The computations involved in statistical learning have long been debated. Here, we build on work suggesting that a basic memory process, chunking, may account for the processing of statistical regularities into larger units. Drawing on methods from the memory literature, we developed a novel paradigm to test statistical learning by leveraging a robust phenomenon observed in serial recall tasks: that short‐term memory is fundamentally shaped by long‐term distributional learning. In the statistically induced chunking recall (SICR) task, participants are exposed to (...) an artificial language, using a standard statistical learning exposure phase. Afterward, they recall strings of syllables that either follow the statistics of the artificial language or comprise the same syllables presented in a random order. We hypothesized that if individuals had chunked the artificial language into word‐like units, then the statistically structured items would be more accurately recalled relative to the random controls. Our results demonstrate that SICR effectively captures learning in both the auditory and visual modalities, with participants displaying significantly improved recall of the statistically structured items, and even recall specific trigram chunks from the input. SICR also exhibits greater test–retest reliability in the auditory modality and sensitivity to individual differences in both modalities than the standard two‐alternative forced‐choice task. These results thereby provide key empirical support to the chunking account of statistical learning and contribute a valuable new tool to the literature. (shrink)

Summary This article approaches post-war debates about the relationship between normative political theory and empirical political science from a French perspective. It does so by examining Raymond Aron's commentaries on a series of articles commissioned by him for a special issue of the Revue française de science politique on this theme as well as through an analysis of his wartime dialogue with the neo-Thomist philosopher, Jacques Maritain. Following a consideration of Aron's critique of contemporary approaches to this issue in France, (...) we discuss his own distinctive attempt to draw normative theory and empirical science into the same orbit by tracing the interaction of these two elements in his work from the late 1930s to the mid-1960s. (shrink)

Originally published in 1942, this book constitutes the companion volume to The Heart of Pascal ; both volumes were formed using selections from Pascal's Pensées. The text gathers together a series of selections, presented in French, which illustrate Pascal's Christian faith and thoughts on the relationship between man and God. An appendix and preface by the editor are also provided. This is a highly informative book that will be of value to anyone with an interest in Pascal and his late (...) thought. (shrink)

Published in 1950: The Penseés is a collection of philosophical fragments, notes and essays in which Pascal explores the contradictions of human nature in psychological, social, metaphysical and - above all - theological terms. Mankind emerges from Pascal's analysis as a wretched and desolate creature within an impersonal universe, but who can be transformed through faith in God's grace.

I would like to write a novel in which the main character would be a man who got a pair of glasses, one lens of which reduced images as powerfully as an oxyhydrogen microscope, and the other of which magnified on the same scale, so that he perceived everything relatively. A flight of fancy by an aspiring science fiction writer? While it may sound as such, this wistful musing is one of the little-discussed personal reflections of nineteenth-century philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, (...) whose remarkable journals and notebooks, unpublished during his lifetime, are presented here. The first of an eleven-volume series produced by Copenhagen's Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre, this volume is the first English translation and commentary of Kierkegaard's journals based on up-to-date scholarship. It offers new insight into Kierkegaard's inner life. In addition to early drafts of his published works, the journals contain his thoughts on current events and philosophical and theological matters, notes on books he was reading, miscellaneous jottings, and ideas for future literary projects. Kierkegaard wrote his journals in a two-column format, one for his initial entries and the second for the marginal comments he added later. The new edition of the journals reproduces this format and contains photographs of original manuscript pages, as well as extensive scholarly commentary. Translated by leading experts on Kierkegaard, Journals and Notebooks will become the benchmark for all future Kierkegaard scholarship. (shrink)

Originally published in 1945, this book constitutes the companion volume to The Apology of Pascal ; both volumes were formed using selections from Pascal's Pensées. The text contains his meditations and prayers, notes for his anti-Jesuit campaign, and remarks on language and style. An index and preface by the editor are also provided. This is a highly informative book that will be of value to anyone with an interest in Pascal and his late thought.

The essays in this book engage the original and controversial claims from Michael Boylan's A Just Society. Each essay discusses Boylan's claims from a particular chapter and offers a critical analysis of these claims. Boylan responds to the essays in his lengthy and philosophically rich reply.

To achieve effective stakeholder governance in the context of international social accountability certification requires constructing a network of agreement. In a case study of a small-to-medium-sized enterprise, we examine managers’ attempts at enrolling participants in the supply chain to investigate how they strive to engage these stakeholders. We adopt actor-network theory and sensemaking theory to develop a novel approach to understanding social accountability standards’ certification in stakeholder networks. We argue that the design and operation of any SA standard across a (...) network requires not only attempts at enrolling other participants in the supply chain but management contextualizing and problematizing the terms of their involvement. (shrink)

We are pleased to present the following Review Forum of Harvey Whitehouse’s book, Arguments and Icons: Divergent Modes of Religiosity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. 204 pages. ISBN 0-19- 823414-7 (cloth); 0-19-823415-5 (paper). We have given the contributors and the book’s author sufficient space to discuss its themes carefully and thus make a significant contribution to the further analysis of religion and ritual generally.

Leg rigidity is associated with frequent falls in people with Parkinson’s disease, suggesting a potential role in functional balance and gait impairments. Changes in the neural state due to secondary tasks, e.g., activation maneuvers, can exacerbate rigidity, possibly increasing the risk of falls. However, the subjective interpretation and coarse classification of the standard clinical rigidity scale has prohibited the systematic, objective assessment of resting and activated leg rigidity. The pendulum test is an objective diagnostic method that we hypothesized would be (...) sensitive enough to characterize resting and activated leg rigidity. We recorded kinematic data and electromyographic signals from rectus femoris and biceps femoris during the pendulum test in 15 individuals with PD, spanning a range of leg rigidity severity. From the recorded data of leg swing kinematics, we measured biomechanical outcomes including first swing excursion, first extension peak, number and duration of the oscillations, resting angle, relaxation index, maximum and minimum angular velocity. We examined associations between biomechanical outcomes and clinical leg rigidity score. We evaluated the effect of increasing rigidity through activation maneuvers on biomechanical outcomes. Finally, we assessed whether either biomechanical outcomes or changes in outcomes with activation were associated with a fall history. Our results suggest that the biomechanical assessment of the pendulum test can objectively quantify parkinsonian leg rigidity. We found that the presence of high rigidity during clinical exam significantly impacted biomechanical outcomes, i.e., first extension peak, number of oscillations, relaxation index, and maximum angular velocity. No differences in the effect of activation maneuvers between groups with clinically assessed low rigidity were observed, suggesting that activated rigidity may be independent of resting rigidity and should be scored as independent variables. Moreover, we found that fall history was more common among people whose rigidity was increased with a secondary task, as measured by biomechanical outcomes. We conclude that different mechanisms contributing to resting and activated rigidity may play an important yet unexplored functional role in balance impairments. The pendulum test may contribute to a better understanding of fundamental mechanisms underlying motor symptoms in PD, evaluating the efficacy of treatments, and predicting the risk of falls. (shrink)

Morality can help guide behavior and facilitate relationships. Although moral judgments by autistic people are similar to neurotypical individuals, many researchers argue that subtle differences signify deficits in autistic individuals. Moral foundation theory describes moral judgments in terms of differences rather than deficits. The current research, aimed at assessing autistic individuals’ moral inclinations using Haidt’s framework, was co-designed with autistic community members. Our aim was to describe autistic moral thinking from a strengths-based perspective while acknowledging differences that may pose interpersonal (...) challenges among autistic youth. We assessed 25 autistic and 23 neurotypical children’s moral judgments using the Moral Foundations Questionnaire for Kids. We used semi-structured interviews and qualitative analysis with a subset of participants to describe children’s moral reasoning. Analyses suggested that autistic and neurotypical children make similar judgments about moral transgressions across all five moral foundations. General linear mixed modeling showed that the greatest predictor of recommending punishment was how bad children deemed moral transgressions to be. We also found a trend that autistic children were more likely to recommend punishment for harmless norms violations than were neurotypical children. Future research could use longitudinal methods to understand the development of moral judgments among autistic and neurotypical children. (shrink)

1. Max Cresswell argued in his “Reality as Experience in F. H. Bradley” that.

1. Max Cresswell has argued recently that F. H. Bradley’s metaphysics needs to be viewed with far more respect than it is by contemporary philosophers. It is true that a substantial proportion of the postwar English-speaking philosophical world has tended to assume, on the authority of Russell and Moore, that Bradley made elementary errors right at the start of the obscure reasoning which led him to the Absolute, and consequently that he is worth looking at as little more than a (...) striking example of how awful metaphysicians can be. But it is further true that a serious look at these early refutations of Bradley reveals that they are almost entirely founded on ignorance and misconception. So Cresswell’s attempt at rehabilitation should be given serious scrutiny. (shrink)

This chapter delineates how despite their received status as almost writerly adversaries, George Orwell and W. H. Auden both adopt in their work a carnophallogocentric stance towards vegetarians that feminizes and denigrates those who choose not to consume meat. Whether because they deviate insidiously from the ordinary decency that will prove humanity’s salvation, or because they strive in futility towards a purity that can only be enforced through dictatorial means, vegetarians serve for both writers throughout the late 1930s not only (...) as obstacles to fascism’s defeat, but as minor-key exemplars of some of its core tendencies. Orwell’s and Auden’s writings of the 1930s thus alert us, through their carnophallagocentrism, both to the co-constitutive nature of oppressive hierarchies and to how our propensity to frame such hierarchies in strictly anthropic terms can serve to reassert the normative model of subjectivity that virtually ensures their perpetuation. (shrink)

Throughout his life Kierkegaard was an engaged student of German philosophy. He was especially exercised by the German philosophy of his own day, which was dominated by the popularity of the Hegelian system and the critical discussions surrounding it. This chapter explores Kierkegaard's use of Hegel and of a number of lesser‐known Hegelians (Marheineke, Daub, Erdmann, Rosenkranz, Hotho, Werder, Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, and Strauss) and Hegel critics (Baader, I.H. Fichte, Schopenhauer, Trendelenburg, and Schelling). This study shows that Kierkegaard's interest in (...) the other figures traditionally associated with Hegelianism in fact goes far beyond this sole aspect of their thought. (shrink)

In 1985, Swiss legal philosopher Walter Ott visited Herbert Hart in Oxford and made this record of their meeting, which casts novel light on some of Hart’s ideas. Ott engaged Hart in a fresh encounter with the legal philosophy of Gustav Radbruch, particularly Hart’s and Radbruch’s reasons for a minimum content of justice in law. They also discussed the grudge informer, state responsibility under laws of an earlier régime, and questions of the definition and falsifiability of legal theories. Hart surprisingly (...) reported Hans Kelsen as stating, when they had met at Berkeley in 1961, that Hume (and not Kant, and certainly not Wittgenstein) was the greatest philosopher who had ever lived. The translation is accompanied with annotations explaining references, assumptions and contexts. (shrink)

The Romance of Science pays tribute to the wide-ranging and highly influential work of Trevor Levere, historian of science and author of Poetry Realised in Nature, Transforming Matter, Science and the Canadian Arctic, Affinity and Matter and other significant inquiries in the history of modern science. Expanding on Levere’s many themes and interests, The Romance of Science assembles historians of science -- all influenced by Levere's work -- to explore such matters as the place and space of instruments in science, (...) the role and meaning of science museums, poetry in nature, chemical warfare and warfare in nature, science in Canada and the Arctic, Romanticism, aesthetics and morals in natural philosophy, and the “dismal science” of economics. The Romance of Science explores the interactions between science's romantic, material, institutional and economic engagements with Nature. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 697 however, that extreme caution is to be advised upon entering those waters? Fully respectful of this concern, Professor Stambaugh enjoins the reader to "reach his own conclusions about parallels and affinities" concerning "some strains of Nietzsche's thought that are most consonant with an Eastern temper of experience." DAVID B. ALLISON SUNY, Stony Brook W. J. Mander. An Introduction to Bradley's Metaphysics. New York: Oxford University Press, (...) 1994. Pp. viii + 175. Cloth, $39-95. T. L. S. Sprigge. James and Bradley: American Truth and British Reality. Chicago: Open Court, 1993. Pp. xiv + 63o. Cloth, $66.95. Paper, $29.95Until the appearance of Mander's book there had been no short general introduction to Bradley in print since Penguin dropped Wollheim's F. H. Bradley from their list. But in any case, as a result of the work of scholars since its last revision in 1969, Wollheim's account, despite its many virtues, is now known to be misleading in crucial places, for he remained to some extent in the grip of the dismissive caricature of Bradley bequeathed to analytic philosophers by Russell and Moore and stilloften just taken for granted. (See, e.g., almost any textbook which has a chapter on truth.) By drawing on this scholarship Mander offers us a philosopher strikingly different from this caricature. Mander's replacement portrayal is, in its broad outlines, accurate enough to be confidently recommended as giving a good general sketch of Bradley's views (excepting the ethics, which Woliheim managed to include), presenting them sympathetically but not completely uncritically in a way which should offer something of interest to both advanced undergraduates and their teachers. As Oxford has also recently published a selection from Bradley's works (Writings on Logic and Metaphysics, edited by James Allard and Guy Stock, with both general and topic-specific introductions), there is the added benefit that one who wishes to read him can now do so without being faced with wading through some intimidatingly large volumes of often meandering discussion in baffling prose. The two should make a good pair around which to structure classes concerning Bradley. I am not quite so confident about some of the detail of Mander's account, which is, moreover, sometimes explained in a way nearly as obscure as the original on which it is intended to cast light. This last is, of course, hard to avoid in expounding a writer whose whole cast of mind is opposed to the exact formulation of precise theses illustrated with clear examples, and is less misleading than artificial precisification; it also perhaps reduces the risk that students will use it as a substitute for, rather than a guide to, the primary texts themselves. And I want to stress that Mander's overall picture of Bradley's views seems to me reliable and as well situated historically as the book's ' G. M. C. Sprung, "Nietzsche's Interest in and Knowledge of Indian Thought," in The Great Yearof Zarathuara (188z-1981), ed. David Goicoechea (Lanham, MD.: University Press of America, x983), 166-8o. 698 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 33:4 OCTOBER 1995 brevity allows. Its usefulness is enhanced by a very full bibliography which does include some coverage of the ethics. Sprigge's massive work is far more ambitious. His aim is "to provide a comparative exposition and personal evaluation of [Bradley's and James's] main views on truth and on the general nature of reality" (xiii). He gives several reasons for selecting these two philosophers for attention: they are the most important of their time; they are misunderstood and misrepresented; and their views have much in common that is largely correct while being the main alternative solutions to the problems they confront. Further, ajoint treatment makes sense because "it is toJames, rather than Russell, let alone Moore, that we must look for a serious critique of Bradley" (417). This is a labor of love, exhibiting reading of remarkable breadth and depth and the familiarity with its subject matter that is the product only of decades of exploration. Perhaps this very familiarity is part of the explanation of an occasional paucity of textual backup for the pictures Sprigge... (shrink)

In this intriguing glimpse at East and West, Collis makes his case that the West should lead the world into a new spiritual age. He compares the contributions of Ghandi and D H Lawrence and finds Lawrence's thinking to be more compelling. The work outlines the philosophy that led Collis to be labelled a pioneer of the ecological movement.

This study analyzes a poem by the Twelver Shiʿi jurist Ḥusayn b. ʿAbd al-Ṣamad al-ʿĀmilī (d. 984/1576) that has recently been discovered in a multiple-text manuscript in Iran. It is argued here that the poem dates from 961–63/1554–56 and expresses the author’s disappointment and frustrations with patrons or intermediaries in his efforts to procure a position shortly after he arrived in Safavid territory.

This book addresses an important current in nineteenth-century European intellectual history, and it would make a good secondary source for undergraduate students and informed general readers. The...

Richard Janko's acclaimed translation of Aristotle's _Poetics_ is accompanied by the most comprehensive commentary available in English that does not presume knowledge of the original Greek. Two other unique features are Janko's translations with notes of both the _Tractatus Coislinianus_, which is argued to be a summary of the lost second book of the Poetics, and fragments of Aristotle’s dialogue On Poets, including recently discovered texts about catharsis, which appear in English for the first time.

IN the recent past there has been a resurgence of interest in the work of Thomas Reid; several new editions of his work have appeared as well as a series of articles concerning various aspects of his systematic philosophy. Interest has generalized to the whole Scottish tradition, including numerous figures in the history of American philosophy who were deeply influenced by Reid and Dugald Stewart. In addition, several recent and contemporary philosophers have used Reid's epistemic views as a point (...) of departure in developing their own adverbial theories of sensing and appearing. Others have used Reid's theory of agency in formulating their own views on freedom and responsibility. (shrink)