Combining anthropological descriptions with historical criticism, Cox situates the Zen arts within contemporary critical discourses.

This article proposes a sensory studies methodology for the interpretation of museum objects. The proposed method unfolds in two phases: virtual encounter via an on-line catalog and actual exposure in the context of a handling workshop. In addition to exploring the écart between image and object, the “Sensing Art and Artifacts” exercise articulates a framework for arriving at a multisensory, cross-cultural, interactive understanding of aesthetic value. The case studies presented here involve four objects from the collection of the Hunterian Museum (...) as sensed and interpreted by scholars of psychology, philosophy, sociology, and anthropology. It is proposed that aesthetic judgment in the expanded (cross-cultural) sense contemplated here involves apprehending the museum object through multiple sensory modalities in place of the conventional Western fixation on visible form. (shrink)

Achieving space domain awareness requires the identification, characterization, and tracking of space objects. Storing and leveraging associated space object data for purposes such as hostile threat assessment, object identification, and collision prediction and avoidance present further challenges. Space objects are characterized according to a variety of parameters including their identifiers, design specifications, components, subsystems, capabilities, vulnerabilities, origins, missions, orbital elements, patterns of life, processes, operational statuses, and associated persons, organizations, or nations. The Space Object Ontology provides a consensus-based realist framework (...) for formulating such characterizations in a computable fashion. Space object data are aligned with classes and relations in the Space Object Ontology and stored in a dynamically updated Resource Description Framework triple store, which can be queried to support space domain awareness and the needs of spacecraft operators. This paper presents the core of the Space Object Ontology, discusses its advantages over other approaches to space object classification, and demonstrates its ability to combine diverse sets of data from multiple sources within an expandable framework. Finally, we show how the ontology provides benefits for enhancing and maintaining longterm space domain awareness. (shrink)

Achieving space situational awareness requires, at a minimum, the identification, characterization, and tracking of space objects. Leveraging the resultant space object data for purposes such as hostile threat assessment, object identification, and conjunction assessment presents major challenges. This is in part because in characterizing space objects we reference a variety of identifiers, components, subsystems, capabilities, vulnerabilities, origins, missions, orbital elements, patterns of life, operational processes, operational statuses, and so forth, which tend to be defined in highly heterogeneous and sometimes inconsistent (...) ways. The Space Domain Ontologies are designed to provide a consensus-based realist framework for formulating such characterizations in a way that is both consistent and computable. Space object data are aligned with classes and relations in a suite of ontologies built around the existing Space Object Ontology. They are stored in a dynamically updated Resource Description Framework triple store, which can be queried to support space situational awareness and the needs of spacecraft operators and analysts. This paper provides an overview of the Space Domain Ontologies and their development and use. It presents the motivation for and advantages of the Space Domain Ontologies, including the benefits they provide for enhancing and maintaining long-term space situational awareness. (shrink)

Consciousness -- Freedom -- Bad faith -- Authenticity.

In the nineteenth century, Nietzsche famously announced that God was dead. In the twentieth century, an increasing reliance on science and technology led to a widespread rejection of belief on the grounds of its irrationality. Yet for all the skepticism directed towards it, religion has not died. In fact, the opposite has occurred: it has persisted and proliferated. In this wide-ranging dialogue, two leading commentators on religion address - from their different but complementary traditions of Christianity and Buddhism - the (...) continuing appeal of spirituality to people eager to explore fundamental questions of meaning and identity. The authors indicate that science, for all the benefits it has conferred, has limits of explanation. It may be able to show how, but not necessarily why. --BOOK JACKET. (shrink)

One significant way in which place is represented is through books based on old photographs and postcards. Recontextualised in such books, historical photos can be used to create mesmeric myths about a locality. This paper explores the genre through four works about areas in Sheffield, a city in the north of England. The book for the well to do suburb, Crosspool, constructs a quaint rural past. Two representations of a working class district are perhaps a little more successful in recovering (...) a personally significant past. The history of a local steel firm avoids issues of social conflict and exploitation by adopting a documentary tone. Thegenre trades on the active interest of seeing familiar scenes as they were in the past, but fails to develop interpretative strategies, such as asking about the context of photos’ original creation or reflecting on how they have been reused. (shrink)

Hopes for biasing the odds towards the development of AGI that is human-friendly depend on finding and employing ethical theories and practices that can be incorporated successfully in the construction; programming and/or developmental growth; education and mature life world of future AGI. Mainstream ethical theories are ill-adapted for this purpose because of their mono-logical decision procedures which aim at “Golden rule” style principles and judgments which are objective in the sense of being universal and absolute. A much more helpful framework (...) for ethics is provided by a dialogical approach using conflict resolution and negotiation methods; a “Rainbow rule” approach to diversity; and a notion of objectivity as emergent impartiality. This conflict resolution approach will also improve our chances in dealing with two other problems related to the “Friendly AI” problem; the difficulty of programming AI to be not merely smarter but genuinely wiser and the dilemmas that arise in considering whether AGIs will be Friendly to humans out of mere partisanship or out of genuine intent to promote the Good. While these issues are challenging; a strategy for pursuing and promoting research on them can be articulated and basic legislation and corporate policies can be adopted to encourage their development as part of the project of biasing the odds in favor of Friendly and Wise AGI. (shrink)

One night about fifteen years ago, I found myself driving a rental car up and down the main street of a tiny Connecticut town, feverishly hunting for an address. I had gotten lost on my trip into the hinterland, and by the time my car turned hesitantly up the drive of an old house that seemed to match the numbers on my notepad, I was hours late for my appointment. When the thick door creaked open, I started my apologies, but (...) the woman I had come to interview paid no attention. “Come out to the kitchen,” she said. Muriel Hall, former researcher for Time-Life, knew how to treat other researchers. She had kept the food warm and the drinks cold, and before the night was over, I saw her lift the top of an old wooden box and start laying out the treasure I had hoped to find—the papers of Isabel Paterson. (shrink)

Realism Materialism Art (RMA) introduces a diverse selection of new realist and materialist philosophies and examines their ramifications in the arts. Encompassing neo-materialist theories, object-oriented ontologies, and neo-rationalist philosophies, RMA serves as a primer on “speculative realism,” considering its conceptual innovations as spurs to artistic thinking and practice and beyond. Despite their differences, these philosophical positions propose that thought can and does think outside itself, and that reality can be known without its being shaped by and for human comprehension. Today’s (...) realisms and materialisms explicitly challenge many of the dominant assumptions of cultural practice and theoretical inquiry, opening up new domains of research and artistic inquiry. -/- Cutting across diverse thematic interests and modes of investigation, the 35 essays in RMA offer a snapshot of the emerging and rapidly changing set of ideas and practices proposed by contemporary realisms and materialisms. The book demonstrates the broad challenge of realist and materialist approaches to received disciplinary categories and forms of practice, capturing their nascent reworking of art, philosophy, culture, theory, and science, among other fields. As such, RMA expands beyond the primarily philosophical context in which realism and materialism have developed. (shrink)

Reflections on the Logic of the Good provides a metaphysical and philosophical foundation for those who argue against micromanagement of the individual, the economy, and society. In doing so, it offers a defense of the open mind, the open society, and the open universe. What emerges is a defense of ethical pluralism without relativism, and an entirely general invisible hand theory entrenched not only in the nature of man but also in the nature of nature.

"Spirit into Matter is published to coincide with the first major retrospective of Teske's work.

The central problem of this dissertation arises from reflecting on Euthyphro’s often neglected final attempt to define piety and the discussion (elenchos) that follows. He claims that piety is knowledge of how to give to the gods what is pleasing in prayer and sacrifice. Socrates, without much argument, reduces Euthyphro’s answer to his earlier, already refuted one – that piety is what is dear to the gods – inviting the question of whether this is all the elenchos is meant to (...) accomplish. If it is not, we should expect to find its purpose in the brief discussion that falls between Euthyphro’s definition and the final reduction of this definition to its predecessor. At the center of this discussion Socrates compares Euthyphronic piety to commerce. This comparison has classically been interpreted as showing Euthyphro’s definition to imply that humans can benefit gods, and since Euthyphro has elsewhere rejected this idea, his definition is refuted by contradiction. But this strands the reduction withoutpurpose, and scrutiny of the text suggests this is not the correct way to interpret the inference structure of this intervening discussion. In this dissertation I argue for two main theses: (i) the disambiguation thesis, which claims that the comparison to commerce is not the philosophical point of the elenchos, and does not result in the refutation of Euthyphro’s definition. It is instead intended to elicit which of two possible models of piety Euthyphro means to describe, the language of his definition being equivocal in at least one important respect, namely whether or not a met need necessarily confers a benefit upon the recipient; (ii) the translation thesis, which claims that there are some important observations to be made about the Greek of Euthyphro’s definition, observations that will make the dis- ambiguation thesis more plausible, and which are obscured by traditional translations of the passage under discussion. These observations concern kecharismena, a word often translated as ‘pleasing’, but is better understood as denoting a broad set of social and religious norms, and for which there is no simple English equivalent. Together, these two theses allow us to see that the main philosophical lesson of the last elenchos is that Euthyphro’s account of piety as ritual is an application of his more famous third attempt to define piety voluntaristically, and that any philosophical concerns over the last definition are consequences of it being an extension of the third one. This is why Plato puts the two side-by-side to close the dialogue, and we are kept from seeing this clearly when we take the comparison to commerce to be accomplishing the main work of the elenchos, rather than as clarifying Euthyphro’s answer so that its conceptual similarities to the previous answer are plainly visible. I conclude the project by defending the venerable view that Socratic piety is service to the gods instantiated by rational inquiry, and show how this model of piety is the antithesis to, and moral remedy for, Euthyphronic piety. (shrink)

The human loss of the sense of sacred has been driven by a mechanization of the world that privileges the mundane and the material. Yet the earliest surviving history of the human mind reveals a widespread, embodied human faculty for perception of the cosmos and an intimate human relation to the cosmos. This history hints of an origin story that may be partly recovered by sacred relics of human prehistory.

The History of Psychology course occupies an unusual but critical place in the psychology curriculum at most universities. As the field has become ever more specialized, with the various subdisciplines branching off, The History of Psychology is often the one course where the common roots of all of these areas are explored. Asking not only "What is psychology?" but also "What is science?" "Why is psychology a science?" and "How did it become one?" this book examines how the paradigm of (...) Psychology was built. Discussing key figures in history in the context of their time, it takes students on a carefully formulated, chronological journey through the build-up of psychology from ancient times to the present, and seeks to draw students into the way science is done, rather than merely presenting them with historical fact. Students will learn not only the "what," but the "why" of the history of psychology and will acquire the necessary background historical material to fully understand those concepts. Organized around a series of moments and cases--such as a shift from scholasticism to rationalism or empiricism, and a shift from idealism to materialism--the book seeks to portray psychology as an on-going, evolving process, rather than a theory.--page i. (shrink)

This paper documents for the first time tournament incentives of pension fund managers and their preferences for social and environmental security characteristics. Using a comprehensive data set on pension fund security holdings, differences in manager tournaments are distinguished by sorting pension funds into portfolios based on the number of concurrent managers each pension fund employs. Results indicate that the way pension schemes structure portfolio manager tournament incentives is important in explaining the social and environmental portfolio firm characteristics of pension fund (...) held stock. (shrink)

This volume examines the transmission and influence of Ciceronian rhetoric from late antiquity to the fifteenth century, examining the relationship between rhetoric and practices as diverse as law, dialectic, memory theory, poetics, and ethics. Includes an appendix of primary texts.

This volume examines the transmission and influence of Ciceronian rhetoric from late antiquity to the fifteenth century, examining the relationship between rhetoric and practices as diverse as law, dialectic, memory theory, poetics, and ethics. Includes an appendix of primary texts.

A concise and accessible dictionary of the key terms used in Sartre's philosophy, his major works and philosophical influences.

We initially describe a feature-rich discriminative Conditional Random Field (CRF) model for Information Extraction in the workshop announcements domain, which offers good baseline performance in the PASCAL shared task. We then propose a method for leveraging domain knowledge in Information Extraction tasks, scoring candidate document labellings as one-value-per-field templates according to domain feasibility after generating sample labellings from a trained sequence classifier. Our relational models evaluate these templates according to our intuitions about agreement in the domain: workshop acronyms should resemble (...) their names, workshop dates occur after paper submission dates. These methods see a 5% f-score improvement in fields retrieved when sampling labellings from a Maximum-Entropy Markov Model, however we do not observe improvement over a CRF model. We discuss reasons for this, including the problem of recovering all field instances from a best template, and propose future work in adapting such a model to the CRF, a better standalone system. (shrink)