Everyone agrees that consciousness is a very special phenomenon, unique in several ways, but there is scant agreement on just how special it is, and whether or not an explanation of it can be accommodated within normal science. John Searle's view, defended with passion in this book, is highly idiosyncratic: what is special about consciousness is its "subjective ontology," but normal science can accommodate subjective ontology alongside (not within) its otherwise objective ontology. Once we clear away some widespread confusions about (...) what science requires, and dismiss the misbegotten field of cognitive science that has been engendered by those confusions, the subjective ontology of the mind, he claims, will lose its aura of unacceptable mystery. (shrink)

There is a bookshop in Cambridge, England, which only sells books published by the Cambridge University Press. It is a common experience for browsers to pull a book off the shelf, attracted by the...

This book is a long-term consequence of Nelson Goodman’s 1960s ‘Project Zero’ to study the state of higher education in the United States. It is traditional in one respect, and contemporary in anot...

A review with commentary on Mark A. Bedau and Emily C. Parke (eds): The Ethics of Protocells: Moral and Social Implications of Creating Life in the Laboratory (Basic Bioethics series) MIT Press, Cambridge,MA, 2009, 365 pp, ISBN 978-0-262-01262-1, ISBN 978-0-262-51269-5.

Book Reviews Olivier Roy, Economics and Philosophy, FirstView Article.

Presentazione del curatore italiano (C.Corradetti): È possibile conciliare il pluralismo culturale con la dimensione pubblica della deliberazione? Partendo dall’analisi critica di Rawls e Habermas, James Bohman offre una risposta innovativa alla questione dell’accordo democratico. In tale proposta, parallelamente al rigetto di soluzioni meramente strategiche, viene riabilitata la nozione di compromesso morale nel quadro di un accordo normativo. Mantenendo fede ad una prospettiva composta da elementi normativi e fattuali, l’autore si propone di ampliare le opportunità democratiche nella riconciliazione tra conflitti culturali (...) profondi propri delle società contemporanee. L’elemento civico partecipativo risulta essere dunque una componente essenziale per la produzione di una sfera pubblica vibrante. Ne emerge una ricostruzione convincente volta non solo a respingere le critiche degli scettici sulle reali possibilità d’inclusività democratica, ma diretta soprattutto a suggerire un più efficace modello deliberativo per la garanzia della stabilità sociale. Questo testo è diventato ormai un riferimento internazionale classico nella discussione sul tema della deliberazione pubblica. L’autore ha inoltre sviluppato in ambito post-nazionale il suo modello deliberativo senza tuttavia ridiscutere i fondamenti concettuali della sua proposta teorica qui enunciati.Vista la rilevanza del tema e considerata la centralità del testo proposto, sembrerebbe dunque auspicabile rendere il testo disponibile anche al lettore italiano. (shrink)

Counting on the weather Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-4 DOI 10.1007/s11016-010-9503-3 Authors Ruth Morgan, History Discipline, Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, The University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley, WA 6009, Australia Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796.

Late in his exceedingly protracted life, Ernst Jünger introduced the term “anarch” to refine his notion of resistance amid political decay. Hermann Amborn’s argument would have benefitted by taking...

Volume 25, Issue 4, June 2020, Page 481-496.

The following is a review of Embodiment, Enaction and Culture. Investigating the Constitution of the Shared World. Edited by Christoph Durt, Thomas Fuchs, and Christian Tewes. MIT Press, 2017.

Contribution to a symposium on Kostas Gavroglu and Ana Simões, Neither Physics nor Chemistry, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The authors of Connected Gaming effectively update Yasmin B. Kafai’s 1995 discussion of “the first constructionist gaming project”, originally published as Minds in Play: Games to Be Played, Ga...

Firstly, this contribution proposes to address synthographies – images generated through Text-to-image technologies – by deepening the epistemological shift related to the possibility of transposing the image-creation process from the analogue arts to the notational ones (or, by drawing on Nelson Goodman's terminology, from the “autographic” to the “allographic” forms of art). Secondly, the paper highlights how synthographies can be considered partly autographic and partly allographic, since the linguistic prompts constitute only the notational aspect of the generated images. Furthermore, this (...) contribution argues that the recent critiques around such images, which referenced aspects related to the absence of authorial presence and mechanicality, characterised the history of photography since its beginning. Finally, the contribution explores how the possibility to create synthographies that are almost indistinguishable from photographies easily might further separate the interaction between the detective and the depictive functions to the advantage of the latter, erasing what remains of the visual reliability and documental value of images. (shrink)

Models all the way down Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-6 DOI 10.1007/s11016-011-9558-9 Authors Naomi Oreskes, Department of History, University of California, San Diego La Jolla, CA 92093-0104, USA Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796.