The article analyzes the meaning of the concept of res in Descartes? metaphysics. The basic meaning is that thing is an essence that could have even real existence. Through the analysis of Descartes? works that meaning has made more precise against the background of the rational distinction between essence and existence. The relations among the thing and the notions of reality, the degrees of reality and the modes of reality were shown. The special attention is dedicated to the relation between (...) the thing and the causality, i.e., to the problems how the things could cause and what is the cause of things. The problem of causality is connected with Descartes? teaching concerning the creation of eternal truths; that connection expresses the difference between his and scholastics? concept of thing, which is obvious in his concept of the causation of the degrees of reality. At the end the late, scholastics? notion of supertranscendental meaning of thing is shown in Descartes. (shrink)

Executive functions represent higher order top-down mechanisms regulating information processing. While suboptimal EF have been studied in various patient groups, their impact on successful behavior is still not well described. Previously, it has been suggested that design fluency —a test including several simultaneous EF components mainly related to fluency, cognitive flexibility, and creativity—predicts successful behavior in a quickly changing environment where fast and dynamic adaptions are required, such as ball sports. We hypothesized that similar behaviors are of importance in the (...) selection process of elite police force applicants. To test this hypothesis, we compared elite police force applicants with a control group of police officer trainees. Although both groups were better than the norm, the elite police force applicants had a significantly better performance in DF total correct when adjusting for sex and age [F = 18.98, p < 0.001]. To understand how this capacity was altered by stress and tiredness, we re-tested the elite police force applicants several days during an extreme field assessment lasting 10 days. The results suggested that there was a lower than expected improvement in DF total correct and a decline in the DF3-subtest that includes a larger component of cognitive flexibility than the other subtests. Although there was a positive correlation between the baseline session and the re-test in DF3 [r = 0.49, p = 0.001], the applicants having the highest scores in the baseline test also displayed the largest percentage decline in the re-test [r = −0.46, p = 0.003]. In conclusion, our result suggests that higher order EF that include cognitive flexibility and creativity are of importance in the application for becoming an elite police officer but relatively compromised in a stressful situation. Moreover, as the decline is different between the individuals, the results suggest that applicants should be tested during baseline conditions and during stressful conditions to describe their cognitive capacity fully. (shrink)

Many people, including many egalitarian political philosophers, professa belief in equality while enjoying high incomes of which they devotevery little to egalitarian purposes. The article critically examinesways of resolving the putative inconsistency in the stance of thesepeople, in particular, that favouring an egalitarian society has noimplications for behaviour in an unequal one; that what''s bad aboutinequality is a social division that philanthropy cannot reduce; thatprivate action cannot ensure that others have good lives; that privateaction can only achieve a ``drop in (...) the ocean''''; that private effortis not called for, since justice is a matter for the state to enforce;that private effort cannot remove the fundamental injustice, whichis inequality of power; and that private effort involves an unreasonablylarge psychological burden. (shrink)

In this essay, I argue that we are merely biological organisms. This view (animalism) explains everyday practices like watching ourselves in the mirror. The claim that we are psychological in nature cannot explain something as trivial as watching ourselves in the mirror. Thus, we should accept animalism.

If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich? is a persuasive extension of Cohen's critique of Rawls's egalitarianism, embedded in reflections on the inadequacies of Marxist theory, on the rationality of "nurtured" beliefs, on Cohen's own personal and intellectual journey, and, finally, on the issue named in the title, the responsibility of the wealthy just in an unjust society. It is an uneven, but highly readable, book. Based on Cohen's 1996 Gifford Lectures, the book is divided into a Prospectus (...) and ten Lectures, one of which was apparently a multimedia sing-along on the "lighter side of the problem of evil" and could not be reproduced! (shrink)

Discussion held in April at a Political Studies Association Roundtable in Manchester, England, on G. A. Cohen’s book If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich?. --- Michael Otsuka's contribution sub-titled: "Il personale e politico? Il confine tra pubblico e private nella sfera della giustizia distributiva" = "Is the personal political? The boundary between the public and the private in the realm of distributive justice.".

Discussion held in April at a Political Studies Association Roundtable in Manchester, England, on G. A. Cohen’s book If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich?. --- Michael Otsuka's contribution sub-titled: "Il personale e politico? Il confine tra pubblico e private nella sfera della giustizia distributiva" = "Is the personal political? The boundary between the public and the private in the realm of distributive justice.".

G.A. Cohen famously claims that egalitarians shouldn’t be so rich. If you possess excess income and there is little chance that the state will redistribute it to the poor, you are obligated to donate it yourself. We argue that this conclusion is correct, but that the case against the rich egalitarian is significantly stronger than the one Cohen offers. In particular, the standard arguments against donating one’s excess income face two critical, unrecognized problems. First, we show that these arguments imply (...) that citizens have no duty to further egalitarian political institutions—a conclusion that Cohen’s Rawlsian opponents cannot abide. Second, these arguments yield unacceptable implications for other questions of justice. We conclude that even moderately rich egalitarians are obligated to donate their excess income. (shrink)

Popular movies present chunk-like events that promote episodic, serial updating of viewers’ representations of the ongoing narrative. Event-indexing theory would suggest that the beginnings of new scenes trigger these updates, which in turn require more cognitive processing. Typically, a new movie event is signaled by an establishing shot, one providing more background information and a longer look than the average shot. Our analysis of 24 films reconfirms this. More important, we show that, when returning to a previously shown location, the (...) re-establishing shot reduces both context and duration while remaining greater than the average shot. In general, location shifts dominate character and time shifts in event segmentation of movies. In addition, over the last 70 years re-establishing shots have become more like the noninitial shots of a scene. Establishing shots have also approached noninitial shot scales, but not their durations. Such results suggest that film form is evolving, perhaps to suit more rapid encoding of narrative events. (shrink)

More and more these days it is asked whether aesthetics is still possible. A question that, given the context and phrasing, seems to direct us towards its answer. Conferences and meetings, books and journal specials examine the issue of aesthetics, talk about rediscovery or return of aesthetics. Well known philosophers and aestheticians underscore the need to reconsider the foundations of aesthetics and set new directions for aesthetics today (Berleant, 2004) or attempt to expand aesthetics beyond aesthetics–like Welsch, for example who (...) tries to extend aesthetics beyond art to society and the life-world (Welsch, 1997). Others underline the need to revisit the aesthetic experience (Shusterman, 1999; Iseminger, 2002, Fenner, 1996) and examine the relevance or irrelevance of the aesthetic with art (Carroll, 2001). It seems that it is strongly recommended to turn to aesthetics on the condition however to carefully re-approach the meaning and import of the term in the present situation. The aesthetic that Passmore condemned as “dreary”(Passmore, 1954), the one Sparshott considered a formless conception, vague and loose in application (Sparshott, 1982), the same that Danto emphatically argues that has nothing to do with the definition of art or arts in general (Danto, 1981) returns to claim its rightful place in the fields of philosophy and critical theory (Levine, 1994, Michaud, 1999), as well as artistic creation. And one cannot but wonder: what does this return mean? What was the degree of aesthetics decline that we need to discuss about recovery or for new implementations of aesthetics? (shrink)

This paper discusses the physical effect of gravity on space, a rather treacherous topic that has not gained much attention in the literature, unlike the effect of gravity on time which has been clearly established from the beginning as a consequence of the Equivalence Principle and also experimentally tested. The difficulties encountered in analysing the effect of gravity on space can be represented by the need to compare vectors associated with different spatial points in a curved manifold, where the parallel-transport (...) of vectors depends on the chosen path. This same problem can also be seen from another perspective: the effect of gravity on space is embodied in the components of the metric tensor, which however are not uniquely determined as a consequence of the degrees of freedom due to the Bianchi identities. We here show that, however, there are circumstances under which these difficulties can be overcome, resulting in a clear representation of the effect of gravity on space. This effect is perfectly dual to the corresponding effect on time: while gravity slows down time, it expands space. This can clarify topics like the effects of gravity at the centre of a spherically symmetric system, where the literature does not provide clear answers. A final confirmation of the gravitational expansion of space is provided by the Equivalence Principle. The conclusions help fill a conceptual gap that has so far prevented gravitational effects on time and space from being viewed on an equal footing. (shrink)

Pedestrian re-recognition is an important research because it affects applications such as intelligent monitoring, content-based video retrieval, and human-computer interaction. It can help relay tracking and criminal suspect detection in large-scale video surveillance systems. Although the existing traditional pedestrian re-recognition methods have been widely applied to address practical problems, they have deficiencies such as low recognition accuracy, inefficient computation, and difficulty to adapt to specific applications. In recent years, the pedestrian re-recognition algorithms based on deep learning have been widely used (...) in the pedestrian re-recognition field because of their strong adaptive ability and high recognition accuracy. The deep learning models provide a technical approach for pedestrian re-recognition tasks with their powerful learning ability. However, the pedestrian re-recognition method based on deep learning also has the following problems: First, the existing deep learning pedestrian re-recognition methods lack memory and prediction mechanisms, and the deep learning methods offer only limited improvement to pedestrian re-recognition accuracy. Second, they exhibit overfitting problems. Finally, initializing the existing LSTM parameters is problematic. In view of this, this paper introduces a revertive connection into the pedestrian re-recognition detector, making it more similar to the human cognitive process by converting a single image into an image sequence; then, the memory image sequence pattern reidentifies the pedestrian image. This approach endows deep learning-based pedestrian re-recognition algorithms with the ability to memorize image sequence patterns and allows them to reidentify pedestrians in images. At the same time, this paper proposes a selective dropout method for shallow learning. Selective dropout uses the classifier obtained through shallow learning to modify the probability that a node weight in the hidden layer is set to 0, thereby eliminating the overfitting phenomenon of the deep learning model. Therefore, this paper also proposes a greedy layer-by-layer pretraining algorithm for initializing LSTM and obtains better generalization performance. Based on the above explanation, this paper proposes a pedestrian re-recognition algorithm based on an optimized LSTM deep learning-sequence memory learning model. Experiments show that the pedestrian re-recognition method proposed in this paper not only has strong self-adaptive ability but also identifies the average accuracy. The proposed method also demonstrates a significant improvement compared with other mainstream methods because it can better memorize and learn the continuous motion of pedestrians and effectively avoid overfitting and parameter initialization in the deep learning model. This proposal provides a technical method and approach for adaptive pedestrian re-recognition algorithms. (shrink)

The Nuremberg Trials of leading National Socialists established the principle that individuals may be legally punished, even by death, for obeying the laws of their country. Is there then a higher law by which enacted valid positive laws may be judged, so that persons subject to such laws would be duty-bound to defy them? In recent years the theory of natural law has been revived by a number of philosophers and jurists, who however often disagree sharply among themselves about the (...) proper methods for defining and deriving natural law. Howard Kainz surveys the history of natural law from its foreshadowing in ancient Greece down to the most recent controversies. Natural Law both introduces the subject to newcomers and sheds fresh light on such figures as Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Veatch, McInerny, Grisez, and Finnis. (shrink)

The Anthropocene prompts renewed critical reflection on some of the central tenets of modern thought including narratives of ‘progress’, the privileging of the nation state, and the universalist rendering of the human. In this context it is striking that ‘rights’, a quintessentially modern mode of articulating normativity, are often presumed to have an enduring relevance in the contemporary moment, exemplified in renewed recourse to rights in their attribution to parts of the nonhuman world. Our intervention contemplates ways in which the (...) apparent disorientations of the Anthropocene might allow for a generative reorientation of some of these presuppositions. We critically consider the institutional and discursive limitations of rights and the ambivalence of rights language, and argue that the monism that rights so often implies limits the capacity to foster generative encounters between Indigenous and non-Indigenous legal traditions. We develop a critical discourse of obligation, understood here to both precede and exceed the rights-duty correlate so central to modern law. An attentiveness to the priority of obligation, we argue, might allow us to foreground an ethics of encounter between traditions, to examine the limits of modernity’s legal and political imaginary, and to pursue a ‘radical re-storying’ of laws for the Anthropocene. (shrink)

Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness is one of the key English-language texts in the post-war settlement literature of the early 1940s. This article analyses the book on three interconnected levels: the nature of the argument made by Niebuhr in the book, its place in the broader post-war settlement literature of the early 1940s, and its relevance to the current problems of right-wing populism and the climate crisis. While the main theme of the book is (...) the necessity and impossibility of democracy, it shares with the work of Isaiah Bowman and David Mitrany a concern for the tension between the state and interdependence. The deepening of this tension since has helped keep Niebuhr relevant, although his initial distinction between the children of light and the children of darkness has been complicated by both populism and the climate crisis. (shrink)

One may well argue that there ought not to be any such thing as an “undergraduate-level introduction to Hegel,” simply because, except perhaps for an especially advanced senior major in philosophy or religious studies, no undergraduate should be allowed to read Hegel. Extreme as it is, this view does have some merit. To read Hegel with even the bare minimum of comprehension requires a sophistication in philosophy, history, art history, and general cultural awareness which is seldom found in undergraduates. It (...) is well-known that a first semester freshman with little or no previous knowledge of philosophy is perfectly able, after only a few introductory lectures, to understand in a basic way the most important and complex sections of Plato’s Republic. Similarly, most intelligent freshmen are able to read Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, and even Kant, with a tolerable degree of comprehension. But with Hegel, on the other hand, whose thought presupposes, contains, interprets, criticizes, and hebt auf all of the thought which has gone before it, to an extent which no other major philosopher has even attempted, such naive reading is impossible. The problem is compounded by Hegel’s prose style, which, though necessary to his intent, and though passable in German, is too often utterly unfathomable in English, even by experts. Of what use, then, is an undergraduate introduction? (shrink)

Kant thought that the central question of the transcendental deduction, and perhaps of the entire Critique of Pure Reason, is what he calls the quid juris of categorial concepts. The quid juris is for him the question of the legitimate right of categories, that is, of non-empirical concepts like ‘substance’ and ‘cause’, to be employed in cognition.

This article takes up Arendt's ‘aporetic’ framing of human rights as well as Rancière's critique and suggests that reading them together may offer a way to re-envision human rights and human rights education —not only because they make visible the perplexities of human rights, but also in that they call for an agonistic understanding of rights; namely, the possibility to make new and plural political and ethical claims about human rights as practices that can be evaluated critically rather than taken (...) on faith. The paper contributes to ongoing discussions about the need for a renewal of HRE by suggesting that the paradoxes of human rights—such as the disparity between the reality of the human condition and the abstract ideal of human rights—can be politically and pedagogically invigorating by rethinking human rights in agonistic terms and formulating more robust practices of HRE. (shrink)

Every day, new warnings emerge about artificial intelligence rebelling against us. All the while, a more immediate dilemma flies under the radar. Have forces been unleashed that are thrusting humanity down an ill-advised path, one that's increasingly making us behave like simple machines? In this wide-reaching, interdisciplinary book, Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger examine what's happening to our lives as society embraces big data, predictive analytics, and smart environments. They explain how the goal of designing programmable worlds goes hand in (...) hand with engineering predictable and programmable people. Detailing new frameworks, provocative case studies, and mind-blowing thought experiments, Frischmann and Selinger reveal hidden connections between fitness trackers, electronic contracts, social media platforms, robotic companions, fake news, autonomous cars, and more. This powerful analysis should be read by anyone interested in understanding exactly how technology threatens the future of our society, and what we can do now to build something better. (shrink)

This paper investigates what it may mean to re-imagine learning through aesthetic experience with reference to John Dewey’s Art as Experience. The discussion asks what learning might look like when aesthetic experience takes centre stage in the learning process. It investigates what Dewey meant by art as experience and aesthetic experience. Working with Dewey as a philosopher of reconstruction of experience, the discussion examines responses to poetic writings and communication in learning situations. In seeking to discover what poetic writing does (...) within the experience of a reader and writer it considers three specific learning situations. Firstly there is an examination of a five-year old child’s experience of shared communication through the story of Horton the Elephant. Secondly there is an account of the responses of an 11-year-old child to poetry in a 1950s classroom setting, and later reconstructions of those experiences by the child as adult. Thirdly, the paper extends to intensive writing with 12 to 13-year-old children. The focus is on the process of learning via acts of expression as aesthetic experiences. Through art as experience the child develops perceptions that recover a coherence and continuity of aesthetic experience in art as in everyday life. (shrink)

This paper establishes a Kantian duty against screen overexposure. After defining screen exposure, I adopt a Kantian approach to its morality on the ground that Kant’s notion of duties to oneself easily captures wrongdoing in absence of harm or wrong to others. Then, I draw specifically on Kant’s ‘duties to oneself as an animal being’ to introduce a duty of self-government. This duty is based on the negative causal impact of the activities it regulates on a human being’s mental and (...) physical powers, and, ultimately, on the moral employment of these powers. After doing so, I argue that the duty against screen overexposure is an instance of the duty of self-government. Finally, I consider some objections. (shrink)

The inspiration or provocation for this paper came from the animal welfare theorists and environmental philosophers who have questioned the justification of our - real and symbolic - practice of eating meat, and from there challenged our meat-eating and generally devouring culture. The author is attempting to examine this motif - a motif of eating, swallowing devouring - its manifestation, display, findings or far-reaching thematisation that have been taking place more or less in passing in the texts of some pivotal (...) thinkers of modern and contemporary philosophical tradition. It is suggested that grasping the procedure of devouring, perceived from the perspective of its imperceptible and in time almost ceremonial outgrowing into self-understandable gesture of a theory - and not only theory - is at least instructive and inspirational actual moment of consciousness for the entire thought, in other words, an aspect of its critical reconstruction and deconstruction. Inspiracija ili provokacija za ovaj clanak dosla je od onih teoreticara dobrobiti zivotinja i envajarmentalistickih filozofa koji su doveli u pitanje opravdanost nase - stvarne ali i simbolicke - prakse jedenja mesa i, odatle stavili na kusnju celokupnu nasu mesozdresku i, uopste, prozdrljivu kulturu. Autor priloga taj motiv - motiv jedenja, gutanja, zdranja - nastoji da propita na tragu onih njegovih manifestovanja, izlaganja, nalaza ili dalekoseznijih tematizacija koji su se vise ili manje usputno odigravali u nekim tekstovima pojedinih stozernih mislilaca moderne i savremene filozofske tradicije. Sugerise se da je pronicanje figure prozdiranja, sagledane iz perspektive njenog neprimetnog i vremenom gotovo obrednog prerastanja u samorazumljivi gest teorije - i niukoliko ne samo teorije - jedan u najmanju ruku instruktivan i inspirativan aktuelni momenat samosvesti celokupnog misljenja, odnosno vid njegove kriticke rekonstrukcije i dekonstrukcije. (shrink)

For over a century the definitions of mass and derivations of its relation with energy continue to be elaborated, demonstrating that the concept of mass is still not satisfactorily understood. The aim of this study is to show that, starting from the properties of Minkowski spacetime and from the principle of least action, energy expresses the property of inertia of a body. This implies that inertial mass can only be the object of a definition—the so called mass-energy relation—aimed at measuring (...) energy in different units, more suitable to describe the huge amount of it enclosed in what we call the “rest-energy” of a body. Likewise, the concept of gravitational mass becomes unnecessary, being replaceable by energy, thus making the weak equivalence principle intrinsically verified. In dealing with mass, a new unit of measurement is foretold for it, which relies on the de Broglie frequency of atoms, the value of which can today be measured with an accuracy of a few parts in 109. (shrink)

This paper aims to question anew the popular and supposedly self-evident affirmation of education, in its modern incarnation as in its historical notion. The “naive” questions suggest that we have recently taken for granted that education ought to be for the masses, that it ought to be upbringing, and that it is better than ignorance. Drawing on the tradition that calls such an understanding of education into question, the author shows that the hidden costs of disregarding such reflection end up, (...) camouflaged and smuggled, taxing the current debates regarding generally accepted education strategies. The characteristic feeling of the currently accepted model of education being in chronic crisis is less a testament to an absence of alternative approaches than to a lack of thorough self-reflection. (shrink)

In this paper I defend the view that not only does Fear and Trembling espouse the teleological suspension of the ethical as a radical suspension and even possible violation of otherwise ethical duties, but also that Kierkegaard himself espouses it and carries the belief through his entire authorship. A brief analysis of Religiousness A suggests that Climacus made a dialectical error in Concluding Unscientific Postscript. This error is corrected by Anti-Climacus and Kierkegaard's own journals, and the correction makes possible a (...) full-blooded affirmation of the teleological suspension where Climacus failed. This reaffirmation can explain the shift from Climacus to Anti-Climacus on the topic of hidden inwardness as well as the shift from Climacus to Kierkegaard on the topic of religious suffering. It can also provide a legitimate Kierkegaardian alterative to positing a stage Merold Westphal (and not Kierkegaard) has termed Religiousness C. What we are left with is an uncompromisingly radical religious dialectic that gives every appearance of being exactly what Kierkegaard intended. (shrink)

Mahatma K. Gandhi's dedication to finding a path of liberation from an epidemic of violence has been well documented before. The central issue and the novelty of this book is its focus on what Gandhi wanted to liberate us for. The book also provides an assessment of how viable his positive vision of humanity is. Gandhi revolutionized the struggle for Indian liberation from Great Britain by convincing his countrymen that they must turn to nonviolence and that India needed to be (...) liberated from its social ills--poverty, unemployment, opium addiction, institution of child marriage, inequality of women, and Hindu-Muslim frictions--even more than it needed political freedom. Although Gandhi's legacy has not been forgotten, it has often been distorted. He is called "Mahatma" and venerated as a saint, but not followed and often misinterpreted. Predrag Cicovacki attempts to de-mythologize Gandhi and take a closer look at his thoughts, aims, and struggles. He invites us to look at the footprints Gandhi left for us, and follow them as carefully and critically as possible. Cicovacki concludes that Gandhi's spiritual vision of humanity and the importance of adherence to truth are his lasting legacy. (shrink)

Recent articles, including those by Dixon and Torres and Hager, criticize tournament playoffs, primarily for reasons of fairness and integrity. Many suggest that playoff and tournament prominence reflect monetary and entertainment interests rather than the pursuit of athletic excellence. Nevertheless, tournament playoffs are increasingly popular. While the concerns are serious, in this paper I defend the overlooked value of playoffs and tournaments. Playoff critics employ too narrow a conception of the best team and too limited a view of excellence. Rather, (...) playoffs and seasons highlight distinct and valuable conceptions of athletic excellence. To better capture this, I consider two alternative championship formats: the hybrid system and championship pluralism. The hybrid system includes a playoff informed by the regular season. Despite its apparent advantages, I reject the hybrid approach. Instead, I propose championship pluralism as a preferred championship model. (shrink)

An assessment is offered of the recent debate on information in the philosophy of biology, and an analysis is provided of the notion of information as applied in scientific practice in molecular genetics. In particular, this paper deals with the dependence of basic generalizations of molecular biology, above all the 'central dogma', on the socalled 'informational talk'. It is argued that talk of information in the 'central dogma' can be reduced to causal claims. In that respect, the primary aim of (...) the paper is to consider a solution to the major difficulty of the causal interpretation of genetic information: how to distinguish the privileged causal role assigned to nucleic acids, DNA in particular, in the processes of replication and protein production. A close reading is proposed of Francis H. C. Crick's On Protein Synthesis and related works, to which we owe the first explicit definition of information within the scientific practice of molecular biology. (shrink)

Some legal historians are startled by the fact that Grotius was able to develop a new theory of res communes omnium and mare liberum by using antique ideas whereas these ideas were known in philosophy and jurisprudence throughout the Middle Ages. This contribution shows that Grotius's theory of res communes omnium was innovative only because he developed a new concept of ownership and placed it within a new framework of ius naturale. Both new concepts, ownership and ius naturale, had their (...) predecessors in medieval theology and the jurisprudence of the Spanish Scholastics, but it was Grotius who merged them to a consistent new theory. This theory of res communes also enabled him to reconcile it with both the Roman legal sources and with contemporary practical needs. (shrink)

An assessment is offered of the recent debate on information in the philosophy of biology, and an analysis is provided of the notion of information as applied in scientific practice in molecular genetics. In particular, this paper deals with the dependence of basic generalizations of molecular biology, above all the ‘central dogma’, on the so-called ‘informational talk’ (Maynard Smith [2000a]). It is argued that talk of information in the ‘central dogma’ can be reduced to causal claims. In that respect, the (...) primary aim of the paper is to consider a solution to the major difficulty of the causal interpretation of genetic information: how to distinguish the privileged causal role assigned to nucleic acids, DNA in particular, in the processes of replication and protein production. A close reading is proposed of Francis H. C. Crick's On Protein Synthesis (1958) and related works, to which we owe the first explicit definition of information within the scientific practice of molecular biology. Introduction 1.1 The basic questions of the information debate 1.2 The causal interpretation (CI) of biological information and Crick's ‘central dogma’ Crick's definitions of genetic information The main requirement for (CI) Types of causation in molecular biology 4.1 Structural causation in molecular biology 4.2 Nucleic acids as correlative causal factors The ‘central dogma’ without the notion of information Concluding remarks This is a new version of this article as there were errors in the abstract and full text in the previous version. (shrink)

In this dissertation I examine the topics of ethics, religion, and their relationship in the work of Charles Taylor. I take Taylor's attempt to confront modern disenchantment by seeking a kind of re-enchantment as my guiding thread. Seeking re-enchantment means, first of all, defending an `engaged realist' account of strong evaluation, i.e., qualitative distinctions of value that are seen as normative for our desires. Secondly, it means overcoming self-enclosure and achieving self-transcendence, which I argue should be understood in terms of (...) transcending a `lower' mode of selfhood for a `higher' one in concern for `strong goods'. One of the main issues that Taylor raises is whether re-enchantment requires theism for its full adequacy. He advances - often as `hunches' - controversial claims regarding the significance of theism for defending strong evaluative realism and for motivating an ethic of universal human concern. I seek to fill out his hunches in terms of a theistic teleological perspective that is centered on the `telos of communion'. I argue that such a view is important for overcoming the problem of what Bernard Williams calls the `radical contingency' of ethical beliefs, which seems to undermine their normative authority. However, I argue that if a non-theistic view of cosmic purpose can be regarded as a viable option, then it could also help to address this problem and support a kind of re-enchantment. Taylor also advances the controversial view that there is an ineradicable draw to `transcendence' in human life in connection to the quest for the meaning of life. Here he opposes certain mainstream theories of secularization that see it as a process involving the ineluctable fading away of the relevance of religion. I seek to fill out and defend Taylor's view in this matter. Besides providing a reading of Taylor's work as a whole and advancing further some of the issues he raises, I also examine his general evaluative framework based on his account of strong evaluation. In doing so I show how he provides a distinct and important perspective among contemporary moral philosophers. (shrink)

This interview with Charles Taylor explores a central concern throughout his work, viz., his concern to confront the challenges presented by the process of ‘disenchantment’ in the modern world. It focuses especially on what is involved in seeking a kind of ‘re-enchantment.' A key issue that is discussed is the relationship of Taylor’s theism to his effort of seeking re-enchantment. Some other related issues that are explored pertain to questions surrounding Taylor’s argument against the standard secularization thesis that views secularization (...) as a process involving the ineluctable fading away of religion. Additionally, the relationship between Taylor’s religious views and his philosophical work is discussed. (shrink)