise nature of those experiences varies over flicker frequency and phase. What’s more, the occurrence of one subjective experience (...) appears to be associated with the occurrence of others. While these data indicate that conscious visual experience may be evoked directly by particular variations in the flow of spatially unstructured light over time, it must be assumed that the systems responsible are essentially temporal in character and capable of representing a variety of visual forms and colors, coded in different frequencies or at different phases of the same processing rhythm. (shrink)

Plato’s Timaeus is usually taken to be a sequel to the Republic which shows the cosmological basis of Plato’s politics. In this article I challenge the traditional understanding by arguing that neither Critias’s nor Timaeus’s speech performs the assigned function. The contrast between Timaeus’s monologue and the silently listening Socrates dramatizes the philosophical differences between investigations of “the human things,” like those conducted by Socrates, and attempts to demonstrate the intelligible, mathematically calculable order of the sensible natural world, like that (...) of Timaeus. (shrink)

Ecological Psychology and Enactivism both challenge representationist cognitive science, but the two approaches have only begun to engage in dialogue. Further conceptual clarification is required in which differences are as important as common ground. This paper enters the dialogue by focusing on important differences. After a brief account of the parallel histories of Ecological Psychology and Enactivism, we cover incompatibility between them regarding their theories of sensation and perception. First, we show how and why in ecological theory perception is, crucially, (...) not based on sensation. We elucidate this idea by examining the biological roots of work in the two fields, concentrating on Gibson and Varela and Maturana. We expound an ecological critique of any sensation-based approach to perception by detailing two topics: classic retinal image theories and perception in single-celled organisms. The second main point emphasizes the importance of the idea of organism-environment mutuality and its difference from structural coupling of sensations and motor behavior. We point out how ecological - phenomenological methods of inquiry grow out of mutualism and compare Gibson’s idea of visual kinesthesis to Merleau-Ponty’s idea of the lived body. Third, we conclude that Ecological Psychology and varieties of Enactivism are laying down different paths to pursue related goals. Thus, convergence of Ecological Psychology and Enactivism is not possible given their conflicting assumptions, but cross-fertilization is possible and desirable. (shrink)

The development of genomics has dramatically expanded the scope of genetic research, and collections of genetic biosamples have proliferated in countries with active genomics research programs. In this essay, we consider a particular kind of collection, national biobanks. National biobanks are often presented by advocates as an economic ‘‘resource’’ that will be used by both basic researchers and academic biologists, as well as by pharmaceutical diagnostic and clinical genomics companies. Although national biobanks have been the subject of intense interest in (...) recent social science literature, most prior work on this topic focuses either on bioethical issues related to biobanks, such as the question of informed consent, or on the possibilities for scientific citizenship that they make possible. We emphasize, by contrast, the economic aspect of biobanks, focusing specifically on the way in which national biobanks create biovalue. Our emphasis on the economic aspect of biobanks allows us to recognize the importance of what we call clinical labor—that is, the regularized, embodied work that members of the national population are expected to perform in their role as biobank participants—in the creation of biovalue through biobanks. Moreover, it allows us to understand how the technical way in which national biobanks link clinical labor to databases alters both medical and popular understandings of risk for common diseases and conditions. (shrink)

Michel Foucault’s understanding of painting oriented him and his readers to an alternative history of art through a means or an approach well known to philosophers and literary critics, that of irony. A close reading of the first chapter of The Order of Things shows that Foucault rejected the traditional interpretations of art history generated by a focus on the intentions of the individual artist, the identification of the subjects portrayed, and the expectations of a genre, relying instead on a (...) synthesis of the approaches to painting given by Merleau-Ponty and Jacques Lacan, which converged with his ironic approach. (shrink)

Pursuing difficult long-term goals typically involves encountering substantial evidence of possible future failure. If decisions to pursue such goals are serious only if one believes that one will act as one has decided, then some of our lives’ most important decisions seem to require belief against the evidence. This is the puzzle of difficult action, to which I offer a solution. I argue that serious decisions to φ do not have to give rise to a belief that one will φ, (...) but can instead be accompanied by a hope to φ. Hope can motivate and rationalize the various actions that we associate with serious commitment. It can also account for the existence of special pressures to adopt an agential stance toward one’s future. Because hope can be cognitively rational when belief is not, there is no problematic tension between the ideal of epistemic rationality and the phenomenon of difficult action. (shrink)

A commonly raised criticism against celebrity culture is that it celebrates people who become famous without any connection to their skills, talents or achievements. A culture in which people become famous simply for being famous is criticized for being shallow and inauthentic. In this paper we offer a defence of celebrity by arguing against this criticism. We begin by outlining what we call the Talent Argument: celebrity is a negative cultural phenomenon because it creates and sustains fame without any connection (...) to the accomplishments that arise from an expression of talent or skill. By appealing to the metaphysics of talent and skill, we argue against the Talent Argument and propose that being a celebrity requires the skills that are necessary to acquire and maintain one’s status as a celebrity. A celebrity is more likely to be talented and successful in their expression of these skills, and even celebrities who are ‘famous for being famous’ will often display talents and skills that give rise to their fame. This means that those who critique celebrity culture should not do so by appealing to the Talent Argument. We show how our account of celebrity, talent and skill works to reject both the strong version of the Talent Argument, as well as a weaker and more plausible version of the argument we call the Valuable Talents argument. We conclude by noting that our analysis has demonstrated the need to explore more closely the kinds of skills that are necessary to cultivate celebrity status. This allows for a more nuanced understanding of what a celebrity is, and the values that are attached to celebrity culture. (shrink)

Dominant paradigms in science foster integration of research findings, but at what cost? Forcing convergence requires centralizing decision-making authority, and risks reducing the diversity of methods and contributors, both of which are essential for the breakthrough ideas that advance science.

More and more areas of medicine involve subjects donating tissues to another — blood, organs, bone marrow, sperm, ova and embryos can all be transferred from one person to another. Within the technical frameworks of biomedicine, such fragments are generally treated as detachable things, severed from social identity once they are removed from a particular body. However an abundant anthropological and sociological literature has found that, for donors and patients, human tissues are not impersonal. They retain some of the values (...) of personhood and identity, and their incorporation often has complex effects on embodied identity. This article draws on feminist philosophy of the body to think through the implications of some of these practices. Specifically, it draws on the idea of intercorporeality, wherein the body image is always the effect of embodied social relations. While this approach is highly productive for considering the stakes involved in tissue transfer, it is argued that the concept of body image has been too preoccupied with the register of the visual at the expense of introceptive data and health/illness events. Empirical data around organ transplant and sperm donation are used to demonstrate that the transfer of biological fragments involves a profound kind of intercorporeality, producing identifications and disidentifications between donors and recipients that play out simultaneously at the immunological, psychic and social levels. (shrink)

Talents often play a significant role in our personal and social lives. For example, our talents may shape the choices we make and the goods that we value, making them central to the creation of a meaningful life. Differences in the level of talents also affect how social institutions are structured, and how social goods and resources are distributed. Despite their normative importance, it is surprising that talents have not yet received substantial philosophical analysis in their own right. As a (...) result, the current literature is rife with conceptual ambiguity: a talent is referred to as all of a skill, potential, ability, capacity, endowment, and a natural gift. In response to this confusion, in this paper I develop an account of what a talent is, based on the debate concerning the metaphysics of ability and dispositions. I argue for a position that I call ‘talent dispositionalism’: S has a talent for skill A in circumstances C iff S has the general disposition to excellently develop and maintain A when, in circumstances C, she tries to excellently develop and maintain A. On this account, a talent is not the skill itself, but a general iterated ability for the excellent development and up-keep of a particular skill, constituted by an agent’s dispositional properties. I defend the account against four objections usually levelled against traditional dispositionalist theories of ability, and highlight some ways the account may influence debates in other areas of philosophical inquiry. (shrink)

The arts and the sciences perform many of the same cognitive functions, both serving to advance understanding. This paper explores some of the ways exemplification operates in the two fields. Both scientific experiments and works of art highlight, underscore, display, or convey some of their own features. They thereby focus attention on them, and make them available for examination and projection. Thus, the Michelson-Morley experiment exemplifies the constancy of the speed of light. Jackson Pollock's "Number One" exemplifies the viscosity of (...) paint. Despite their similarities, science and art might seem to differ in their attitude toward facts. Science is said to adhere to facts; art, to be indifferent to them. Such, I urge, is not the case. Science, like art, often scorns fact to advance understanding through fiction. Thought experiments, I contend, are scientific fictions; literary and pictorial fictions, aesthetic thought experiments. (shrink)

Today, new artistic practices incorporate scientific techniques linked to medical research that modify the body’s biological performance in vivo, transforming it into a singular laboratory object. In this way, some artists are making works of their bodies by subjecting them to various biotechnological procedures, often invasive. Augmented, the biological body of these performance artists becomes a site for experimentation. DIY (Do It Yourself) enthusiasts or accompanied by biologists and doctors, are these ‘bio-artists’ evidence of the changes brought about by a (...) new mechanisation of the human body, the complexity of which we are only just beginning to understand? Could there be, in the name of art, reasons that justify the creation of utopian bodies that are not eschatological, and that could make us believe in the worst or the best of all worlds? Based on performances by Stelarc, Yann Marussich, Marion Laval-Jeantet and the Quimera Rosa duo, our aim is to analyse what is at stake in this new fabrication of the body outside its biological limits. (shrink)

We often form intentions to resist anticipated future temptations. But when confronted with the temptations our resolutions were designed to withstand, we tend to revise our previous evaluative judgments and conclude that we should now succumb—only to then revert to our initial evaluations, once temptation has subsided. Some evaluative judgments made under the sway of temptation are mistaken. But not all of them are. When the belief that one should now succumb is a proper response to relevant considerations that have (...) newly emerged, can acting in line with one’s previous intention nonetheless be practically rational? To answer this question, I draw on recent debates on the nature of higher-order evidence and on what rationally responding to such evidence involves. I propose that agents facing temptation often have evidence of “deliberative unreliability”, which they ought to heed even when it is “misleading” (that is, even when their evaluative judgments are in fact proper responses to the relevant considerations then available). Because evidence of deliberative unreliability can “dispossess” agents of normative reasons for evaluative judgments and actions that they would otherwise have, being continent despite judging that one should now succumb can often be more rational than giving in. (shrink)

This chapter explores some of the ways that mechanisms are invoked in neuroscience and looks at a selection of the philosophical problems that arise when trying to understand mechanistic explanations. It introduces a series of historical case studies that illustrate how neuroscientists have depended on mechanistic metaphors in their efforts to understand the mind and brain, and how their mechanistic explanations have developed over time. The chapter highlights what contemporary philosophers have identified as the fundamental features of mechanisms and mechanistic (...) explanation. It considers some of the methodological issues that arise in neuroscience including how to integrate psychological with neural models, how to generalize findings in model organisms like the sea slug Aplysia to human learning and memory, and whether to favor top-down or bottom-up methods. Constructing multi-level mechanistic explanations involves intensive collaboration across different branches of science, and involves many challenges, both pragmatic and methodological. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Deaconesses and Ritual ImpurityCatherine Brown TkaczCultural diversity underlies the differences between deaconesses of the East and of the West.1 In the West, women were recognized by their faith as able to catechize others and to assist women at baptism; in some parts of the East, only a deaconess could take these roles. Again, only in some areas of the East, women at certain times were not permitted to enter (...) the church building, but deaconesses could take the Eucharist to these housebound women. In religious life, corresponding differences existed. In the West, nuns were fitted by their vows to take various roles in the Liturgy of the Hours; in the East, in some areas, only a diaconal abbess could take these roles. In remote monasteries which might lack a priest for some time, the diaconal abbess could distribute pre-consecrated communion to the community. Long has cosmic dualism been recognized as a trait of the Eastern groups that had deaconesses. Now another trait can be identified: [End Page 187] apparently the groups which retained the Levitical laws of ritual impurity were the ones that needed the gender-specific ministry of deaconesses. Examining the theological and cultural context in which that office arose helps explain this varied history. Next, the Western deaconess is most clearly limned by comparing the pertinent Latin ceremonies. This also sheds unexpected light on how the Roman Catholic Church protected the property rights of consecrated women.The Context in Which Deaconesses AroseJesus taught a new doctrine: the call to sanctification: "Be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect" (Matt 5:48). Again, he commanded them to imitate him, to take up their cross daily and follow him (Luke 9:23). The post-Gospels New Testament continued to suggest ways for the believer to imitate Christ (for example, Heb 13:10–15). These teachings ground the doctrine that every human person is called to be holy and like Christ. To ensure that his followers knew that this vocation to holiness concerns women equally with men, Jesus demonstrated and emphasized the spiritual equality of the sexes throughout his time on earth.2 In an unprecedented way, he provided balanced examples of male and female in his interactions with men and women, in his healings, resurrection miracles, parables, and prophecies.3 In contrast, in the Old Testament and in the Jewish Haggadah, [End Page 188] paired male and female examples are "quite rare."4 While Tannaite Jews "exempted" women from reciting Shema and other acts of ritual worship and required only domestic devotions, Jesus elicited a public profession of faith from a woman as well as from a man—Peter (John 6:69) and Martha of Bethany (John 11:27)—and hers proves to be fuller.5 This dynamically demonstrated the spiritual equality of the sexes, and Eustathios of Antioch, Chrysostom, Augustine, and others praised Martha for teaching the faith.6From the start, both men and women were instructed in the faith, baptized, and received communion.7 Women also participated with men in evangelizing others. This began at Jesus's presentation in the Temple, his first public appearance, when the prophetess Anna announced the coming of the Messiah (Luke 2:36–38). The Samaritan woman evangelized her community: as soon as she learned of Jesus through conversation with him, she actively instructed others, so that many believed in him "because of the woman's testimony" (John 4:28–30, 39–42). The evangelical work of Priscilla was reported, with the account of her teaching a man (Acts 18:2, 26). That is, Christians interacted without a strict segregation of the sexes. When the apostles learned of neglect of the Greek widows, they obviously did not think that only other women could respond to this social need, for the apostles appointed men to do so (Acts 6:1–6).8Contrast this to the Jewish understanding of the roles of men and women. In the Temple, only Jewish men were allowed inside; women were relegated to the women's court. This segregation continued in medieval synagogues.9 [End Page 189] Likewise, as noted above, the Tannaite Jews "exempted" women from public worship. In Christian churches, however... (shrink)

Aux frontières de l’art et de l’expérience scientifique, des artistes s’aventurent à reprogrammer les mécanismes du vivant, à les réincarner en s’appuyant sur les données les plus récentes de la biologie pour produire des réalités vivantes inédites. Transposés du monde clos des laboratoires au monde de l’art, ces artefact vivants, sont-ils en mesure de modifier le regard que nous portons sur la science et plus encore sur le vivant et d’infléchir nos comportements à l’égard d’entités vivantes reprogrammées sur mesure? Sont-ils (...) les pièces à conviction d’une science en train de transformer la société et les valeurs qui s’y rattachent? L’identité humaine court-elle le risque de se perdre à travers cette collection d’entités biologico-futuristes qui transgressent la logique du vivant? Dans une société libérale où prévaut l’autonomie artistique, quand la performance technique semble se confondre avec la valeur esthétique de l’œuvre et que l’artiste relève autant de l’ingénieur que du concepteur, cet art protéiforme qui œuvre en laboratoire hors de tout programme appliqué à la médecine et à l’industrie, est-il en mesure de produire tous les possibles en matière de fabrication du vivant? Notre propos consistera à interroger d’un point de vue éthique la production de ces artistes qui érigent en dogme la rationalisation des phénomènes biologiques, interfèrent l’organisation spontanée des organismes vivants, et dessinent les contours d’une biosphère inédite. (shrink)

This book provides original descriptive accounts of two schools of thought in the philosophy of beauty: the 20th-century "Anti-Aesethetic" movement and the 21st-century "Beauty Revival" movement. It also includes a positive defence of beauty as a lived experience extrapolated from Beauty-Revival position. Beauty was traditionally understood in the broadest sense as a notion that engages our sense perception and embraces everything evoked by that perception, including mental products and affective states. This book constructs and places in parallel with one another (...) the Anti-Aesthetic and Beauty-Revival movements. In the author's view, Anti-Aestheticism is devoted to a decisive negation of beauty-denying its importance as a philosophical notion and its significance as a lived experience. It suggests that beauty is a merely sensual experience, which can be used, at best, as a distraction from justice and, at worst, as an instrument of evil. Alternatively, the Beauty-Revival movement advances arguments for beauty as an experience that extends primarily to sensual experience, but which also calls forth mental products and cognitive and affective states evoked by that experience. After reconstructing these two positions, the author elaborates on the notion of beauty as a lived experience through three key moments which occur in the process of our experiencing beautiful objects. These moments are (a) the conditions that constitute an experience of beauty, (b) the attitudinal features most likely to lead to the experience of beauty, and (c) the results of the experience of beauty. The Revival of Beauty will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in aesthetics, history of philosophy, and art history. (shrink)

Early in the Phaedrus, Socrates tells his interlocutor that he does not have time to formulate naturalistic reinterpretations of old stories, because he is not yet able, according to the Delphic inscription, to know myself. Indeed, it appears laughable to me for one who is still ignorant of this to examine alien things. … [So] I examine not them but myself: whether I happen to be some wild animal more multiply twisted and filled with desire than Typhon, or a gentler, (...) simpler animal having by nature a share in a divine fate. (shrink)

Modern societies are characterized by group-based hierarchies. Similar to attackers, disadvantaged-group members wish to change the status quo; like defenders, advantaged-group members wish to protect it. However, the psychological arrays that are typical of disadvantaged- and advantaged-group members are opposite to those of attackers and defenders – suggesting that the Attacker-Defender Game does not capture the dynamics between advantaged and disadvantaged groups.

This study of the metaphysics of G. W. Leibniz gives a clear picture of his philosophical development within the general scheme of seventeenth-century natural philosophy. Catherine Wilson examines the shifts in Leibniz's thinking as he confronted the major philosophical problems of his era. Beginning with his interest in artificial languages and calculi for proof and discovery, the author proceeds to an examination of Leibniz’s early theories of matter and motion, to the phenomenalistic turn in his theory of substance and (...) his subsequent de-emphasis of logical determinism, and finally to his doctrines of harmony and optimization. Specific attention is given to Leibniz’s understanding of Descartes and his successors, Malebranche and Spinoza, and the English philosophers Newton, Cudworth, and Locke. Wilson analyzes Leibniz’s complex response to the new mechanical philosophy, his discontent with the foundations on which it rested, and his return to the past to locate the resources for reconstructing it. She argues that the continuum-problem is the key to an understanding not only of Leibniz’s monadology but also of his views on the substantiality of the self and the impossibility of external causal influence. A final chapter considers the problem of Leibniz-reception in the post-Kantian era, and the difficulty of coming to terms with a metaphysics that is not only philosophically "critical" but, at the same time, “compensatory.” Originally published in 2050. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

This book helps break down and analyze the process of solid decision making.