Arguments for or against a trend in the evolution of complexity are weakened by the lack of an unambiguous definition of complexity. Such definitions abound for both dynamical systems and biological organisms, but have drawbacks of either a conceptual or a practical nature. Physical complexity, a measure based on automata theory and information theory, is a simple and intuitive measure of the amount of information that an organism stores, in its genome, about the environment in which it evolves. It is (...) argued that physical complexity must increase in molecular evolution of asexual organisms in a single niche if the environment does not change, due to natural selection. It is possible that complexity decreases in co‐evolving systems as well as at high mutation rates, in sexual populations, and in time‐dependent landscapes. However, it is reasoned that these factors usually help, rather than hinder, the evolution of complexity, and that a theory of physical complexity for co‐evolving species will reveal an overall trend towards higher complexity in biological evolution. BioEssays 24:1085–1094, 2002. © 2002 Wiley‐Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Consecutive measurements performed on the same quantum system can reveal fundamental insights into quantum theory’s causal structure, and probe different aspects of the quantum measurement problem. According to the Copenhagen interpretation, measurements affect the quantum system in such a way that the quantum superposition collapses after each measurement, erasing any memory of the prior state. We show here that counter to this view, un-amplified measurements have coherent ancilla density matrices that encode the memory of the entire set of quantum measurements (...) that came before, and that the chain of this entire set is therefore non-Markovian. In contrast, sequences of amplified measurements are equivalent to a quantum Markov chain. We argue that the non-Markovian nature of quantum measurement has empirical consequences that are incompatible with the assumption of wave function collapse, thus elevating the collapse assumption into a testable hypothesis. Finally, we find that all of the information necessary to reconstruct an arbitrary non-Markovian quantum chain of measurements is encoded on the boundary of that chain, reminiscent of the holographic principle. (shrink)

Biological evolution provides a creative fount of complex and subtle adaptations, often surprising the scientists who discover them. However, because evolution is an algorithmic process that transcends the substrate in which it occurs, evolution’s creativity is not limited to nature. Indeed, many researchers in the field of digital evolution have observed their evolving algorithms and organisms subverting their intentions, exposing unrecognized bugs in their code, producing unexpected adaptations, or exhibiting outcomes uncannily convergent with ones in nature. Such stories routinely reveal (...) creativity by evolution in these digital worlds, but they rarely fit into the standard scientific narrative. Instead they are often treated as mere obstacles to be overcome, rather than results that warrant study in their own right. The stories themselves are traded among researchers through oral tradition, but that mode of information transmission is inefficient and prone to error and outright loss. Moreover, the fact that these stories tend to be shared only among practitioners means that many natural scientists do not realize how interesting and lifelike digital organisms are and how natural their evolution can be. To our knowledge, no collection of such anecdotes has been published before. This paper is the crowd-sourced product of researchers in the fields of artificial life and evolutionary computation who have provided first-hand accounts of such cases. It thus serves as a written, fact-checked collection of scientifically important and even entertaining stories. In doing so we also present here substantial evidence that the existence and importance of evolutionary surprises extends beyond the natural world, and may indeed be a universal property of all complex evolving systems. (shrink)

Plato's dialogues are usually understood as simple examples of philosophy in action. In this book Professor Rowe treats them rather as literary-philosophical artefacts, shaped by Plato's desire to persuade his readers to exchange their view of life and the universe for a different view which, from their present perspective, they will barely begin to comprehend. What emerges is a radically new Plato: a Socratic throughout, who even in the late dialogues is still essentially the Plato (and the Socrates) of the (...) Apology and the so-called 'Socratic' dialogues. This book aims to understand Plato both as a philosopher and as a writer, on the assumption that neither of these aspects of the dialogues can be understood without the other. The argument of the book is closely based in Plato's text, but should be accessible to any serious reader of Plato, whether professional philosopher, classicist, or student. (shrink)

In this article Cristoph Wulf examines the basic concepts of pedagogy and educational science in the German-speaking world, looking at education and socialization from the perspective of educational anthropology. He makes evident that the complex German concept of Bildung, in particular, can only be fully understood by means of a historical and philosophical analysis.

Objectives: To investigate whether different methods of obtaining informed consent affected recruitment to a study of delirium in older, medically ill hospital inpatients.Design: Open randomised study.Setting: Acute medical service for older people in an inner city teaching hospital.Participants: Patients 70 years or older admitted to the unit within three days of hospital admission randomised into two groups.Intervention: Attempted recruitment of subjects to a study of the natural history of delirium. This was done by either a formal test of capacity, followed (...) by either a request for consent or an attempt at obtaining assent from a proxy, or a combined informal capacity/consent process.Main outcome measures: Prevalence and severity of delirium, and, as case mix measures, length of hospital stay and destination on discharge.Results: Recruitment of subjects through establishing formal capacity and then informed consent was less successful and, compared with those recruited through the usual combined capacity/consent approach, yielded a sample with less cognitive impairment, lower severity of delirium, lower probability of case note diagnosis of delirium and lower rate of entering a care home.Conclusions: Methods of obtaining informed consent may significantly influence the case mix of subjects recruited to a study of delirium. Stringent testing of capacity may exclude patients with delirium from studies, thus rendering findings less generalisable. A different method is necessary to achieve an ethical balance between respecting autonomy through obtaining adequate informed consent and avoiding sample bias. (shrink)

Suppose we believe that God created the world. Then surely we want it to be the case that he intended, in some sense at least, to create THIS world. Moreover, most theists want to hold that God didn't just guess or hope that the world would take one course or another; rather, he KNEW precisely what was going to take place in the world he planned to create. In particular, of each person P, God knew that P was to exist. (...) Call this the "standard" conception. Most theists find the standard conception appealing. Unfortunately, the view seems to conflict with the equally appealing idea — call it "temporal actualism" — that there are no "future" individuals beyond those that already exist in the present moment. For, on this view, for any historical person P, prior to creation, there was no such person as P and hence nothing about P for God to know. Hence, in particular, God couldn't have known that P was to exist. This is of course not a new problem. But past solutions to it are highly problematic. In this paper, after canvassing previous approaches, I will propose a solution that seems to preserve both temporal actualism and a suitably robust form of the standard conception while avoiding the pitfalls of the past. (shrink)

Aristotle attaches particular significance to the homonymy of many central concepts in philosophy and science: that is, to the diversity of ways of being common to a single general concept. His preoccupation with homonymy influences his approach to almost every subject that he considers, and it clearly structures the philosophical methodology that he employs both when criticizing others and when advancing his own positive theories. Where there is homonymy there is multiplicity: Aristotle aims to find the order within this multiplicity, (...) and believes that doing so is crucial to scientific inquiry and philosophical progress.Christopher Shields investigates and evaluates Aristotle's approach to questions about homonymy, characterizing the metaphysical and semantic commitments necessary to establish the homonymy of a given concept. Then, in a series of case-studies, Shields examines in detail some of Aristotle's principal applications of homonymy--to the body, sameness and oneness, life, goodness, and being. Shields's aim is not only to give a fuller understanding of Aristotle's methodology and to illuminate his specific doctrines in a variety of areas, but to show that this methodology remains fruitful today. (shrink)

The Realm of Reason develops a new, general theory of what it is for a thinker to be entitled to form a given belief. The theory locates entitlement in the nexus of relations between truth, content, and understanding. Peacocke formulates three principles of rationalism that articulate this conception. The principles imply that all entitlement has a component that is justificationally independent of experience. The resulting position is thus a form of rationalism, generalized to all kinds of content.To show how these (...) principles are realized in specific domains, Peacocke applies the theory in detail to several classical problems of philosophy, including the nature of perceptual entitlement, induction, and the status of moral thought. These discussions involve an elaboration of the structure of entitlement in ways that have applications in many other areas of philosophy. He also relates the theory to classical and recent rationalist thought, and to current issues in the theory of meaning, reference and explanation. In the course of these discussions, he proposes a general theory of the a priori.The focus of the work lies in the intersection of epistemology, metaphysics, and the theory of meaning, and will be of interest both to students and researchers in these areas, and to anyone concerned with the idea of rationality. (shrink)

Expressives like damn and bastard have, when uttered, an immediate and powerful impact on the context. They are performative, often destructively so. They are revealing of the perspective from which the utterance is made, and they can have a dramatic impact on how current and future utterances are perceived. This, despite the fact that speakers are invariably hard-pressed to articulate what they mean. I develop a general theory of these volatile, indispensable meanings. The theory is built around a class of (...) expressive indices. These determine the expressive setting of the context of interpretation. Expressives morphemes act on that context, actively changing its expressive setting. The theory is multidimensional in the sense that descriptives and expressives are fundamentally different but receive a unified logical treatment. (shrink)

In February 54b.c. Cicero concludes a missive to his brother with a passing and – for us – tantalizing remark:Lucreti poemata ut scribis ita sunt, multis luminibus ingeni, multae tamen artis. sed cum veneris. virum te putabo si Sallusti Empedoclea legeris; hominem non putabo. Quintus had, it seems, readDe rerum natura, or at least parts thereof, just before he left Rome for an undisclosed location nearby, and he shared his enthusiasm with his brotherper codicillos. Meanwhile, he was corresponding with Julius (...) Caesar, whose staff in Gaul he was about to join. When, a few months later, he was stationed with Caesar, he was involved in another literary affair, this time concerning his brother who wrote to him, inquiring about his autobiographicalDe temporibus suis:quo modo nam, mi frater, de nostris versibus Caesar? nam primum librum se legisse scripsit ad me ante, et prima sic ut neget se ne Graeca quidem meliora legisse; reliqua ad quendam locum ῥᾳθυμότερα (hoc enim utitur verbo). dic mihi verum: num aut res eum aut χαρακτὴρ non delectat?(Q.fr.2.15.5). (shrink)

Discusses Derrida's writings on Plato, Kant, Hegel, Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Freud.

Difficult Atheism shows how contemporary French philosophy is rethinking the legacy of the death of God in ways that take the debate beyond the narrow confines of atheism into the much broader domain of post-theological thinking. Christopher Watkin argues that Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy and Quentin Meillassoux each elaborate a distinctive approach to the post-theological, but that each approach still struggles to do justice to the death of God.

Fallacies and Argument Appraisal presents an introduction to the nature, identification, and causes of fallacious reasoning, along with key questions for evaluation. Drawing from the latest work on fallacies as well as some of the standard ideas that have remained relevant since Aristotle, Christopher Tindale investigates central cases of major fallacies in order to understand what has gone wrong and how this has occurred. Dispensing with the approach that simply assigns labels and brief descriptions of fallacies, Tindale provides fuller treatments (...) that recognize the dialectical and rhetorical contexts in which fallacies arise. This volume analyzes major fallacies through accessible, everyday examples. Critical questions are developed for each fallacy to help the student identify them and provide considered evaluations. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:A fundamental question of global business ethics is, “When moral business conduct standards conflict across borders, whose standards should prevail?” Western scholarship and practice tends to depict home country standards as “higher” or more “restrictive” or “well-ordered” than the “lower” standards of emerging market actors. As much as the question appears culturally neutral, many who ask it do so with a culturally-specific lens shaped by prevailing conditions of Western economic strength. However, the dominant economic powers of the future are not (...) likely to be the same North American and Western European markets that have reigned supreme in the recent past. As corporations increasingly re-examine their political roles in global governance, we need also to re-examine the moral authority of global ethical norms so they do not merely reflect the dominant ideologies of the most economically powerful market actors. (shrink)

We often know what we are judging, what we are deciding, what problem we are trying to solve. We know not only the contents of our judgements, decidings and tryings; we also know that it is judgement, decision and attempted problem-solving in which we are engaged. How do we know these things?

In this detailed study, Christopher Norris defends the kinds of arguments advanced by the early realist, Hilary Putnam. Norris makes a point of placing Putnam's work in a wider philosophical context, and relating it to various current debates in epistemology and philosophy of science. Much like Putnam, Norris is willing to take full account of opposed viewpoints while maintaining a vigorously argued commitment to the values of debate and enquiry.

In _Discrimination Against the Dying_, Philip Reed argues, among other things, that ‘right to die laws (euthanasia and assisted suicide) also exhibit terminalism when they restrict eligibility to the terminally ill’. 1 Additionally, he suggests ‘the availability of the option of assisted death only for the terminally ill negatively influences the terminally ill who wish to live by causing them to doubt their choice’. 1 I argue that on scrutiny, neither of these two points hold. First, we routinely limit a (...) course of treatment to only those for whom we believe the treatment might provide a benefit. Typically, we do not think hastening death provides benefit when an individual is not experiencing a terminal illness. Thus, I conclude, either all treatments are discriminatory, or medical aid in dying is not. Second, I argue that permitting individuals to refuse or remove life sustaining care may very well cause... (shrink)

'Ethik ist auf deskriptives Wissen angewiesen. Das ist nichts Neues: Bereits Aristoteles betont, die Ethik müsse berücksichtigen, dass der Mensch von Natur aus ein soziales Wesen sei. Wie viel Gewicht aber kann und sollte man dem deskriptiven Wissen in normativen Fragen zugestehen? Eine naturalistische Ethik hält es für möglich, dass deskriptives Wissen nicht nur Hilfsmittel für die Anwendung ethischer Normen sein, sondern einen großen Teil der bisher erforderlichen Normen ersetzen kann. Eine naturalistische Ethik fordert außerdem: Möglichst wenig metaphysische Annahmen! Statt (...) Metaphysik möchten Naturalisten Ergebnisse und Methoden der Wissenschaften einsetzen, mit dem Ziel, den Bestand an Normen in der Ethik und damit den Begründungsbedarf zu verkleinern. Lassen sich also Normen durch Fakten ersetzen? Und wenn ja, wie weit? In diesem Band kommen zu dieser Frage Philosophie, Ökonomik, Soziologie, Psychologie, Soziobiologie, Rechtswissenschaft und Spieltheorie zu Wort. Es geht hierbei gerade nicht um eine ethisch-moralische Bewertung von Resultaten oder Methoden dieser Disziplinen, sondern - umgekehrt - um die Frage, welchen Beitrag diese Wissenschaften zur Ethik leisten können.' (Autorenreferat). Inhaltsverzeichnis: Gerhard Vollmer, Christoph Lütge: Fakten statt Normen? Einleitung und Überblick (VII-XIV); Dieter Birnbacher: Prognosen statt Normen? Das Zusammenspiel von Normen und Fakten in der Angewandten Ethik (3-13); Gerhard Schurz: Zur Rolle von Brückenprinzipien in einer faktenorientierten Ethik (14-27); Uwe Czaniera: Vernünftige Normen statt moralischer Fakten (28-42); Gerhard Engel: Von Fakten zu Normen: Zur Ableitbarkeit des Sollen aus dem Sein (43-59); Dagmar Borchers: Träume von Tatsachen und Tugenden: Stärken und Schwächen des tugendethischen Naturalismus (60-77); Wolfgang Buschlinger: Hinter verschlossene Türen: Ethik in die Hand von Experten? (78-87); Eric Hilgendorf: Fakten und Normen in der Rechtstheorie Tatsachenfragen und Wertungsfragen: Bausteine zu einer naturalistischen Jurisprudenz (91-102); Karl Homann: Fakten und Normen: Der Fall der Wirtschaftsethik (105-116); Christoph Lütge: Ordnungsethik - naturalistisch konzipiert (117-127); Ken Binmore: Natural Justice (128-150); Michael Baurmann: Mehrheit ohne Moral? Warum demokratische Entscheidungen ethische Prinzipien erfordern (153-176); Eckart Voland: Normentreue zwischen Reziprozität und Prestige-Ökonomie: Eine soziobiologische Interpretation kostspieliger sozialer Konformität (177-189); Günter Dux: Das Sein des Sollens (190-204); Heiko Breit, Lutz Eckensberger: Fakten und Normen in der Psychologie. Die Faktizität des Normenbewusstseins: Eine entwicklungspsychologische Perspektive (207-224). (shrink)

Do famous athletes have special obligations to act virtuously? A number of philosophers have investigated this question by examining whether famous athletes are subject to special role model obligations (Wellman 2003; Feezel 2005; Spurgin 2012). In this paper we will take a different approach and give a positive response to this question by arguing for the position that sport and gaming celebrities are ‘ambassadors of the game’: moral agents whose vocations as rule-followers have unique implications for their non-lusory lives. According (...) to this idea, the actions of a game’s players and other stakeholders—especially the actions of its stars—directly affect the value of the game itself, a fact which generates additional moral reasons to behave in a virtuous manner. We will begin by explaining the three main positions one may take with respect to the question: moral exceptionalism, moral generalism, and moral exemplarism. We will argue that no convincing case for moral exemplarism has thus far been made, which gives us reason to look for new ways to defend this position. We then provide our own ‘ambassadors of the game’ account and argue that it gives us good reason to think that sport and game celebrities are subject to special obligations to act virtuously. (shrink)

According to commonsense psychology, one is conscious of everything that one pays attention to, but one does not pay attention to all the things that one is conscious of. Recent lines of research purport to show that commonsense is mistaken on both of these points: Mack and Rock (1998) tell us that attention is necessary for consciousness, while Kentridge and Heywood (2001) claim that consciousness is not necessary for attention. If these lines of research were successful they would have important (...) implications regarding the prospects of using attention research to inform us about consciousness. The present essay shows that these lines of research are not successful, and that the commonsense picture of the relationship between attention and consciousness can be. (shrink)

What is involved in the consciousness of a conscious, "occurrent" propositional attitude, such as a thought, a sudden conjecture or a conscious decision? And what is the relation of such consciousness to attention? I hope the intrinsic interest of these questions provides sufficient motivation to allow me to start by addressing them. We will not have a full understanding either of consciousness in general, nor of attention in general, until we have answers to these questions. I think there are constitutive (...) features of these states which can be identified by broadly philosophical investigation, and in the early part of this paper I will try to do some of that identification. -/- Beyond the intrinsic interest of the topic, the nature of such conscious attitudes is highly pertinent to a philosophical account of psychological self-knowledge. So I will also say something about the significance of the constitutive features of these conscious attitudes for a philosophical account of how it can be that a thinker has a distinctive kind of knowledge of some of his mental states. The general challenge in this area is to find anything intermediate between the unexceptionable but uninformative, on the one hand, and the absolutely unbelievable on the other. (shrink)

Introduction : war, politics, democracy -- Democratic security -- Citizens and soldiers : the difference uniforms make -- A modest case for symmetry : are soldiers morally equal? -- Leaders and the gambles of war : against political luck -- War, democracy, and sSecrecy : secret law -- Must a democracy be ruthless? : torture and existential politics -- Humanitarian intervention and the new democratic holy wars -- Drones and democracy -- Democracy and the death of norms -- Democratic states (...) in victory : vae victis? -- Looking backward : democratic transitions and the choice of justice. (shrink)

The literature on the nature of understanding can be divided into two broad camps. Explanationists believe that it is knowledge of explanations that is key to understanding. In contrast, their manipulationist rivals maintain that understanding essentially involves an ability to manipulate certain representations. The aim of this paper is to provide a novel knowledge based account of understanding. More specifically, it proposes an account of maximal understanding of a given phenomenon in terms of fully comprehensive and maximally well-connected knowledge of (...) it and of degrees of understanding in terms of approximations to such knowledge. It is completed by a contextualist semantics for outright attributions of understanding according to which an attribution of understanding is true of one just in case one knows enough about it to perform some contextually determined task. It is argued that this account has an edge over both its explanationist and manipulationist competitors. (shrink)

Authentizitat ist ein in unserem kulturellen Raum allgegenwartiges Phanomen. Doch wem oder was begegnen wir, wenn wir meinen, uns selbst verwirklichen oder alternativ einfach uns selbst treu sein zu mussen? Christoph Wiesinger zeigt, dass wir auf ein Selbst geworfen werden, das zwar als homogener Nukleus der Person projiziert werden kann, sich aber bei genauerem Hinsehen als komplexe sozial verinnerlichte Struktur entpuppt. Das Selbst ist keineswegs objektiv zu fassen, sondern unterliegt sozialen Genesen und wird durch soziale Adressierung unterschiedlich formiert. Das (...) Ereignis von Authentizitat gibt somit Anlass zur Reflexion der Differenz zwischen Erwartung und Erfahrung. Christoph Wiesinger legt die Strukturen des Phanomens der Authentizitat frei, zeigt die theologischen Implikationen auf und diskutiert die praktisch-theologischen Konsequenzen. (shrink)

This paper examines the debate between permissive and impermissive forms of Bayesianism. It briefly discusses some considerations that might be offered by both sides of the debate, and then replies to some new arguments in favor of impermissivism offered by Roger White. First, it argues that White’s (Oxford studies in epistemology, vol 3. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 161–186, 2010) defense of Indifference Principles is unsuccessful. Second, it contends that White’s (Philos Perspect 19:445–459, 2005) arguments against permissive views do not (...) succeed. (shrink)

In Libanius' speechFor the Temples(Or. 30), sometimes regarded as the crowning work of his career, he refers to an unnamed city in which a great pagan temple had recently been destroyed; the date of the speech is disputed, but must be in the 380 s or early 390 s, near the end of the speaker's life. After deploring the actions of a governor appointed by Theodosius, often identified with the praetorian prefect Maternus Cynegius, Libanius continues (30.44–5):Let no-one think that all (...) this is an accusation against you, Your Majesty. For on the frontier with Persia (πρὸς τοῖς ὁρίοις Περσῶν) there lies in ruins a temple which had no equal, as one may hear from all who saw it, so very large was it and so very large the blocks with which it was built, and it occupied as much space as the city itself. Why, amid the terrors of war, to the benefit of the city's inhabitants, those who took the city gained nothing because of their inability to take the temple as well (τοῖς ἑλοῦσι τὴν πόλιν οὐκ ἔχουσι κἀκεῖνον προσεξελεῖν), since the strength of the walls defied every siege-engine. Besides that, one could mount up to the roof and see a very great part of enemy territory, which gives no small advantage in time of war. I have heard some people disputing which of the two sanctuaries was the greater marvel, this one that has gone, or one that one hopes may never suffer in the same way, and contains Sarapis. But this sanctuary, of such a kind and size, not to mention the secret devices of the ceiling and all the sacred statues made of iron that were hidden in darkness, escaping the sun – it has vanished and is destroyed.Jacques Godefroy (Gothofredus), best known for his edition of the Theodosian Code, also produced theeditio princepsof the speechFor the Temples, supplying a Latin translation and extensive notes. He hesitated whether to identify the city in question with Apamea in Syria or with Carrhae, ‘urbs superstitione Gentilicia tum referta’, but opted for a third choice: Edessa, the capital of Osrhoene. In doing so he took for granted that a law of the Theodosian Code (16.10.8), in which the emperors order that a pagan temple in Osrhoene remain open, referred to the same temple; I shall argue below that this is incorrect. Opinion continues to be divided, though with a majority favouring Edessa. But this lay some ten or fifteen miles from the border with Persia, whereas Carrhae was directly on it, and is much more likely than Edessa to have had a temple from which one ‘could observe a vast area of enemy country’. The principal deity of Carrhae (Harran) was Sîn, the Moon God, said by some sources to be male, by others to be female. Describing how Caracalla was assassinated while on a pilgrimage to the god, Cassius Dio says that he had ‘set out from Edessa for Carrhae’, and was murdered on the way: according to Herodian, he was staying in Carrhae when he decided to go in advance of his army ‘and to reach the temple of the Moon, whom the local people greatly revere: the temple is a long way from the city [presumably Carrhae], so as to require a (special) journey’. Another emperor to visit the sanctuary was Julian on his march into Babylonia. Theodoret of Cyrrhus alleges that ‘he entered the sanctuary honoured by the impious’ and cut open a human victim, a woman suspended by the hair, in order to obtain an omen of his future victory. (shrink)

Ectogestation involves the gestation of a fetus in an ex utero environment. The possibility of this technology raises a significant question for the abortion debate: Does a woman’s right to end her pregnancy entail that she has a right to the death of the fetus when ectogestation is possible? Some have argued that it does not Mathison & Davis. Others claim that, while a woman alone does not possess an individual right to the death of the fetus, the genetic parents (...) have a collective right to its death Räsänen. In this paper, I argue that the possibility of ectogestation will radically transform the problem of abortion. The argument that I defend purports to show that, even if it is not a person, there is no right to the death of a fetus that could be safely removed from a human womb and gestated in an artificial womb, because there are competent people who are willing to care for and raise the fetus as it grows into a person. Thus, given the possibility of ectogestation, the moral status of the fetus plays no substantial role in determining whether there is a right to its death. (shrink)

This article presents an overview of the basic philosophical motivations for, and some recent work in, modal set theory.

In “Bayesianism, Infinite Decisions, and Binding”, Arntzenius et al. (Mind 113:251–283, 2004 ) present cases in which agents who cannot bind themselves are driven by standard decision theory to choose sequences of actions with disastrous consequences. They defend standard decision theory by arguing that if a decision rule leads agents to disaster only when they cannot bind themselves, this should not be taken to be a mark against the decision rule. I show that this claim has surprising implications for a (...) number of other debates in decision theory. I then assess the plausibility of this claim, and suggest that it should be rejected. (shrink)

Schopenhauer's philosophy was formed during the years 1810–18. This chapter looks at the influences that shaped it, principally Kant, but also Plato, and the Upanishads. Schopenhauer aimed at a synthesis of these influences. Although indebted to Kant for the framework of his thought, he developed a conception of metaphysics and a ‘better consciousness’ of objective reality that would be free from the limitations imposed by Kant. Schopenhauer's antagonistic relationship with Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel is also mentioned.

Plotinus, following certain Platonic cues, maintains that ‘we’ and ‘the true human being’ correspond to the rational part of the embodied human soul. This view is counterintuitive because it is natural to see ourselves and our humanity as including parts of the human organism additional to reason. In this paper, I propose that Plotinus’ view that we are our rational part is best understood as expressing a teleological claim. Since our proper end is an activity of the rational part of (...) soul, it is appropriate to identify our nature with that part of the organism alone. (shrink)