Whether causing flash crashes in financial markets, purchasing illegal drugs, or running over pedestrians, AI is increasingly engaging in activity that would be criminal for a natural person, or even an artificial person like a corporation. We argue that criminal law falls short in cases where an AI causes certain types of harm and there are no practically or legally identifiable upstream criminal actors. This Article explores potential solutions to this problem, focusing on holding AI directly criminally liable where it (...) is acting autonomously and irreducibly. Conventional wisdom holds that punishing AI is incongruous with basic criminal law principles such as the capacity for culpability and the requirement of a guilty mind. -/- Drawing on analogies to corporate and strict criminal liability, as well as familiar imputation principles, we show how a coherent theoretical case can be constructed for AI punishment. AI punishment could result in general deterrence and expressive benefits, and it need not run afoul of negative limitations such as punishing in excess of culpability. Ultimately, however, punishing AI is not justified, because it might entail significant costs and it would certainly require radical legal changes. Modest changes to existing criminal laws that target persons, together with potentially expanded civil liability, are a better solution to AI crime. (shrink)

Long noncoding RNAs have been described in cell lines and various whole tissues, but lncRNA analysis of development in vivo is limited. Here, we comprehensively analyze lncRNA expression for the adult mouse subventricular zone neural stem cell lineage. We utilize complementary genome-wide techniques including RNA-seq, RNA CaptureSeq, and ChIP-seq to associate specific lncRNAs with neural cell types, developmental processes, and human disease states. By integrating data from chromatin state maps, custom microarrays, and FACS purification of the subventricular zone lineage, we (...) stringently identify lncRNAs with potential roles in adult neurogenesis. shRNA-mediated knockdown of two such lncRNAs, Six3os and Dlx1as, indicate roles for lncRNAs in the glial-neuronal lineage specification of multipotent adult stem cells. Our data and workflow thus provide a uniquely coherent in vivo lncRNA analysis and form the foundation of a user-friendly online resource for the study of lncRNAs in development and disease. © 2013 Elsevier Inc. (shrink)

Inflammatory responses are essential for the clearance of pathogens and the repair of injured tissues; however, if these responses are not properly controlled chronic inflammation can occur. Chronic inflammation is now recognized as a contributing factor to many age‐associated diseases including metabolic disorders, arthritis, neurodegeneration, and cardiovascular disease. Due to the connection between chronic inflammation and these diseases, it is essential to understand underlying mechanisms behind this process. In this review, factors that contribute to chronic inflammation are discussed. Further, we (...) emphasize the emerging roles of microRNAs (miRNAs) and other noncoding RNAs (ncRNA) in regulating chronic inflammatory states, making them important future diagnostic markers and therapeutic targets. Copyright Line: © 2015 The Authors BioEssays Published by Wiley‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA. (shrink)

Promoting the use of contact tracing technology will be an important step in global recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. Across two studies, we assessed two messaging strategies as motivators of intended contact tracing uptake. In one sample of 1117 Australian adults and one sample of 888 American adults, we examined autonomy-supportive and controlling message framing and the presence or absence of information safety as predictors of intended contact tracing application uptake, using an online randomized 2 × 2 experimental design. The (...) results suggested that the provision of data safety assurances may be key in affecting people’s intentions to use contact tracing technology, an effect we found in both samples regardless of whether messages were framed as autonomy-supportive or controlling. Those in high information safety conditions consistently reported higher intended uptake and more positive perceptions of the application than those in low information safety conditions. In Study 2, we also found that perceptions of government legitimacy related positively to intended application uptake, as did political affiliation. In sum, individuals appeared more willing to assent to authority regarding contact tracing insofar as their data safety can be assured. Yet, public messaging strategies alone may be insufficient to initiate intentions to change behavior, even in these unprecedented circumstances. (shrink)

Throughout the biological and biomedical sciences there is a growing need for, prescriptive ‘minimum information’ (MI) checklists specifying the key information to include when reporting experimental results are beginning to find favor with experimentalists, analysts, publishers and funders alike. Such checklists aim to ensure that methods, data, analyses and results are described to a level sufficient to support the unambiguous interpretation, sophisticated search, reanalysis and experimental corroboration and reuse of data sets, facilitating the extraction of maximum value from data sets (...) them. However, such ‘minimum information’ MI checklists are usually developed independently by groups working within representatives of particular biologically- or technologically-delineated domains. Consequently, an overview of the full range of checklists can be difficult to establish without intensive searching, and even tracking thetheir individual evolution of single checklists may be a non-trivial exercise. Checklists are also inevitably partially redundant when measured one against another, and where they overlap is far from straightforward. Furthermore, conflicts in scope and arbitrary decisions on wording and sub-structuring make integration difficult. This presents inhibit their use in combination. Overall, these issues present significant difficulties for the users of checklists, especially those in areas such as systems biology, who routinely combine information from multiple biological domains and technology platforms. To address all of the above, we present MIBBI (Minimum Information for Biological and Biomedical Investigations); a web-based communal resource for such checklists, designed to act as a ‘one-stop shop’ for those exploring the range of extant checklist projects, and to foster collaborative, integrative development and ultimately promote gradual integration of checklists. (shrink)

Vaccine research, as well as the development, testing, clinical trials, and commercial uses of vaccines involve complex processes with various biological data that include gene and protein expression, analysis of molecular and cellular interactions, study of tissue and whole body responses, and extensive epidemiological modeling. Although many data resources are available to meet different aspects of vaccine needs, it remains a challenge how we are to standardize vaccine annotation, integrate data about varied vaccine types and resources, and support advanced vaccine (...) data analysis and inference. To address these problems, the community-based Vaccine Ontology (VO) has been developed through collaboration with vaccine researchers and many national and international centers and programs, including the National Center for Biomedical Ontology (NCBO), the Infectious Disease Ontology (IDO) Initiative, and the Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI). VO utilizes the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) as the top ontology and the Relation Ontology (RO) for definition of term relationships. VO is represented in the Web Ontology Language (OWL) and edited using the Protégé-OWL. Currently VO contains more than 2000 terms and relationships. VO emphasizes on classification of vaccines and vaccine components, vaccine quality and phenotypes, and host immune response to vaccines. These reflect different aspects of vaccine composition and biology and can thus be used to model individual vaccines. More than 200 licensed vaccines and many vaccine candidates in research or clinical trials have been modeled in VO. VO is being used for vaccine literature mining through collaboration with the National Center for Integrative Biomedical Informatics (NCIBI). Multiple VO applications will be presented. (shrink)

Fools rush in. ALEXANDER POPE, AN ESSAY ON CRITICISM (London, 1711). The full quotation is, “For Fools rush in where Angels fear to tread.” Id. at 66. She who hesitates is lost. Adaptation of the line, “The woman that deliberates is lost.” JOSEPH ADDISON, CATO: A TRAGEDY, AND SELECTED ESSAYS 30 (2004). See also OLIVER WENDALL HOLMES, SR., THE AUTOCRAT AT THE BREAKFAST TABLE 29 (1858) (“The woman who ‘calculates’ is lost.”). American legal realism numbers among the most important (...) theoretical contributions of legal academia to date. Given the movement’s influence, as well as the common centrality of certain key figures, it is surprising that privacy scholarship in the United States has paid next to no attention to the movement. This inattention is unfortunate for several reasons, including that privacy law furnishes rich examples of the indeterminacy thesis — a key concept of American legal realism — and because the interdisciplinary efforts of privacy scholars to explore extra-legal influences on privacy law arguably further the plot of legal realism itself. (shrink)

Since the Romantic era in Europe, walking has shifted from an obligatory activity tied to livelihood, through mobility, to a recreational pursuit of life quality, engaging the landscape on foot. 2 In the above quotation from the FABC, one of the earliest confederations of independent bushwalking or- ganisations in Australia, three elements make it germane: the bushwalker, the bush itself and the appreciation of the bush. As a therapeutic get-away from the city, bushwalking is amenable to “the mind and the (...) body” and remedies the effects of urban stressors like “hustle and bustle.” Through walking, the urban dweller assumes the persona of an early European explorer − say John Eyre or Alexander von Humboldt − who charted terra nullius “where no man has trod before,” or at least no European human. Most significantly, the recreational bushwalker, who would have typically been a male member of the upper-classes, experiences a transformation of values, realising that the bush looms largely beyond the horizon of city life, and its urban, suburban and rural spheres of organisation and commerce. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Theory of Kingship The Traditional Schools New Directions: Cynics, Stoics, and Epicureans The Politics of Cynicism? Stoicism and Epicureanism.

The essay is a ‘personal impression’ of Isaiah Berlin and his liberalism, beginning with some intellectual biography, and turning to the question of how the way Berlin wrote about political ideas illuminates the liberalism he espoused. The essay discounts Berlin’s self-description as a historian of ideas who had abandoned philosophy, and follows Bernard Williams in arguing that the historicity of our political values demands a dialogical approach to their analysis in which we engage with our forebears and contemporaries in an (...) essentially conversational mode. The claim is illustrated with Berlin’s engagement with Alexander Herzen and Romanticism. (shrink)

Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash INTRODUCTION The coronavirus pandemic is a challenge to educators, policy makers, and ordinary people. In facing the threat from COVID-19, school systems and global institutions need “to address the essential matter of each human being and how they are interacting with, and affected by, a much wider set of biological and technical conditions.”[1] Educators must grapple with the societal issues that come with the intent of ensuring the safety of the public. To some, “these (...) are actually as important as the biological concerns of people.”[2] The current global crisis shows that “scientifically, socially, and politically the economy and technosphere are not just related, they are integral to a comprehensive response to major challenges.”[3] In developing these responses, scientists, government leaders, and policy makers need to consider the vulnerabilities of people, especially those in “thrown away” groups.[4] Jerome Ravetz explains that “microscopic viral predators cull our populations, as ever, but with a selection that is not natural but social and political.”[5] Educators must address the underlying vulnerabilities and evaluate the virus as a threat to academic experiences and access to a fair education. ANALYSIS • Critical Pedagogy By definition, the critical approach to teaching is about the problem-posing method of education developed by Paolo Freire. In his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, he proposed a paradigm shift away from the banking method of learning wherein teachers deposit knowledge into the minds of students. Critical pedagogy is an educational approach that challenges students to develop the ability to recognize and criticize dominating theories and evaluate them in their social context. Teachers press students to recognize oppression and try to remedy oppression in their culture.[6] Despite the lack of in-person interaction between the teacher and the students, the effort to use innovative teaching techniques like critical pedagogy should continue. Online learning is not just about the use of technology, although the internet is crucial in the delivery of content. Since human beings are creators of value, they determine the meaning and purpose of technology. In this way, the set of values people have will influence online learning. Teachers cannot be more concerned about outcomes than about the process itself. The process is crucial since the ability of the student to think critically is developed in the exchange between the student and the teacher. The teacher cannot simply dump loads of information (deposit knowledge) but must pose problems to test the analytical and critical skills of students.[7] Education is about how people humanize the world. Policy makers miss the point when they focus on the delivery but do not pay attention to the substantive aspect of learning, which is human empowerment. Education is meant to expand the freedom of people. Education should be seen as an integrative activity. Learning is a formative process that aims to develop the human person. Without the face-to-face encounter between teacher and students, the challenge is finding ways to make learning an effective means to mold the values of young people. • Online Critical Pedagogy & the Role of Technology Physical distance appears to be an impediment in realizing the ideals of learning. The lack of contact between the teacher and the students may prevent a more meaningful interaction since online instruction is impersonal. It can be argued that there is no alternative to some classroom activities, especially laboratory experiments in science courses. The total classroom environment naturally influences the behavior of students when it comes to academic work: the look in the eyes of the professor, the caring ways of a teacher, or the pressure while taking exams contribute to an experience that only a classroom setting can provide. If implemented properly, technology can facilitate the personal relationships between teachers and students while providing meaningful experiences. With the current need for online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, gadgets are indispensable. Some would even consider gadgets an extension of the human body. A mobile phone is not just any instrument; it has evolved into a novel way of being in the world. Our gadgets are a means of seeing how the outside world unfolds. Modern technological tools allow the interface of people in many fields of experience in a globalized environment. Computers and other digital devices extend the meaning and value of human freedom. For example, a laptop provided to a poor child can redefine the meaning of and what the future might hold for that child. The device is crucial to the whole learning process. Modern tools are critical to self-discovery and greater freedom. The values that people embrace will matter in the new normal. The internet has provided a new democratic space that empowers groups and individuals to express themselves and to understand the world.[8] In an online class, students and teachers alike need to analyze big picture questions and layers of information. For example, the student in an ethics or philosophy class can reflect on the realities of life. With the proper guidance, online education should help define the meaning of moral commitment and human responsibility. CONCLUSION Before the pandemic, policy makers had been pursuing the goals of a globalized economy. They had been fashioning and promoting programs that cater to the interests of a consumer-driven world that has deprived the poor of opportunity. When the pandemic struck, globalization suddenly came to a halt and people realized the things that truly matter in life – family, love, and life itself. The new normal must now emphasize the role of education as a source of inner strength that can empower the person to live well reinforcing values based on a social consciousness. Critical pedagogy is possible under the new normal. The distance between the teacher and student does not make the educational process less real and in the absence of a vaccine, online learning is the safest strategy. Governments cannot freeze an entire school year since education is the only way out from poverty for millions. The COVID-19 pandemic provides a reason to re-imagine teaching using technology to encourage all students to question systems of oppression or greed, as the persistent pursuit of the truth is what education is all about. [1] Hartsell, Layne, Krabbe, Alexander, & Pastreich, Emmanuel. “Covid-19, Global Justice, and a New Biopolitics of the Anthropocene.” Social Ethics Society Journal of Applied Philosophy 6, no. 2 (2020), 3. [2] Ravetz, Jerome. “Science for a Proper Recovery: Post-Normal, not New Normal.” Issues in Science and Technology [Internet] July 15, 2020. https://issues.org/post-normal-science-for-pandemic-recovery/ [3] Hartsell, et al. “Covid-19, Global Justice, and a New Biopolitics of the Anthropocene,” 6. [4] Ravetz, “Science for a Proper Recovery: Post-Normal, not New Normal.” [5] Ibid. [6] Freire, Paolo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. (New York: Continuum Books, 1993). [7] Freire writes that in such a situation “instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiqués and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat.” See his Pedagogy of the Oppressed. [8] Bakardjieva, Maria. Internet Society. (London: Sage Publications, 2005). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Thomas Reid on Logic, Rhetoric and the Fine Arts: Papers on the Culture of the MindRyan NicholsAlexander Broadie, editor. Thomas Reid on Logic, Rhetoric and the Fine Arts: Papers on the Culture of the Mind. The Edinburgh Edition of Thomas Reid, Vol. 5. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005. Pp. xlix + 350. Cloth, $85.00.Following an enlightening introduction by Alexander Broadie, this volume collects Reid's (...) manuscripts into three parts of about 100 pages each: the first about the culture of the mind, the second about Aristotle's logic, and the third about eloquence and the fine arts.The first part reproduces Reid's manuscripts on the cultivation or improvement of the mind—originally lecture notes delivered to one of his classes at the University of Glasgow. Reid describes how one is to improve one's faculties of the mind, including reason, memory, perception, and imagination. His motivation lies in his conviction that the faculties are like "the Earth itself" which was "left by the Almighty in a Rude and uncultivated state but capable of a high degree of Cultivation by human Labour Industry [and] Art" (13).This material will be most useful to those interested in Reid's philosophy of education, or the philosophy of education in eighteenth-century Scotland. Nonetheless, Reid makes several interesting points in these lectures that students of his metaphysics, ethics, and epistemology will find interesting. For example, he considers the nature of acquired perception here because our ability to form acquired perceptions depends on the cultivation of our senses. He recognizes that "the far greater part of the perceptions we have by [the senses] are acquired and therefore must be learned by practice and Habit" (18). This would confirm the interpretation of acquired perceptions according to which they are not as non-inferential and non-cognitive as Reid's "original perceptions."Perhaps Reid's most intriguing observations concern the social nature of our faculties. In his analysis of testimony, scholars have seen in Reid a concern with social aspects of knowledge unparalleled in the history of philosophy. But Reid goes a step further by arguing that the faculties themselves are social in origin. Comparing a cultured man with a feral man, he argues that culture is necessary for the development of our intellectual and active powers, including reasoning, language-use, the conception of abstract ideas, and moral perception (40–42). This prompts Reid to attack Rousseau's thesis that man is most happy as a solitary individual in a state of nature, lacking these powers. Reid's case against Rousseau includes some unjustifiable ad hominem attacks, but is on the whole persuasive.Reid also applies philosophical reasoning to his religious beliefs in these lectures, warning readers that some facts are beyond the human mind: "the first origin both of the human Soul and of the human Body is unknown to us" (25). This discussion should influence the question of whether Reid believes the substance of the mind is fundamentally beyond human comprehension. Second, in a conceptual argument that eludes me, he contends that it is "probable" that God "must" have created human beings as fully-formed adults (49).The second part is entitled 'A Brief Account of Aristotle's Logic. With Remarks.' Amidst his excoriation of Aristotle and syllogistic reasoning, Reid's emphasis on the use of induction is impressive and important. Readers of this part will get glimpses of Reid's views on first principles and the nature of truth. Reid sees his philosophical reasoning—about the [End Page 165] mind and now about logic—as having immediate practical benefit to those wishing to learn about the world. Though he praises Aristotle on several occasions for establishing the foundations of logic, he sees little of value in Aristotle's own logic. Of Aristotle's Topics, Reid asks, "Why should I throw away so much time and painful attention upon a thing of so little real use?" (115).The final part of the volume is about the fine arts, principally eloquence, which is noblest because it combines the virtues of all the others (197). Reid mentions several conditions for a flourishing art of eloquence, including a number... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Dewey and the Aesthetic Unconsciousness: The Vital Depths of Experience by Bethany HenningFrank X. RyanDewey and the Aesthetic Unconsciousness: The Vital Depths of Experience Bethany Henning. Lexington Books, 2022.In this important and splendidly crafted book, Bethany Henning recovers a philosophy of aesthetic wisdom distinct from the narrow epistemological lens dominant today. Unlike the psychological atomism of European Empiricism, from its outset, American philosophy embraced nature's aesthetic splendor and (...) the continuity between our thought and our world. Jonathan Edwards held that relations among ideas reflect beauty in the structure of being. For Ralph Waldo Emerson, each of us is a "transparent eyeball" where the cultivation of nature's spontaneous beauty fortifies our moral and spiritual agency. At the apex of this tradition is John Dewey, for whom Henning touts "aesthetic experience as the highest mode of human experience" (55).Although the aesthetic is generally associated with the cognitive evaluation of art, of special significance for Dewey is its non-reflective or unconscious dimension. Henning's appropriation of "unconscious"—the cradle of Freud's infantile id—is intentionally provocative. American culture, reflected in academic thought, has largely resisted appeals to subterranean urges and drives. In so doing, however, we perpetuate a myth of rational and moral exceptionalism that masks our history of colonialism, oppression, and crass commercialism. In accepting the unconscious, European thought has taken strides to acknowledge and address such ills. Despite America's disdain for psychoanalysis, Henning wonders whether it "could have accepted a dynamic unconscious, were it presented with an alternative mythology" (10).Dewey's alternative, says Henning, arises from his underappreciated notion of qualitative immediacy. In Henning's interpretation of this, meaning is embodied as a "sense of fulfillment" among accumulated habits—a "coming to terms with the world around us" through an "aesthetic (directly felt) connection between ourselves and the world." As such, to appreciate meaning, we must affirm the tacit, unconscious depth of experience; that is, we must "welcome aesthetic experience back into our philosophical lives" (5).Embodied meaning signifies that "the sensuous, lived body" is "the primary reality" (69). In this reality, qualitative immediacy is a non-reflective, aesthetic unity punctuated by "impulsions" arising from an organism's needs. Such needs are satisfied in organism-environment interactions where, says Dewey, "the epidermis is only in the most superficial way an indication of where an organism ends and its environment begins" (LW 10:61). As "a site of adaptive adjustments," Henning continues, "the body is responsive to the [End Page 114] brink of coalescence at the point of contact with the world, in which things that are 'outside of it' belong to it" (71). As such, the body-mind relation is a problem of aesthetics, not epistemology. For Dewey, as for Merleau-Ponty, the body "is the organic and dynamic condition of my thought" (75). The body is not a thing, however, but a process "always organically involved in exchanges" (86).Following the feminist thought of Susan Bordo, Henning agrees that the ascendance of the body amounts to a kind of philosophical recovery. Seventeenth-century science eviscerated the organic "female" universe of the Middle Ages. But this loss of an integrated world evoked existential fright, which Descartes tried to calm by subjugating feminine vagaries of the body to a masculine cognitive certitude bent upon controlling the whole of nature. In America today, this neurosis perpetuates our cultural alienation from our bodies, our environments, and one another (81–84). With the re-emergence of the body, however, it is possible to acknowledge and address this trauma."Feeling," in Dewey's sense, is unconsciously affective: a constant rhythm of disequilibrium and equilibrium, of need and resolution noticed only when a problem rises to the point of requiring our conscious attention. This affective "charge," this rhythm of sensed need and the desire to overcome it, is Dewey's appropriation of Plato's Erōs. Thomas Alexander casts Dewey's Erōs broadly as humanity's aesthetic investment in our world—our collective effort "to transform a biophysical environment into a world filled with meaning" (Alexander 11). But Henning turns to the more familiar sense of Erōs attuned not to the world at... (shrink)

Recently, several philosophers have moved from a classical account of divine omniscience according to which God knows all truths to a restricted account of divine omniscience according to which God knows all knowable truths. But an important objection offered by Alexander Pruss threatens to show that if God knows all knowable truths, God must also know all truths. In this paper, I show that there is a way out of Pruss’s objection for the advocate of restricted omniscience if she (...) will define her view in terms of ways of knowing rather than in terms of logical possibilities. (shrink)

The thematic focus of this yearbook is concerned with the various relations of „art“ and „technology“. It seeks to interrogate and reflect their conceptual filiations, their complementarities and mutual stimulations, and contrasts and tensions. The very notion of the „work“ challenges us to explode or triangulate the dichotomy of art and technology. This connects to further problems in and for the philosophy of technology, such as the relation of arts and crafts, the question of Kitsch or camp in art and (...) technology, or the role of play as a basic modality of artful technical production. Finally, of course, comes design, packaging, marketing and the aesthetic effects of works. With contributions by Katrin Becker, Rainer Becker, Andreas Beinsteiner, Hans Blumenberg, Johanna Dombois, Daniel Martin Feige, Nico Formanek, Petra Gehring, Sebastian Hallensleben, Andreas Hauschke, Dawid Kasprowicz, Viet Anh Nguyen Duc, Regina Oehler, Anika Reineke, Dirk Rustemeyer, Bernhard Siebert, Larissa Ullmann, Claudia Wiesemann, Ryan Mitchell Wittingslow and Konstanze Wolter. (shrink)

I argue that Alexander Pruss's ontomystical arguments should not be endorsed without further argumentative support of their premises. My specific targets are his claims that (i) Śamkara's principle is true and (ii) the high mystics had phenomenal experiences of radical dependence and as of a maximally great being. Against (i), I urge a host of counterexamples. The only ways I can see for Pruss to respond to these counterexamples end up falsifying (ii). The key problem which leads to this (...) conclusion is that Pruss needs a criterion for distinguishing phenomenal experiences from non-phenomenal experiences according to which the experiences of the high mystics were phenomenal experiences while the experiences of those persons I discuss in my counterexamples to Śamkara's principle are not. There appears to be no such criterion. I suggest that the future of the ontomystical arguments lies in developing them as inductive rather than deductive arguments. (shrink)

Ryan Nichols - Thomas Reid on Logic, Rhetoric and the Fine Arts: Papers on the Culture of the Mind - Journal of the History of Philosophy 45:1 Journal of the History of Philosophy 45.1 165-166 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Reviewed by Ryan Nichols California State University, Fullerton Alexander Broadie, editor. Thomas Reid on Logic, Rhetoric and the Fine Arts: Papers on the Culture of the Mind. The Edinburgh Edition of Thomas Reid, Vol. 5. University Park, (...) PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005. Pp. xlix + 350. Cloth, $85.00. Following an enlightening introduction by Alexander Broadie, this volume collects Reid's manuscripts into three parts of about 100 pages each: the first about the culture of the mind, the second about Aristotle's logic, and the third about eloquence and the fine arts. The first part.. (shrink)

The problem : commerce and corruption -- Smith's defense of commercial society -- What is corruption? : political and psychological perspectives -- Smith on corruption : from the citizen to the human being -- The solution : moral philosophy -- Liberal individualism and virtue ethics -- Social science vs. moral philosophy -- Types of moral philosophy : natural jurisprudence vs. ethics -- Types of ethics : utilitarianism, deontology, and virtue ethics -- Virtue ethics : modern, ancient, and Smithean -- Interlude (...) : the what and the how of TMS VI -- The what : Sith's "practical system of morality" -- The how : rhetoric, audience, and the methods of practical ethics -- The how : the ascent of self-love in three stages -- Prudence or commercial virtue -- The challenge : from praise to prudence -- Educating the vain : fathers and sons -- Self-interest rightly understood -- The advantages and disadvantages of prudence -- Magnanimity or classical virtue -- The problems of prudence and the therapy of magnanimity -- Up from individualism : desert, praiseworthiness, conscience -- Modernity, antiquity, and magnanimity -- The dangers of magnanimity -- Beneficence or christian virtue -- Between care and caritas -- Benevolence and beneficence and the human telos -- The character and purposes of the wise and virtuous man -- Wisdom and virtue and Adam Smith's apology -- Epilogue: The "economy of greatness". (shrink)

Recent setbacks to international institutions and projects of global governance have been viewed as marking a resurgence of nation-state sovereignty. In fact, however, many of the major controversies and developments in contemporary international law and geopolitics concern the administration, autonomy, and internal hierarchy not of states, but of supra-state regions. The spatial logic of a world divided into such regions is best articulated in Carl Schmitt’s theory of the Großraum, which in various respects describes and explains key features of modern (...) world order. Taking regional systems as self-constituting political units characterized by internal forms of dominance and legitimation aids in identifying the operation of hegemony in contemporary international law and institutions. It also makes possible a reinterpretation of global constitutionalist discourse as a democratizing project that finds its most important expressions in counter-hegemonic movements within the various “great spaces” constituting today’s world. (shrink)

Engaging in environmental stewardship is critical for sustainability. Understanding individual differences and engagement is an important gap in present scholarship and addressing it is necessary to understand individual factors that relate to the types of activities engaged in, motivations and barriers to environmental stewardship. We surveyed 637 Canadian and American adults via Amazon Mechanical Turk, querying a range of demographic, psychological and environmental perceptions factors as well as motivations and barriers to stewardship activities. Respondents were ultimately grouped into Non-Stewards, Home-Oriented (...) Stewards and Community-Oriented Stewards. Few differences were found among these groups. However, Home-Oriented Stewards and Community-Oriented Stewards exhibited very different initial and ongoing motivations to engage in environmental stewardship. Accordingly, we identify stewardship motivations as a potential leverage point and as one of several promising avenues for future research related to enhancing engagement in environmental stewardship for the sustainability of the planet. (shrink)

Do the sciences aim to uncover the structure of nature, or are they ultimately a practical means of controlling our environment? In Instrumental Biology, or the Disunity of Science, Alexander Rosenberg argues that while physics and chemistry can develop laws that reveal the structure of natural phenomena, biology is fated to be a practical, instrumental discipline. Because of the complexity produced by natural selection, and because of the limits on human cognition, scientists are prevented from uncovering the basic structure (...) of biological phenomena. Consequently, biology and all of the disciplines that rest upon it--psychology and the other human sciences--must aim at most to provide practical tools for coping with the natural world rather than a complete theoretical understanding of it. (shrink)

Does the formation of delusions involve abnormal reasoning? According to the prominent ‘two-factor’ theory of delusions (e.g. Coltheart, 2007), the answer is yes. The second factor in this theory is supposed to affect a deluded individual's ability to evaluate candidates for belief. However, most published accounts of the two-factor theory have not said much about the nature of this second factor. In an effort to remedy this shortcoming, Coltheart, Menzies and Sutton (2010) recently put forward a Bayesian account of inference (...) in delusions. I outline some criticisms of this important account, and sketch an alternative account of delusional inference that, I argue, avoids these criticisms. Specifically, I argue that the second factor in delusion formation involves a systematic deviation from Bayesian updating, a deviation that may be characterized as a bias towards ‘explanatory adequacy’. I present a numerical model of this idea and show that my alternative account is broadly consistent with prominent prediction error models of delusion formation (e.g. Corlett, Murray et al., 2007). (shrink)

Highly mobile computing devices promise to improve quality of life, productivity, and performance. Increased situation awareness and reduced mental workload are two potential means by which this can be accomplished. However, it is difficult to measure these concepts in the ‘wild’. We employed an ultra-portable battery operated and wireless functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to non-invasively measure hemodynamic changes in the brain’s prefrontal cortex. Measurements were taken during navigation of a college campus with either a hand-held display, or an augmented (...) reality wearable display. Hemodynamic measures were also paired with secondary tasks of visual perception and auditory working memory to provide behavioral assessment of situation awareness and mental workload. Navigating with an augmented reality wearable display produced the least workload during both secondary tasks. The hemodynamics associated with errors were also different between the two devices. Errors with an augmented reality wearable display were associated with increased prefrontal activity and the opposite was observed for the hand-held display. This suggests that the cognitive mechanisms underlying errors between the two devices differ. These findings show fNIRS is a valuable tool for assessing new technology in ecologically valid settings and that head-mounted displays offer benefits with regards to mental workload while navigating, and potentially superior situation awareness with improved display design. (shrink)

This book explores the nature of meaning, primarily through readings of the work of Walter Benjamin and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Alexander Stern offers a critical analysis of Benjamin's philosophy of language, finding in it a common root with Wittgenstein's thought on language, and traces the historical foundation of both accounts of meaning to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German philosophy. Benjamin's theory of language is notoriously dense and obscure. In elucidating it, Stern emphasizes Benjamin's attempt to reorient the Kantian project around language-the (...) medium in which knowledge is expressed-and his concern with the logical understanding of language gaining credence in the work of Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege. The result is a radical model of the relationship between language, experience, and the world that sees "absolutely everything" as linguistic in a broadened sense and which sees the logical or designative capacities of language as grounded in an aesthetic foundation. Wittgenstein and Benjamin are read in the book as complementary to one another, sharing comparable critiques of empiricism and comparable accounts of concept use, linguistic understanding, and the relation between experience and language. Although this similarity breaks down over Wittgenstein's account of the "experience of meaning," which is subordinated to his account of meaning as use, Stern argues that Benjamin's theory of language can productively address some unresolved issues in Wittgenstein's understanding of meaning. (shrink)

We explore the prospects of a monist account of explanation for both non-causal explanations in science and pure mathematics. Our starting point is the counterfactual theory of explanation for explanations in science, as advocated in the recent literature on explanation. We argue that, despite the obvious differences between mathematical and scientific explanation, the CTE can be extended to cover both non-causal explanations in science and mathematical explanations. In particular, a successful application of the CTE to mathematical explanations requires us to (...) rely on counterpossibles. We conclude that the CTE is a promising candidate for a monist account of explanation in both science and mathematics. (shrink)

Philosophical discussions often involve appeals to verdicts about particular cases, sometimes actual, more often hypothetical, and usually with little or no substantive argument in their defense. Philosophers — on both sides of debates over the standing of this practice — have often called the basis for such appeals ‘intuitions’. But, what might such ‘intuitions’ be, such that they could legitimately serve these purposes? Answers vary, ranging from ‘thin’ conceptions that identify intuitions as merely instances of some fairly generic and epistemologically (...) uncontroversial category of mental states or episodes to ‘thick’ conceptions that add to this thin base certain semantic, phenomenological, etiological, or methodological conditions. As this chapter discusses, thick conceptions turn out to have their own methodological problems; some may even leave philosophers in the methodologically untenable position of being unable to determine when anyone is doing philosophy correctly. (shrink)

This collection examines the question of nonhuman animal agency by shifting emphasis from the human perspective toward that of other animals, exploring modes of ...

This article focuses on Auguste Comte’s understanding of the organism–environment relationship. It makes three key claims therein: Comte’s metaphysical position privileged materiality and relativized the intellect along two dimensions: one related to the biological organism, one related to the social environment; this twofold materiality confounds attempts to reduce cognition to either nature or nurture, so Comte’s position has interesting parallels to the field of ‘epigenetics’, which sees the social environment as a causative factor in biology; and although Comte ultimately diverged (...) from the ‘postgenomic’ view in crucial ways, he remains a forerunner of the trend towards viewing the social and biological as entangled. Tending to these dimensions challenges the view that Comte is notable from a classical standpoint but ignorable from a contemporary one. It consequently invites renewed attention to his theoretical system. (shrink)

A traditional interpretation holds that Kant's political theory simply constitutes an account of the constraints which reason places on the state's authority to regulate external action. Alexander Kaufman argues that this traditional interpretation succeeds neither as a faithful reading of Kant's texts nor as a plausible, philosophically sound reconstruction of a `Kantian' political theory. Rather, he argues that Kant's political theory articulates a positive conception of the state's role.

____Feminist Geneaologies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic__ ____Futures__ provides a feminist anaylsis of the questions of sexual and gender politics, economic and cultural marginality, and anti-racist and anti-colonial practices both in the "West" and in the "Third World." This collection, edited by Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, charts the underlying theoretical perspectives and organization practices of the different varieties of feminism that take on questions of colonialism, imperialism, and the repressive rule of colonial, post-colonial and advanced capitalist nation-states. It provides (...) a comparative, relational, historically grounded conception of feminist praxis that differs markedly from the liberal pluralist, multicultural understanding that sheapes some of the dominant version of Euro-American feminism. As a whole, the collection poses a unique challenge to the naturalization of gender based in the experiences, histories and practices of Euro-American women. (shrink)