"TAKE A LINE cut in two unequal sections, one for the kind that is seen, the other for the kind that is thought, and go on and cut each section in the same ratio". In order to follow this request, not only must one know geometry, which treats linear magnitudes; one must also know the relations between geometry and the art which treats kinds. The problem of the first cut in the line is the problem of determining what ratio of (...) two parts of a line is the same as the ratio of the two kinds: visible and thinkable. In order to solve this problem, a procedure seems to be needed for deciding when a ratio of magnitudes, a geometric ratio, is the same as a ratio of kinds, or at least what ratio of magnitudes is the same as the ratio of visible to thinkable. (shrink)

"TAKE A LINE cut in two unequal sections, one for the kind that is seen, the other for the kind that is thought, and go on and cut each section in the same ratio". In order to follow this request, not only must one know geometry, which treats linear magnitudes; one must also know the relations between geometry and the art which treats kinds. The problem of the first cut in the line is the problem of determining what ratio of (...) two parts of a line is the same as the ratio of the two kinds: visible and thinkable. In order to solve this problem, a procedure seems to be needed for deciding when a ratio of magnitudes, a geometric ratio, is the same as a ratio of kinds, or at least what ratio of magnitudes is the same as the ratio of visible to thinkable. (shrink)

This second festschrift for Robert Sokolowski brings together papers given in April 2000 at a colloquium on the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday. In contrast with the first festschrift in honor of his sixtieth birthday, which was mostly phenomenological philosophy, the present collection is mostly phenomenological theology.

Apresentamos os resultados dos nossos estudos entre os processos educacionais e processos de subjetivação. Associamos este fato com a dificuldade dos educadores deslocarem o corpo do lugar de quem ensina para o lugar de quem aprende. Estudamos as implicações do corpo nos processos educacionais e sugerimos uma “atitude moderna” a partir do “cuidado de si”, apoiados em Foucault, como a ação do educador que “toma partido” do educando.

Recent trends in business ethics along with growing attacks upon unions, suggest that employee rights will be a major social concern for business managers during the next decade. However, in most of the discussions of employee rights to date, the very meaning and legitimacy of such rights are often uncritically taken for granted. In this paper, we develop an account of employee rights and defend this conception against what we take to be the strongest in-principle objections to it.

Over the last decade, research in semantics and pragmatics has started to increasingly incorporate new experimental methods from cognitive psychology. That this empirical stance on utterance interpretation has now reached maturity is revealed by two unmistakable symptoms: an increased reflection on the contextual methods used to elicit experimental data, and a continuous expansion of the linguistic phenomena and themes being investigated through these methods. The articles gathered in this volume testify to this very recent evolution of the field: a first (...) set of papers questions the interpretation or interpretability of data collected in non-naturalistic settings, while a second set reflects the extension of experimental methods to new topics. The volume offers an up-to-date overview of contemporary issues arising within the thriving field of Empirical Pragmatics. (shrink)

The feasibility of reversing human aging within a matter of decades has traditionally been dismissed by all professional biogerontologists, on the grounds that not only is aging still poorly understood, but also many of those aspects that we do understand are not reversible by any current or foreseeable therapeutic regimen. This broad consensus has recently been challenged by the publication, by five respected experimentalists in diverse subfields of biogerontology together with three of the present authors, of an article (Ann NY (...) Acad Sci 959, 452–462) whose conclusion was that all the key components of mammalian aging are indeed amenable to substantial reversal (not merely retardation) in mice, with technology that has a reasonable prospect of being developed within about a decade. Translation of that panel of interventions to humans who are already alive, within a few decades thereafter, was deemed potentially feasible (though it was not claimed to be likely). If the prospect of controlling human aging within the foreseeable future cannot be categorically rejected, then it becomes a matter of personal significance to most people presently alive. Consequently, we suggest that serious public debate on this subject is now warranted, and we survey here several of the biological, social and political issues relating to it. BioEssays 24:667–676, 2002. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Recent times have seen increasing interest in conversational assistants (e.g., Amazon Alexa) designed to help users in their daily tasks. In military settings, it is critical to design assistants that are, simultaneously, helpful and able to minimize the user’s cognitive load. Here we show that embodiment plays a key role in achieving that goal. We present an experiment where participants engaged in the desert survival task in augmented reality. Participants were paired with a voice assistant, an embodied assistant, or no (...) assistant. The assistants made suggestions verbally throughout the task, whereas the embodied assistant further used gestures and emotion to communicate with the user. Our results indicate that both assistant conditions led to higher performance over the no assistant condition, but the embodied assistant achieved this with less cognitive burden on the decision maker than the non-embodied assistant. We discuss implications for the design of intelligent collaborative systems for the warfighter. (shrink)

The development of synthetic biology calls for accurate understanding of the critical functions that allow construction and operation of a living cell. Besides coding for ubiquitous structures, minimal genomes encode a wealth of functions that dissipate energy in an unanticipated way. Analysis of these functions shows that they are meant to manage information under conditions when discrimination of substrates in a noisy background is preferred over a simple recognition process. We show here that many of these functions, including transporters and (...) the ribosome construction machinery, behave as would behave a material implementation of the informationmanaging agent theorized by Maxwell almost 150 years ago and commonly known as Maxwell’s demon (MxD). A core gene set encoding these functions belongs to the minimal genome required to allow the construction of an autonomous cell. These MxDs allow the cell to perform computations in an energy-efficient way that is vastly better than our contemporary computers. (shrink)

The essays in Practicing Gnosis demonstrate that the Gnostics were not necessarily trendy intellectuals seeking epistomological certainities. Instead, this book explores how Gnostics were seeking religious experiences that relied on practices including ritual, magic, liturgy, and theurgy. This book celebrates the career of Birger A. Pearson.

Written in a highly personal style, Spinoza's "Ethics" presents to readers anordered vision of the universe as a unified whole--not as a lifeless world ofinnumerable separate entities. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

This research examines how an organization, Thanksgiving Coffee, establishes and maintains its legitimacy with its constituent publics. In line with Boyd’s (2000, Journal of Public Relations Research 12(4), 341–353.) concept of actional legitimacy, Thanksgiving Coffee demonstrates a legitimation strategy addressing social issues and by responding to ethical and political questions. Applying Fisher’s (1984, Communication Monographs 51, 1–18) concepts of narrative fidelity and probability, Thanksgiving Coffee’s policies and communication activities were found to alleviate the social issues to which they were addressed (...) and therefore reinforce perceptions of legitimacy among publics. Viewing the influence of organizations from a different perspective, this study provides an example of how the policies of an organization can have a positive impact on the broader society in which it operates. (shrink)

Healey et al. introduce the special issue with a brief overview of work on communication in the Cognitive Sciences and some of the historical and conceptual influences that have marginalized the study of miscommunication. Drawing on more recent work in Cognitive Science and Conversation Analysis they argue that miscommunication is in fact a highly structured, ubiquitous phenomenon that is fundamental to human interaction.

A review of the achievements of Fr. Busa over the course of his 60 years of work in the area of computational linguistics: internal hypertexts, the systematization of allographs, lemmatization, homographs and typologies; the lexical system; the laws of economy for graphemes, for semantic typology, for heterogeneity among terms, and of the two lexical hemispheres. Finally, the project of disciplined languages is mentioned, a response to the linguistic challenge resulting from informational globalization.

Counterfactual thinking involves imagining hypothetical alternatives to reality. Philosopher David Lewis argued that people estimate the subjective plausibility that a counterfactual event might have occurred by comparing an imagined possible world in which the counterfactual statement is true against the current, actual world in which the counterfactual statement is false. Accordingly, counterfactuals considered to be true in possible worlds comparatively more similar to ours are judged as more plausible than counterfactuals deemed true in possible worlds comparatively less similar. Although Lewis (...) did not originally develop his notion of comparative similarity to be investigated as a psychological construct, this study builds upon his idea to empirically investigate comparative similarity as a possible psychological strategy for evaluating the perceived plausibility of counterfactual events. More specifically, we evaluate judgments of comparative similarity between episodic memories and episodic counterfactual events as a factor influencing people's judgments of plausibility in counterfactual simulations, and we also compare it against other factors thought to influence judgments of counterfactual plausibility, such as ease of simulation and prior simulation. Our results suggest that the greater the perceived similarity between the original memory and the episodic counterfactual event, the greater the perceived plausibility that the counterfactual event might have occurred. While similarity between actual and counterfactual events, ease of imagining, and prior simulation of the counterfactual event were all significantly related to counterfactual plausibility, comparative similarity best captured the variance in ratings of counterfactual plausibility. Implications for existing theories on the determinants of counterfactual plausibility are discussed. (shrink)

Traduit de l'italien par Marilène Raiola et Thierry Bedouelle Préface de Jean-Robert Armogathe Le premier mérite de T. Gregory est de présenter l'état actuel des recherches, sur un mode critique, illustré par des exemples. Tandis qu'un consensus s'était établi qui voyait dans les "libertines érudits" les derniers humanistes de la Renaissance, Gregory y voit les premiers représentants d'une pensée articulée des Lumières. A une Renaissance perçue comme le dernier feu du passé il oppose une interprétation nouvelle, hardie, d'ouverture (...) des temps modernes, de genèse de la raison classique. Sans doute il faut s'entendre sur les mots : cette raison-là contient bien des éléments magiques, astrologiques, alchimiques. Mais n'avons-nous pas trop souvent procédé par anachronisme et anticipé notre conception de la rationalité sur un âge où elle se constituait, à partir d'autres éléments? Gregory décrit la mise en place de cette rationalité inchoative, la genèse de la raison classique. A partir de l'introduction. (shrink)

In this article we intend to analyze the relationship between science and values from the philosophy of Hans Jonas. It starts with an analysis of the change identified by the author with regard to the new status of knowledge in modernity, which gives rise to the so-called technobioscience, born from the articulation between knowing and doing, in view of a new power. It is about showing how the old formulation of knowledge as contemplation gave way to the utilitarian idea of (...) knowledge as exploration, although in such a version, the claim of neutrality and absolute freedom is maintained, characteristic of the old moral island represented by knowledge pre-modern. Jonas argues in favor of an articulation of technobioscience with ethics, in order to provide the values capable of guiding knowing, doing and power in technological civilization. (shrink)

Introduction: the age of reflexion Part I. Romanticism: 1. Romanticism and the sciences David Knight 2. Schelling and the origins of his Naturphilosophie S. R. Morgan 3. Romantic philosophy and the organization of the disciplines: the founding of the Humboldt University of Berlin Elinor S. Shaffer 4. Historical consciousness in the German Romantic Naturforschung Dietrich Von Engelhardt 5. Theology and the sciences in the German Romantic period Frederick Gregory 6. Genius in Romantic natural philosophy Simon Shaffer Part II. Sciences (...) of the Organic: 7. Doctors contra clysters and feudalism: the consequences of a Romantic revolution Nelly Tsouyopoulos 8. Morphotypes and the historical-genetic method in Romantic biology Timothy Lenoir 9. ’Metaphorical mystifications’: the Romantic gestation of nature in British biology Evelleen Richards 10. Transcendental anatomy Philip F. Rehbock 11. Romantic thought and the origins of cell theory L. S. Jacyna 12. Alexander von Humbolt and the geography of vegetation Malcolm Nicholson Part III. Sciences of the Inorganic: 13. Goethe, colour, and the science of seeing Dennis L. Sepper 14. Johann Wilhelm Ritter: Romantic physics in Germany Walter D. Wetzels 15. The power and the glory: Humphrey Davy and Romanticism Christopher Lawrence 16. Oersted’s discovery of electromagnetism H. A. M. Snelders 17. Caves, fossils and the history of the earth Nicholas A. Rupke Part IV. Literature and the Sciences: 18. Goethe’s use of chemical theory in his Elective Affinities Jeremy Adler 19. Kleist’s bedlam: abnormal psychology and psychiatry in the works of Heinrich von Kleist Nigel Reeves 20. Coleridge and the sciences Trevor H. Levere 21. Nature’s book: the language of science in the American Renaissance David van Leer 22. The shattered whole: Georg Buchner and Naturphilosophie John Reddick. (shrink)

The diverse essays in this volume speak to the relevance of phenomenological and psychological questioning regarding perceptions of the human. This designation, human, can be used beyond the mere identification of a species to underwrite exclusion, denigration, dehumanization and demonization, and to set up a pervasive opposition in Othering all deemed inhuman, nonhuman, or posthuman. As alerted to by Merleau-Ponty, one crucial key for a deeper understanding of these issues is consideration of the nature and scope of perception. Perception defines (...) the world of the perceiver, and perceptual capacities are constituted in engagement with the world – there is co-determination. Moreover, the distinct phenomenology of perception in the spectatorial mode in contrast to the reciprocal mode, deepens the intersubjective and ethical dimensions of such investigations. -/- Questions motivating the essays include: Can objectification and an inhuman gaze serve positive ends? If so, under what constraints and conditions? How is an inhuman gaze achieved and at what cost? How might the emerging insights of the role of perception into our interdependencies and essential sociality from various domains challenge not only theoretical frameworks, but also the practices and institutions of science, medicine, psychiatry and justice? What can we learn from atypical social cognition, psychopathology and animal cognition? Could distortions within the gazer’s emotional responsiveness and habituated aspects of social interaction play a role in the emergence of an inhuman gaze? -/- Perception and the Inhuman Gaze will interest scholars and advanced students working in phenomenology, philosophy of mind, psychology, psychiatry, sociology and social cognition. -/- Table of Contents -/- Introduction -/- Part I. The Gaze in Classical Phenomenology: Perspectives on Objectification -/- 1. Defending the Objective Gaze as a Self-transcending Capacity of Human Subjects -/- Dermot Moran -/- 2. Two Orders of Bodily Objectification: The Look and the Touch -/- Sara Heinämaa -/- 3. On Eliminativism’s Transient Gaze -/- Timothy Mooney -/- 4. Not wholly human. Reading Maurice Merleau-Ponty with Jacques Lacan. -/- Dorothée Legrand -/- 5. Disclosure and the Gendered Gaze in Simone de Beauvoir's Ethics -/- Christinia Landry -/- Part II. Vision, Perception and Gazes -/- 6. Inside the gaze -/- Shaun Gallagher -/- 7. Perception and its Objects. -/- Maurita Harney -/- 8. Technological Gaze: Understanding How Technologies Transform Perception -/- Richard Lewis -/- 9. The Inhuman Gaze and Perceptual Gestalts: The Making and Unmaking of Others and Worlds -/- Anya Daly -/- Part III. Psychiatry, Psychopathology and Inhuman Gazes -/- 10. Values and Values-based Practice in Psychopathology: Combining Analytic and Phenomenological Approaches -/- G Stanghellini and K.W.M. (Bill) Fulford -/- 11. The Inhuman and Human Gaze in Psychiatry, Psychopathology and Schizophrenia. -/- Matthew Broome -/- 12. Overcoming the Gaze: Psychopathology, Affect, and Narrative. -/- Anna Bortolan -/- 13. From excess to exhaustion : The rise of burnout in a post-modern achievement society. -/- Philippe Wuyts -/- 14. Blackout Rages: The Inhibition of Episodic Memory in Extreme Berserker Episodes -/- John Protevi -/- Part IV. Beyond the Human: Divine, Posthuman and Animal Gazes -/- 15. Wondering at the Inhuman Gaze -/- Sean. D. Kelly -/- 16. What Counts as Human/ Inhuman Right Now? -/- Rosi Braidotti -/- 17. Beyond Human and Animal: Metamorphosis in Merleau-Ponty -/- Dylan Trigg -/- Part V. Sociality and Boundaries of the Human -/- 18. Voice and gaze considered together in ‘languaging’. -/- Fred Cummins -/- 19. Ethics Beyond the Human: Disability and The Inhuman -/- Jonathan Mitchell -/- 20. Social Invisibility and Emotional Blindness -/- James Jardine -/- 21. What are you looking at? Dissonance as a window on the autonomy of participatory sense-making frames. -/- Mark James. (shrink)

Cet article remet en question les fondements théoriques et pédagogiques de la notion de compétence éthique ainsi que la conception de l’éthique qu’elle préfigure. Après une analyse du contexte d’émergence de cette notion, notamment dans le champ de la santé, nous verrons en quoi l’approche socioconstructiviste de l’apprentissage, à laquelle se réfèrent de nombreux dispositifs de formation, fait de l’éthique une ressource d’action visant l’adaptation passive des professionnels au contexte organisationnel et socioprofessionnel. Nous proposerons dès lors de revisiter l’apprentissage de (...) l’éthique dans une approche pragmatiste plus critique et plus émancipatrice. Nous en exposerons les principales orientations pédagogiques et insisterons, pour conclure, sur la responsabilité des environnements socioprofessionnels. Ces derniers sont appelés à devenir plus capacitants, c’est-à-dire à créer les conditions favorables au développement de cet apprentissage de l’éthique. (shrink)

The precarious rights of senior citizens, especially those who are highly educated and who are expected to counsel and guide the younger generations, has stimulated the creation internationally of advocacy associations and opinion leader groups. The strength of these groups, however, varies from country to country. In some countries, they are supported and are the focus of intense interest; in others, they are practically ignored. For this is reason we believe that the creation of a network of all these associations (...) is essential. The proposed network would act as a support for the already-existing policies of the United Nations’ High Commission for Human Rights, of independent experts, and of the Global Alliance for the Rights of Older People. All three have long ago recommended the creation of a recognized instrument for uniting presently scattered efforts. The proposed network, therefore, will seek to promote the international exchange of relevant expertise, and it will reinforce the commitments and actions that single countries are currently taking to meet these objectives. For example, informative public events can be organised to promote particular support initiatives and to provide an opportunity for new members of the network to be presented. The network will promote health for senior citizens, disease prevention, senior mobility, safe free time for seniors, alimentary education, protection against new risks and dangers, as well as equity in the services necessary for seniors to adopt new information and communication technologies. In the case of retired academic members, the network will promote equality with respect to continuing use of digital technologies (particularly email), continuing access to research libraries, and the guaranteed ability for seniors to fund their own research programs and to deliver free seminars. (shrink)

In this paper, we focus on whether and to what extent we judge that people are responsible for the consequences of their forgetfulness. We ran a series of behavioral studies to measure judgments of responsibility for the consequences of forgetfulness. Our results show that we are disposed to hold others responsible for some of their forgetfulness. The level of stress that the forgetful agent is under modulates judgments of responsibility, though the level of care that the agent exhibits toward performing (...) the forgotten action does not. We argue that this result has important implications for a long-running debate about the nature of responsible agency. (shrink)