Quantum probability (QP) provides a new perspective for cognitive science. However, one must be clear about the outcome the QP model is predicting. We discuss this concern in reference to modeling the subjective probabilities given by people as opposed to modeling the choice proportions of people. These two models would appear to have different cognitive assumptions.

The most pressing issues of the twenty-first century—climate change and persistent hunger in a world of food surpluses, to name only two—are not problems that can be solved from within individual disciplines, nation-states, or cultural perspectives. They are predicaments that can only be resolved by generating sustained and globally robust coordination across value systems. The scale of the problems and necessity for coordinated global solutions signal a world historical transit as momentous as the Industrial Revolution: a transition from the predominance (...) of technical knowledge to that of ethical deliberation. This volume brings together leading thinkers from around the world to deliberate on how best to correlate worth (value) with what is worthwhile (values), pairing human prosperity with personal, environmental, and spiritual flourishing in a world of differing visions of what constitutes a moral life. Especially in the aftermath of what is now being called the Great Recession, awareness has mounted of the imperative to question the modern divorce of economics from ethics. While the domains of economics and ethics were from antiquity through at least the eighteenth century understood in many cultures to be coterminous and mutually entailing, the modern assumption has been that the goal of maximizing human prosperity and the aim of justly enhancing our lives as persons and as communities were functionally and practically distinct. Working from a wide array of perspectives, the contributors to this volume offer a set of challenges to the assumed independence of the quantitative and qualitative dimensions of human and planetary well-being. Reflecting on the complex interrelationship among economics, justice, and equity, the book resists "one size fits all" approaches and struggles to revitalize the marriage of economics and ethics by activating cultural differences as the basis of mutual contribution to shared human flourishing. The publication of this important collection will stimulate or extend critical debates among scholars and students working in a number of disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, including philosophy, history, environmental studies, economics, and law. Contributors: Roger T. Ames, James Behuniak Jr., Steve Bein, Nalini Bhushan, Purushottama Bilimoria, Steven Burik, Amita Chatterjee, Baoyan Cheng, Gordon Davis, Jay L. Garfield, Steven F. Geisz, Peter D. Hershock, Larry A. Hickman, Kathleen M. Higgins, Heidi M. Hurd, Thomas P. Kasulis, Workineh Kelbessa, Lori Keleher, Oliver Leaman, James McRae, Jin Y. Park, James Peterman, Naoko Saito, May Sim, Robert Smid, Paul Standish, Kenneth W. Stikkers, Karsten J. Struhl, Meera Sushila Viswanathan, Wu Shiu- Ching, Xu Di, T. Yamauchi, Yang Liuxin. (shrink)

In this essay, I claim that certain passages in Book IV of Benedict de Spinoza’s Ethics suggest a novel version of what is known as metaethical constructivism. The constructivist interpretation emerges in the course of attempting to resolve a tension between Spinoza’s apparent ethical egoism and some remarks he makes about the efficacy of collaborating with the right partners when attempting to promote our individual self-interest . Though Spinoza maintains that individuals necessarily aim to promote their self-interest, I argue that (...) Spinoza has an atypical conception of self that allows the interests of other people to be partially constitutive of one's own self-interest. In this way, Spinoza can account for the rationality of concern for the interests of others . This interpretation attributes to Spinoza a form of constructivism that differs in important ways from contemporary Humean and Kantian constructivisms and which can in principle be detached from Spinoza’s particular metaphysical commitments in order to yield a third general category of constructivist view . Though my treatment is necessarily brief, it is my hope that it can serve both to motivate a constructivist reading of Spinoza and, perhaps even more crucially, to suggest a Spinozistic variety of constructivism as a live theoretical option in metaethics. (shrink)

We suggest that in the particular context of medical education, ethics can be considered in a similar way to other kinds of knowledge that are categorised and shaped by academics in the context of wider society. Moreover, the study of medical ethics education is translational in a manner loosely analogous to the study of medical education as adjunct to translational medicine. Some have suggested there is merit in the idea that much as translational research attempts to connect the laboratory scientist's (...) work to its implications for patient care, translational ethics focuses on bringing ethics scholarship into the sphere of personal and public action. We distinguish the term ‘translational ethics’ (the study of ethics being translated between academy, classroom and clinic) from other prominent definitions in the bioethics literature. To do this, we build off a notion of knowledge translation that focuses on the nonlinear movement of information that comes to professionals through multiple competing sources. We suggest that this knowledge, and particularly knowledge about ethics, becomes embodied by the individual. It is through a reflective practice that internally embedded ethics knowledge might be modified, and this work might be best carried out with a moral community that maintains a sense of practical wisdom. Applying this translational approach to the study of medical ethics education can be both academically relevant and practically useful. This view of translation can help bridge the evident, multidirectional relationships between research, education and performance. It might also create further opportunities to develop medical ethics education theory. (shrink)

Immanuel Kant spent many of his younger years working on what are generally considered his masterpieces: the three _Critiques_. But his work did not stop there: in later life he began to reconsider subjects such as anthropology, and topics including colonialism, race and peace. In _Late Kant_, Peter Fenves becomes one of the first to thoroughly explore Kant's later writings and give them the detailed scholarly attention they deserve. In his opening chapters, Fenves examines in detail the various essays (...) in which Kant invents, formulates and complicates the thesis of 'radical evil' - a thesis which serves as the point of departure for all his later writings. _Late Kant_ then turns towards the counter-thesis of 'radical mean-ness', which states that human beings exist on earth for the sake of another species or race of human beings. The consequences of this startling thesis are that human beings cannot claim possession of the earth, but must rather prepare the earth for its rightful owners. _Late Kant _is the first book to develop the 'geo-ethics' of Kant's thought, and the idea that human beings must be prepared to concede their space for another kind of human. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the later works of Immanuel Kant. (shrink)

Hegemony is one of the most widely diffused concepts in the contemporary social sciences and humanities internationally, interpreted in a variety of ways in different disciplinary and national contexts. However, its contemporary relevance and conceptual coherence has recently been challenged by various theories of ‘posthegemony’. This article offers a critical assessment of this theoretical initiative. In the first part of the article, I distinguish between three main versions of posthegemony – temporal, foundational and expansive – characterized by different understandings of (...) the temporal and logical implications of hegemony. I then offer a critical assessment of the shared presuppositions of these theories, including their ‘pre-Gramscianism’, their indebtedness to Laclau and Mouffe’s formulation of hegemony, and their characterization of hegemony in terms compatible with modern theories of sovereignty. I conclude by arguing that the contradictions and oversights of the debate on posthegemony encourage us to undertake a reassessment of the real historical complexity of hegemonic politics and its different traditions of conceptualization. (shrink)

As the Pyrrhonians made clear, reasons that adequately justify beliefs can have only three possible structures: foundationalism, coherentism, and infinitism. Infinitism—the view that adequate reasons for our beliefs are infinite and non-repeating—has never been developed carefully, much less advocated. In this paper, I will argue that only infinitism can satisfy two intuitively plausible constraints on good reasoning: the avoidance of circular reasoning and the avoidance of arbitrariness. Further, I will argue that infinitism requires serious, but salutary, revisions in our evaluation (...) of the power of reasoning. Thus, reasoning can not provide a basis for assenting to a proposition—where to assent to a proposition, p, means to believe that we know that p. A non-dogmatic form of provisional justification will be sketched. Finally, the best objections to infinitism, including those posed by the Pyrrhonians, will be shown (at least provisionally!) to be inadequate. (shrink)

Uses Buddhist philosophy to discuss diversity as a value, one that can contribute to equity in a globalizing world.

There are many things that could be wrong with foundationalism. For example, some have claimed that a so‐called basic belief cannot be both 1) a reason for non‐basic beliefs and 2) such that it cannot be provided with at least prima facie justification.1 If something is a reason, they say, then that something has to be a proposition (or sufficiently proposition‐like) and if it is a proposition (or sufficiently proposition‐like), then it is the kind of thing that requires a reason (...) in order to be even prima facie justified.2 Another reason that some give for rejecting normative foundationalism is that it leads directly to skepticism.3 There is no way, they claim, to move from so‐called basic propositions (typically given as first person introspective reports) to “external world” propositions by employing normatively acceptable principles of reasoning.4 Still others have thought that the invention of a nonrea‐soned reason was as ad hoc as the invention of an unmoved mover.5. (shrink)

The issues involved in decision making about the aggressiveness of future medical care for older persons are explored. They are related to population trends, the heterogeneity of older persons and a variety of factors involved in individual preferences. Case studies are presented to illustrate these points, as well as a review of pertinent literature. The argument is offered that, considering these many factors, a system of flexible, individualized care by informed patient preference, is more rational than the rationing of technological (...) services by age. (shrink)

Recent history makes clear that the quantum leaps being made in technology are the leading edge of a groundswell of paradigm shifts taking place in science, politics, economics, social institutions, and the expression of cultural values. Indeed it is the simultaneity and interdependence of these changes occurring in every dimension of human experience and endeavor that makes the present so historically distinctive. The essays gathered here give voice to perspectives on the always improvised relationship between technology and cultural values from (...) Africa, the Americas, Asia, Australia, Europe, and the Pacific. Contributors: Syed Muhammad Naquib Al-Attas, Roger T. Ames,Yoko Arisaka, Carl Becker, Francesca Bray, James Buchanan, Arindam Chakrabarti, Frank W. Derringh, Rolf Elberfeld, Charles Ess, Andrew Feenberg, Susantha Goonatilake, H. Jiuan Heng, Peter Hershock, Thomas P. Kasulis, George Khushf, David Farrell Krell, Joel J. Kupperman, William R. LaFleur, Lois Ann Lorentzen, David Loy, Joseph Margolis, Hans-Georg Möller, Robert Cummings Neville, Peimin Ni, Monica Atieno Opole, Kuruvilla Pandikattu SJ, Helen Petrovsky, Ramon Sentmartí, Kristin Shrader-Frechette, Vasanthi Srinivasan, Marietta Stepaniants, Vyacheslav S. Stiopin, Henk ten Have, Paul B.Thompson, Mary Tiles, David B.Wong. (shrink)

Translated and edited by Peter D. Arnott, this classic and highly popular edition contains two essential plays in the development of Greek tragedy-_Oedipus the King and Antigone_-for performance and study. The editor's introduction contains a brief biography of the playwright and a description of Greek theater. Also included are a list of principal dates in the life of Sophocles and a bibliography.

In the Western aesthetic of melancholy, alienation and authenticity walk hand in hand, and therapies that change affective states—especially drugs like Prozac—are philosophically suspect. This is not a necessary state of affairs. What would be the central philosophical questions in a culture whose aesthetic values rose from the well‐springs of optimism?

This chapter is offered as a contribution to the logic of down below. We attempt to demonstrate that the nature of human agency necessitates that there actually be such a logic. The ensuing sections develop the suggestion that cognition down below has a structure strikingly similar to the physical structure of quantum states. In its general form, this is not an idea that originates with the present authors. It is known that there exist mathematical models from the cognitive science of (...) cognition down below that have certain formal similarities to quantum mechanics. We want to take this idea seriously. We will propose that the subspaces of von Neumann-Birkhoff lattices are too crisp for modelling requisite cognitive aspects in relation to subsymbolic logic. Instead, we adopt an approach which relies on projections into nonorthogonal density states. The projection operator is motivated from cues which probe human memory. (shrink)

An ongoing debate among legal scholars and public health advocates is the role of litigation in shaping public policy. For the most part, the debate has been waged at a conceptual level, with opponents and proponents arguing within fairly well-defined boundaries. The debate has been based either on speculation of what litigation could achieve or on ideological grounds as to why litigation should or should not be used this way. With the exception of Rosenberg's study of how litigation shaped policy (...) in civil rights, abortion, and environmental matters, there is almost no empirical support for either position.In recent years, the most ardent proponents of litigation as public policy have been public health advocates. Perhaps out of frustration with the inability to achieve desired public health goals through the legislative branch of government, public health advocates have pursued litigation as an alternative strategy. Beginning with tobacco class action litigation in the early 1990s and continuing with litigation against gun manufacturers at the end of that decade, public health advocates have waged a veritable litigation assault aimed at changing how public health policy is formed. (shrink)