H. G. Liddell & R. Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, rev. and aug. by Sir H. S. Jones. with the ass. of R. McKenzie, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1940. ῥυθμός , Ion. ῥυσμός (v. infr. 111, IV), ὁ : (ῥέω) :— A. any regular recurring motion (“πᾶς ῥ. ὡρισμένῃ μετρεῖται κινήσει” Arist.Pr.882b2) : I. measured motion, time, whether in sound or motion, Democr.15c ; = ἡ τῆς κινήσεως τάξις, Pl.Lg.665a, cf. 672e ; “ὁ ῥ. ἐκ τοῦ ταχέος (...) - Études grecques (...) et latines. (shrink)

The five books of Artemidorus of Ephesus’ Oneirocritica (c. second century CE) constitute the largest collection of divinatory dream-interpretations to survive from Graeco-Roman antiquity. This article examines Artemidorus’ contribution to longstanding medico-philosophical debates over the ontological and epistemic character of such dreams. As with wider Mediterranean traditions concerning premonitory dreams, Greeks and Romans popularly understood them as phenomena with origins exterior to the dreamer (e.g. a visitation of a god). Presocratic and Hippocratic thinkers, however, initiated an effort to bring at (...) least some dream events within the body as interior processes of a physical soul, a bodily turn which ultimately engendered a split in thinking about the possibility and scope of prophetic and diagnostic dreams (e.g. Hippocrates Regimen 4, Aristotle On Prophecy in Dreams, Rufus of Ephesus, and Galen). Here, I examine the way that Artemidorus meant the Oneirocritica to address seriously questions about the origins of dreams and the powers of empirical science in two, related ways. We will see that his defense of oneirocriticism as a techne unfolds along two main axes. First, Artemidorus constructs a necessary veneer of scientific credibility by mobilizing the tropes and organizational strategies characteristic of contemporary technical literature. Secondly, he anchors that authority upon a materialist account of prophetic dreams as “semiotic movements of the soul.” As Price, S. 1986. “The Future of Dreams: From Freud to Artemidorus.” Past & Present 113: 3–36 and Harris-McCoy, D. 2012. Artemidorus’ Oneirocritica: Text, Translation, and Commentary. Oxford: Oxford University Press observed, this explicit commitment to an empirical method of dream-interpretation resembles that of the Hellenistic medical ‘sect’ known as ‘Empiricists,’ who eschewed interest in theoretical etiology in favor of observation, comparison, and compilation of symptoms and outcomes. Pushing beyond similarity, I argue that Artemidorus not only deployed this method to defend empirically grounded accounts of dream-divination (cf. Cicero De div. 1), but endeavored to show that such a scientific method can be used to stabilize and corral productively the potentially infinite number of interpretations any dream-sign might bear without recourse to an underlying, causal theory. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 42.4 (2004) 489-490 [Access article in PDF] Ian M. Crystal. Self-Intellection and its Epistemological Origins in Ancient Greek Thought. Aldershot, England: Ashgate Publishing, 2002. Pp. x + 220. Cloth, $79.95. In this excellent re-working of his King's College Ph.D. thesis, Ian Crystal presents an account of the problem of self-intellection in Greek philosophy from Parmenides through Plotinus. The problem, at least as it (...) appears in ancient Greek philosophy, is connected to the way in which a faculty of soul relates to its proper object. For example, the proper object of the visual faculty is light, that of the auditory faculty sound, and it is the difference in kind between these proper objects that requires different faculties of soul in any account of how it is that we come to grasp the two different kinds of sensory data. Reason is itself a faculty of soul that is supposed to correspond to objects of cognition, but since it is possible to grasp, cognitively, the structure of this faculty the question arises: May this faculty function as its own object? The question is famously answered in the affirmative in Aristotle's treatise De anima at 430a2-5 on the grounds that any immaterial object of cognition is identical to thought itself (epi men gar tôn aneu hulês to auto esti to nooun kai to nooumenon).While this may seem like a peculiarly Aristotelian analysis of cognition (relying, as it does, on Aristotle's distinction between matter and form and his rather cryptic claim that the faculties of soul are actually what their proper objects are potentially), Crystal traces the idea both backwards and forwards in time, rooting the problem in Parmenides' general account of faculties of soul and tracing it through Plotinus's sophisticated account of noetic intellect, with visits along the way not only with Aristotle but Plato and the Stoics as well.The book is divided into three parts. In the first ("The Epistemological Origins") Crystal examines the evolution of the philosophical analysis of cognition from Parmenides through Plato. Parmenides, on this account, was the first to offer anything like a philosophical treatment of intellect (Greek nous). In particular, Parmenides distinguishes between a faculty of intellection and an object of that faculty. Plato, consciously working in the Parmenidean tradition, further analyses mind into its faculties and their proper objects but also gives a more detailed analysis of the epistemological subject. Specifically, Plato's treatment of the faculty in the Theaetetus provides an account of the structure of our cognitive faculty and how that structure relates to the metaphysics of the external world. It is here that Crystal recognizes the emergence of a linguistic component in the epistemic subject's cognitive activity (101; cf. Theaetetus189e6-190a6).Part II ("The Emergence of Self-Intellection") consists of a single chapter in which Crystal reads Aristotle's treatment of self-intellection in the De anima as "Aristotle's epistemological response to Plato." Since self-intellection per se really only emerges for the first time in the De anima, this chapter is in some sense the meatiest part of the book. We are given first a careful treatment of Aristotle's account of perception in DA3.2, affection in DA2.5 and De generatione et corruptione1.7, and the central problem of self-consciousness in DA3.2. The argument moves quickly here but Crystal's analysis is precise and clear. Next comes the analysis of the cognitive structure of intellect itself in DA3.4 and Crystal's account of how Aristotle's two aporiai (How can intellect be both a passive affection and something simple and impassive; and Is intellect itself an intelligible object) are responses to Plato's account of cognition at Theaetetus197c1-200d4 (the Aviary passage) on the one hand and to the general lack of an account of intelligible objects in the Theaetetus on the [End Page 489] other. On Crystal's account, Aristotle improves on Plato in the sense... (shrink)

The authors of this collection fail to make clear the distinction between naturalistic and purely logical/methodological approaches to the philosophy of science. I also criticise Thomas Nickles's attempt to devise an explanatory method for discovery in science using programs that produce trial and error explorations of a domain, which he thinks replaces the need for a conjecture a refutation approach (cf. Popper and Campbell). Such programs embody undeclared conjectures in the way they are set up.

Abū Jaʿfar Muḥammad b. Jarīr al-Ṭabarī, Selections from The Comprehensive Exposition of the Interpretation of the Verses of the Qurʾān. Translated by Scott C. Lucas. 2 vols. Cambridge: The Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought and The Islamic Texts Society, 2017. Pp. xxxiv + 575; xxxii + 550. $32.95 each.

Why We Argue : A Guide to Political Disagreement in an Age of Unreason presents an accessible and engaging introduction to the theory of argument, with special emphasis on the way argument works in public political debate. The authors develop a view according to which proper argument is necessary for one's individual cognitive health; this insight is then expanded to the collective health of one's society. Proper argumentation, then, is seen to play a central role in a well-functioning democracy. Written (...) in a lively style and filled with examples drawn from the real world of contemporary politics, and questions following each chapter to encourage discussion, Why We Argue reads like a guide for the participation in, and maintenance of, modern democracy. An excellent student resource for courses in critical thinking, political philosophy, and related fields, Why We Argue is an important contribution to reasoned debate. What's New in the Second Edition: Updated examples throughout the book, including examples from the 2016 U.S. election and first years of the Trump presidency; Expanded coverage of dialectical fallacies, including coverage of new types of fallacies and of sites where such fallacies thrive ; Revised For Further Thought questions and definitions of Key Terms, included at the end of each chapter; The addition of five new chapters: Deep Disagreement Argument by Analogy Argument between the Ads The Owl of Minerva Argumentative Responsibility and Repair. (shrink)

Arguments are weakly meta-argumentative when they call attention to themselves and purport to be successful as arguments. Arguments are strongly metaargumentative when they take arguments (themselves or other arguments) as objects for evaluation, clarification, or improvement and explicitly use concepts of argument analysis for the task. The ambitious meta-argumentation thesis is that all argumentation is weakly argumentative. The modest meta-argumentation thesis is that there are unique instances of strongly meta-argumentative argument. Here, we show how the two theses are connected and (...) both are plausible. (shrink)

The basic purpose of this essay, the first of an intended pair, is to interpret standard von Neumann quantum theory in a framework of iterated measure algebraic truth for mathematical (and thus mathematical-physical) assertions — a framework, that is, in which the truth-values for such assertions are elements of iterated boolean measure-algebras (cf. Sections 2.2.9, 5.2.1–5.2.6 and 5.3 below).The essay itself employs constructions of Takeuti's boolean-valued analysis (whose origins lay in work of Scott, Solovay, Krauss and others) to provide (...) a metamathematical interpretation of ideas sometimes considered disparate, heuristic, or simply ill-defined: the collapse of the wave function, for example; Everett's many worlds'-construal of quantum measurement; and a natural product space of contextual (nonlocal) hidden variables. (shrink)

Este trabalho apresenta uma discussão que tem como objetivo principal propor um novo risco ao contorno da noção de intericonicidade que aparece em Courtine, precisamente, em 2003. Aí encontramos uma abertura que nos permite traçar outras curvaturas em sua noção. É justamente por este interstício que vamos propor a inclusão de dois elementos que, a nosso ver, estão na ordem da constituição das imagens: as utopias e heterotopias, conforme discussões iniciadas anteriormente por Araújo (2014a, 2014b). Para tanto, tomamos como pano (...) de fundo as imagens em movimento de duas produções francesas de horror e as imagens fotográficas da prisão de Abou Ghraib que serão analisadas à luz da discussão realizada por Foucault em Le corps utopique, les heterotopies e em Outros Espaços, juntamente com as discussões de Courtine e de Milanez acerca da intericonicidade (cf. COURTINE, 2005; 2011; 2013; MILANEZ, 2011a; 2011b; 2013a, 2013b). Os Elementos de Semiologia e A escrita do acontecimento de Barthes também fazem parte da discussão, já que este autor aparece desde cedo no trabalho de Courtine, precisamente, quando buscava apresentar a noção de intericonicidade. (shrink)

Religion is not an evolutionary adaptation per se, but a recurring by-product of the complex evolutionary landscape that sets cognitive, emotional and material conditions for ordinary human interactions. Religion involves extraordinary use of ordinary cognitive processes to passionately display costly devotion to counterintuitive worlds governed by supernatural agents. The conceptual foundations of religion are intuitively given by task-specific panhuman cognitive domains, including folkmechanics, folkbiology, folkpsychology. Core religious beliefs minimally violate ordinary notions about how the world is, with all of its (...) inescapable problems, thus enabling people to imagine minimally impossible supernatural worlds that solve existential problems, including death and deception. Here the focus is on folkpsychology and agency. A key feature of the supernatural agent concepts common to all religions is the triggering of an "Innate Releasing Mechanism," or “agency detector,” whose proper domain encompasses animate objects relevant to hominid survival - such as predators, protectors and prey - but which actually extends to moving dots on computer screens, voices in wind, faces on clouds. Folkpsychology also crucially involves metarepresentation, which makes deception possible and threatens any social order; however, these same metacognitive capacities provide the hope and promise of open-ended solutions through representations of counterfactual supernatural worlds that cannot be logically or empirically verified or falsified. Because religious beliefs cannot be deductively or inductively validated, validation occurs only by ritually addressing the very emotions motivating religion. Cross-cultural experimental evidence encourages these claims. (shrink)

The nocebo effect, a phenomenon whereby learning about the possible side effects of a medical treatment increases the likelihood that one will suffer these side effects, continues to challenge physicians and ethicists. If a physician fully informs her patient as to the potential side effects of a medicine that may produce nocebogenic effects, which is usually conceived of as being a requirement associated with the duty to respect autonomy, she risks increasing the likelihood that her patient will experience these side (...) effects and therefore suffer (unnecessary) harm, a violation of the duty of nonmaleficence. If, on the other hand, she intentionally withholds side effect information in an effort to protect her patient from suffering unnecessary harm from side effects, which is consistent with the duty of nonmaleficence, she violates the duty to respect patient autonomy. In this paper, the author discusses several previous attempts to deal with the nocebo effect and explains their weaknesses. He then proposes a means of managing the nocebo effect and argues that it does not share the weaknesses found in previous approaches. He concludes with a discussion of a simple, yet practical tool that might help clinicians manage the tension resulting from the nocebo effect. (shrink)

Recourse to meta-argument is an important feature of successful argument exchanges; it is where norms are made explicit or clarified, corrections are offered, and inferences are evaluated, among much else. Sadly, it is often an avenue for abuse, as the very virtues of meta-argument are turned against it. The question as to how to manage such abuses is a vexing one. Erik Krabbe proposed that one be levied a fine in cases of inappropriate meta-argumentative bids (2003). In a recent publication (...) (2022) Beth Innocenti expands on this notion of a penalty, arguing that some meta-arguments should be halted with “shouting, cussing, sarcasm, name-calling.” In this essay, we review Innocenti’s case that these confrontations and haltings improve the argumentative circumstances. We provide three reasons that this promise is not well-founded. First, that such confrontations have a significant audience problem, in that they are more likely to be interpreted as destroying the argumentative context than improving it. Second, that Innocenti’s procedural justification, that those who lose meta-discussions should pay a penalty, is not satisfied if the meta-discussion is halted. And third, there is a boundary problem for the cases, since it seems there is no principled reason to restrict halting meta-arguments just to these cases (especially if there is no meta-discussion on the matter to make the bounds explicit). Though expressions of anger can be appropriate in argument, we argue, it cannot take the place of argument. (shrink)

Lucretius follows his symmetry argument that one should not fear death with a dialectical strategy, the squandering argument. The dialectical presumption behind the squandering argument is that its audience is not an Epicurean, so squanders their life. The question is whether the squandering argument works on lives that by Epicurean standards are not squandered.

This paper reports on a survey that investigated the moral decision processes of accountants. A formal belief revision model is adapted and hypotheses based on theorizations from the cognitive-developmental school are tested. The moral decision processes of accountants are hypothesized to be influenced by professional expectations, organizational expectations and internalized expectations. Subjects provided specific demographic data and were asked to access the appropriateness of fourteen principles for making moral decisions in business. Subjects were also asked to indicate which of the (...) fourteen approaches would be most appropriate for resolving each of five ethical situations that are representative of common ethical dilemmas in accounting.Subjects'' responses to the appropriateness of the fourteen principles are reduced to two dimensions using factor analysis. The factors are consistent and representative of important underlying dimensions of the stages of moral development. Demographic variables are correlated with the extracted factors using analysis of variance. (shrink)

This article argues that the theoretical concept of meta-argumentative fallacy is useful. The authors argue for this along two lines. The first is that with the concept, the authors may clarify the concept of meta-argumentation. That is, by theorizing where meta-argument goes wrong, the authors may capture the norms of this level of argumentation. The second is that the concept of meta-argumentative fallacies provides an explanatory model for a variety of errors in argument otherwise difficult to theorize. The authors take (...) three as exemplary: the straw man, both sides, and free speech fallacies. (shrink)

Evidence for a dichotomy between the planning of an action and its on-line control in humans is reviewed. This evidence suggests that planning and control each serve a specialized purpose utilizing distinct visual representations. Evidence from behavioral studies suggests that planning is influenced by a large array of visual and cognitive information, whereas control is influenced solely by the spatial characteristics of the target, including such things as its size, shape, orientation, and so forth. Evidence from brain imaging and neuropsychology (...) suggests that planning and control are subserved by separate visual centers in the posterior parietal lobes, each constituting part of a larger network for planning and control. Planning appears to rely on phylogenetically newer regions in the inferior parietal lobe, along with the frontal lobes and basal ganglia, whereas control appears to rely on older regions in the superior parietal lobe, along with the cerebellum. Key Words: action; apraxia; control; illusions; optic ataxia; PET; planning; reaching;. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue for three theses. First, that the problem of Deep Disagreement is usefully understood as an instance of the skeptical Problem of the Criterion. Second, there are structural similarities between proposed optimistic answers to deep disagreement and the problem of the criterion. Third, in light of these similarities, there are both good and bad consequences for proposed solutions to the problem of deep disagreement.

According to St. Thomas, the natures of material things are the proper objects of human understanding.Thomas claims only that the natures of things are the proper objects of the intellect, not that they are its only objects: he does not deny that we have intellective cognition also of the contingent states and situations of particular material things. And he holds that, at least in this life, humans cognize these natures, not through innate species or by perceiving the divine exemplars, but (...) only by abstraction from phantasms (ST Ia, 84.7, 85.1).This claim applies to the exercising of concepts already acquired, as well as their initial acquisition (ST Ia 84.7). Here and throughout, I use “cognition” to translate “cognitio.” As Scott MacDonald (“Theory of Knowledge” in Cambridge Companion to Aquinas, ed., N. Kretzmann and E. Stump [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993], p. 162) points out, translating “cognitio” with “knowledge” is misleading, given that cognitiones can, on Thomas’s account, be false (see, for example, ST Ia 17.3). I discuss Aquinas’s conception of cognition in section I.1. More precisely, the human intellect’s active component, the agent intellect, produces cognition of the natures of material things by abstracting intelligible forms from phantasms and informing them on its passive component, the possible intellect, to actualize the latter’s potency to understand.This division of the intellect into an active and a passive component originates in Aristotle’s cryptic remark that in the soul “there is a mind for becoming all things” and “a mind for producing all things” (DA III 5, 430a10). This passage has been subject to myriad interpretations. Aristotle’s Arabic commentators read him as saying that (one or both) of these intellects are single and separate from individual human souls. In opposition to these interpretations, Aquinas holds that the agent and possible intellects are both immanent powers of each individual soul. Since these interpretations enjoyed considerable popularity in Aquinas’s day, we often find him developing his account of the human intellect in explicit opposition to them (cf. OUIAA). The aim of the present piece is to clarify Thomas’s account of this intellective abstraction, and thereby the precise force of the conceptual empiricism it asserts.Important recent work by several scholars has advanced our understanding of many central aspects of Aquinas’s philosophy of mind and epistemology, including his account of intellective abstraction. See Eleonore Stump, “Aquinas on the Foundations of Knowledge,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy (Supplementary Volume) 17 (1992); “Aquinas’s Account of the Mechanisms of Intellective Cognition,” Revenue Internationale de Philosophie 52 (1998): 287–307; “Aquinas on Sensory Cognition,” in Medieval Analyses in Language and Cognition, eds. Sten Ebbesen and Russell L. Friedman, volume 77 in the series Det Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab, Historisk-Filosofiske Meddelelser (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1999), pp. 377–395. Norman Kretzmann, “Infallibility, Error, and Ignorance,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 17 (1992); Kretzmann, “Philosophy of Mind,” in Cambridge Companion to Aquinas; Robert Pasnau, Theories of Cognition in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and Scott MacDonald (“Theory of Knowledge,” in Cambridge Companion to Aquinas).Many of these discussions share a salutary focus on Aquinas’s claims regarding the reliability of our faculties, so that their treatments of intellective abstraction tend to center on his prima faciae wildly implausible claim to its infallibility: “The proper object of intellect is the quiddity of a thing, and this is why intellect is not fallible regarding the quiddity of a thing, speaking of it just as such” (ST Ia 85.6). Kretzmann provides an interesting and detailed treatment of this claim. Drawing on a range of texts, he argues that the intellect’s apprehension of the quiddity of a thing is such that one acquires an initial, crude concept of that thing, and that this apprehension must be distinguished from the intellect’s act of compounding, in judgments, the aspects of things so apprehended: it is only through a fallible, and extended process of making such judgments that we arrive at more adequate concepts of things (see the final section of “Infallibility, Error, and Ignorance”). MacDonald also makes insightful, and complementary, observations along similar lines (pp. 183–84). However, though helpful, these points do not suffice to explain, let alone render defensible, Thomas’s claim of infallibility: why can’t some of our acts of intellective abstraction yield false cognitions (however rudimentary), in the sense Thomas specifies?; in other words; why can’t the agent intellect sometimes produce in the possible intellect forms which do not correspond to the forms that actually inhere, or even could inhere, in material things? I think that Stump is right to take this optimism to be one striking instance of Thomas’s general epistemic optimism rooted in his conviction that God designed our cognitive faculties (Stump, “Foundations of Knowledge,” pp. 145–48).The interpretation of his intellective abstraction provided here complements Stump’s insight. For it, in effect, elaborates how Aquinas’s theistic metaphysics grounds his epistemic optimism about the first operation of our intellect. In particular, it explains how the agent intellect, as the human participating likeness in the divine light of understanding, has the active potency to order phantasms in such a way that it can produce in the possible intellect intelligible species which are determinate likenesses of the particular material things of which we have experience (cf. Section III iv, below). Examining his distinction between sensible and intellectual cognition, and his account of the way the former, in phantasms, supplies the data for intellective abstraction, will lead us to reassess the nature of Thomas’s antinativism—arguably the most important historical and philosophical legacy of his cognitive psychology. (shrink)

: Este artigo é o segundo de uma tríade que trata do diálogo, mais precisamente do envolvimento, entre a filosofia de Denis Diderot e o ceticismo. O primeiro artigo, intitulado “O jovem Diderot e o ceticismo dos Pensamentos”, foi publicado na revista Dois Pontos, em sua edição dedicada ao tema do ceticismo (cf. PIVA, 2007), e limitou-se a uma análise minuciosa do problema da postura cética nos Pensamentos filosóficos, de 1746. O presente artigo, por seu turno, examina duas questões fundamentais, (...) desta vez em O passeio do cético ou As alamedas, de 1747, último livro em que o ceticismo é evocado com destaque pelo enciclopedista, dois anos antes de ele render-se definitivamente ao materialismo ateu: 1) a interpretação que Diderot desenvolve do ceticismo e 2) sua posição diante dele. Já o terceiro e derradeiro texto da tríade examinará – evidentemente, numa próxima oportunidade – a presença do ceticismo no pensamento diderotiano da maturidade, ou seja, no período que se inicia em 1749, com a redação da Carta sobre os cegos, quando a questão da dúvida cética passa a perder em suas obras a relevância que tinha na origem de suas reflexões, mudando, até mesmo, de registro. (shrink)

Pragmatism, Experience, and the Given The doctrine of the Given is that subjects have direct non-inferential awareness of content of their experiences and apprehensions, and that some of a subject's beliefs are justified on the basis of that subject's awareness of her experiences and apprehensions. Pragmatist criticisms of the Given as a myth are shown here not only to be inadequate but to presuppose the Given. A model for a pragmatist account of the Given is then provided in terms of (...) refinements of Dewey's theory of experience. The doctrine of the Given is implicated in the functions of inquiry insofar as one must take it that experience is a source of justification. (shrink)

The treatment in what follows of the politics of hegemony is not per se one of Gramsci, or Laclau or of Stuart Hall's earlier work. At stake is something that encompasses a more general regime of power that will be developed throughout the length of this: what might be called 'extensive politics'. What I will try to show is that such extensive power or such an extensive politics is being progressively displaced by a politics of intensity. I will trace the (...) shift from hegemony or extensive politics to such an intensive politics in terms of: 1) a transition to an ontological regime of power, from a regime that in important respects is 'epistemological', 2) a shift in power from the hegemonic mode of 'power over' to an intensive notion of power from within and power as generative force, 3) a shift from power and politics in terms of normativity to a regime of power much more based in what can be understood as a 'facticity'. This points to a general transition from norm to fact in politics. From hegemonic norm to what we will see are intensive facts. The fourth section will look at this shift through a change from an extensive regime of representation to an intensive regime of communications. (shrink)

Given immunity’s general role in the organism’s economy—both in terms of its internal environment as well as mediating its external relations—immune theory has expanded its traditional formulation of preserving individual autonomy to one that includes accounting for nutritional processes and symbiotic relationships that require immune tolerance. When such a full ecological alignment is adopted, the immune system becomes the mediator of both defensive and assimilative environmental intercourse, where a balance of immune rejection and tolerance governs the complex interactions of the (...) organism’s ecological relationships. Accordingly, immunology, which historically had affiliated with the biology of individuals, now becomes a science concerned with the biology of communities. With this translocation, the ontological basis of the organism is undergoing a profound change. Indeed, the recent recognition of the ubiquity of symbiosis has challenged the traditional notions of biological individuality and requires a shift in the metaphysics undergirding biology, in which a philosophy of the organism must be characterized by ecological dialectics “all-the-way-down.”. (shrink)

In this essay I discuss a novel engineering ethics class that has the potential to significantly decrease the likelihood that students will inadvertently or unintentionally act unethically in the future. This class is different from standard engineering ethics classes in that it focuses on the issue of why people act unethically and how students can avoid a variety of hurdles to ethical behavior. I do not deny that it is important for students to develop cogent moral reasoning and ethical decision-making (...) as taught in traditional college-level ethics classes, but as an educator, I aim to help students apply moral reasoning in specific, real-life situations so they are able to make ethical decisions and act ethically in their academic careers and after they graduate. Research in moral psychology provides evidence that many seemingly irrelevant situational factors affect the moral judgment of most moral agents and frequently lead agents to unintentionally or inadvertently act wrongly. I argue that, in addition to teaching college students moral reasoning and ethical decision-making, it is important to: 1. Teach students about psychological and situational factors that affect people’s ethical judgments/behaviors in the sometimes stressful, emotion-laden environment of the workplace; 2. Guide students to engage in critical reflection about the sorts of situations they personally might find ethically challenging before they encounter those situations; and 3. Provide students with strategies to help them avoid future unethical behavior when they encounter these situations in school and in the workplace. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Plato and the PoetsCatalin ParteniePierre Destrée and Fritz-Gregor Herrmann, editors. Plato and the Poets. Mnemosyne Supplements: Monographs on Greek and Latin Language and Literature, 328. Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2011. Pp. xxii + 434. Cloth, $217.00.This beautifully produced volume is a collection of nineteen essays, half of them being initially presented as papers given at a 2006 conference in Louvain. Seven chapters focus on the Republic and address a variety (...) of issues: the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry (Glenn W. Most); Plato’s criticism of poetry and his negative attitude toward women (Penelope Murray); mimêsis as appearance-making (Gabriel Richardson); the meaning of mimêsis (Jera Marušič); Plato’s criticism and appreciation of poetry (Stephen Halliwell); thumos and the criticism of poetry (Pierre Destrée); painting, poetry, and the cognitive division of the soul (Rachel Singpurwalla). One chapter deals with myth, invented story, and true account in the Timaeus (Gretchen Reydams-Schils). Two are devoted to the Laws—mimetic correctness and choric poetry (Antony Hatzistavrou), and tragedy and philosophy (Susan Sauvé Meyer). The remaining nine chapters deal with other dialogues, although they are often discussed in connection with the Republic; the topics they discuss include: theia moira, enthousiasmos, and mimêsis in Gorgias (Fritz-Gregor Herrmann); divine possession, inspiration, and mimêsis in Ion and Republic (with references to Plato’s entire corpus, Catherine Collobert); the poet and the rhapsode as hermêneus in Ion (Carlotta Capuccino); the poet, the mad lover, and the mad philosopher as the true interpreter in Ion and Phaedrus (Francisco Gonzalez); inspiration and Plato’s psychology in Ion, Phaedrus, Politicus, Philebus, Timaeus (Stefan Büttner); theia moira in Ion and Meno, and the poets’ incomplete ascension in Symposium (Dominic Scott); Plato’s use of poetry and poets in Symposium (Elizabeth Bel-fiore); poetry and image-making in Republic and Sophist (Noburu Notomi); and poetry, the tripartition of the soul and the Form of Beauty in Phaedrus (Elizabeth Pender).As Stephen Halliwell put it in his essay, there is the seemingly Platonic attitude “which criticizes, censors and even ‘banishes’ poets, and which speaks in terms of unmasking the false pretensions and the damaging influence of poetry. But there is also the Platonic stance which never ceases to allow the voices of poetry to be heard in Plato’s own writing, which presupposes not only extensive knowledge but also ‘love’ of poetry on the part of Plato’s readers, and which at certain key junctures claims for itself nothing less than the status of a new kind of philosophical poetry and art: the status, indeed, of ‘the greatest music’ [Phaedo 61a; cf. Phaedrus 248d, 259b] and even of ‘the finest and best tragedy’ [Laws 817b]” (241). All the contributors address, in one way or another, the puzzling contrast between these two views on poetry. Halliwell, for instance, claims that Book X of the Republic “offers not a simple repudiation of the best poets but a complicated counterpoint in which resistance and attraction to their work are intertwined, a counterpoint which (among other things) explores the problem of whether, and in what sense, it might be possible to be a ‘philosophical lover’ of poetry” (244). While Most argues that “there is little or no evidence for any consciousness” of a generic opposition between philosophy and poetry tout court before Plato, “this opposition may even be in the process of being constructed” in his Republic (19) (Notomi, too, discusses this topic, and refers to the view according to which the “ancient quarrel” was Plato’s invention). [End Page 291]In reading the nineteen essays of this volume, one realizes that in Plato there is not just one poetics, or two contrasting views on poetry, but—as the editors put it—“several models of what poetry is and what the poets do” (xxii). One would have liked that these several models be explicitly discussed in a concluding chapter. The editors, however, acknowledge that neither they nor their authors aimed at achieving a unified vision of the subject: “While certain recurring themes crystallize themselves with increasing complexity in the course of the various discussions, there remain both contradictions and incompatibilities between results... (shrink)

On the Nature of Photographic Realism’ Kendall Walton argues that lack of mental-state involvement in the formation of photographic images is a quality that sets them apart from handmade images such as paintings or sketches. This paper defends and substantially develops this idea. It argues that viewers' knowledge of this objective character of the photographic process provides them with special warrant for the acceptance of first-order perceptual beliefs formed as a result of viewing photographic images. As well, it distinguishes between (...) two different ways in which mental states can be involved in the formation of photographic images, and uses this distinction to ward off the objection that decisions about film type, composition, moment of exposure, etc. undermine the objectivity of the photographic process. (shrink)

Michael Hannon has recently given “a new apraxia” argument against skepticism. Hannon’s case is that skepticism depends on a theory of knowledge that makes the concept “useless and uninteresting.” Three arguments rebutting Hannon’s metaphilosophical pragmatism are given that show that the concept of knowledge that makes skepticism plausible is both interesting and useful.

Memes are hypothetical cultural units passed on by imitation; although nonbiological, they undergo Darwinian selection like genes. Cognitive study of multimodular human minds undermines memetics: unlike in genetic replication, high-fidelity transmission of cultural information is the exception, not the rule. Constant, rapid 'mutation' of information during communication generates endlessly varied creations that nevertheless adhere to modular input conditions. The sort of cultural information most susceptible to modular processing is that most readily acquired by children, most easily transmitted across individuals, most (...) apt to survive within a culture, most likely to recur in different cultures, and most disposed to cultural variation and elaboration. (shrink)

According to rational pedagogy models, learners take into account the way in which teachers generate evidence, and teachers take into account the way in which learners assimilate that evidence. The authors develop a framework for integrating rational pedagogy into models of active exploration, in which agents can take actions to influence the evidence they gather from the environment. The key idea is that a single agent can be both teacher and learner.

This article poses two regresses for justification of moral knowledge and discusses three models for moral epistemic infinitism that arise. There are moral infinitisms dependent on empirical infinitism, what are called “piggyback” moral infinitisms. There are substantive empiricist moral infinitisms, requiring infinite chains of descriptive facts to justify normative rules. These empiricist infinitisms are developed either as infinitist egoisms or as infinitist sentimentalisms. And, finally, there are substantive rationalist moral infinitisms, requiring infinite chains of normative reasons to justify moral rules. (...) Rationalist moral infinitism is posed as a mixed view integrating moral intuitions with the demand for justifying reasons. (shrink)

In this essay, we give a theoretical overview of how humor can play a meta-argumentative role, particularly in making clear the norms and stakes of arguments. This, we think, has salutary consequences for teaching critical thinking and argument evaluation—humor is a useful tool for making those things clear. However, there are troubling features of humor’s functions that problematize its use in teaching settings. These are what we call the cruelty, audience, accessibility, and gender gap problems for humor as a pedagogical (...) tool. (shrink)

In a world where politics is often associated with notions such as moral decay, frustration and disappointment, the feeling of betrayal, and of democracy in ...

BackgroundDelirium is highly prevalent in the general hospital patient population, characterized by acute onset, fluctuating levels of consciousness, and global impairment of cognitive functioning. Mental capacity, its assessment and subsequent consent are therefore prominent within this cohort, yet under-explored.AimThis study of patients with delirium sought to determine the processes by which consent to medical treatment was attempted, how capacity was assessed, and any subsequent actions thereafter.MethodA retrospective documentation review of patients identified as having a delirium for the twelve months February (...) 2013 to January 2014 was undertaken. Inclusion and exclusion criteria were used; demographic and descriptive data collected. A total of n=1153 patients were identified with n=310 meeting inclusion criteria.ResultA random sample of one hundred patients were subsequently reviewed. One third of patients had documentation relating to consent, while four patients had documentation relating to capacity. Median delirium duration was three days, with treatment refusal occurring in twenty-two patients and “duty of care” being used as an apparent beneficent related treatment framework in twelve patients.ConclusionsWhile impaired decision-making was indicated, the review was unable to indicate what patient characteristics flag the need for capacity assessment. Documentation relating to consent processes appeared deficient for this cohort. (shrink)

Developmental biology is a theory of interpretation. Developmental signals are interpreted differently depending on the previous history of the responding cell. Thus, there is a context for the reception of a signal. While this conclusion is obvious during metamorphosis, when a single hormone instructs some cells to proliferate, some cells to differentiate, and other cells to die, it is commonplace during normal development. Paracrine factors such as BMP4 can induce apoptosis, proliferation, or differentiation depending upon the history of the responding (...) cells. In addition, organisms have evolved to alter their development in response to differences in temperature, diet, the presence of predators, or the presence of competitors. This allows them to develop the phenotype, within the limits imposed by the genotype, best suited for the immediate habitat of the organism. Most developing organisms have also evolved to expect developmental signals from symbionts, and these organisms develop abnormally if the symbiont signals are not present. Thus Hoffmeyer’s “vertical semiotic system” of genetic communication and “horizontal semiotic system” of ecological communication are integrated during development. (shrink)