The method of projection is applied to a relativistic field theory of fermions interacting with a nonlinear scalar field, specifically the Friedberg-Lee soliton model. Projection is effected by operating on a localized “bag” state with the translation operator exp (iP·Z), and integrating overZ. The resulting state is an eigenstate of zero momentum. The energy and the expectation value of other physical operators can be expressed as Gaussian moments of the Hamiltonian or the physical operator times powers of the momentum operator (...) taken with respect to the bag state. Renormalization in the one-loop approximation is discussed in detail for the boson sector, and briefly for the fermion sector. The method can be tested for convergence against nonexpansion techniques. The latter, however, cannot so easily handle distortion of the Bose modes or the distortion of the Dirac sea. (shrink)

Embodied cognition often challenges standard cognitive science. In this outstanding introduction, Lawrence Shapiro sets out the central themes and debates surrounding embodied cognition, explaining and assessing the work of many of the key figures in the field, including George Lakoff, Alva Noë, Andy Clark, and Arthur Glenberg. Beginning with an outline of the theoretical and methodological commitments of standard cognitive science, Shapiro then examines philosophical and empirical arguments surrounding the traditional perspective. He introduces topics such as dynamic systems theory, (...) ecological psychology, robotics, and connectionism, before addressing core issues in philosophy of mind such as mental representation and extended cognition. Including helpful chapter summaries and annotated further reading at the end of each chapter, _Embodied Cognition_ is essential reading for all students of philosophy of mind, psychology, and cognitive science. (shrink)

Catholic doctrine’s strict prohibition on abortion can lead clinicians or institutions to conscientiously refuse to provide abortion, although a legal duty to provide abortion would apply to anyone who refused. Conscientious refusals by clinicians to end a pregnancy can constitute murder or reckless homicide under American law if a woman dies as a result of such a refusal. Such refusals are not immunized from criminal liability by the constitutional right to the free exercise of religion or by statutes that confer (...) immunity from criminal homicide prosecution. Core principles of the rule of law require the state to protect the lives of all persons equally and to place the life and health of persons above any the interests of providers have in moral integrity or in respecting the moral status of prenatal humans. In some states criminal liability related to conscientious objection also applies to corporate hospital officials. (shrink)

_Property Rights: Philosophic Foundations,_ first published in 1977, comprehensively examines the general justifications for systems of private property rights, and discusses with great clarity the major arguments as to the rights and responsibilities of property ownership. In particular, the arguments that hold that there are natural rights derived from first occupancy, labour, utility, liberty and virtue are considered, as are the standard anti-property arguments based on disutility, virtue and inequality, and the belief that justice in distribution must take precedence over (...) private ownership. Lawrence Becker goes on to contend that there are four sound lines of argument for private property that, together with what is sound in the anti-property arguments, must be co-ordinated to form the foundations of a new theory. He therefore expounds a concise but sophisticated theory of property that is relevant to the modern world, and concludes by indicating some of the implications of his theory. (shrink)

The Doctrine of Temporal Parts (sometimes abbreviated herein as 'DTP') asserts that, for each portion (including infinitely small portions) of the smallest period of time during which a material object exists, there is an object-a temporal part of the material object in question-which exists at that and at no other time. In "Things Change," Mark Heller offers an argument for DTP, and responds to a objection, the "No-Change" objection, to that doctrine.2 My goal in this paper is to undermine both (...) Heller's argument in favor of DTP and his response to that criticism. (shrink)

The standard philosophical and folk-psychological accounts of cognition and action credit us with too much spontaneity in our activities and projects. We are taken to be fundamentally active rather than reactive, to project our needs and aims and deploy our full supporting arsenal of cognitive instruments upon an essentially passive environment. The corrected point of view presented here balances this image of active agency with an appreciation of how we are also continually responding to the world, that is, to the (...) pragmatic situations that effectively select subsets of our cognitive resources to be at our disposal in generating responses. The result is a superseding of the standard Cognitive Integrationist picture by a model of a structurally divided mind, comprising a multiplicity of diverse and sometimes-conflicting standpoints, personas, and wills whose elicitation is a complex function of agent intentions and plans, the encountered environment, past experience, and temporal sequence. According to this model, the manifold stored representations constituting a person’s cognitive endowment do not form a single integrated network all equally ready for use. Cognition at any given moment is limited to drawing upon only a subset of one’s perspective, the perspect that is activated in accordance with the specific mental task or situation (the pragmatic context) that one perceives oneself to be facing. The system enlists the environmental context as trigger for practical and theoretical activity, based upon the agent’s prior experience. Though susceptible to certain kinds of error, and not inherently inclined toward innovative thinking, it enables the generally efficient use of our enormous cognitive endowments in conducting our lives in real time. (shrink)

____Politics, Philosophy, Culture__ contains a rich selection of interviews and other writings by the late Michel Foucault. Drawing upon his revolutionary concept of power as well as his critique of the institutions that organize social life, Foucault discusses literature, music, and the power of art while also examining concrete issues such as the Left in contemporary France, the social security system, the penal system, homosexuality, madness, and the Iranian Revolution.

Drawing on the thought of Heidegger, this book puts forward a new conception of attention as human presence, showing how its state determines the efficacy of public spaces in articulating and achieving visions of the common good. A valuable resource for scholars of philosophy of mind, political philosophy, phenomenology, and cognitive science.

Ever since Greek antiquity "disembodied knowledge" has often been taken as synonymous with "objective truth." Yet we also have very specific mental images of the kinds of bodies that house great minds--the ascetic philosopher versus the hearty surgeon, for example. Does truth have anything to do with the belly? What difference does it make to the pursuit of knowledge whether Einstein rode a bicycle, Russell was randy, or Darwin flatulent? Bringing body and knowledge into such intimate contact is occasionally seen (...) as funny, sometimes as enraging, and more often just as pointless. Vividly written and well illustrated, Science Incarnate offers concrete historical answers to such skeptical questions about the relationships between body, mind, and knowledge. Focusing on the seventeenth century to the present, Science Incarnate explores how intellectuals sought to establish the value and authority of their ideas through public displays of their private ways of life. Patterns of eating, sleeping, exercising, being ill, and having (or avoiding) sex, as well as the marks of gender and bodily form, were proof of the presence or absence of intellectual virtue, integrity, skill, and authority. Intellectuals examined in detail include René Descartes, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, and Ada Lovelace. Science Incarnate is at once very funny and deeply serious, addressing issues of crucial importance to present-day discussions about the nature of knowledge and how it is produced. It incorporates much that will interest cultural and social historians, historians of science and medicine, philosophers, sociologists, and anthropologists. (shrink)

In this chapter, we consider, and reject, the claim that all elderly patients’ desires for suicide are irrational. The same reasons that have led to a growing acceptance for the rationality of suicide in terminal cases should lead us to view other desires for suicide as possibly rational. In both cases, desires for suicide can and do materialize in the absence of mental illness. Furthermore, we claim that desires for suicide can remain rational even in the face of some mental (...) illnesses so long as four criteria are met: individuals must demonstrate rationality, have realistic information and judgments about their life-world, be in a state of mind (e.g., their emotions and will) that is not be severely compromised by mental illness, and make choices that are congruent with their fundamental values and critical interests. We conclude that some rational suicides can be ethically justifiable. (shrink)

Hans Jonas accuses Heidegger of “never bring[ing] his question about Being into correlation with the testimony of our physical and biological evolution.” Neither the early nor later Heidegger has a “philosophy of nature,” Jonas charges, because Naturphilosophie demands a new concept of matter, a monistic account of cosmogony and evolution, and the grounding of ethical responsibility for future generations in an ontological “first principle.” Jonas’s ontological rethinking of Darwinism allows him to overcome the nihilism that a mechanistic interpretation of evolution (...) forces upon us: a nihilism allegedly shared by Heidegger. I imagine a Heideggerian response to Jonas, and ask whether the dream of recovering a synthesis between cosmogony and moral insight has been irrecoverably shattered by modern natural science. (shrink)

Living with cancer: a state of perpetual emergency -- Notes -- References -- PART IV: Environmental aesthetics and resistance -- 12. The great turning -- 13. The underestimated power effects of the discourses and practices of the food justice movement -- Pessimist premise -- General system failure -- The transformative strength of the three Foucaults -- How practices and discourses of the food justice movement illustrate the three Foucaults -- The biopolitical disaster of industrial agriculture -- Via Campesina: peasant knowledge, (...) land and power -- Urban agriculture: eaters' resistance and practices for a new food system -- Slow Food: putting eaters' culture back into "agriculture" -- Conclusion: get your hands dirty! -- Acknowledgements -- References -- 14. Interrogating the neoliberal biopolitics of the sustainable development-resilience nexus -- The political genealogy of sustainable development -- From security to resilience -- The disastrous and politically debased subject of resilience -- Conclusion: development contra neoliberalism? -- References -- 15. The aesthetics of triage: Towards life beyond survival -- Mechanism of a triage -- Photographic triage -- The cinematic triage -- Beyond survival -- References -- 16. End piece: Dealing with disastrous life -- Extra/ordinary disasters -- Dread life -- Towards a new critical framework? -- References -- Index. (shrink)

Librarians often object to Internet filters on the grounds that filters are prone to overblocking and underblocking. This argument implies that a significant problem with contemporary filters is that they are insufficiently fine-grained. In this article, we posit that present-day filters will always be conceptually capable of failure, regardless of how granular their content analysis becomes. This is because, we argue, objections to content are best understood as objections to problematic interactions between content and particular knowers. We import the concept (...) of the situated knower from feminist epistemology to capture the heterogeneous, socially embedded nature of patrons, about whom we cannot make blunt generalizations for filtering purposes. A successful filter would need information about these differently situated patrons, the content they seek, and the interactions between the two. We conclude that a genuinely successful Internet filter would therefore need to be both mind reading and fortune-telling. (shrink)

Islamic fundamentalism (Islamic neo-traditionalism) is an important component of Islamic identity struggles in the three South Asian nations of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. The contested role, status, and legal rights of women provide a focus for comparative study, and the treatment of women in the courts showcases the problematic relation of religious and civil law. The cases of Shah Bano in India and Safia Bibi in Pakistan display (1) the radically different ways fundamentalism influences judicial processes; (2) the varying challenges (...) that confront Muslims in different polities (in India, the maintenance of Islamic identity; in Pakistan and Bangladesh, the evolution of a just and democratic Islamic state); and (3) the fact that the single gravest problem confronting Muslims regardless of political frontiers and varying structures of civil government is whether piety requires that religious law formulated in premodern cultures be regarded as fixed and binding today. (shrink)

Leon Kass is much misunderstood. He is not simply a Republican ideologue who tailored his ideas to break out of the ivory tower and into the halls of power. Nor does he ook simply to use human nature as a moral guide. When the full range of his writings is considered and set in the tradition of his teachers, Hans Jonas and Leo Strauss, what emerges is a natural law position colored by religious revelation.

There are many who believe Moses parted the Red Sea and Jesus came back from the dead. Others are certain that exorcisms occur, ghosts haunt attics, and the blessed can cure the terminally ill. Though miracles are immensely improbable, people have embraced them for millennia, seeing in them proof of a supernatural world that resists scientific explanation. -/- Helping us to think more critically about our belief in the improbable, The Miracle Myth casts a skeptical eye on attempts to justify (...) belief in the supernatural, laying bare the fallacies that such attempts commit. Through arguments and accessible analysis, Larry Shapiro sharpens our critical faculties so we become less susceptible to tales of myths and miracles and learn how, ultimately, to evaluate claims regarding vastly improbable events on our own. Shapiro acknowledges that belief in miracles could be harmless, but cautions against allowing such beliefs to guide how we live our lives. His investigation reminds us of the importance of evidence and rational thinking as we explore the unknown. (shrink)

Leon Kass is much misunderstood. He is not simply a Republican ideologue who tailored his ideas to break out of the ivory tower and into the halls of power. Nor does he ook simply to use human nature as a moral guide. When the full range of his writings is considered and set in the tradition of his teachers, Hans Jonas and Leo Strauss, what emerges is a natural law position colored by religious revelation.

Listening to subject’s commentaries can be a useful spur to novel scientific departures, as in studies of blindsight. Recently further testing has been possible with subject DB, who was a blindsight patient tested intensively over a period of 10 years and who was the subject of the book, . Essentially his original capacity is the same or somewhat more sensitive. Some further types of discriminations have now been tested that were not possible in the original study. But a new feature (...) was discovered, namely that he describes conscious after-images of a wide range of inducing stimuli of which he is unconscious. The properties of the after-images are briefly described, such as their occurrence following unseen colour patches, luminance changes, shape, spatial frequency, their long durations, showing inter-ocular transfer, as well as their conforming to Emmert’s Law. Various approaches are discussed towards finding the source of their generation, such as the use of after-images of colour mixes of separate inputs to the two eyes . They are also discussed in terms of after-images in normal subjects that are generated by imagination. The discovery offers a rare potential opportunity to compare the brain activity associated with both the conscious and unconscious attributes of the precisely the same stimuli in the same locus in the same subject. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to identify the paradoxes of industry self-regulation and to draw parallels between recent work on collaboration with the notion of control and regulation. Various examples of collaborative control are identified and self-regulation is used to illustrate how the process happens. Suggestions are offered on how collaboration is necessary for future regulatory issues.