The definition of life has been one of the greatest philosophical questions of mankind. In recent years, this debate had intensified due to the discovery of naturally occurring biological entities, such as viruses and prions, which lie at the boundary of what we consider as living. “Are viruses alive?” has turned out to be the largest vote swinging debate in an introductory course to microbiology [1], with 79% of the students changing their opinions before and after the debate compared to (...) genetic engineering (56% opinion swing) and childhood immunization (25% opinion swing). Using boundary cases as classification criteria, also known as the decision boundary or decision surface, had been well established [2]. (shrink)

here has been a large number of studies in neurological sciences on how human brain works, especially in reading and parallel information processing. So I think this statement is really sweeping. Perhaps it is better to knowledge the abilities of human brains and to comment on the limitations of the human brain. The book “Adapt” by Tim Hartford advocates micro-step changes. An important aspect in this area is to understand the processes involved behind the scenes so that it gives us (...) a better formulation of the creativity algorithms involved. I will try to put in some pointers on the depths to which higher level intelligence has been simulated by AI in the past years. Some of the higher level intelligence mechanisms such as creativity, dreams and logical thinking have been implemented in machines in certain ways. However, they are still not implemented in the way humans do the same. The exact mechanism in which these intelligence mechanisms are used by human brains is still way ahead of that done by computers. However, we now look at other aspects in them as well as other functions which might be explored in the years ahead in AI. (shrink)

Martin Buber: The Life of Dialogue , the first study in any language to provide a complete overview of Buber's thought, remains the definitive guide to the full range of his work and the starting point for all modern Buber scholarship. As well as summarizing Buber's early intellectual development and attitudes - his mysticism, his youthful existentialism, his philosophy of Judaism and religious socialism - it focuses on the two crucial issues of his mature thought: his dialogic or I-Thou philosophy, (...) and his probing of the nature and redemption of evil. As a sensitive, intuitive and perennially fascinating account of one of the twentieth century's great spiritual teachers, and as an influential classic in its own right, Martin Buber: The Life of Dialogue reveals the implications of Buber's thought for theory of knowledge, education, philosophy, myth, history and Judaic and Christian belief. This fully revised and expanded 4th edition includes a new preface from the author, an expanded bibliography incorporating new Buber scholarship, and two new appendices in the form of essays on Buber's influence on Emmanuel Levinas and Mikhail Bakhtin. (shrink)

First published in 1945, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s monumental _Phénoménologie de la perception _signalled the arrival of a major new philosophical and intellectual voice in post-war Europe. Breaking with the prevailing picture of existentialism and phenomenology at the time, it has become one of the landmark works of twentieth-century thought. This new translation, the first for over fifty years, makes this classic work of philosophy available to a new generation of readers. _Phenomenology of Perception _stands in the great phenomenological tradition of (...) Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre. Yet Merleau-Ponty’s contribution is decisive, as he brings this tradition and other philosophical predecessors, particularly Descartes and Kant, to confront a neglected dimension of our experience: the lived body and the phenomenal world. Charting a bold course between the reductionism of science on the one hand and "intellectualism" on the other, Merleau-Ponty argues that we should regard the body not as a mere biological or physical unit, but as the body which structures one’s situation and experience within the world. Merleau-Ponty enriches his classic work with engaging studies of famous cases in the history of psychology and neurology as well as phenomena that continue to draw our attention, such as phantom limb syndrome, synaesthesia, and hallucination. This new translation includes many helpful features such as the reintroduction of Merleau-Ponty’s discursive Table of Contents as subtitles into the body of the text, a comprehensive Translator’s Introduction to its main themes, essential notes explaining key terms of translation, an extensive Index, and an important updating of Merleau-Ponty’s references to now available English translations. Also included is a new foreword by Taylor Carman and an introduction to Merleau-Ponty_ _by Claude Lefort. Translated by Donald A. Landes. (shrink)

- A powerful defence of religion in which the author draws upon his wide knowledge of the world religions.- One of the greatest ironies of the modern world is that its most ardent champions are the blindest to the real assets of the times.

‘Individualized medicine’ is an emerging paradigm in clinical life science research. We conducted a socio-empirical interview study in a leading German clinical research group, aiming at implementing ‘individualized medicine’ of colorectal cancer. The goal was to investigate moral and social issues related to physician–patient interaction and clinical care, and to identify the points raised, supported and rejected by the physicians and researchers. Up to now there has been only limited insight into how experts dedicated to individualized medicine view its problems. (...) Interviews with researchers and clinicians were based on a prestructured questionnaire. The content analysis revealed a broad spectrum of opinions. Major findings were disappointments with the limits of the current therapy regimen and clinical practice; problematic impacts on physician–patient relationship; and an informed consent procedure which is mainly based on paternalistic assumptions. According to our analysis, major problems will be uncertainties related to the biomarker's sensitivity and specificity, and the identification of ‘non-responders’. However, the findings also indicate that experts expect evidence-based medicine to replace decisions based on gut feeling or hierarchical structures. (shrink)

This classic work in the philosophy of physical science is an incisive and readable account of the scientific method. Pierre Duhem was one of the great figures in French science, a devoted teacher, and a distinguished scholar of the history and philosophy of science. This book represents his most mature thought on a wide range of topics.

Prior research indicates that managers’ dark personality traits increase their tendency to engage in disruptive and unethical organizational behaviors including accounting earnings management. Other research suggests that the prevalence of dark personalities in management may represent an accidental byproduct of selecting managers with accompanying desirable attributes that fit the stereotype of a “strong leader.” Our paper posits that organizations may hire some managers who have dark personality traits because their willingness to push ethical boundaries aligns with organizational objectives, particularly in (...) the accounting context where ethical considerations are especially important. Using several validation studies and experiments, we find that experienced executives and recruiting professionals favor hiring a candidate with dark personality traits into an accounting management position over an otherwise better-qualified candidate when the hiring organization faces pressure to manage earnings. Our results help to illuminate why individuals with dark personality traits may effectively compete for high-level accounting positions. (shrink)

Published in German during the last 15 years, the 13 essays in this volume provide readers with valuable knowledge of the much discussed theme of hermeneutics today. Gadamer was an early student of Martin Heidegger and has been a lifelong friend and interpreter. These essays are an outgrowth of Gadamer's Truth and Method. They can be understood, however, independently of it. Gadamer's standpoint is a blend of Hegel's and Heidegger's, with his own independent development in part. The book contains a (...) long and highly competent introduction by the editor, David E. Linge, who has translated most of the essays. - Choice, on back cover. (shrink)

Voluntary disclosures of sustainability information have recently received considerable attention by investors, regulators, and public companies in improving reliability and integrity of corporate reporting. We examine the association between the quantity and quality of sustainability disclosures and earnings quality in the context of corporate ethical value and culture. We posit that sustainability disclosures of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance reports are linked to earnings quality, because of the importance of both earnings quality and ESG sustainability disclosures to investors and (...) trustworthiness of corporate reporting. We collect our sample of 35,110 firm-year observations between 1999 and 2015. Using both difference-in-difference tests and OLS regression, we find that sustainability disclosure quantity is positively associated with innate earnings quality and negatively correlated with discretionary earnings quality in mitigating managerial earnings manipulation and unethical opportunistic reporting behavior. Further tests illustrate that sustainability disclosure quality can strengthen the positive relation between innate earnings quality and sustainability disclosure quantity and mitigate the negative relation between discretionary earnings quality and sustainability disclosure quantity. Finally, additional tests suggest that the relation between earnings quality and sustainability disclosure quantity is moderated by corporate structure and prior-year sustainability performance. Our results provide policy, practical, and research implications as ESG sustainability reporting is being integrated into corporate culture and business models. (shrink)

Ethical care is beginning to be recognised as care that accounts for the views of those at the receiving end of care. However, in the context of palliative and supportive district nursing care, the patients’ and their carers’ views are seldom heard. This qualitative research study explores these views. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with 26 patients with palliative and supportive care needs receiving district nursing care, and 13 of their carers. Participants were recruited via community nurses and hospices (...) between September 2010 and October 2011. Post-structural discourse analysis is used to examine how discourses operate on a moral level. One discourse, ‘busyness’, is argued to preclude a moral form of nursing care. The discourse of friendship is presented to contrast this. Discussion explores Gallagher’s ‘slow ethics’ and challenges the currently accepted ways of measuring to improve quality of care concluding that quality cannot be measured. (shrink)

At the time of his death in May 1961, Maurice Merleau-Ponty held the chair of Philosophy at the College de France. Together with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, he was cofounder of the successful and influential review Les Temps Modernes. However, after Merleau-Ponty's two studies of Marxist theory and practice (Humanisme et Terreur and Les Aventures de la Dialectique), he alienated both orthodox Marxists and "mandarins of the left" such as Sartre and de Beauvoir. Perhaps his most lasting (...) contribution to the interpretation of human existence was his formulation of a positive philosophical approach to psychology the foundations of which were clearly outlined in The Structure of Behavior and later more fully developed in Phenomenology of Perception. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 36.2 (2003) 119-134 [Access article in PDF] The Constitution of Rhetoric's Tradition Maurice Charland Rhetoric is not a discipline. That is to say, as a domain of theoretical and practical knowledge, rhetoric is weakly institutionalized, lacking a centralized arbiter and standardized set of procedures for establishing truth claims. It also lacks the basic characteristics that Michel Foucault defines as disciplinary, for while we can identify (...) "groups of objects, methods, their corpus of properties considered to be true, the interplay of rules and definitions, of techniques and tools," these are neither universally admitted, nor do they "constitute a sort of anonymous system, freely available to whoever wishes, or whoever is able to make use of them, without their being any question of their meaning" (1972, 222). On the contrary, despite the fact that rhetoric is usually figured as offering practical and, indeed, positive knowledge, the meaning of its terms is always being questioned and at stake. While we might, by considering terms loosely, seek to identify rhetoric in terms of objects such as "persuasion," or "discourse," these are not exclusively its province. Furthermore, the ends of rhetoric are themselves unclear. Is rhetoric really the art of discovering the available means of persuasion? Or is it an art of citizenship? Or a method of enquiry? It has at times been defined as each. Consequently, none of these methods can fix its identity. At most, we can say that "rhetoric," as a domain of knowledge, signals a commitment to the idea of agency in discourse.Rhetoric, while not disciplinary, nevertheless "hangs together" as a domain of knowledge even though it does not cohere conceptually. It is, or comes close to being, a "discursive formation." That is to say, we can identify a field that produces statements concerning discourse and its operations, which is characterized by certain regularities that articulate with the term rhetoric itself. The first such regularity is the gesture of negation. Rhetoric refuses philosophy (or acts out having been refused by philosophy). [End Page 119] Rhetoric further is defined against other intellectual genres: rhetoric is not poetics, is not political science, is not ethics, though it may "speak" to them. Ultimately, though, this tells us very little about the nature of rhetoric's difference, for while refusal is effective in positing the existence of a boundary between rhetoric and other domains, the location of that boundary and what it contains remains unspecified. Rhetoric must also be attributed an at least provisional sense. This is accomplished by rhetoric's second gesture, which initially appears more substantial. Rhetoric is framed in terms of the positivity of a foundational "tradition." Indeed, the gesture toward tradition is ubiquitous. Consider, for example, both the title and principles of organization of Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg's (1990) anthology, George Kennedy's (1998) recursion to the idea of "tradition" even as he attempts to present rhetoric as a natural and cross-cultural phenomenon, recent feminist works that explicitly address "the tradition," 1 the routine citation of Classical authorities and examples, the recurrence of "new" rhetorics, including Burke's dramatism, Perelman's theory of argumentation, as well as Barthes' semiotics, which are offered as supplements to tradition's lacks, and, finally, the energy devoted to the study of the history of rhetoric. The rhetorical tradition, as something bequeathed or put in play by ancient teachers, appears to offer rhetoric a substance, a literature, and a set of problems, particularly through variants of two other principles of discursive formation identified by Foucault, commentary and the author-function. Even so, the gesture toward tradition does not imply the existence of a historically rooted and fixed corpus or model: "Tradition" is a vague term, there is no unproblematic canon of texts to be commented upon, and tradition itself, rather than Aristotle, Plato, or Cicero, stands as "author." What we debate is the meaning of the "tradition," the uneasy relationship between Socrates and Sophists, Plato and Aristotle, but as positions rather than personae. Furthermore, in the name of rhetoric, ancient and modern texts are often read against the grain, and what is... (shrink)

This Book Incorporates Prof. Friedman S Lectures And Discussions That Were A Part Of The Inter-Cultural Dialogue At Many Levels. His Major Contribution Is In Developing An Approach That Is Within The Framework Of The Human Image.

In this study, we built and tested a theoretical model to determine how ethical leadership affects team creativity among teams composed of different characteristics. Following social learning theory and an antecedent–benefit–cost framework, we conducted analyses of multisource data from 50 team supervisors and 186 employees, which revealed an inverted U-shaped relationship between ethical leadership and team creativity. The teams exhibited more creativity when there was a moderate level of ethical leadership than when there were very low or very high levels. (...) Moreover, from an interactional perspective, we found that team faultlines significantly moderated the curvilinear relationship between ethical leadership and team creativity such that the inverted U-shaped relationship was more significant among teams with weak team faultlines. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed. (shrink)

Bd. 1. System des menschlichen Erkennens -- Bd. 2. Die stammesgeschichtliche Entwicklung des menschlichen Sprechens -- Bd. 3. Die Entwicklung der Operation "Messen" -- Bd. 4. Die Evolution der instrumentellen Wahrnehmung -- Bd. 5. Die Genesis des schlussfolgernden Denkens -- Bd. 6. Die evolutionären Stufen der Analyse (des Scheidens und Unterscheidens) -- Bd. 7. Das Werden des Vorstellens (Geistes) -- Bd. 8. Die Mechanisierung und Automation der erkennenden Akte und Operationen -- Bd. 9. Die Entstehung des beziehenden Denkens -- Bd. (...) 10. Der phylogenetische Weg der Zeichengebung (Entwicklung der Elemente der Verständigung) -- Bd. 11. Der Irrtum -- Bd. 12. Kritik der Erkenntnislehre des transzendentalen Idealismus Immanuel Kants. (shrink)

Using Bakhtin's notion of polyphony, this study explored the discussion of the end-of-life issues in the Course on Life and Death Education in one Chinese university. Ethnographic methods were adopted to investigate the collision between the classroom voices and the voices of the mainstream culture on end-of-life in the process of developing students' attitudes toward death. The findings revealed that “to understand death” involved challenging the voice of “strangeness and fear of death”; “honestly facing up to and accepting the feelings (...) of the fear, pain, and helplessness” was the response to “be brave”; and the goal “to die peacefully” resisted the notion of “extending life at any cost.” Through the collision between these voices, students developed their attitudes toward death in facing, understanding, accepting, and choosing how to die. The analysis further revealed that providing only one “answer” to death by the teacher is not sufficient or effective to foster students' attitudes toward death because the students are a diverse group holding different views on the end-of-life issues, which demonstrated the importance of creating dialogues in the life and death education. (shrink)

[vol. non numéroté] Notice. 1952. v. 1. Livres petit alif, grand alif ba' gim. 2. éd. 1967. v. 2. Livres dal, he zay, hha', tta' 2. éd. 1967. v. 3. Livres ya' et lam, et index alphabétiques des 3 volumes. 1948.

潜逻辑学是由中国人创立的一门新的学科。本书由8篇论文和5个附录组成,主要研究潜思维形式、潜思维规律及其应用。.

_Tradition in Social Science _is the social philosophy written early in life by the jurisprudent who became the preeminent public law jurist in France in the first quarter of the twentieth century, Maurice Hauriou. His work remains prominent in theorizing European Community as well as in Latin American jurisprudence. His studies concern three areas of research: legal theory, social science, and philosophy. In this book Hauriou first focuses on the object and method of the social sciences in a preliminary (...) chapter. The main text is devoted first to a philosophy of history that uses the growth objectively in fraternity, liberty and equality as the criterion for progress; and next to the subjective elements of progress, namely, the recognition of a “pessimistic individualism” in which failure in conduct is to be expected, but is rectified by social institutions. This part closes with the dynamizing of his philosophy of history by evolution and alternation between two phases of social development, namely, middle ages and renaissances. The second part is the philosophy of social science built around social matter, where the dynamic of imitation is the motive force, and three social networks—positive, religious, and metaphysical—specify its consequences. The last of these, the political fabric, is provided with a final chapter of its own. The main doctrinal device that Hauriou developed for use in law was his theory of the institution; this is developed for the first time in the present work. (shrink)

This volume discusses the ideas of six leading thinkers of the French Enlightenment: Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Holbach, and Condorcet. A general introduction surveys the political theories of the Enlightenment, setting them in the context of the political realities of 18th-century France. The first book of its kind on the subject, Philosophers and Pamphleteers brings a welcome, new perspective to the study of French political thought during a fascinating historical era.

[1] The early years, 1878-1923 -- [2] The middle years, 1923-1945 -- [3] The later years, 1945-1965.