In this book, Daniel Cohen explores the connections between arguments and metaphors, most pronounced in philosophy because philosophical discourse is both thoroughly metaphorical and replete with argumentation. Cohen covers the nature of arguments, their modes and structures, and the principles of their evaluation, and addresses the nature of metaphors, their place in language and thought, and their connections to arguments, identifying and reconciling arguments' and metaphors' respective roles in philosophy.

The Jewish Philosophy Reader is the first comprehensive anthology of classic writings on Jewish philosophy from the Bible to postmodernism. The Reader is clearly divided into four separate parts: Foundations and First Principles, Medieval and Renaissance Jewish Philosophy, Modern Jewish Thought, and Contemporary Jewish Philosophy. Each part is clearly introduced by the editors. The readings featured are representative writings of each era listed above and are from the following major thinkers: Abrabanel, Baeck, Bergman, Borowitz, Buber, Cohen, Crescas, Fackenheim, Geiger, (...) Gersonides, Goodman, Graetz, Halevi, Hartman, Heschel, Hess, Hirsch, Ibn Ezra, Ibn Gabirol, Ibn Paquda, Kellner, Kook, Krochmal, Leibowitz, Levinas, Maimonides, Maybaum, Mendelssohn, Novak, Philo, Plaskow, Rosenzweig, Saadia, Scholem, Seeskin, Soloveitchik, Spinoza, Strauss, Wolf, Zunz. (shrink)

Michael Smith has resisted Harry Frankfurt's claim that moral responsibility does not require the ability to have done otherwise. He does this by claiming that, in Frankfurt cases, the ability to do otherwise is indeed present, but is a disposition that has been `finked' or masked by other factors. We suggest that, while Smith's account appears to work for some classic Frankfurt cases, it does not work for all. In particular, Smith cannot explain cases, such as the Willing Addict, (...) where the Frankfurt devise - e.g. the addiction - is intrinsic to the agent. (shrink)

The Routledge Classic Edition of Daniels’ influential 2001 text _Vygotsky and Pedagogy_ explores the growing interest in Vygotsky and the pedagogic implications of the body of work that is developing under the influence of his theories. With a new preface from Harry Daniels this book explores the growing interest in Vygotsky and the pedagogic implications of the body of work that is developing under the influence of his theories. It provides an overview of the ways in which the original (...) writing has been extended and identifies areas for future development. The author considers how these developments are creating new and important possibilities for the practices of teaching and learning in school and beyond, and illustrates how Vygotskian theory can be applied in the classroom. The book is intended for students and academics in education and the social sciences and will be of interest to all those who wish to develop an analysis of pedagogic practice within and beyond the field of education. (shrink)

One of the central pillars of Vygotsky’s contribution to social science is his concept of mediation: the process through which the social and the individual mutually shape each other. His rich, complex and challenging texts focus on a nuanced notion of mediation that was not necessarily visible to those active in the command-and-control climate of the Stalinist era. The article focuses on this notion of the lack of visibility in mediation.

This volume presents new essays by leading figures in speech-act theory, the interdisciplinary study of things we do with words. They range over formal semantics and pragmatics, foundational issues about the nature of linguistic representation, and issues at the intersection of the philosophy of language, ethics, and political philosophy.

This paper explores the benefits that might arise from an appropriate fusion of the version of Activity Theory being developed by Yrjo Engestrom and the sociology of the late Basil Bernstein. It explores the common roots of the two traditions and on the basis of empirical work carried out in British special schools formulates an approach to the development of a language of description which would extend the analytical power of Activity Theory.

In this volume, Engeström's work is used as a springboard to reflect on the question of the use, appropriation, and further development of the classic heritage within activity theory.

What does one do as a Jewish philosopher if one is convinced by much of the Nietzschean critique of religion? Is there a contemporary Jewish philosophical theology that can convince in a post-metaphysical age? The argument of this book is that Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik - the leading twentieth-century exponent of Modern Orthodoxy - presents an interpretation of halakhic Judaism, grounded in traditional sources, that brings a life-affirming Nietzschean sensibility to the religious life. Soloveitchik develops a form of Judaism replete with (...) key Nietzschean ideas, which parries Nietzsche's critique by partially absorbing it. This original study of Soloveitchik's philosophy highlights his unique contribution to Jewish thought for students and scholars in Jewish studies, while also revealing his wider significance for those working more broadly in fields such as philosophy and religious studies. (shrink)

This paper reports on part of an evaluation of teacher support teams as a special education needs support strategy in primary schools. Using a mixture of quantitative and qualitative evaluation methods, it focuses on areas derived from a theoretical framework for understanding schools’ approaches to SENs. TSTs were set up and run in six of the eight schools, with meetings of between 30 and 45 minutes, usually during lunchtime or after school. Most of the referrals were about behaviour problems, though (...) many were about learning difficulties. The support included providing emotional encouragement, specific approaches to managing behaviour, teaching strategies and consulting others. Referring teachers reported that their TST experience led to increased confidence and some improvements in the children, while TST members themselves believed that they had gained much from the TST experience. Overall the study showed the feasibility and benefits of setting up TSTs in primary schools. The findings are discussed in terms of the wider benefits of TSTs and their relevance to special needs policies and the implementation of the SENs code of practice. (shrink)

We give a brief overview of several recent strands of speech-act theory, and then survey some issues in social and political philosophy can be profitably understood in speech-act-theoretic terms. Our topics include the social contract, the law, the creation and reinforcement of social norms and practices, silencing, and freedom of speech.

Background One of the biggest challenges of practicing medicine in the age of informational technology is how to conciliate the overwhelming amount of medical-scientific information with the multiple patients’ values of modern pluralistic societies. To organize and optimize the the Decision-Making Process of seriously ill patient care, we present a framework to be used by Healthcare Providers. The objective is to align Bioethics, Evidence-based Practice and Person-centered Care. Main body The framework divides the DMP into four steps, each with a (...) different but complementary focus, goal and ethical principle. Step 1 focuses exclusively on the disease, having accuracy is its ethical principle. It aims at an accurate and probabilistic estimation of prognosis, absolute risk reduction, relative risk reduction and treatments’ burdens. Step 2 focuses on the person, using empathic communication to learn about patient values and what suffering means for the patient. Emphasis is given to learning and active listening, not taking action. Thus, instead beneficence, we trust comprehension and understanding with the suffering of others and respect for others as autonomous moral agents as the ethical principles of Step 2. Step 3 focuses on the healthcare team, having the ethics of situational awareness guiding this step. The goal is, through effective teamwork, to contextualize and link rates and probabilities related to the disease to the learned patient’s values, presenting a summary of which treatments the team considers as acceptable, recommended, potentially inappropriate and futile. Finally, Step 4 focuses on provider-patient relationship, seeking shared Goals of Care, for the best and worst scenario. Through an ethics of deliberation, it aims for a consensus that could ensure that the patient’s values will be respected as well as a scientifically acceptable medical practice will be provided. In summary: accuracy, comprehension, understanding, situational awareness and deliberation would be the ethical principles guiding each step. Conclusion Hopefully, by highlighting and naming the different perspectives of knowledge needed in clinical practice, this framework will be valuable as a practical and educational tool, guiding modern medical professionals through the many challenges of providing high quality person-centered care that is both ethical and evidence based. (shrink)

There is a long and distinguished tradition in philosophy and psychology according to which the mind’s fundamental, foundational connection to the world is made by connecting perceptually to features of objects. On this picture, which we’ll call feature prioritarianism, minds like ours first make contact with the colors, shapes, and sizes of distal items, and then, only on the basis of the representations so obtained, build up representations of the objects that bear these features. The feature priority view maintains, then, (...) that our perception/knowledge of objects asymmetrically depends on our perception/knowledge of simple features. This paper has two aims. First, we will present evidence, drawn from a variety of perceptual effects, that feature prioritarianism cannot be true, since there are cases that speak against the priority of feature representations in perceptual processing. Instead, we claim that the evidence supports an alternative —-and more complex—- no-priority view. Second, we will offer a framework for a no-priority view that both captures the cases we cite and provides a more sensible architecture in which to understand a variety of productive projects in perceptual science, and show how the framework cross-cuts some recent discussions in philosophy of perception. (shrink)

Pt. 1. Aux sources de la croissance -- L'espèce humaine -- L'exode -- Le 13 novembre 2026 -- Naissance de la monnaie -- Le vol de l'histoire -- Du monde clos à l'univers infini -- Pt. 2. L'avenir, l'avenir ! -- La singularité est proche -- Où va le travail humain 2 -- La croissance disparue -- Marx à Hollywood -- De collapsus novum -- Pt. 3. Repenser le progrès -- La (nouvelle) grande transformation -- L'autonomie et la survie -- (...) Mythes et ressentiments -- Le double bind -- Comment peut-on être danois 2 -- L'endogamie sociale -- Au-delà de la croissance. (shrink)

Qu'est-ce qui fonde les relations entre philosophie et musique ` ? Qu'est-ce qui légitime leur proximité et leur désaccord ?

Ignorance, or the lack of knowledge, appears to be steadily spreading, despite the increasing availability of information. The notion of informed ignorance herein proposed to describe the widespread position of being exposed to an abundance of information yet lacking relevant knowledge, which is tied to the exponential growth in misinformation driven by technological developments and social media. Linked to many of societies’ most looming catastrophes, from political polarization to the climate crisis, practices related to knowledge and information are deemed some (...) of the most imminent and daunting modern threats, evidenced by the latest report of the World Economic Forum, which has named misinformation the most severe short-term global risk. This paper’s epistemic perspective links the properties of today’s information culture and the ways in which it interacts with individual capacities and limitations in current technological and socio-political contexts. Such a position is analyzed through the lens of epistemic principles as a contemporary epistemic phenotype that emerges from an environment of ill-adapted and excessive information inputs and leads to a distinctive type of social injustice that is primarily epistemic in nature. While equity and accessibility are widely discussed as important contributing factors to epistemic discrepancies, other overlooked but fundamental issues underlying epistemic injustices are considered, such as information manipulation, cognitive limitations, and epistemic degradation. To effectively face this elusive threat, we propose an inclusive viewpoint that harnesses knowledge from cognitive science, science and technology studies, and social epistemology to inform a unifying theory of its main impacts and driving forces. By adjusting a modern epistemic framework to the described phenomena, we intend to contextually outline its trajectory and possible means of containment based on a shared responsibility to maintain ethical epistemic standards. In a time of international unrest and mounting civil acts of violence, it is pertinent to emphasize the ethical principles of knowledge systems and authorities and suggest policy adaptations to maintain a social contract based on the shared values of truth and freedom. (shrink)

Here, we argue that any neurobiological theory based on an experience/function division cannot be empirically confirmed or falsified and is thus outside the scope of science. A ‘perfect experiment’ illustrates this point, highlighting the unbreachable boundaries of the scientific study of consciousness. We describe a more nuanced notion of cognitive access that captures personal experience without positing the existence of inaccessible conscious states. Finally, we discuss the criteria necessary for forming and testing a falsifiable theory of consciousness.

Orthodox decision theory gives no advice to agents who hold two goods to be incommensurate in value because such agents will have incomplete preferences. According to standard treatments, rationality requires complete preferences, so such agents are irrational. Experience shows, however, that incomplete preferences are ubiquitous in ordinary life. In this paper, we aim to do two things: (1) show that there is a good case for revising decision theory so as to allow it to apply non-vacuously to agents with incomplete (...) preferences, and (2) to identify one substantive criterion that any such non-standard decision theory must obey. Our criterion, Competitiveness, is a weaker version of a dominance principle. Despite its modesty, Competitiveness is incompatible with prospectism, a recently developed decision theory for agents with incomplete preferences. We spend the final part of the paper showing why Competitiveness should be retained, and prospectism rejected. (shrink)

Although our subjective impression is of a richly detailed visual world, numerous empirical results suggest that the amount of visual information observers can perceive and remember at any given moment is limited. How can our subjective impressions be reconciled with these objective observations? Here, we answer this question by arguing that, although we see more than the handful of objects, claimed by prominent models of visual attention and working memory, we still see far less than we think we do. Taken (...) together, we argue that these considerations resolve the apparent conflict between our subjective impressions and empirical data on visual capacity, while also illuminating the nature of the representations underlying perceptual experience. (shrink)

One result of successful argumentation – able arguers presenting cogent arguments to competent audiences – is a transfer of credibility from premises to conclusions. From a purely logical perspective, neither dubious premises nor fallacious inference should lower the credibility of the target conclusion. Nevertheless, some arguments do backfire this way. Dialectical and rhetorical considerations come into play. Three inter-related conclusions emerge from a catalogue of hapless arguers and backfiring arguments. First, there are advantages to paying attention to arguers and their (...) contexts, rather than focusing narrowly on their arguments, in order to understand what can go wrong in argumentation. Traditional fallacy identification, with its exclusive attention to faulty inferences, is inadequate to explain the full range of argumentative failures. Second, the notion of an Ideal Arguer can be defined by contrast with her less than ideal peers to serve as a useful tool in argument evaluation. And third, not all of the ways that arguers raise doubts about their conclusions are pathological. On the contrary, some ways that doubts are raised concerning our intended conclusions are an integral part of ideal argumentative practice. (shrink)

It has been a decade since the phrase virtue argumentation was introduced, and while it would be an exaggeration to say that it burst onto the scene, it would be just as much of an understatement to say that it has gone unnoticed. Trying to strike the virtuous mean between the extremes of hyperbole and litotes, then, we can fairly characterize it as a way of thinking about arguments and argumentation that has steadily attracted more and more attention from argumentation (...) theorists. We hope it is neither too late for an introduction to the field nor too soon for some retrospective assessment of where things stand. (shrink)

The claim that argumentation has no proper role in either philosophy or education, and especially not in philosophical education, flies in the face of both conventional wisdom and traditional pedagogy. There is, however, something to be said for it because it is really only provocative against a certain philosophical backdrop. Our understanding of the concept "argument" is both reflected by and molded by the specific metaphor that argument-is-war, something with winners and losers, offensive and defensive moments, and an essentially adversarial (...) structure. Such arguments may be suitable for teaching a philosophy, but not for teaching philosophy. Surely, education and philosophy do not need to be conceived as having an adversarial essence-if indeed they are thought to have any essence at all. Accordingly, philosophy and education need more pragmatic goals than even Pierce's idealized notion of truth as the end of inquiry, e.g., the simple furtherance of inquiry. For this, new metaphors for framing and understanding the concept of argumentation are needed, and some suggestions in that direction will be considered. (shrink)

Background: While religious faith remains one of the most significant features of human life, little is known about its relationship to ordinary belief at the level of the brain. Nor is it known whether religious believers and nonbelievers differ in how they evaluate statements of fact. Our lab previously has used functional neuroimaging to study belief as a general mode of cognition, and others have looked specifically at religious belief. However, no research has compared these two states of mind directly. (...) Methodology/Principal Findings: We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure signal changes in the brains of thirty subjects - fifteen committed Christians and fifteen nonbelievers - as they evaluated the truth and falsity of religious and nonreligious propositions. For both groups, and in both categories of stimuli, belief was associated with greater signal in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, an area important for self-representation, emotional associations, reward, and goal-driven behavior. This region showed greater signal whether subjects believed statements about God, the Virgin Birth, etc. or statements about ordinary facts. A comparison of both stimulus categories suggests that religious thinking is more associated with brain regions that govern emotion, self-representation, and cognitive conflict, while thinking about ordinary facts is more reliant upon memory retrieval networks. Conclusions/Significance: While religious and nonreligious thinking differentially engage broad regions of the frontal, parietal, and medial temporal lobes, the difference between belief and disbelief appears to be content-independent. Our study compares religious thinking with ordinary cognition and, as such, constitutes a step toward developing a neuropsychology of religion. However, these findings may also further our understanding of how the brain accepts statements of all kinds to be valid descriptions of the world. © 2009 Harris et al. (shrink)

In this paper we present an account of practical rationality and weakness of will in terms of rational capacities. We show how our account rectifies various shortcomings in Michael Smith's related theory. In particular, our account is capable of accommodating cases of weak-willed behaviour that are not `akratic', or otherwise contrary to the agent's better judgement. Our account differs from Smith's primarily by incorporating resolve: a third rational capacity for resolute maintenance of one's intentions. We discuss further two ways to (...) explain the importance of resolve to practical rationality: one based on Richard Holton's recent work, and an alternative, non-consequentialist account. (shrink)

I argue that semantics is the study of the proprietary database of a centrally inaccessible and informationally encapsulated input–output system. This system’s role is to encode and decode partial and defeasible evidence of what speakers are saying. Since information about nonlinguistic context is therefore outside the purview of semantic processing, a sentence’s semantic value is not its content but a partial and defeasible constraint on what it can be used to say. I show how to translate this thesis into a (...) detailed compositional-semantic theory based on the influential framework of Heim and Kratzer. This approach situates semantics within an independently motivated account of human cognitive architecture and reveals the semantics–pragmatics interface to be grounded in the underlying interface between modular and central systems. (shrink)

Virtue epistemology was modeled on virtue ethics theories to transfer their ethical insights to epistemology. VE has had great success: broadening our perspective, providing new answers to traditional questions, and raising exciting new questions. I offer a new argument for VE based on the concept of cognitive achievements, a broader notion than purely epistemic achievements. The argument is then extended to cognitive transformations, especially the cognitive transformations brought about by argumentation.

Virtue argumentation theory provides the best framework for accommodating the notion of an argument that is “fully satisfying” in a robust and integrated sense. The process of explicating the notion of fully satisfying arguments requires expanding the concept of arguers to include all of an argument’s participants, including judges, juries, and interested spectators. And that, in turn, requires expanding the concept of an argument itself to include its entire context.

While morality prohibits us from creating miserable children, it does not require us to create happy children. I offer an actualist explanation of this apparent asymmetry. Assume that for every possible world W, there is a distinct set of permissibility facts determined by the welfare of those who exist in W. Moral actualism says that actual-world permissibility facts should determine one's choice between worlds. But if one doesn't know which world is actual, one must aim for subjective rightness and maximize (...) expected actual-world permissibility. So, because one should expect actual people to be worse off than they could have been if one creates a miserable child, creating a miserable child is subjectively impermissible. And because one should expect actual people to be at least as well off as they could have been if one fails to create a happy child, failing to create a happy child is subjectively permissible. (shrink)

This paper presents an approach for monitoring exercises of hand rehabilitation for post stroke patients. The developed solution uses a leap motion controller as hand-tracking device and embeds a supervised machine learning. The K-nearest neighbor methodology is adopted for automatically characterizing the physiotherapist or helper hand movement resulting a unique movement pattern that constitutes the basis of the rehabilitation process. In the second stage, an evaluation of the patients rehabilitation exercises results is compared to the movement pattern of the patient (...) and results are presented, saved and statistically analyzed. Physicians and physiotherapists monitor and assess patients’ rehabilitation improvements through a web application, furthermore, offer medical assisted rehabilitation processes through low cost technology, which can be easily exploited at home. Recorded tracked motion data and results can be used for further medical study and evaluating rehabilitation trends according to patient’s rehabilitation practice and improvement. (shrink)

Alan Turing, one of the fathers of computing, warned that Artificial Intelligence (AI) could one day pose an existential risk to humanity. Today, recent advancements in the field AI have been accompanied by a renewed set of existential warnings. But what exactly constitutes an existential risk? And how exactly does AI pose such a threat? In this chapter we aim to answer these questions. In particular, we will critically explore three commonly cited reasons for thinking that AI poses an existential (...) threat to humanity: the control problem, the possibility of global disruption from an AI race dynamic, and the weaponization of AI. (shrink)

Current evolutionary and cognitive theories of religion posit that supernatural agent concepts emerge from cognitive systems such as theory of mind and social cognition. Some argue that these concepts evolved to maintain social order by minimizing antisocial behavior. If these theories are correct, then people should process information about supernatural agents’ socially strategic knowledge more quickly than non-strategic knowledge. Furthermore, agents’ knowledge of immoral and uncooperative social behaviors should be especially accessible to people. To examine these hypotheses, we measured response-times (...) to questions about the knowledge attributed to four different agents—God, Santa Claus, a fictional surveillance government, and omniscient but non-interfering aliens—that vary in their omniscience, moral concern, ability to punish, and how supernatural they are. As anticipated, participants respond more quickly to questions about agents’ socially strategic knowledge than non-strategic knowledge, but only when agents are able to punish. (shrink)

What makes it the case that an utterance constitutes an illocutionary act of a given kind? This is the central question of speech-act theory. Answers to it—i.e., theories of speech acts—have proliferated. Our main goal in this chapter is to clarify the logical space into which these different theories fit. -/- We begin, in Section 1, by dividing theories of speech acts into five families, each distinguished from the others by its account of the key ingredients in illocutionary acts. Are (...) speech acts fundamentally a matter of convention or intention? Or should we instead think of them in terms of the psychological states they express, in terms of the effects that it is their function to produce, or in terms of the norms that govern them? In Section 2, we take up the highly influential idea that speech acts can be understood in terms of their effects on a conversation’s context or “score”. Part of why this idea has been so useful is that it allows speech-act theorists from the five families to engage at a level of abstraction that elides their foundational disagreements. In Section 3, we investigate some of the motivations for the traditional distinction between propositional content and illocutionary force, and some of the ways in which this distinction has been undermined by recent work. In Section 4, we survey some of the ways in which speech-act theory has been applied to issues outside semantics and pragmatics, narrowly construed. (shrink)

Technology has made argumentation rampant. We can argue whenever we want. With social media venues for every interest, we can also argue about whatever we want. To some extent, we can select our opponents and audiences to argue with whomever we want. And we can argue however we want, whether in carefully reasoned, article-length expositions, real-time exchanges, or 140-character polemics. The concepts of arguing, arguing well, and even being an arguer have evolved with this new multiplicity and diversity; theory needs (...) to catch up to the new reality. Successful strategies for traditional contexts may be counterproductive in new ones; classical argumentative virtues may be liabilities in new situations. There are new complications to the theorist’s standard questions—What is an argument? and Who is an arguer?—while new ones move into the spotlight—Should we argue at all? and If so, why? Agent-based virtue argumentation theory provides a unifying framework for this radical plurality by coordinated redefinitions of the concepts of good arguers and good arguments. It remains true that good arguers contribute to good arguments, and good arguments satisfy good arguers, but the new diversity strains the old unity. Ironically, a unifying factor is provided by examining those paragons of bad arguers, argument trolls whose contributions to arguments are not very good, not really contributions, and, ultimately, not genuine argumentation. (shrink)