Are risk preferences stable over time? To address this question we elicit risk preferences from the same pool of subjects at two different moments in time. To interpret the results, we use a Fechner stochastic choice model in which the revealed preference of individuals is governed by some underlying preference, together with a random error. We take cumulative prospect theory as the underlying preference model (Kahneman and Tversky, Econometrica 47:263–292, 1979; Tversky and Kahneman, Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 5:297–323, 1992). (...) We observe that the aggregate pattern of preferences is very similar in both sessions, and it matches the results reported in the literature. Most subjects are risk averse for gains, and risk seeking for losses. However, the subjects that jointly agree with the reflection effect of prospect theory are around 50%. The percentage of individuals that change their responses across sessions is quite high, 63%. Estimating the stochastic choice model we find that 72% of the subjects have an underlying preference which agrees with the reflection effect of prospect theory. The remaining 28% are mainly classified as risk averse for both gains and losses. The results reinforce the empirical validity of the reflection effect. Deviations from the reflection effect can be attributed to noise, as well as to the existence of a fraction of risk averse subjects. (shrink)

Linking the process of rational decision making to emotions, an award-winning scientist who has done extensive research with brain-damaged patients notes the dependence of thought processes on feelings and the body's survival-oriented regulators. 50,000 first printing.

Columbia University Press's multivolume _Prison Notebooks_ is the only complete critical edition of Antonio Gramsci's seminal writings in English. Based on the authoritative Italian edition of Gramsci's work, _Quaderni del Carcere_, this comprehensive translation presents the intellectual as he ought to be read and understood, with critical notes that clarify Gramsci's history, culture, and sources; an index of names; and a contextualization of the thinker's ideas against his earlier writings and letters. This set includes notebooks 1 through 8 with (...) all attendant notes and materials and is an indispensible resource for scholars in the humanities and social sciences. (shrink)

Il sansimonismo, sistema culturale della civiltà tecnologica, di A. Cattabiani.--Nota dell'Editore.--Introduzione.--Beniamino Constant.--I San-Simoniani.--Appendice: L'utopismo di Carlo Fourier.

Scientists are rapidly mapping the chemical and physical pathways that constitute biological systems, making the complexity of processes such as inheritance, development, evolution, and even the origin of life increasingly tractable. Through genetics and neuroscience, biological understanding is now being extended deeply into the human sciences and has begun to transform our understanding of behavior, mind, culture, and values. The idea of a science-driven unity of knowledge has reemerged in several forms in both reductionist and nonreductionist frameworks. This volume examines (...) some of the extraordinary empirical discoveries that have caused a revival of this idea and presents theories from thinkers in a variety of disciplines, including E. O. Wilson, Eric Kandel, and Elaine Scarry. (shrink)

The publication of this book is an event in the making. All over the world scientists, psychologists, and philosophers are waiting to read Antonio Damasio's new theory of the nature of consciousness and the construction of the self. A renowned and revered scientist and clinician, Damasio has spent decades following amnesiacs down hospital corridors, waiting for comatose patients to awaken, and devising ingenious research using PET scans to piece together the great puzzle of consciousness. In his bestselling Descartes' Error, (...) Damasio revealed the critical importance of emotion in the making of reason. Building on this foundation, he now shows how consciousness is created. Consciousness is the feeling of what happens-our mind noticing the body's reaction to the world and responding to that experience. Without our bodies there can be no consciousness, which is at heart a mechanism for survival that engages body, emotion, and mind in the glorious spiral of human life. A hymn to the possibilities of human existence, a magnificent work of ingenious science, a gorgeously written book, The Feeling of What Happens is already being hailed as a classic. (shrink)

This article addresses an open problem in the area of cognitive systems and architectures: namely the problem of handling (in terms of processing and reasoning capabilities) complex knowledge structures that can be at least plausibly comparable, both in terms of size and of typology of the encoded information, to the knowledge that humans process daily for executing everyday activities. Handling a huge amount of knowledge, and selectively retrieve it according to the needs emerging in different situational scenarios, is an important (...) aspect of human intelligence. For this task, in fact, humans adopt a wide range of heuristics (Gigerenzer & Todd) due to their “bounded rationality” (Simon, 1957). In this perspective, one of the requirements that should be considered for the design, the realization and the evaluation of intelligent cognitively-inspired systems should be rep- resented by their ability of heuristically identify and retrieve, from the general knowledge stored in their artificial Long Term Memory (LTM), that one which is synthetically and contextually relevant. This requirement, however, is often neglected. Currently, artificial cognitive systems and architectures are not able, de facto, to deal with complex knowledge structures that can be even slightly comparable to the knowledge heuris- tically managed by humans. In this paper I will argue that this is not only a technological problem but also an epistemological one and I will briefly sketch a proposal for a possible solution. (shrink)

Antonio Gramsci (1891--1937) was one of the most original political thinkers in Western Marxism and an exceptional intellectual. Arrested and imprisoned by the Italian Fascist regime in 1926, Gramsci died before fully regaining his freedom, yet he wrote extensive letters while incarcerated, rich with insight into the physical and psychological tortures of prison. In meticulous detail, Gramsci records how political prisoners, himself included, contend with the fear of illness and death and the rules and regulations that threaten to efface (...) their individuality. Forming an incomparable link between Gramsci's intellectual passion and his emotional vulnerability, _Letters from Prison_ shows a man reconstructing his life while being separated from it, struggling to recapture the primary relationships that once defined his identity. Frank Rosengarten divides more than four hundred Gramsci letters into two companion volumes, complete with a chronology of the thinker's crucial life experiences, biographical notes on his correspondents, and a bibliography of works cited in his letters. (shrink)

Antonio Negri, one of the world's leading scholars on Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) and his contemporary legacy, offers a straightforward explanation of the philosopher's elaborate arguments and a persuasive case for his ongoing relevance. Responding to a resurgent interest in Spinoza's thought and its potential application to contemporary global issues, Negri demonstrates the thinker's special value to politics, philosophy, and related disciplines. Negri's work is both a return to and an advancement of his initial affirmation of Spinozian thought in _The (...) Savage Anomaly_. He further defends his understanding of the philosopher as a proto-postmodernist, or a thinker who is just now, with the advent of the postmodern, becoming contemporary. Negri also connects Spinoza's theories to recent trends in political philosophy, particularly the reengagement with Carl Schmitt's "political theology," and the history of philosophy, including the argument that Spinoza belongs to a "radical enlightenment." By positioning Spinoza as a contemporary revolutionary intellectual, Negri addresses and effectively defeats twentieth-century critiques of the thinker waged by Jacques Derrida, Alain Badiou, and Giorgio Agamben. (shrink)

What kind of relationship subsists between an "organism" and a "monas dominans"? In some texts, Leibniz claims that the soul "actuat" the organic body and in the late debate with Stahl he describes the "monas dominans" as a "monas actuatrix". But how does the monas "actualize" the organic body? And what is implied by Leibniz's use of the word "agere" to describe this? Is it also possibile to describe this event in terms of "whole/part" relationship? The aim of this paper (...) is to sketch out the status quaestionis of the topic by discussing some of the most recent studies. More specifically to propose an interpretation of the "monas dominans" as the "nota distinguens" of the whole organism. (shrink)

v. 1. Introducción a la teología moral. La conciencia moral -- v. 2. La violencia, el amor y la sexualidad -- v. 3. Etica y religión.

This selection of papers is concerned with the history of linguistics in Spain, dealing with the evolution of linguistic ideas from the Middle Ages and the European context of the linguistic debates in Spain to the 20th century, concluding with Malkiel's appraisal of Ramón Menéndez Pidal (1869-1968). The volume includes papers on Antonio Nebrija and Sanctius, probably the best-known grammarians of the Iberian peninsula, but - as the other papers suggest - there is much more to be known about (...) the Spanish linguistic traditions. The papers in this volume were previously published in Historiographia Linguistica XI:1/2 (1984). (shrink)

_Factory of Strategy_ is the last of Antonio Negri's major political works to be translated into English. Rigorous and accessible, it is both a systematic inquiry into the development of Lenin's thought and an encapsulation of a critical shift in Negri's theoretical trajectory. Lenin is the only prominent politician of the modern era to seriously question the "withering away" and "extinction" of the state, and like Marx, he recognized the link between capitalism and modern sovereignty and the need to (...) destroy capitalism and reconfigure the state. Negri refrains from portraying Lenin as a ferocious dictator enforcing the proletariat's reappropriation of wealth, nor does he depict him as a mere military tool of a vanguard opposed to the Ancien Régime. Negri instead champions Leninism's ability to adapt to different working-class configurations in Russia, China, Latin America, and elsewhere. He argues that Lenin developed a new political figuration in and beyond modernity and an effective organization capable of absorbing different historical conditions. He ultimately urges readers to recognize the universal application of Leninism today and its potential to institutionally--not anarchically--dismantle centralized power. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Damasio, an eminent neuroscientist explores the science of human emotion and what the great Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza can teach of how and why we feel. Damasio shows how joy and sorrow, those most defining of human feelings, are in fact the cornerstones of our survival and culture.

Este artículo se ocupa del impacto que el uso de los sistemas predictivos automatizables tiene, y puede tener en un futuro inmediato, en la actividad decisional. Para abordar esta cuestión se han elegido tres aspectos que se consideran centrales: la inclusión de elementos evaluativos en los sistemas predictivos, el estatus normativo de los sistemas predictivos utilizados, y, en tercer lugar, la responsabilidad por la configuración formal y sustantiva del proceso decisional.

In _Time’s Causal Power_, Antonio Vargas explains how Proclus (412-485 C.E.) developed the unique theory that time is a cause and a god, the world’s first unmoved mover by addressing Aristotle’s criticisms of Plato’s claim that time is a change.

Partindo das figuras do sábio e do ignorante tal como aparecem na obra de Espinosa, busca-se situá-las, na estratégia de exposição de Espinosa, como modelos ou imagens cujo conceito remete à prática. Com isso, procura-se mostrar o lugar central ocupado pelos conceitos de regra de vida e emenda da vida na concepção espinosana de liberdade.

O artigo procura mostrar, com base no parágrafo 17 do Tratado da Emenda do Intelecto, a centralidade do conceito de vulgo para a interpretação da obra de Espinosa. Para tanto, discute-se a relação entre imagens e conceitos na teoria do conhecimento em Espinosa, bem como a relação entre linguagem e filosofia.