Late in 1990, the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions at Illinois Institute of Technology (lIT) received a grant of more than $200,000 from the National Science Foundation to try a campus-wide approach to integrating professional ethics into its technical curriculum.! Enough has now been accomplished to draw some tentative conclusions. I am the grant's principal investigator. In this paper, I shall describe what we at lIT did, what we learned, and what others, especially philosophers, can learn (...) from us. We set out to develop an approach that others could profitably adopt. I believe that we succeeded. (shrink)

It is widely recognized that police performance may be hindered by psychophysiological state changes during acute stress. To address the need for awareness and control of these physiological changes, police academies in many countries have implemented Heart-Rate Variability biofeedback training. Despite these trainings now being widely delivered in classroom setups, they typically lack the arousing action context needed for successful transfer to the operational field, where officers must apply learned skills, particularly when stress levels rise. The study presented here aimed (...) to address this gap by training physiological control skills in an arousing decision-making context. We developed a Virtual-Reality breathing-based biofeedback training in which police officers perform deep and slow diaphragmatic breathing in an engaging game-like action context. This VR game consisted of a selective shoot/don’t shoot game designed to assess response inhibition, an impaired capacity in high arousal situations. Biofeedback was provided based on adherence to a slow breathing pace: the slower and deeper the breathing, the less constrained peripheral vision became, facilitating accurate responses to the in-game demands. A total of nine male police trainers completed 10 sessions over a 4-week period as part of a single-case experimental ABAB study-design. Results showed that eight out of nine participants showed improved breathing control in action, with a positive effect on breathing-induced low frequency HRV, while also improving their in-game behavioral performance. Critically, the breathing-based skill learning transferred to subsequent sessions in which biofeedback was not presented. Importantly, all participants remained highly engaged throughout the training. Altogether, our study showed that our VR environment can be used to train breathing regulation in an arousing and active decision-making context. (shrink)

What are words? What makes two token words tokens of the same word-type? Are words abstract entities, or are they (merely) collections of tokens? The ontology of words tries to provide answers to these, and related questions. This article provides an overview of some of the most prominent views proposed in the literature, with a particular focus on the debate between type-realist, nominalist, and eliminativist ontologies of words.

"Der vorliegende Band hebt sich aus der wachsenden Zahl der Publikationen zur Spatantike und namentlich zur spatantiken Philosophie schon durch die Originalitat des behandelten Themas hervor, das eine Forschungsluecke schlieat. Die Beitrage von Wissenschaftlern verschiedener europaischer Nationen, die als Spezialisten fuer die Spatantike gelten konnen, bieten sowohl einzeln als auch in der Zusammenstellung einen echten Forschungsfortschritt." Plekos "a a valuable contribution. The volume also shows, as the product of predominantly young scholars, that the future of scholarship in the area of (...) ancient and Patristic philosophy is in good hands." Vigiliae Chritianae Inhalt: S. Follinger: Philosophische Theorien in Arnobius' apologetischer Argumentation J. Althoff: Zur Epikurrezeption bei Laktanz C. Riedweg: Philosophische Argumentationsstrukturen in Julians Contra Galilaeos D. J. O'Meara: Epicurus Neoplatonicus R. Thiel: Stoische Ethik im neuplatonischen System (Simplikios' Kommentar zu Epiktets Enchiridion) M. Erler: Hellenistische Philosophie im Platonismus der Spatantike M. Bettetini: Ai limiti della materia, tra neoplatonismo e cristianesimo K. Schlapbach: Ciceronisches und Neuplatonisches in den Proomien von Augustin, Contra Academicos 1 und 2 S. Harwardt: Die Gluecksfrage der Stoa in Augustins De beata vita C. Horn: Augustinus ueber Tugend, Moralitat und das hochste Gut T. Fuhrer: Zum wahrnehmungstheoretischen Hintergrund von Augustins Glaubensbegriff C. Oser-Grote: Virtus Romana und Virtus Christiana - ein romischer Wertbegriff bei Prudentius J. Opsomer / C. Steel: Proclus' Doctrine on the Origin of Evil K. Pollmann: Fiktionalitat in der Philosophie des Hellenismus und in der Spatantike U. Eigler: Strukturen und Voraussetzungen zum Erhalt von philosophischem Wissen in der Spatantike Stellenregister. (shrink)

Die technisierte »Urszene« im Rahmen medizinisch assistierter Reproduktion verlangt allen Familienmitgliedern herausfordernde psychische Integrationsleistungen ab. Seitens der Eltern ist eine bewusste Auseinandersetzung mit den Belastungen durch Infertilitätsdiagnose und Kinderwunschbehandlung sowie mit den Erwartungen in Bezug auf das Kind notwendig; sie ermöglicht ihnen einen offenen Umgang mit den Besonderheiten der Entstehung ihres Kindes. Für Kinder besteht die Herausforderung in der realen und phantasmatischen Auseinandersetzung mit allen an ihrer Entstehung Beteiligten. Durch die Verwendung von »Fremdgameten« oder die Auslagerung der Schwangerschaft in eine (...) »Tragemutter« bekommt der »Familienroman« eine reale Grundlage. Sie erfordert eine Anerkennung multipler Elternschaft. Anonyme Gametenspenden stellen Leerstellen in der Biographie dar und erschweren die Identitätsfindung. Psychoanalytisches Verstehen, Beraten und Forschen kann, wie die Autorin zeigen möchte, die notwendigen Integrationsprozesse in Zeiten einer rapiden Entwicklung im Bereich der Reproduktionsmedizin unterstützen. (shrink)

Summary Fabricius ab Aquapendente commissioned coloured paintings of the reproductive parts and foetuses of a vast spectrum of animals. His published works on generation feature corresponding engravings. In contrast, his student William Harvey questioned the accuracy and usefulness of anatomical illustrations and used alternative approaches to represent his observations. I discuss these anatomists' criteria for selecting specimens, their techniques of investigation, and how these decisions affected their observations and representations of animal generation. I consider what each medium—paintings, intaglios, written accounts—discloses (...) or highlights and also their respective limitations. My study of Fabricius's colour plates also reveals the possibility that they served as inspiration for the first colour anatomical prints: a copy of the illustrations of foetuses is bound with drafts of Aselli's plates, and I suggest a possible link between the colour images. (shrink)

In La nova scientia , Niccolò Tartaglia analyses trajectories of cannonballs by means of different forms of reasoning, including ‘physical and geometrical reasoning’, ‘demonstrative geometrical reasoning’, ‘Archimedean reasoning’, and ‘algebraic reasoning’. I consider what he understood by each of these methods and how he used them to render the quick succession of a projectile's positions into a single entity that he could explore and explain. I argue that our understanding of his methods and style is greatly enriched by considering the (...) abacus tradition in which he worked. As a maestro d'abaco in sixteenth-century Venice he had access to a great variety of mathematical and natural-philosophical works. This paper traces how Tartaglia drew elements from a vast spectrum of sources and combined them in an innovative manner. I examine his use of algebra and geometry, consider what he knew about Archimedes and suggest a reading of his enigmatic phrase ‘Archimedean reasoning’, which has eluded satisfactory interpretation. (shrink)

Philosopher's zombies are hypothetical beings behaviorally, functionally, and perhaps even physically indistinguishable from normal humans, but who lack our consciousness. Many people seem to be convinced that such zombies are a real conceptual possibility, and that this bare possibility entails that understanding human consciousness must remain forever beyond the reach of science. However, the conceptual entailments of zombiehood have not been sufficiently examined. This brief article shows that any way of understanding the behavior of zombies that does in fact support (...) the suggested entailment, leads to contradictions and absurdities. Zombies are _not_ conceptually possible. (shrink)

The observations which are compatible with temporal origins of the earth, the solar system and the universe are briefly mentioned, prior to examining the assumptions implicit in the hypothesis of temporal origin which the observations were designed to test. No decisive observation enables us to distinguish between theories of a temporal origin of the universe and the theories of infinite time (continuous creation); the aspects of the galaxies offer no test of either theory without invoking additional assumptions. Curvature of time (...) is rejected as being a complication at present scientifically unnecessary, as is also the hypothesis of continuous creation. The view maintained is that the temporal theory based on linear extrapolation is acceptable until it be disproved. Various new techniques which may be useful in attempting to refute this theory are discussed. (shrink)

It has been a common assumption that words are substances that instantiate or have properties. In this paper, I question the assumption that our ontology of words requires posting substances by outlining a bundle theory of words, wherein words are bundles of various sorts of properties (such as semantic, phonetic, orthographic, and grammatical properties). I argue that this view can better account for certain phenomena than substance theories, is ontologically more parsimonious, and coheres with claims in linguistics.

Let be a class of models with a notion of ‘strong’ submodel and of canonically prime model over an increasing chain. We show under appropriate set-theoretic hypotheses that if K is not smooth , then K has many models in certain cardinalities. On the other hand, if K is smooth, we show that in reasonable cardinalities K has a unique homogeneous-universal model. In this situation we introduce the notion of type and prove the equivalence of saturated with homogeneous-universal.

ABSTRACT The idea that two words can be instances of the same word is a central intuition in our conception of language. This fact underlies many of the claims that we make about how we communicate, and how we understand each other. Given this, irrespective of what we think words are, it is common to think that any putative ontology of words, must be able to explain this feature of language. That is, we need to provide criteria of identity for (...) word-types which allow us to individuate words such that it can be the case that two particular word-instances are instances of the same word-type. One solution, recently further developed by Irmak, holds that words are individuated by their history. In this paper, I argue that this view either fails to account for our intuitions about word identity, or is too vague to be a plausible answer to the problem of word individuation. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to show that the Elementary Process Theory (EPT) agrees with the knowledge of the physical world obtained from the successful predictions of Special Relativity (SR). For that matter, a recently developed method is applied: a categorical model of the EPT that incorporates SR is fully specified. Ultimate constituents of the universe of the EPT are modeled as point-particles, gamma-rays, or time-like strings, all represented by integrable hyperreal functions on Minkowski space. This proves that the (...) EPT agrees with SR. -/- Edit: this preprint differs significantly from the published chapter. (shrink)

It has been widely argued that words are analogous to species such that words, like species, are natural kinds. In this paper, I consider the metaphysics of word-kinds. After arguing against an essentialist approach, I argue that word-kinds are homeostatic property clusters, in line with the dominant approach to other biological and psychological kinds.

The role of probability is one of the most contested issues in the interpretation of contemporary physics. In this paper, I’ll be reevaluating some widely held assumptions about where and how probabilities arise. Larry Sklar voices the conventional wisdom about probability in classical physics in a piece in the Stanford Online Encyclopedia of Philosophy, when he writes that “Statistical mechanics was the first foundational physical theory in which probabilistic concepts and probabilistic explanation played a fundamental role.” And the conventional wisdom (...) about quantum probabilities is that they are basic, not reducible to the types of probabilities we see in statistical mechanics. In the first section of this paper, I’ll argue that in fact classical physics was steeped in probability long before statistical mechanics came on the scene, specifically, that an objective measure over phase space is an indispensable component of any informative physical theory. In the next section, I’ll argue that this objective measure is the fundamental form of physical probability and that quantum probabilities can be defined in terms of it. In the last, I’ll raise some questions about the metaphysical status of the fundamental measure. (shrink)

The natural name theory, recently discussed by Johnson (2018), is proposed as an explanation of pure quotation where the quoted term(s) refers to a linguistic object such as in the sentence ‘In the above, ‘bank’ is ambiguous’. After outlining the theory, I raise a problem for the natural name theory. I argue that positing a resemblance relation between the name and the linguistic object it names does not allow us to rule out cases where the natural name fails to resemble (...) the linguistic object it names. I argue that to avoid this problem, we can combine the natural name theory with a type-realist metaphysics of language, and hold that the name is natural because the name is an instance of the kind that it names. I conclude by reflecting on the importance of the metaphysics of language for questions in the philosophy of language. (shrink)