What fundamental aim should be seen as animating egalitarian views of distributive justice? I want to challenge a certain answer to this question: namely, that the basic (...) aim of egalitarianism is to neutralize the effects of luck on the distribution of goods in society. I shall also sketch part of a different answer, which I think does a better job of supporting egalitarianism. My arguments here are not presented in a way that is intended to win over those who have no sympathy with egalitarianism to begin with; they move within the compass of egalitarian concern. Moreover, it is difficult, for familiar reasons, to separate the question of what the basic aim of egalitarianism is from the question of what it should be. If one aim does a better job of supporting egalitarian results than another, then, even if few egalitarians recognize this, it may be regarded as a stronger candidate for what the basic aim of egalitarianism is. As with other essentially contested concepts, a new conception does not change the subject. (shrink)

Many religious people are alarmed about features of the current age - violence in the media, a pervasive hedonism, a marginalization of religion, and widespread abortion. These concerns (...) class='Hi'> influence politics, but just as there should be a separation between church and state, so should there be a balance between religious commitments and secular arguments calling for social reforms. Robert Audi offers a principle of secular rationale, which does not exclude religious grounds for action but which rules out restricting freedom except on grounds that any rational citizen would accept. The book describes the essential commitments of free democracy, explains how religious and secular moral considerations can be integrated to facilitate co-operation in a world of religious pluralism, and proposes ideals of civic virtue that express the mutual respect on which democracy depends. Audi offers a balanced and sophisticated treatment of the relations between religion and politics in a modern, secular society. (shrink)

This work is intended as an introduction to the study of Soviet psy chology. In it we have tried to present the main lines of Soviet psycho (...) logical theory, in particular, the philosophical principles on which that theory is founded. There are surprisingly few books in English on Soviet psychology, or, indeed, in any Western European language. The works that exist usually take the form of symposia or are collections of articles translated from Soviet periodicals. The most important of these are Psychology in the Soviet Union (ed. by Brian Simon), Recent Soviet Psychology (ed. by Neil O'Connor) and Soviet Psychology, A Symposium (ed. by Ralf Winn). Raymond Bauer has also edited an interesting symposium entitled Some Views on Soviet Psychology. Only two systematic studies of Soviet psychology have been published to date: Joseph Wortis' Soviet Psychiatry and Raymond Bauer's The New Man in Soviet Psychology. Both are valuable introductions to Soviet psychology; Bauer's book, in particular, gives a good account of the debates on psychological theory in the Soviet Union in the nineteen twenties and -thirties. Both, however, are somewhat out of date. There are also a number of interesting articles written by Ivan D. London and Gregory Razran, which give general surveys of particular periods or aspects of Soviet psychology. These have been listed in the bibliography. (shrink)

This volume brings together a collection of essays on the history and philosophy of probability and statistics by one of the eminent scholars in these subjects. Written (...) over the last fifteen years, they fall into three broad categories. The first deals with the use of symmetry arguments in inductive probability, in particular, their use in deriving rules of succession. The second group deals with four outstanding individuals who made lasting contributions to probability and statistics in very different ways: Frank Ramsey, R. A. Fisher, Alan Turing, and Abraham de Moivre. The last group of essays deals with the problem of 'predicting the unpredictable' - making predictions when the range of possible outcomes is unknown in advance. The essays weave together the history and philosophy of these subjects and document the fascination that they have exercised for more than three centuries. (shrink)

Among various cases that equally admit of evidentialist reasoning, the supposedly evidentialist solution has varying degrees of intuitive attractiveness. I suggest that cooperative reasoning may account for (...) the appeal of apparently evidentialist behavior in the cases in which it is intuitively attractive, while the inapplicability of cooperative reasoning may account for the unattractiveness of evidentialist behaviour in other cases. A collective causal power with respect to agreed outcomes, not evidentialist reasoning, makes cooperation attractive in the Prisoners' Dilemma. And a natural though unwarranted assumption of such a power may account for the intuitive appeal of the one-box response in Newcomb's Problem. (shrink)

This text provides a long-overdue pedagogical commentary on Cicero's "Pro L. Muerna Oratio".

Walter Freeman's theory of nonlinear neurodynamics has had a major impact on brain dynamics in modern cognitive neuroscience. Steven Bressler's theory of neurocognitive networks follows from (...) class='Hi'> Freeman's work, and his empirical evidence for the coordination of cortical areas by phase-coupled beta rhythms in large-scale cognitive brain networks supports Freeman's ideas on nonlinear brain dynamics. Bressler's work, taking Freeman's concepts into the realm of cognitive neurodynamics, also supports Scott Kelso's theory of metastability in coordination dynamics. The aims of the present paper are threefold: 1) to explore relevant concepts in Freeman's theoretical framework, 2) unify it and provide empirical support for it, and 3) explore its import for the study of consciousness. We take as our point of departure Bressler and Kelso's 2016 publication on cortical coordination dynamics and the Freeman-Kelso dialogue noted in the literature on this topic. In our view, Freeman's conceptual framework has great explanatory power. Its grounding in a dynamical systems approach to the study of brain function, and its incorporation of embodiment, make it relevant to the study of consciousness. Thus, with Freeman, we argue that the scientific understanding of consciousness must move beyond notions of computationalism and mental representations, to employ concepts of nonlinear brain dynamics and embodiment. (shrink)

Ordo V comprises works on religious instruction. This first volume of Ordo V in the Amsterdam edition of the Latin texts of Erasmus offers one of Erasmus’ (...) earliest writings De contemptu mundi and other theological works, including the Explanation on the Apostles’ Creed , a book on prayer and a work on the Christian’s preparation on death. (shrink)

This paper suggests that the imbrication of user-friendly software and the posthuman has increasingly been revealed as an intrinsically arborescent relationship, one premised upon the striation (...) class='Hi'>of personal information through different forms of software media and allowing for unprecedented avenues of control and subjective manipulation. My analysis begins with a conceptualisation of user-friendliness, tracing its development as the majoritarian style of software design. In assessing the effects of this process of subjective imbrication with arborescent software technology, it is suggested that one effect of the pathological asignification of instrumentality in the representation of software is the genesis of a topological space which allows for a capacity for control over the subjective becoming of others through control over digitally mediated perception. To illustrate this point, the revelations concerning Cambridge Analytica's use of targeted advertisements on Facebook to affect voting preferences during the 2016 American presidential election are examined as an example of the quotidian domination which is characteristic of the subjective condition of arbormosis. This analysis can be applied to issues of gender, technology, and modes of subjective control. (shrink)

"Seymon Lyudvigovich Frank, the author of the volume here made available for the first time in English translation, was one of the leading Russian philosophers of this (...) century; some authorities consider him the most outstanding Russian philosopher of any age...._ " _Man's Soul__ is a book which perfectly exemplifies the generous conception of the mission and competence of philosophy characteristic of Frank and the other members of the Russian metaphysical movement. Frank's stated aim in the treatise is to reclaim for philosophy a field of investigation which, from the time of Plato and Aristotle to that of the Russian Idealists, philosophers had viewed as properly theirs, but which, since the mid-nineteenth century, they had allowed to fall into almost complete neglect: the study of the nature of the human soul...._ "The moral message of _Man's Soul__ is well summed up by its epigraph, quoted from St. Augustine: 'Let man first of all return to his own self, so that once he has, as it were, stepped therein, he may rise from thence and be elevated to God.'" -- from the foreword by Philip J. Swoboda. (shrink)