Arthur I. Miller is a master at capturing the intersection of creativity and intelligence. He did it with Einstein and Picasso, and now he does it with Pauli and Jung. Their shared obsession with the number 137 provides a window into their genius. --Walter Isaacson.

Craig Nelson, the author of this unflaggingly engrossing book, comes from an impressive background in publishing, having been vice president and executive editor of Harper and Row, Hyperion, and Random House. In this respect, he reminds me of the better known Walter Isaacson, who was managing editor of Time magazine before turning his attention to writing biographies of Einstein, Steve Jobs, and Ben Franklin, and, most recently, a collective biography of the pioneers of the digital revolution. Although I (...) reach this conclusion on the basis of having read only one book by each, I would say that Isaacson’s oeuvre is more scholarly, Nelson’s more journalistic. A review in the New York Times of Nelson’s bestseller Rocket Men informs would-be readers that while the book “lacks the shapeliness and authority of some earlier lunar histories,…it ends up making an engaging contribution.” Comparing The Age of Radiance to the many similar histories of radioactivity and the making of the bomb that I .. (shrink)

While epiphenomenalism—i.e., the claim that the mental is a causally otiose byproduct of physical processes that does not itself cause anything—is hardly ever mentioned in philosophical discussions of free will, it has recently come to play a crucial role in the scientific attack on free will led by neuroscientists and psychologists. This paper is concerned with the connection between epiphenomenalism and the claim that free will is an illusion, in particular with the connection between epiphenomenalism and willusionism, i.e., with the (...) thesis that there is empirical evidence for a thoroughgoing skepticism with regard to free will that is based on the claim that mental states are epiphenomena. The paper discusses four arguments for willusionism that in some form or other appeal to epiphenomenalism and argues that three of them can be discarded relatively easily. The fourth one, based on Daniel Wegner’s theory of apparent mental causation and his claim that free will is an illusion because the feeling of conscious will is epiphenomenal with regard to the corresponding voluntary actions, is dealt with in more detail. The overall verdict is negative: there is no empirical evidence for any kind of epiphenomenalism that would warrant the claim that free will is an illusion. Whatever it is that makes free will the object of contention between neuroscience and philosophy, epiphenomenalism provides no reason to think that free will is an illusion. (shrink)

This book brings the idea of a public—defined in part as the quality of communication among strangers—back into focus. The benefits of doing this are many, but perhaps the most important are to adjust our understanding of what is good teaching and to widen our understanding of what counts as central to the educational process.

The last several years have seen vibrant debates among policymakers and scholars on whether to craft new human rights (or novel interpretations of existing ones) around neurotechnologies. These con...

Argument for the role of the human conscience in determining right and wrong, good and evil.

A translation of the main text for only published version J. G. Fichte's later WL. (Hitzig: Berlin 1810). It excludes Fichte's Preface.

The aim of this study was to investigate unconscious priming by the use of a spatial mirror-masking paradigm. Words and nonwords with no under-length letters are mirrored at their horizontal axis. The results are figures of geometric-like forms that contain letters in their upper part. In the three experiments reported in this study, a priming procedure used such mirrored words and nonwords as primes. Participants were ignorant of the nature of the construction of the stimuli. Perceptual reports of the participants (...) revealed that they did not realize that words were hidden in the primes. Nevertheless, they showed priming in all three experiments. Priming effects were replicated with prime–target SOAs of between 1 and 3 s. Functional dissociations were found between ignorant and informed participants. Informed groups showed perceptual and semantic priming, while ignorant groups showed only perceptual priming. (shrink)

How much is given in perceptual experience, and how much must be constructed? John Locke's answer to this question contains two prima facie incompatible strands. On the one hand, he claims that ideas of primary qualities come to us passively, through multiple senses: the idea of a sphere can be received either by sight or touch. On the other hand, Locke seemingly thinks that a faculty he calls “judgment” is needed to create visual ideas of three‐dimensional shapes. How can these (...) accounts be made consistent? The problem comes to a head in the discussion of Molyneux's problem: can a person born blind and then made to see identify a sphere and a cube, when he had only touched them in the past? Locke's answer is no, but, as George Berkeley points out, it is hard to see why: if the ideas of shapes come to us through sight as well as touch, nothing should stop Molyneux man from instantly recognizing sphere and cube. Pace much of the existing literature, I argue that although Locke does think we receive visual ideas of primary qualities, the faculty of judgment is required to “inflate” those ideas into three dimensions and to correct for other perspectival distortions. I then show how this answer is consistent with the rest of his theory of perception. (shrink)

We here attempt to address certain criticisms of the philosophical import of the so-called Brazilian approach to paraconsistency by providing some epistemic elucidations of the whole enterprise of the logics of formal inconsistency. In the course of this discussion, we substantiate the view that difficulties in reasoning under contradictions in both the Buddhist and the Aristotelian traditions can be accommodated within the precepts of the Brazilian school of paraconsistency.

Los conceptos de reconocimiento y de lucha por el reconocimiento han jugado un papel central en la discusión socio-filosófica reciente, particularmente en referemcia a Hegel. No obstante se ha tenido poco en cuenta que Hegel ha elaborado estos conceptos en sus distintas determinaciones, pero que a la vez los ha relativizado conscientemente desde el punto de vista histórico: los procesos de reconocimiento y de lucha por el reconocimiento –en su pleno sentido filosófico- tienen lugar antes de su entrada en la (...) sociedad civil y también antes de su entrada en la comunidad internacional. „Reconocimiento“ es pues igualmente un concepto pre-social. Y por eso Hegel lo formula drásticamente: el reconocimiento es algo „para esclavos“; en las sociedades estatales desarrolladas y en las relaciones internacionales la lucha por el reconocimiento es algo que ya existe, más que algo que puede llegar a conseguirse. (shrink)

This book develops a bold poetics based on the author's critical reexamination of the views of Plato.

This chapter contains sections titled: At Home in the Commonplace Re‐Thinking Proto‐Modernism: Dickinson Re‐Thinking High Modernism: Stevens.

The paper offers a discussion of Philip Merlan's contributions (in "From Platonism to Neoplatonism, The Hague 1960, e in some papers of his, now included in his "Kleine Philosophische Schriften", Hildesheim 1976) to the understanding of Aristotle's metaphysics, with particular reference to the science of being qua being.

Fundamental aspects of human use of the environment can be explained by game theory. Game theory explains aggregate behaviour of the human species driven by perceived costs and benefits. In the ‘game’ of global environmental protection and conservation, the stakes are the living conditions of all species including the human race, and the playing field is our planet. The question is can we control humanity's hitherto endless appetite for resources before we irreparably harm the global ecosystem and cause extinction of (...) even more species? The central problem is that some proportion of the individuals or groups will behave selfishly. The inducement for using more than a fair share, or ‘cheating’, increases as that resource becomes rarer, thus the benefits of cheating increase. In addition, the total number of people is increasing, so the proportion of cheaters must decrease to even keep total resource use constant. Cost benefit analysis of the effect of regulation and incentives on potential cheaters may provide a rational approach to controlling environmental problems. While it is debatable that environmental values are constant across cultures, communal use of resources seems to follow global rules. Cooperative use and punishment of those who use more than their share appear to be ubiquitous in human societies. Schemes for controlling human impact on the global environment must take into consideration basic behaviours including development of social norms and the positive feedback created because resources become more valuable with increasing rarity leading to more incentive for consumption. (shrink)