Examines the development of the philosophy, culture, and civilization of ancient China and discusses the history of Taoism and Confucianism.

The Negation Problem states that expressivism has insufficient structure to account for the various ways in which a moral sentence can be negated. We argue that the Negation Problem does not arise for expressivist accounts of all normative language but arises only for the specific examples on which expressivists usually focus. In support of this claim, we argue for the following three theses: 1) a problem that is structurally identical to the Negation Problem arises in non-normative cases, and this problem (...) is solved once the hidden quantificational structure involved in such cases is uncovered; 2) the terms ‘required’, ‘permissible’, and ‘forbidden’ can also be analyzed in terms of hidden quantificational structure, and the Negation Problem disappears once this hidden structure is uncovered; 3) the Negation Problem does not arise for normative language that has no hidden quantificational structure. We conclude that the Negation Problem is not really a problem about expressivism at all but is rather a feature of the quantificational structure of the required, permitted, and forbidden. (shrink)

De re modality is eliminable if there is an effective translation of all wffs into non-de re equivalents. We cannot have logical equivalence unless 'logic' has odd theses, but we can have material equivalence by banning all essences, something the nonde re facts let us do, or by giving everything such humdrum essences as self-identity and banning the more interesting ones. Eliminability cannot be got from weaker assumptions, nor independent ones of even modest generality. The net philosophical import is that, (...) quite apart from the merits of essentialism, de re language has scant utility. (shrink)

Pioneering biblical critic, theorist of democracy, and legendary conflater of God and nature, Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) was excommunicated by the Sephardic Jews of Amsterdam in 1656 for his "horrible heresies" and "monstrous deeds." Yet, over the past three centuries, Spinoza's rupture with traditional Jewish beliefs and practices has elevated him to a prominent place in genealogies of Jewish modernity. The First Modern Jew provides a riveting look at how Spinoza went from being one of Judaism's most notorious outcasts (...) to one of its most celebrated, if still highly controversial, cultural icons, and a powerful and protean symbol of the first modern secular Jew. Ranging from Amsterdam to Palestine and back again to Europe, the book chronicles Spinoza's posthumous odyssey from marginalized heretic to hero, the exemplar of a whole host of Jewish identities, including cosmopolitan, nationalist, reformist, and rejectionist. Daniel Schwartz shows that in fashioning Spinoza into "the first modern Jew," generations of Jewish intellectuals -German liberals, East European maskilim, secular Zionists, and Yiddishists- have projected their own dilemmas of identity onto him, reshaping the Amsterdam thinker in their own image. The many afterlives of Spinoza are a kind of looking glass into the struggles of Jewish writers over where to draw the boundaries of Jewishness and whether a secular Jewish identity is indeed possible. Cumulatively, these afterlives offer a kaleidoscopic view of modern Jewish culture and a vivid history of an obsession with Spinoza that continues to this day."--Jacket. (shrink)

Research design is fundamentally central to all scientific endeavors, at all levels and in all institutional settings. This book is a practical, short, simple, and authoritative examination of the concepts and issues in interpretive research design, looking across this approach's methods of generating and analyzing data. It is meant to set the stage for the more "how-to" volumes that will come later in the Routledge Series on Interpretive Methods, which will look at specific methods and the designs that they require. (...) It will, however, engage some very practical issues, such as ethical considerations and the structure of research proposals. Interpretive research design requires a high degree of flexibility, where the researcher is more likely to think of "hunches" to follow than formal hypotheses to test. Yanow and Schwartz-Shea address what research design is and why it is important, what interpretive research is and how it differs from quantitative and qualitative research in the positivist traditions, how to design interpretive research, and the sections of a research proposal and report. (shrink)

The Information Artifact Ontology (IAO) was created to serve as a domain‐neutral resource for the representation of types of information content entities (ICEs) such as documents, data‐bases, and digital im‐ages. We identify a series of problems with the current version of the IAO and suggest solutions designed to advance our understanding of the relations between ICEs and associated cognitive representations in the minds of human subjects. This requires embedding IAO in a larger framework of ontologies, including most importantly the Mental (...) Func‐tioning Ontology (MFO). It also requires a careful treatment of the aboutness relations between ICEs and associated cognitive representa‐tions and their targets in reality, which implies in turn a new treatment of the relation of truthmaking. (shrink)

Despite its appeal and popularity, the view that membership in a natural kind is essential to an individual is unsupported by the logic of essences and has no compelling reflective support. While the view has strong intuitive and empirical support this is insufficient to establish it. There are advantages to abandoning the view that kind membership is essential to individuals. One of these advantages is that it allows for a reconfiguring of the problem of material constitution in a way that (...) removes much of the paradox. (shrink)

What was it like to be a woman scientist battling the “old boy’s” network during the 1960s and 1970s? Neena Schwartz, a prominent neuroendocrinologist at Northwestern University, tells all. She became a successful scientist and administrator at a time when few women entered science and fewer succeeded in establishing independent laboratories. She describes her personal career struggles, and those of others in academia, as well as the events which lead to the formation of the Association of Women in Science, (...) and Women in Endocrinology, two national organizations, which have been successful in increasing the numbers of women scientists and their influence in their fields. The book intersperses this socio-political story with an account of Schwartz’s personal life as a lesbian and a description of her research on the role of hormones in regulating reproductive cycles. In a chapter titled “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” she examines the “evidence” from a scientist’s point of view for the hormonal and genetic theories for homosexuality. Other chapters provide advice on mentoring young scientists and a discourse on why it matters to all of us to have more women doing and teaching science. She also describes the process of putting together an interdisciplinary Center on Reproductive Science at Northwestern, which brought together basic and clinical scientists in an internationally recognized program of research and practice. (shrink)

Fear, sadness, surprise, anger, lust and love - virtually nothing was more important in the paintings ofthe Golden Age than convincingly depicting human emotions. In this publication, the Frans Hals Museum and Rembrandt expert Gary Schwartz present a selection of masterpieces in which these emotions are sublimely portrayed. According to seventeenth-century connoisseurs, the beauty of a painting was not even half as important as the passions that could be seen in that painting; they formed the soul of the work. (...) Painters such as Rembrandt, Frans Hals, Maerten van Heemskerck and Cornelis van Haarlem were masters at depicting a range of emotions. Their works are presented in a new context - the emotional life - and with a focus on the flourishing scientific study of emotions in our own time. Emotions will be published in conjunction with the first exhibition in the Netherlands to present this essential component of painting. Exhibition: Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, the Netherlands (11.10.2014-15.02.2015). (shrink)

Plato's dialogues frequently criticize traditional Greek myth, yet Plato also integrates myth with his writing. Daniel S. Werner confronts this paradox through an in-depth analysis of the Phaedrus, Plato's most mythical dialogue. Werner argues that the myths of the Phaedrus serve several complex functions: they bring nonphilosophers into the philosophical life; they offer a starting point for philosophical inquiry; they unify the dialogue as a literary and dramatic whole; they draw attention to the limits of language and the (...) limits of knowledge; and they allow Plato to co-opt cultural authority as a way of defining and legitimating the practice of philosophy. Platonic myth, as a species of traditional tale, is thus both distinct from philosophical dialectic and similar to it. Ultimately, the most powerful effect of Platonic myth is the way in which it leads readers to participate in Plato's dialogues and to engage in a process of self-examination. (shrink)

_A portion of the revenue from this book’s sales will be donated to Doctors Without Borders to assist in the fight against COVID-19._ The rapid spread of COVID-19 has had an unprecedented impact on modern health-care systems and has given rise to a number of complex ethical issues. This collection of readings and case studies offers an overview of some of the most pressing of these issues, such as the allocation of ventilators and other scarce resources, the curtailing of standard (...) privacy measures for the sake of public health, and the potential obligations of health-care professionals to continue operating in dangerous work environments. (shrink)

Mathematics professor from Brown University uses colorful illustrations and cartoons to display the concepts of infinity and large numbers.

Finding Oz tells the remarkable story behind one of the world’s most enduring and best-loved books. Offering profound new insights into the true origins and meaning of L. Frank Baum’s 1900 masterwork, it delves into the personal turmoil and spiritual transformation that fueled Baum’s fantastical parable of the American Dream. Before becoming an impresario of children’s adventure tales, the J. K. Rowling of his age, Baum failed at a series of careers and nearly lost his soul before setting out on (...) a journey of discovery that would lead to the Land of Oz. Drawing on original research, Evan Schwartz debunks popular misconceptions and shows how the people, places, and events in Baum’s life gave birth to his unforgettable images and characters, from the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City to the dual view of witches that reflected the life of Baum’s mother-in-law, the radical women’s rights leader Matilda Joslyn Gage. A narrative that sweeps across late-nineteenth-century America, Finding Oz ultimately reveals how failure and heartbreak can sometimes lead to redemption and bliss, and how one individual can ignite the imagination of the entire world. (shrink)

For over four decades, Richard Schwartz has engaged with two ethically rich ways of living that, as he charts in this book, he came to appreciate in middle age: Judaism and veganism. Having been born into a secular Jewish family, it was his marriage and an increasing commitment to social justice that propelled him to study and rediscover the essence of his Jewish faith. That sense of social justice further raised his awareness of the environmental movement, and, ultimately, to (...) animal rights and veganism. In Vegan Revolution: Saving Our World, Revitalizing Judaism, Schwartz shows how, now perhaps more than ever, veganism offers a pathway for all of us of whatever faith (or no faith) to reduce hunger, conserve the environment, save water, reinstitute justice, and care for animals and the Earth. It is no coincidence, as Schwartz demonstrates, that many of these ideas are mandates in Jewish scripture, and that reincorporating a care for the world (tikkun olam) can itself reinvigorate the spirit of a faith and galvanize its practitioners to act. (shrink)

The opening of Halakhic man : a covert dialogue with homo religiosus -- Homo religiosus: between religion and cognition -- The first paradigm of homo religiosus : Maimonides -- The second paradigm of homo religiosus : Kant -- Halakhic man as cognitive man -- The negation of metaphysics and of the messianic idea -- Mysticism, Kabbalah, and Hasidism -- Halakhic cognition and the norm -- Halakhic man's personality structure -- Religiosity after cognition : all-inclusive consciousness -- Myth as metaphor : (...) halakhic man as a creator of worlds -- Change or interpretation: repentance as creativity -- On providence and prophecy -- Halakhic man after twenty years : what has changed?. (shrink)

In dieser Arbeit wird ein erster Schritt unternommen, die traditionelle wissenschaftliche Konzeption der Psychologie im Diskurs des Radikalen Konstruktivismus zu betrachten und die Grundlegung einer neuen radikal konstruktivistischen Psychologie zu versuchen. Dabei stellen sich mehrere Aufgaben: - erstens muß ein geeigneter erkenntnistheoretischer Standpunkt für die Analyse, den Ver gleich bzw. dessen Diskurs gefunden werden, - zweitens muß in groben Umrissen eine Fragestellung für den Vergleich von traditionel lem und neuem Paradigma entworfen werden, - drittens ist es notwendig, das vorherrschende wissenschaftliche (...) Paradigma der Psycholo gie offenzulegen, schließlich ist - viertens das neue Paradigma des Radikalen Konstruktivismus, insofern es für eine wis senschaftliche Psychologie geeignet ist, darzustellen, und nicht - zuletzt muß auch der Nachweis angetreten werden, daß eine radikal konstruktivistische Psychologie überhaupt möglich ist. Diese fünf Problemkreise entsprechen im großen und ganzen dem Aufbau dieser Ar beit, wobei aufgrund der engen Verflechtung dieser Aufgaben zahlreiche Wechselbezie hungen und Querverbindungen bestehen, die eine bloß - für manche vielleicht wünschens werte - lineare Anordnung nicht immer zulassen. Es ist für den Diskurs des Radikalen Konstruktivismus geradezu kennzeichnend, daß in ihm ein Ende immer zugleich ein An fang ist bzw. vice versa, sodaß er sich grundsätzlich als niemals abschließbarer zirkulärer Prozeß darstellt, dessen erster Durchlauf in dieser Arbeit geleistet werden soll. (shrink)

V. 1. Structures and processes -- v. 2. Domains and categories.

This is Werner S. Pluhar's translation of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urtheilskraft) for Hackett Publications (Indianapolis, Indiana). ISBN 9780872200258 (paperback).

Flach bringt Kants geltungs- und prinzipientheoretische Freiheitslehre zur Darstellung und sucht zu zeigen, welches Erklärungspotential diese Lehre in puncto Humanität hat. Krijnen bringt Hegels logische und geistphilosophische Freiheitslehre zur Darstellung und sucht zu zeigen, daß und wie in ihr ein fundamentaler Aspekt der Freiheit thematisch wird, der in Kants Lehre unterbeleuchtet bleibt. Die Diskussionsbeiträge zeigen, welchen Stellenwert dem einen und dem anderen Paradigma im aktuellen Urteil zuerkannt wird. Flach presents Kant’s conception of freedom as well as its potential for understanding (...) what it means to be human. Krijnen presents Hegel’s conception of freedom and shows that Kant’s conception underestimates an essential feature of freedom. The contributions of other authors assess the results. (shrink)

Explores the philosophical dimensions and implications of integral theory. Dancing with Sophia is the first book of essays to focus on the philosophical dimensions and implications of integral theory. A metatheory that organizes first order theories and disciplines into higher order modes of knowing and insight needed to address the complexity of today’s world, integral theory has already impacted a wide range of disciplines, from psychology to business to religious studies to art. Included here are perspectives by scholars in the (...) continental, comparativist, and process traditions who dive into integral theory’s postmetaphysical claims in order to mine, extend, and critique its philosophical merits. On the verge of its own emergence, integral philosophy promotes modes of creative critical thought oriented toward the multidimensional flourishing of planetary well-being, and Dancing with Sophia will be of interest to scholars in philosophy; religious studies; transpersonal, developmental, and humanist psychology; and more. “Integral theory is a bold and provocative endeavor. It challenges one to think past the norm, to sail beyond the horizon and risk encountering the Scylla and Charybdis of what is academically acceptable—or at least familiar—and what is possible, in ways that only are now beginning to dawn on both thinking and dwelling. If it is nothing else, integral theory is the movement beyond the purely intellectual into the lived experience. This is its ‘meta-’ dimension properly understood.” — from the Foreword by Brian Schroeder. (shrink)

This collection broadens the scientific discussion of modularity by bringing together experts from a variety of disciplines, including artificial life, ...

Affective congruency effects in the evaluation task can be explained by either spreading of activation or response competition. Eliminating effects of response compatibility by using other tasks (semantic categorisation, naming task) typically also eliminates affective congruency effects. However, there is no need for processing the affective information of the stimuli in these tasks either, which could be necessary for an affectively mediated spreading of activation (Spruyt et al., 2007, 2009, 2012). We introduced a new task to further test this hypothesis. (...) The valent/neutral-categorisation task does not confound affective congruency with response compatibility, but still requires a processing of the stimuli's valence. No affective congruency effect was obtained with this task in two experiments, disfavouring a conditional spreading activation account. On the other hand, a significant priming effect was found for associated word pairs in Experiment 1, providing evidence for the sensitivity of the task to detect spreading activation processes. (shrink)

Significant research has been devoted to detecting people in images and videos. In this paper we describe a human de- tection method that augments widely used edge-based fea- tures with texture and color information, providing us with a much richer descriptor set. This augmentation results in an extremely high-dimensional feature space (more than 170,000 dimensions). In such high-dimensional spaces, classical machine learning algorithms such as SVMs are nearly intractable with respect to training. Furthermore, the number of training samples is much (...) smaller than the dimensionality of the feature space, by at least an order of magnitude. Finally, the extraction of features from a densely sampled grid structure leads to a high degree of multicollinearity. To circumvent these data characteristics, we employ Partial Least Squares (PLS) analysis, an effi- cient dimensionality reduction technique, one which pre- serves significant discriminative information, to project the data onto a much lower dimensional subspace (20 dimen- sions, reduced from the original 170,000). Our human de- tection system, employing PLS analysis over the enriched descriptor set, is shown to outperform state-of-the-art tech- niques on three varied datasets including the popular INRIA pedestrian dataset, the low-resolution gray-scale Daim- lerChrysler pedestrian dataset, and the ETHZ pedestrian dataset consisting of full-length videos of crowded scenes. (shrink)

Health Level 7 (HL7) is an organization seeking to provide universal standards for the exchange of healthcare information. In a document entitled ‘HL7 Version 3 Standard: Data Types’, the HL7 organization advances descriptions of data types recom- mended for use as identifiers. We will argue that the descriptions supplied provide insufficient guidance as to what exactly the entities are which these data types uniquely identify. Are they real things, such as persons or pieces of equipment? Or are they representations of (...) such real things in information artifacts? We here outline the problems faced by HL7 in providing answers to such questions, problems which arise because of the lack of anything like a coherent ontology in the HL7 standard, and we make some recommendations for future improvements. (shrink)

In Book I of his Nicomachean Ethics (NE), Aristotle defines happiness, or eudaimonia, in accordance with an argument he makes regarding the distinctive function of human beings. In this paper, I argue that, despite this argument, there are moments in the NE where Aristotle appeals to elements of happiness that don’t follow from the function argument itself. The place of these elements in Aristotle’s account of happiness should, therefore, be a matter of perplexity. For, how can Aristotle appeal to elements (...) of happiness not entailed by his argument for what happiness involves? I will examine two instances that exemplify the sort of appeal to outside elements that I have in mind. The first deals with Aristotle’s reference, in NE, I, 8, to certain goods—ancestry, children, beauty—goods unrelated to man’s function or his fulfillment of it, but nevertheless required for his happiness. The second instance involves pleasure. Aristotle makes various arguments, both in Books I and X of the NE, that tie pleasure to the activity of the soul, and the function argument in turn. However, none of these arguments succeeds in demonstrating that pleasure would necessarily follow from this activity. Taken together then, these two examples demonstrate the extent to which Aristotle’s definition of happiness is more inclusive than his function argument permits. (shrink)

Finding Oz tells the remarkable story behind one of the world’s most enduring and best-loved books. Offering profound new insights into the true origins and meaning of L. Frank Baum’s 1900 masterwork, it delves into the personal turmoil and spiritual transformation that fueled Baum’s fantastical parable of the American Dream. Before becoming an impresario of children’s adventure tales, the J. K. Rowling of his age, Baum failed at a series of careers and nearly lost his soul before setting out on (...) a journey of discovery that would lead to the Land of Oz. Drawing on original research, Evan Schwartz debunks popular misconceptions and shows how the people, places, and events in Baum’s life gave birth to his unforgettable images and characters, from the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City to the dual view of witches that reflected the life of Baum’s mother-in-law, the radical women’s rights leader Matilda Joslyn Gage. A narrative that sweeps across late-nineteenth-century America, Finding Oz ultimately reveals how failure and heartbreak can sometimes lead to redemption and bliss, and how one individual can ignite the imagination of the entire world. (shrink)

Modal dispositionalists hold that dispositions provide the foundation of metaphysical necessity and possibility. According to the kind of modal dispositionalism that can be found in the present literature, a proposition p is possible just in case some things are disposed to be such that p. In the first part of this paper I show that combining this classic form of dispositionalism with the assumptions that the laws of nature are necessary and deterministic and that all dispositions are forward-looking in time (...) leads to the unattractive conclusion that every truth is necessary. I argue that the classic dispositionalist should be troubled by this result and in the second part of the paper I suggest a novel variant of dispositionalism that avoids it. This extended form of dispositionalism allows that some propositions are only indirectly underwritten by dispositions. (shrink)

Decision making is a key activity, perhaps the most important activity, in the practice of healthcare. Although physicians acquire a great deal of knowledge and specialised skills during their training and through their practice, it is in the exercise of clinical judgement and its application to individual patients that the outstanding physician is distinguished. This has become even more relevant as patients become increasingly welcomed as partners in a shared decision making process. This book translates the research and theory from (...) the science of decision making into clinically useful tools and principles that can be applied by clinicians in the field. It considers issues of patient goals, uncertainty, judgement, choice, development of new information, and family and social concerns in healthcare. It helps to demystify decision theory by emphasizing concepts and clinical cases over mathematics and computation. (shrink)

Referent tracking (RT) is a new paradigm, based on unique identification, for representing and keeping track of particulars. It was first introduced to support the entry and retrieval of data in electronic health records (EHRs). Its purpose is to avoid the ambiguity that arises when statements in an EHR refer to disorders or other entities on the side of the patient exclusively by means of compound descriptions utilizing general terms such as ‘pimple on nose’ or ‘small left breast tumor’. In (...) this paper, we describe the theoretical foundations of this paradigm and show how it is being applied to the solution of analogous problems of ambiguous identification in the fields of digital rights management, corporate memories and decision algorithms. (shrink)

Basing ourselves on the writings of Hans Jonas, we offer to psychosomatic medicine a philosophy of life that surmounts the mind-body dualism which has plagued Western thought since the origins of modern science in seventeenth century Europe. Any present-day account of reality must draw upon everything we know about the living and the non-living. Since we are living beings ourselves, we know what it means to be alive from our own first-hand experience. Therefore, our philosophy of life, in addition to (...) starting with what empirical science tells us about inorganic and organic reality, must also begin from our own direct experience of life in ourselves and in others; it can then show how the two meet in the living being. Since life is ultimately one reality, our theory must reintegrate psyche with soma such that no component of the whole is short-changed, neither the objective nor the subjective. In this essay, we lay out the foundational components of such a theory by clarifying the defining features of living beings as polarities . We describe three such polarities: 1) Being vs. non-being: Always threatened by non-being, the organism must constantly re-assert its being through its own activity. 2) World-relatedness vs. self-enclosure: Living beings are both enclosed with themselves, defined by the boundaries that separate them from their environment, while they are also ceaselessly reaching out to their environment and engaging in transactions with it. 3) Dependence vs. independence: Living beings are both dependent on the material components that constitute them at any given moment and independent of any particular groupings of these components over time. We then discuss important features of the polarities of life: Metabolism; organic structure; enclosure by a semi-permeable membrane; distinction between "self" and "other"; autonomy; neediness; teleology; sensitivity; values. Moral needs and values already arise at the most basic levels of life, even if only human beings can recognize such values as moral requirements and develop responses to them. (shrink)

Philosophers of science traditionally have ignored the details of scientific research, and the result has often been theories that lack relevance either to science or to philosophy in general. In this volume, leading philosophers of biology discuss the limitations of this tradition and the advantages of the "naturalistic turn"—the idea that the study of science is itself a scientific enterprise and should be conducted accordingly. This innovative book presents candid, informal debates among scholars who examine the benefits and problems of (...) studying science in the same way that scientists study the natural world. Callebaut achieves the effect of face-to-face engagement through separate interviews with participants. Contributors include William Bechtel, Robert Brandon, Richard M. Burian, Donald T. Campbell, Patricia Churchland, Jon Elster, Ronald N. Giere, David L. Hull, Philip Kitcher, Karin Knorr Cetina, Bruno Latour, Richard Levins, Richard C. Lewontin, Elisabeth Lloyd, Helen Longino, Thomas Nickles, Henry C. Plotkin, Robert J. Richards, Alexander Rosenberg, Michael Ruse, Dudley Shapere, Elliott Sober, Ryan Tweney, and William Wimsatt. "Why can't we have both theoretical ecology and natural histories, lovingly done?"—Philip Kitcher "Don't underestimate the arrogance of philosophers!"—Elisabeth Lloyd. (shrink)