As earlier research on Korsakoff syndrome, a frequent neurological complication of alcohol-dependence, mainly focused on cognition, affective impairments have been little investigated despite their crucial impact in AD. This article proposes new research avenues on this topic by combining two theoretical frameworks: dual-process models, positing that addictions are due to an imbalance between underactivated reflective system and overactivated affective-automatic one; continuity theory, postulating a gradual worsening of cognitive impairments from AD to KS. We suggest that this joint perspective may renew (...) the current knowledge by clarifying the affective-automatic deficits in KS and their interactions with reflective impairments, but also by offering a direct exploration of the continuity between AD and KS regarding reflective and affective-automatic abilities. (shrink)

The Twentieth Century has seen a dramatic rise in the use of probability and statistics in almost all fields of research. This has stimulated many new philosophical ideas on probability. _Philosophical Theories of Probability_ is the first book to present a clear, comprehensive and systematic account of these various theories and to explain how they relate to one another. Gillies also offers a distinctive version of the propensity theory of probability, and the intersubjective interpretation, which develops the subjective theory.

Argues that a pluralistic understanding of truth can foster productive conversations about common concerns involving religion, science, ethics, politics, economics, and ecology without falling into relativism. In this book, Donald A. Crosby defends the idea that all claims to truth are at best partial. Recognizing this, he argues, is a necessary safeguard against arrogance, close-mindedness, and potentially violent reactions to differences of outlook and practice. Crosby demonstrates how “partial truths” are inevitably at work in conversations and debates about religion, (...) science, morality, economics, ecology, and social and political progress. He then focuses on the concept in the discipline of philosophy, looking at a number of distinctions that are taken to be strictly binary—those between fact and value, continuity and novelty, rationalism and empiricism, mind and body, and good and evil—and demonstrates how in all of these cases, each on its own can offer only an incomplete picture. Partial Truths and Our Common Future invites ongoing dialogue with others for the sake of mutual enlargements of understanding rather than mere civility, and provides incentive for continuing open-minded and shared inquiries into the important issues of life. “This is a transdisciplinary philosophical work that moves with grace across traditions, time periods, and thinkers. It is a master class in the existential and public relevance of philosophy and a rare example of a book that is both timely and timeless.” — Michael S. Hogue, author of The Promise of Religious Naturalism. (shrink)

Music as an Imitation of Harmonious Balance.

Two key themes structure the work of French philosopher of science Gilbert Simondon: the processes of individuation and the nature of technical objects. Moreover, these two themes are also at the heart of contemporary debates within Ethics and Bioethics. Indeed, the question of the individual is a key concern in both Virtue Ethics and Feminist Ethics of Care, while the hyper-technical reality of the present stage of medical technology is a key reason for both the urgency for and the success (...) of the field of Bioethics. And yet, despite its potential for thinking about these issues, Simondon’s philosophy remains largely unknown. Rather than exploring Simondon’s complex ontology for itself, the aim of this paper is to establish what contribution his work can make in Ethics and Bioethics on two essential questions: the relational structure of the self and the nature of the human-technology relation. I argue that Simondon’s re-conceptualization of the individual harmonizes with perspectives in Feminist Bioethics (particularly the Ethics of Care) and points toward what I call an “open” Virtue Ethics that takes relations to be essential. In order to establish this connection, I explore at length the relational approach to Feminist Bioethics offered by Susan Sherwin’s work. I argue that a Simondonian account of technology and of the individual furthers the relational understanding of the self, offers a characterization of Virtue Ethics that is in harmony with the Ethics of Care, and clarifies a notion of responsibility that is implicated in the complex reality of the modern technological milieu. (shrink)

This book argues that the subjective and the objective are crucially dependent on one another and neither is intelligible apart from the other. There is no such thing as a purely external, in-itself world. This book is not intended as a defense of epistemological relativism but as a strong recommendation for modest fallibilism and pluralism.

As a descriptive philosophy, it might seem that the ethical nowhere has its place in phenomenology. And yet, phenomenology is every-where shot through with normative concerns. This section includes articles from the 2018 conference Toward a Phenomenological Ethics, where two themes emerged regarding the elusive place of the ethical in phenomenology: first, research demonstrates that early phenomenology was indeed oriented by the ethical; second, Critical Phenomenology examines ethical questions in terms of intersubjectivity and oppression. In this introduction, I suggest that (...) the place of the ethical in phenomenology implies a certain paradoxical logic of expression, and I consider the relationship between expression and encroachment. This points to a double responsibility for the cultivation of our own virtual and the virtual that we collectively sustain. I conclude with a brief re????lection on how these ideas might help us to rethink our responsibilities in the age of COVID-19. (shrink)

William James and Alfred North Whitehead strongly rejected materialism as a metaphysical option. While James lived and wrote only up to the beginning of the revolution in physics that brought to the fore fundamentally different theories such as quantum theory and the special and general theories of relativity, Whitehead, as an accomplished mathematician, was readily conversant with these new developments. Since their respective times, however, much innovation and refinement of theories in physics and other natural sciences has taken place. With (...) these later developments, conceptions of matter and its capabilities have undergone far-reaching explicit and implicit changes. A consequence of these... (shrink)

Engages the work and career of a central figure in contemporary philosophy. Hugh J. Silverman was an inspiring scholar and teacher, known for his work engaging and shaping phenomenology, hermeneutics, psychoanalysis, structuralism, poststructuralism, and deconstruction. As Professor of Philosophy and Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at Stony Brook University, State University of New York, Silverman’s work was marked by “the between,” a concept he developed to think the postmodern in the space between philosophy and non-philosophy. In this volume, leading scholars (...) explore and extend Silverman’s philosophical contributions, from reflections on the notions of care, time, and responsibility, to presentations of the practices and possibilities of deconstruction itself. They provide an assessment of Silverman’s life and work at the intersection of philosophy, ethics, and politics. (shrink)

Mot de présentation du dossier spécial intitulé "Bergson et Deleuze sur L’évolution créatrice".

Walras's Market Models describes and evaluates Léon Walras's models of competitive markets. Through identification of his career phases and the associated general equilibrium models, which are shown to be very different in character, this book differs from previous examinations of his work. During his mature phase of theoretical activity, Walras was concerned with a competitive economy which passes through a phase of disequilibrium in the production and sales of commodities. While in his last phase of theoretical activity, he developed a (...) model in which there is no production, sales, hiring, consuming or saving until an assumed set of equilibrium prices obtains of the model. The two phases of Walras's theoretical work have not previously been identified, and the models have not been subjected to an accurate analysis and evaluation. (shrink)

Winner of the 2014 Edward Goodwin Ballard Award for an Outstanding Book in Phenomenology, awarded by the Center for Advance Research in Phenomenology. -/- Merleau-Ponty and the Paradoxes of Expression offers a comprehensive reading of the philosophical work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a central figure in 20th-century continental philosophy. -/- By establishing that the paradoxical logic of expression is Merleau-Ponty's fundamental philosophical gesture, this book ties together his diverse work on perception, language, aesthetics, politics and history in order to establish the (...) ontological position he was developing at the time of his sudden death in 1961. Donald A. Landes explores the paradoxical logic of expression as it appears in both Merleau-Ponty’s explicit reflections on expression and his non-explicit uses of this logic in his philosophical reflection on other topics, and thus establishes a continuity and a trajectory of his thought that allows for his work to be placed into conversation with contemporary developments in continental philosophy. The book offers the reader a key to understanding Merleau-Ponty's subtle methodology and highlights the urgency and relevance of his research into the ontological significance of expression for today's work in art and cultural theory. (shrink)

This book explicates and defends the reality of time against its scientific, philosophical, and theological detractors, and it discusses how a proper view of the nature of time serves as a way to comprehend the challenges of human existence and confront the current ecological crisis.

A view from deep inside the trenches of environmental policy formation leads me to conclude that, ironically, despite the failure of environmental ethics to penetrate public policy discourses, ethical analyses of environmental problems still appear to be more than ever vitally crucial to improving environmental decision making.

Develops and defends a philosophical account of meaning, purpose, and value in human life and experience that is naturalistic without being reductionistic or scientistic.

_ Source: _Volume 45, Issue 3, pp 369 - 385 In “The Vestige of Art,” Jean-Luc Nancy argues that art is neither representation nor inscription, but rather _exscription_. The figure is the vestige of an expressive gesture; it represents neither a separable idea nor the one who traced it but, rather _exscribes_ their presence and their world in the event of expression. As such, Nancy’s aesthetics in _The Muses_ deploys a certain logic of expression best understood in the tradition of (...) Merleau-Pontian phenomenology. Echoing Merleau-Ponty’s notion of speech accomplishing, rather than translating, thought, Nancy’s understanding of the expressive gesture suggests an event that brings forth a self that does not pre-exist its expression and that is paradoxically always already past, always already fallen into material vestiges. By connecting Merleau-Ponty’s notion of a “past that has never been present” to Nancy’s concept of _exscription_, I argue that reading Nancy’s _The Muses_ and Merleau-Ponty’s “Eye and Mind” together suggests an importantly restructured “phenomenology” of painting that is in fact more of an ontology of intercorporeality. (shrink)

Although the suggestion that Kant offers a significant contribution to Virtue Ethics might be a surprising one, in The Metaphysics of Morals Kant makes virtue central to his ethics. In this paper, I introduce a Merleau-Pontian phenomenological perspective into the ongoing study of the convergence between Kant and Virtue Ethics, and argue that such a perspective promises to illuminate the continuity of Kant’s thought through an emphasis on the implicit structure of moral experience, revealing the insights his perspective contains for (...) establishing an embodied phenomenology of virtue. These two aims are accomplished by exploring Kant’s ‘proto-phenomenological’ descriptions of the weight of the moral law, his implicit ‘existential’ account of human nature, and his notion of the art of navigating the complex moral terrain that involves a certain Spielraum. When thus viewed, Kant’s virtue ethics sketches out a subtle understanding of embodiment and temporality. (shrink)

I am struck by how little is known about so much of cognition. One goal of this paper is to argue for the need to consider a rich set of interlocking issues in the study of cognition. Mainstream work in cognition—including my own—ignores many critical aspects of animate cognitive systems. Perhaps one reason that existing theories say so little relevant to real world activities is the neglect of social and cultural factors, of emotion, and of the major points that distinguish (...) an animate cognitive system from an artificial one: the need to survive, to regulate its own operation, to maintain itself, to exist in the environment, to change from a small, uneducated, immature system to an adult, developed, knowledgeable one.Human cognition is not the same as artificial cognition, if only because the human organism must also be concerned with the problems of life, of development, of survival. There must be a regulatory system that interacts with the cognitive component. And it may well be that it is the cognitive component that is subservient, evolved primarily for the benefit of the regulatory system, working through the emotions, through affect.I argue that several concepts must become fundamental parts of the study of cognition, including the roles of culture, of social interaction, of emotions, and of motivation. I argue that there are at least 12 issues that should comprise the study of cognition, and thereby, the field of Cognitive Science. We need to study a wide variety of behavior before we can hope to understand a single class. Cognitive scientists as a whole ought to make more use of evidence from the neurosciences, from brain damage and mental illness, from cognitive sociology and anthropology, and from clinical studies of the human. These must be accompanied, of course, with the study of language, of the psychological aspects of human processing structures, and of artificially intelligent mechanisms. The study of Cognitive Science requires a complex interaction among different issues of concern, an interaction that will not be properly understood until all parts are understood, with no part independent of the others, the whole requiring the parts, and the parts the whole. (shrink)

This book questions the idea that the boundary between truth and falsity must always be absolute, and thus that there is no possible bridge between the two. The author argues that searching for liminal bridges between opposing claims is an essential part of finding absolute truths.

Any attempt to rise to the climate challenge will be fruitless unless it is understood as part of a much wider battle of worldviews, a process of rebuilding and reinventing the very idea of the collective, the communal, the commons, the civil, and the civic after so many decades of attack and neglect. Because what is overwhelming about the climate challenge is that it requires breaking so many rules at once.Columnist and editor Naomi Klein calls our attention to the urgent (...) need for a radical reenvisioning of entrenched worldviews or conceptions of reality in our time of direly threatening climate change and pending ecological disaster around the globe. We need, in other words, to question our most basic assumptions... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Sacredness of Nature: Response to Six Objections to Religious NaturalismDonald A. Crosby (bio)The poet Mary Oliver speaks as a kind of religious naturalist when she writes in her book of prose and poetry Winter Hours, “I would not be a poet without the natural world. Someone else could. But not me. For me, the door to the woods is the door to the temple. Under the trees, along (...) the pale slopes of sand, I walk in an ascendent relationship to rapture, and with words, I celebrate the rapture. I see, and dote upon, the manifest.”1 She speaks as a poet and not as a philosopher or religious scholar, but she does so as one who is ardently in touch with the sacredness of nature. Her vocation as a poet is testimony to this constant attunement. Her daily walks in the woods and by the sea are her portals of access to the temple of the natural world. Her every step makes contact with holy ground.Oliver’s poetic vocation shows itself to be in deep sympathy with all of the living and nonliving aspects of nature, and thus with the imminent ecological crisis of our time, when she reflects later in this same book, “The farthest star and the mud at our feet are a family; and there is no decency or sense of honoring one thing, or a few things, and then closing the list. The pine tree, the leopard, the Platte River, and ourselves—we are at risk together, or we are on our way to a sustainable world together. We are each other’s destiny.”2Poet, philosopher, religious scholar, ecologist, and perceptive human being are bound together in Mary Oliver’s alert responses to the sacredness of nature. She captures in both her poetic and prose writing the essential spirit and outlook of religious naturalism. I do not claim that she is a religious naturalist; that would be going beyond what I am capable of knowing. But she certainly sounds like one in many respects throughout the poetry and prose of this book.I want us to keep constantly in mind her spirit and outlook as we ponder the cogency, adequacy, and appeal of religious naturalism as a way of thinking and living religiously, for they are the ultimate tests of that adequacy. I want us to do so by considering objections of various sorts arguing that religious [End Page 24] naturalism fails to be sufficiently religious in the way of satisfying the deepest discernments, needs, hopes, and foundations of authentic religious faith. My plan for this essay is to present what I surmise to be some of the most substantive objections, and to reply to each of them in turn.I do so in defense of the thesis that religious naturalism—at least as I have come to interpret and understand it over many years—is a strong contender for having an honored place among the religions of the world. My personal conception of religious naturalism is of course only one of many, and other religious naturalists might have different kinds of response to at least some of these objections. But my responses indicate the capability of religious naturalism to take such objections seriously into account and to provide plausible answers to them.The objections I want to respond to in this essay are six in number. All of them, as will be seen, assume a kind of panpsychism or the primordiality of some kind of mind or spirit, a view I find unnecessary and tending strongly toward an untenable mind-matter dualism in my defense of religious naturalism. 3 The first one is that nature by itself has no overarching purpose or reason for being. The second is that if mind and spirit are emergent rather than primordial, then they are reducible to blind physical processes, meaning that religion is implausibly reduced to physics. The third objection is that nature is just a mass of meaningless facts, with no objective, dependable values of any kind, including religious values. The fourth objection is that with impersonal nature rather than a personal, loving, God as its focus, religious naturalism lacks essential divine... (shrink)

ABSTRACT Whether explicitly or implicitly, Kant's critical project weighs heavily upon Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception. This article argues that we can understand Merleau-Ponty's text as a phenomenological rewriting of the Critique of Pure Reason from within the paradoxical structures of lived experience, effectively merging Kant's Transcendental Aesthetic and Transcendental Analytic. Although he was influenced by Husserl's and Heidegger's interpretations of Kant's first version of the Transcendental Deduction, Merleau-Ponty develops a unique position between Kant, Husserl, and Heidegger via an embodied and (...) lived synthesis that collapses Kant's distinction between sensibility and the understanding, and that makes sense of temporality and subjectivity as a paradoxical trajectory. (shrink)

I am struck by how little is known about so much of cognition. One goal of this paper is to argue for the need to consider a rich set of interlocking issues in the study of cognition. Mainstream work in cognition—including my own—ignores many critical aspects of animate cognitive systems. Perhaps one reason that existing theories say so little relevant to real world activities is the neglect of social and cultural factors, of emotion, and of the major points that distinguish (...) an animate cognitive system from an artificial one: the need to survive, to regulate its own operation, to maintain itself, to exist in the environment, to change from a small, uneducated, immature system to an adult, developed, knowledgeable one.Human cognition is not the same as artificial cognition, if only because the human organism must also be concerned with the problems of life, of development, of survival. There must be a regulatory system that interacts with the cognitive component. And it may well be that it is the cognitive component that is subservient, evolved primarily for the benefit of the regulatory system, working through the emotions, through affect.I argue that several concepts must become fundamental parts of the study of cognition, including the roles of culture, of social interaction, of emotions, and of motivation. I argue that there are at least 12 issues that should comprise the study of cognition, and thereby, the field of Cognitive Science. We need to study a wide variety of behavior before we can hope to understand a single class. Cognitive scientists as a whole ought to make more use of evidence from the neurosciences, from brain damage and mental illness, from cognitive sociology and anthropology, and from clinical studies of the human. These must be accompanied, of course, with the study of language, of the psychological aspects of human processing structures, and of artificially intelligent mechanisms. The study of Cognitive Science requires a complex interaction among different issues of concern, an interaction that will not be properly understood until all parts are understood, with no part independent of the others, the whole requiring the parts, and the parts the whole. (shrink)

Part 1. Introduction -- Introduction: Navigating the Perfect Moral Storm in Light of a Thirty-Five Year Debate -- Thirty-Five Year Climate Change Policy Debate -- Part 2. Priority Ethical Issues -- Ethical Problems with Cost Arguments -- Ethics and Scientific Uncertainty Arguments -- Atmospheric Targets -- Allocating National Emissions Targets -- Climate Change Damages and Adaptation Costs -- Obligations of Sub-national Governments, Organizations, Businesses, and Individuals -- Independent Responsibility to Act -- Part 3. The Crucial Role of Ethics in Climate (...) Change Policy Making -- Why Has Ethics Failed to Achieve Traction? -- Conclusion: Navigating the Perfect Moral Storm. (shrink)

Technological change is often seen as something that follows its own logic -- something we may welcome, or about which we may protest, but which we are unable to alter fundamentally. This reader challenges that assumption and its distinguished contributors demonstrate that technology is affected at a fundamental level by the social context in which it develops. General arguments are introduced about the relation of technology to society and different types of technology are examined: the technology of production: domestic and (...) reproductive technology; and military technology. The book draws on authors from Karl Marx to Cynthia Cockburn to show that production technology is shaped by social relations in the workplace. It moves on to the technologies of the household and biological reproduction, which are topics that male-dominated social science has tended to ignore or trivialise -- though these are actually of crucial significance where powerful shaping factors are at work, normally unnoticed. The final section asks what shapes the most frightening technology of all -- the technology of weaponry, especially nuclear weapons. The editors argue that social scientists have devoted disproportionate attention to the effects of technology on society, and tended to ignore the more fundamental question of what shapes technology in the first place. They have drawn both on established work in the history and sociology of technology and on newer feminist perspectives to show just how important and fruitful it is to try to answer that deeper question. The first edition of this reader, published in 1985, had a considerable influence on thinking about the relationship between technology andsociety. This second edition has been thoroughly revised and expanded to take into account new research and the emergence of new theoretical perspectives. (shrink)

In American Heat, Donald Brown critically analyzes the U.S. response to global warming, inviting readers to examine the implicit morality of the U.S position, and ultimately to help lead the world toward an equitable sharing of the burdens and benefits of protecting the global environment. In short, Brown argues that an ethical focus on global environmental matters is the key to achieving a globally acceptable solution.