Mark Siderits’ contributions to Buddhist philosophy, and to the enterprise he likes to call “fusion philosophy,” are legion. We write this essay in celebration and warm appreciation of his career and his impact on the area.

"Paradox drives a good deal of philosophy in every tradition. In the Indian and Western traditions, there is a tendency among many philosophers to run from contradiction and paradox. If and when a contradiction appears in a theory, it is regarded as a sure sign that something has gone amiss. This aversion to paradox commits them, knowingly or not, to the view that reality must be consistent. In East Asia, however, philosophers have reacted to paradox differently. Many East Asian philosophers-both (...) in the Daoist and the Buddhist traditions-have openly embraced paradox. They have taken compelling arguments for contradictory positions to suggest that the world is-at least in some respects, and often in very deep respects-inconsistent, and that our best theories of the world will therefore be inconsistent. This book is an initial survey of the writings of some influential East Asian thinkers who were committed to paradox, and for good reason. Their acceptance of contradiction allowed them to develop important insights that evaded those who consider paradox out of bounds"--. (shrink)

: Nagarjuna seems willing to embrace contradictions while at the same time making use of classic reductio arguments. He asserts that he rejects all philosophical views including his own-that he asserts nothing-and appears to mean it. It is argued here that he, like many philosophers in the West and, indeed, like many of his Buddhist colleagues, discovers and explores true contradictions arising at the limits of thought. For those who share a dialetheist's comfort with the possibility of true contradictions commanding (...) rational assent, for Nagarjuna to endorse such contradictions would not undermine but instead confirm the impression that he is indeed a highly rational thinker. It is argued that the contradictions he discovers are structurally analogous to many discovered by Western philosophers and mathematicians. (shrink)

In his article in this issue, " 'How do Mādhyamikas Think?' Revisited," Tom Tillemans reflects on his earlier article "How do Mādhyamikas Think?" (2009), itself a response to earlier work of ours (Deguchi et al. 2008; Garfield and Priest 2003). There is much we agree with in these non-dogmatic and open-minded essays. Still, we have some disagreements. We begin with a response to Tillemans' first thoughts, and then turn to his second thoughts.Tillemans (2009) maintains that it is wrong to (...) attribute to Nāgārjuna or to his Mādhyamika followers a strong dialetheism, according to which some contradictions of the form p ∧ ¬p are to be accepted. He argues that, nonetheless, a weak dialetheism may be implicit in the .. (shrink)

The argument from fine tuning is supposed to establish the existence of God from the fact that the evolution of carbon-based life requires the laws of physics and the boundary conditions of the universe to be more or less as they are. We demonstrate that this argument fails. In particular, we focus on problems associated with the role probabilities play in the argument. We show that, even granting the fine tuning of the universe, it does not follow that the universe (...) is improbable, thus no explanation of the fine tuning, theistic or otherwise, is required. (shrink)

In this issue, Constance Kassor describes Gorampa's attitude to contradictions as they occur in various contexts of Buddhist pursuit. We agree with much of what she says; with some things we do not.First, some preliminary comments, and a fundamental disagreement. Kassor says:Based on . . . [the assumption that Nāgārjuna has a coherent system of thought] one must resolve apparent contradictions in Nāgārjuna's texts in order to maintain the coherency of his logic. The problem with contradictions is that if they (...) are introduced into a classical logical system, that entire system can break down. This is because of the law of explosion—the principle that everything can follow [DGP: does follow] from a contradiction.One .. (shrink)

Most metazoan organisms have evolved a mildly acidified and calcium diminished sorting hub in the early secretory pathway commonly referred to as the Endoplasmic Reticulum‐Golgi intermediate compartment (ERGIC). These membranous vesicular‐tubular clusters are found tightly juxtaposed to ER subdomains that are competent for the production of COPII‐coated transport carriers. In contrast to many unicellular systems, metazoan COPII carriers largely transit just a few hundred nanometers to the ERGIC, prior to COPI‐dependent transport on to the cis‐Golgi. The mechanisms underlying formation and (...) maintenance of ERGIC membranes are poorly defined. However, recent evidence suggests an important role for Trk‐fused gene (TFG) in regulating the integrity of the ER/ERGIC interface. Moreover, in the absence of cytoskeletal elements to scaffold tracks on which COPII carriers might move, TFG appears to promote anterograde cargo transport by locally tethering COPII carriers adjacent to ERGIC membranes. This action, regulated in part by the intrinsically disordered domain of TFG, provides sufficient time for COPII coat disassembly prior to heterotypic membrane fusion and cargo delivery to the ERGIC. -/- . (shrink)

ABSTRACTEpisodic counterfactual thoughts and autobiographical memories involve the reactivation and recombination of episodic memory components into mental simulations. Upon reactivation, memories become labile and prone to modification. Thus, reactivating AM in the context of mentally generating CFT may provide an opportunity for editing processes to modify the content of the original memory. To examine this idea, this paper reports the results of two studies that investigated the effect of reactivating negative and positive AM in the context of either imagining a (...) better or a worse alternative to an experienced event, as opposed to attentively retrieving the memory without mental modification or no reactivation. Our results suggest that attentive remembering was the best strategy to both reduce the negative affect associated with negative AM, and to prevent the decay of positive affect associated with positive AM. In addition, reactivati... (shrink)

Wicked problems’ are tricky to solve because of their many interconnected components and a lack of any single optimal solution. At the science–policy interface, all problems can look wicked: research exposes the complexity that is relevant to designing, executing and implementing policy fit for ambitious human needs. Expertise in philosophical research can help to navigate that complexity.

Informed decision-making (IDM) is considered an important ethical and legal requirement for population-based screening. Governments offering such screening have a duty to enable invitees to make informed decisions regarding participation. Various views exist on how to define and measure IDM in different screening programmes. In this paper we first address the question which components should be part of IDM in the context of cancer screening. Departing from two diverging interpretations of the value of autonomy—as a right and as an ideal—we (...) describe how this value is operationalized in the practice of informed consent in medicine and translate this to IDM in population-based cancer screening. Next, we specify components of IDM, which is voluntariness and the requirements of disclosure and understanding. We argue that whereas disclosure should contain all information considered relevant in order to enable authentic IDM, understanding of basic information is sufficient for a valid IDM. In the second part of the paper we apply the capability approach in order to argue for the responsibility of the government to warrant equal and real opportunities for invitees for IDM. We argue that additional conditions beyond mere provision of information are needed in order to do so. (shrink)

L'obtention du droit de vote en avril 1944 et une participation active à la Résistance semblent représenter le début de quelque chose de nouveau pour les femmes françaises. Etudier la vie quotidienne des femmes à Toulouse pendant et après la guerre - à travers des sources écrites et orales - montre que les années d'après-guerre, avec la réintégration des hommes, le rétablissement de la politique traditionnelle et le retour de la normalité quotidienne, ont poussé les femmes à reprendre leurs habitudes (...) d'avant-guerre dans l'espace domestique. Il semble que, paradoxalement, les conditions créées par la guerre aient fourni des possibilités nouvelles aux femmes. Elles ont eu accès à une certaine autonomie, ont mesuré leurs capacités professionnelles, ont assumé de nouvelles responsabilités, et elles ont exprimé leurs opinions politiques pour la première fois. (shrink)

Al-Jabartī, ʿAjāʾib al-āthār fī l-tarājim wa-l-akhbār. Edited by Shmuel Moreh. Max Schloessinger Memorial Series, Texts, vol. 9. 5 vols. Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 2013. Pp. 2,780. $525.

B a c k g r o u n d. This article reveals the understanding of the concept of nature in the works of the American philosopher Henry David Thoreau. Henry David Thoreau is an American philosopher, poet, essayist, naturalist and political activist. Together with Ralph Waldo Emerson, his friend and mentor, he is considered one of the founders of the transcendentalist movement. Transcendentalism was a powerful movement of American philosophy of the 19th century. It was characterized by focusing on (...) the problem of human self-knowledge, human's returning to own essence, living in harmony with nature, as well as criticism of modern society and active abolitionism. M e t h o d s. The article uses both general scientific methods and special methods, such as – the method of historical-philosophical reconstruction, which made it possible to reproduce the ideas of the American thinker, the hermeneutic method – for explaining individual positions of the philosopher. In addition, literary-critical methods were used, for the possibility of using various primary sources, and systematic method – to identify a systematized structure in the philosophical work of H. D. Thoreau. R e s u l t s. One of the main features of transcendentalism is a special interest in reflection on nature and a special approach to it. Thus, the concept of nature is present in most of H. D. Thoreau's works, and it is the central topic of his philosophical searches. The concept of nature in his works appears in different contexts, acquires different meanings. Thus, H. D. Thoreau talks about nature in the context of nature, in the context of poetic creativity, in his philosophical searches, in his vision of man and in his argumentation of his own political position. However, the different meanings that H. D. Thoreau attaches to the concept of nature do not contradict each other, but, on the contrary, complement and clarify his understanding of nature. C o n c l u s i o n s. This article proposes to consider the use of the concept of nature by H. D. Thoreau in the following aspects: Nature and Peculiarities of nature as a subject of scientific knowledge. Nature and The relationship between nature and culture through the relationship between "the wild" and society. Nature and From naturalism to humanism. Nature as an inner essence of man and solitude with nature as a return to this essence. (shrink)

L'obtention du droit de vote en avril 1944 et une participation active à la Résistance semblent représenter le début de quelque chose de nouveau pour les femmes françaises. Etudier la vie quotidienne des femmes à Toulouse pendant et après la guerre - à travers des sources écrites et orales - montre que les années d'après-guerre, avec la réintégration des hommes, le rétablissement de la politique traditionnelle et le retour de la normalité quotidienne, ont poussé les femmes à reprendre leurs habitudes (...) d'avant-guerre dans l'espace domestique. Il semble que, paradoxalement, les conditions créées par la guerre aient fourni des possibilités nouvelles aux femmes. Elles ont eu accès à une certaine autonomie, ont mesuré leurs capacités professionnelles, ont assumé de nouvelles responsabilités, et elles ont exprimé leurs opinions politiques pour la première fois. (shrink)

Despite increasing scientific interest in self-generated thought-mental content largely independent of the immediate environment-there has yet to be any comprehensive synthesis of the subjective experience and neural correlates of affect in these forms of thinking. Here, we aim to develop an integrated affective neuroscience encompassing many forms of self-generated thought-normal and pathological, moderate and excessive, in waking and in sleep. In synthesizing existing literature on this topic, we reveal consistent findings pertaining to the prevalence, valence, and variability of emotion in (...) self-generated thought, and highlight how these factors might interact with self-generated thought to influence general well-being. We integrate these psychological findings with recent neuroimaging research, bringing attention to the neural correlates of affect in self-generated thought. We show that affect in self-generated thought is prevalent, positively biased, highly variable (both within and across individuals), and consistently recruits many brain areas implicated in emotional processing, including the orbitofrontal cortex, amygdala, insula, and medial prefrontal cortex. Many factors modulate these typical psychological and neural patterns, however; the emerging affective neuroscience of self-generated thought must endeavor to link brain function and subjective experience in both everyday self-generated thought as well as its dysfunctions in mental illness. (shrink)

Robert Hannas The Rational Human Condition is a five-volume book series, including: Volume 1. Preface and General Introduction, Supplementary Essays, and General Bibliography Volume 2. Deep Freedom and Real Persons: A Study in Metaphysics Volume 3. Kantian Ethics and Human Existence: A Study in Moral Philosophy Volume 4. Kant, Agnosticism, and Anarchism: A Theological-Political Treatise Volume 5. Cognition, Content, and the A Priori: A Study in the Philosophy of Mind and Knowledge The fifth volume in the series, Cognition, Content, and (...) the A Priori, was published by Oxford University Press in 2015. So, with the present publication of the first four volumes in the series by Nova Science in 2019, all five volumes of The Rational Human Condition are now available in hard-copy and as e-books. All five books share a common aim, which is to work out a true general theory of human rationality in a thoroughly nonideal natural and social world. This philosophical enterprise is what Hanna calls rational anthropology. In the eleventh and most famous of his Theses on Feuerbach, Marx wrote that philosophers have only interpreted the world in different ways; the point is to change it. Hanna completely agrees with Marx that the ultimate aim of philosophy is to change the world, not merely interpret it. So, Marx and Hanna are both philosophical liberationists: that is, they both believe that philosophy should have radical political implications. But, beyond Marx, Hanna also thinks that the primary aim of philosophy (understood as rational anthropology) and its practices of synoptic reflection, writing, teaching, and public conversation is to change lives for the betterand ultimately, for the sake of the highest good. Then, and only then, can the human race act upon the world in the right way. The four volumes of The Rational Human Condition will therefore appeal not only to philosophers, but also to any other philosophically-minded person interested in the intellectual and practical adventure of synoptic, reflective thinking about the nature of our rational, but still ineluctably human, all-too-human lives. (shrink)

Ce témoignage qui fut publié en anglais en 1972, a été traduit puis réédité par Rémy Casals pour l’inclure dans sa collection « Témoignages pour l’histoire ». Née et élevée en Australie, l’auteur, Christine Morrow, arrive en Europe en 1935 pour préparer sa thèse de doctorat à Londres et ensuite à Paris. Lorsqu’elle touche au terme de ce travail en mai 1940, elle se trouve en Bretagne quand les Allemands envahissent la France. Sa nationalité britannique l’oblige à fuir la zone (...) occupée pour tra... (shrink)

Precisely how and precisely where is human conscious experience located in the natural world? The Extended Conscious Mind Thesis says this: -/- The constitutive mechanisms of human conscious experience include both extra-neural bodily facts and also extra-bodily worldly facts. -/- Recently, in “Spreading the Joy? Why the Machinery of Consciousness Is (Probably) Still in the Head,” Andy Clark has argued for what I call The Cautious Consciousness-Is-All-Neural Thesis: -/- Because the arguments currently on offer for The Extended Conscious Mind Thesis (...) fall short of decisive proof, then, all things considered, we should conclude that the constitutive mechanisms of human conscious experience are all either in the brain or the central nervous system. -/- I agree with Clark that The Extended Conscious Mind Thesis is (probably) false. But I also think that there is sufficient reason for rejecting Clark’s Cautious Consciousness-Is-All-Neural Thesis, and for accepting what I call The Body-Bounded Conscious Mind Thesis: -/- Human conscious experience occurs everywhere in our living bodies, constitutively including the brain and the central nervous system, and ALSO constitutively including all the other vital systems of the living body, right out to the skin, but no further out than that. [End Page 15] -/- If what[ever] consciousness [there is] spreads all over human bodies, then there won’t be any temptation to use the [Cartesian] word ‘ego’. —L. Wittgenstein . (shrink)

Few would disagree that P. F. Strawson and W. V. O. Quine have been the leading figures in Anglo-American philosophy during the second half of the twentieth century. This book brings together a number of Strawson’s widely-scattered previously-published essays from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. The unity of the collection is partly provided by the internal connectedness of the essays to Strawson’s most important books Individuals, The Bounds of Sense, Logico-Linguistic Papers, and Subject and Predicate in Grammar and Logic. But (...) its unity principally lies in Strawson’s consistent and vigorous opposition to Quine’s extreme extensionalism. The extensionalist says that the meanings of terms and sentences in natural languages or logical systems are strictly determined by the objects they refer to; and the Quinean extensionalist also says that those objects are ultimately whatever the natural sciences tell us they are. The intensionalist, by contrast, says that meanings in natural language and logic are underdetermined by the functions of reference and have irreducible, autonomous structures that include primitive features of generality and modality; and the Strawsonian intensionalist says that those irreducible, autonomous structures are grounded in the person-oriented world of ordinary speech-transactions and everyday common sense. In the Introduction, Strawson helpfully divides the essays into seven groups or clusters: two on identity and universals; two on quantification and properties; three on singular reference and beliefreports; two on logical form; one on epistemic modality; two on pragmatics; and four on Kant. The essays on Kant are primarily exegeticalcritical, but also have a deeper import. For Strawson’s metaphysical commonsensism and personalism can be fairly neatly derived from Kantian metaphysics by logically detaching Kant’s plausible conception of “empirical realism” from his questionable doctrine of “transcendental idealism”, and by similarly detaching Kant’s plausible conception of a self-conscious embodied empirical subject and her a priori cognitive and practical capacities from his questionable conception of a noumenal self. It is of course impossible in a very short review even to summarize all sixteen essays, far less to explicate or criticize them. So to maximize available resources I will concentrate the rest of my remarks on what seems to me to be the most important paper. In “Logical Form and Logical Constants”, Strawson addresses a fundamental and lingering problem in the philosophy of logic: How precisely to define the logical constants and to justify their introduction into a logical theory? All logicians agree that logical constants are just those terms in a formal or natural language which hold their meanings fixed under the variable interpretations of all other terms, which enter essentially into logical truths and deductions, and which are “topic-neutral”—indifferent to all special subject-matters. But these notions do not get us very far, since the meaning of any term can be held rigidly and topic-neutrally fixed over a language and also held to enter essentially into logical truths and deductions, by sheer stipulation. Strawson’s approach to solving the problem has two basic steps. First, he joins a line of thought shared by Kant, Boole, and early Wittgenstein: “[l]ogic reveals the general essence of all thought and all language”. Secondly, he borrows and exploits Wittgenstein’s idea that all the logical constants are packed into the general form of a proposition, which is simply “this is how things are.” This leads to the proposal that we can “think of standard logic as something in principle excogitatable... by pure reflection on the general nature of statement, on what is the least that is necessarily involved in the making of empirical informative statements”. Such a line of reasoning— rather like Kant’s discovery of his “table of judgments” in the first Critique —runs backward from the notion of an empirical statement to the root logical notions of general term and singular term, of compatibility and incompatibility, and of “identifiable linguistic forms or devices with conventional forces or meaning” ; and from there by gradual steps to the notions of contradiction and entailment, the truth-functions, logical truth, first-order quantification, and so forth. I have a worry about this way of excogitating logic, however. While it neatly accounts for standard logic, I cannot see how it will be able to account for nonstandard logic—whether in the form of conservative extensions of standard logic or in the form of deviant logics. In other words, the starting point for logical reflection must be something more comprehensive than the empirical statement. Now the notion of an analytic a priori statement seems like the obvious candidate: no system, standard or nonstandard, will wholly lack logical laws or logical truths. If so, then Strawson’s disinclination to deploy the notion of analyticity directly may be a concession to Quine’s attack on the analytic-synthetic distinction. On this pivotal issue, in fact, Strawson’s intensionalism has lost out to Quine’s extensionalism—the Grice-Strawson reply to “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” from ordinary-language considerations has not generally prevailed. But we are very fortunate that Strawson has been both willing and so brilliantly able to resist the Quinean juggernaut for five decades.—Robert Hanna, University of Colorado at Boulder. (shrink)

The Hebrew Bible mentions 12 precious stones arranged in four rows of three each on the high priest’s breastpiece in two lists (Ex 28:17–20 and 39:10–13). Nine of these precious stones reappear in the Tyrian king’s ‘covering’ in Ezekiel 28:13 in three groups of three. Although the two lists in Exodus are identical, the order in Ezekiel is slightly different. In Septuagint (LXX) Ezekiel there are 12 precious stones. However, the number and order in the LXX lists (LXX-Ex 28:17–20 (...) and 36:17–20; LXX-Ezk 28:13) are constant in all three cases. The same 12 stones as in the LXX appear, but with variation in order, in two accounts found in Josephus ( The Wars of the Jews Book 5, Chapter 5, Section 7; The Antiquities of the Jews Book 3, Chapter 7, Section 5). The list of precious stones in Revelation 21:19–20 that adorn the 12 foundations of the New Jerusalem is reminiscent of the breastpiece, but it shows four new names along with eight that are known from the LXX; it is not clear if it is a fresh translation from the Hebrew list. This article focuses on the relationships amongst these lists by examining the arrangement, translation and symbolism of these precious stones. Contribution: The precious stones in the high priest’s breastpiece (Exod 28:17–20, 39:10–13) were rendered differently and re-arranged by the Septuagint and other later versions for new contexts, audiences and theological purposes. Unknown stones were rendered with similar stones known to the translator or the incipient text terms were transliterated. (shrink)

Initially, the deification of representatives of religious and lay authority, endowing them with superhuman merits and power; sanctification of the authority of emperors, tsars, kings, and members of the clergy - high priests, popes, etc.; in its contemporary manifestations, the imposition upon the people of worship of the carriers of authority as infallible, and ascribing to them the capacity to make history at their will and desire. In the labor and communist movements, worship of an individual is a foreign, anti-Marxist (...) ideology and practice, leads to the inculcation of anti-democratic methods in the building of socialism, exaggeration of the role of force, artificial inflation of the role of leaders, and denigration of the role of the party and the people at large, which leads to distortion of socialist ideals. (shrink)