According to the author, the dichotomy between the primordialist and the instrumentalist approach to the problem od ethnicity is similar to the classical philoso_phical dichotomy of rationalism versus empiricism. Kant's solution - differentiating between the form and the content of ideas - might be animating for us in overcoming the dichotomy between primordialism and instrumentalism. In a new model of ethnicity the ethnicity is to be analogically divided into its form, i. e. the inner universal emotional structure of our mind, (...) on one hand, and its contingent content, acquired from outside in the process of socialization a enculturation on the other hand. This model is based on Tajfel's theory of the minimal group and on Lorenz's conception of imprinting. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 7, July 2022.

Biological species are spatio-temporally localized entities. This fact led to the concept of species as individuals [11], [14], and, at the same time, to the refutation of essentialism in evolutionary biology and taxonomy. On the other hand, molecular biology is compatible with essentialisms of chemistry and physics. The new concept of "historical essences", which is presented in this paper, tries to reconcile antiessentialism of evolutionary biology with essentialism of molecular biology. Historical essences are those parts of genetic information which determine (...) characters relevant for the identification of a taxon. Since membership in a particular taxon is defined by the sharing of the most recent common ancestor, historical essences correspond to the genetic information responsible for the creation of such common ancestor. Historical essences, which are spatiotemporally localized, generate a particular arrangement of spatiotemporally unrestricted processes which lead to the creation, maintenance and reproduction of organisms. These arrangements are results of fortuitous confluence of biological and extrabiological circumstances . In historical essences such a sequence of historical contingencies is "conserved", which allows molecular taxonomy to reconstruct the phylogenetic relationships. The concept of historical essences can be seen as a post-Darwinian modification of the original Aristotleś term of essence - "to-ti-en-einai". (shrink)

Dieser Beitrag nimmt drei Perspektiven ein. Zunächst geht es um Ikonografien der Fliege und des Totenkopfes innerhalb der Stilllebenmalerei seit der Frühen Neuzeit und um die doppelte Vergänglichkeitsmetaphorik, die aus der Kombination von Motiv und Genre resultiert. Zudem geht die Untersuchung der Frage nach, welche medialen und semantischen Verschiebungen bei dem Übertrag dieser dichten Vanitas-Konfiguration in die Fotografie entstehen. Mein Fokus liegt dabei auf den zeitgenössischen Arbeiten der amerikanischen Fotografin Paulette Tavormina und ihren zwischen 2013 und 2015 entstandenen Re-Inszenierungen historischer (...) Stillleben-Darstellungen. Aus der motiv- und gattungsspezifischen sowie der medialen Perspektive ergeben sich schließlich Fragestellungen, die das Thema Vanitas in seiner moralisierenden wie auch zeitlichen Dimension thematisieren. So stelle ich zwei konträre Formen der Temporalität in den Stillleben mit Fliege und Totenkopf zur Diskussion: das Enden und das Sich-Verflüchtigen. (shrink)

Dieser Beitrag nimmt drei Perspektiven ein. Zunächst geht es um Ikonografien der Fliege und des Totenkopfes innerhalb der Stilllebenmalerei seit der Frühen Neuzeit und um die doppelte Vergänglichkeitsmetaphorik, die aus der Kombination von Motiv und Genre resultiert. Zudem geht die Untersuchung der Frage nach, welche medialen und semantischen Verschiebungen bei dem Übertrag dieser dichten Vanitas-Konfiguration in die Fotografie entstehen. Mein Fokus liegt dabei auf den zeitgenössischen Arbeiten der amerikanischen Fotografin Paulette Tavormina und ihren zwischen 2013 und 2015 entstandenen Re-Inszenierungen historischer (...) Stillleben-Darstellungen. Aus der motiv- und gattungsspezifischen sowie der medialen Perspektive ergeben sich schließlich Fragestellungen, die das Thema Vanitas in seiner moralisierenden wie auch zeitlichen Dimension thematisieren. So stelle ich zwei konträre Formen der Temporalität in den Stillleben mit Fliege und Totenkopf zur Diskussion: das Enden und das Sich-Verflüchtigen. (shrink)

The volume presents the views of ten authors from four PostCommunist Central and East European countries (Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland and Latvia) on the impact of emerging technologies on human condition. They analyse the topic from anthropological, ethical, philosophical, ontological, empirical and legal perspectives.

The newly updated Right and Wrong 2nd Edition is an accessible introduction to the major traditions in western philosophical ethics, written in a lively and engaging style. It is designed for entry-level ethics courses and includes real-life ethical scenarios chosen to appeal directly to students. Greatly expanded and improved, this successful text introduces students to the major ethical traditions, and provides a simple methodology for resolving ethical dilemmas Treats teleological and deontological approaches to ethics as the two most important traditions, (...) but now includes chapters on virtue ethics and the ethics of care The very accessible writing style speaks directly to students’ own experience Draws examples from three types of real-life ethical scenarios submitted by students: academic dishonesty, partying, and personal relationships Provides a concise treatment of this notoriously complex subject, perfect for entry-level ethics and applied ethics courses. (shrink)

Recenze: Vladimír Havlík. Anomálie, ad hoc hypotézy a temné stránky kosmologie. Plzeň: Západočeská univerzita v Plzni, 2015, 165 stran.

People are motivated by shared social values that, when held with moral conviction, can serve as compelling mandates capable of facilitating support for ideological violence. The current study examined this dark side of morality by identifying specific cognitive and neural mechanisms associated with beliefs about the appropriateness of sociopolitical violence, and determining the extent to which the engagement of these mechanisms was predicted by moral convictions. Participants reported their moral convictions about a variety of sociopolitical issues prior to undergoing functional (...) MRI scanning. During scanning, they were asked to evaluate the appropriateness of violent protests that were ostensibly congruent or incongruent with their views about sociopolitical issues. Complementary univariate and multivariate analytical strategies comparing neural responses to congruent and incongruent violence identified neural mechanisms implicated in processing salience and in the encoding of subjective value. As predicted, neuro-hemodynamic response was modulated parametrically by individuals’ beliefs about the appropriateness of congruent relative to incongruent sociopolitical violence in ventromedial prefrontal cortex, and by moral conviction in ventral striatum. Overall moral conviction was predicted by neural response to congruent relative to incongruent violence in amygdala. Together, these findings indicate that moral conviction about sociopolitical issues serves to increase their subjective value, overriding natural aversion to interpersonal harm. (shrink)

As the use of automated social media analysis tools surges, concerns over accuracy of analytics have increased. Some tentative evidence suggests that sarcasm alone could account for as much as a 50% drop in accuracy when automatically detecting sentiment. This paper assesses and outlines the prevalence of sarcastic and ironic language within social media posts. Several past studies proposed models for automatic sarcasm and irony detection for sentiment analysis; however, these approaches result in models trained on training data of highly (...) questionable quality, with little qualitative appreciation of the underlying data. To understand the issues and scale of the problem, we are the first to conduct and present results of a focused manual semantic annotation analysis of two datasets of Twitter messages, associated with; hashtags commonly employed in automated sarcasm and irony detection approaches, and tweets relating to 25 distinct events, including, scandals, product releases, cultural events, accidents, terror incidents, etc. We also highlight the contextualised use of multi-word hashtags in the communication of humour, sarcasm and irony, pointing out that many sentiment analysis tools simply fail to recognise such hashtag-based expressions. Our findings also offer indicative evidence regarding the quality of training data used for automated machine learning models in sarcasm, irony and sentiment detection. Worryingly only 15% of tweets labelled as sarcastic were truly sarcastic. We highlight the need for future research studies to rethink their approach to data preparation and a more careful interpretation of sentiment analysis. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Personhood: A Start Are Dolphins Persons? Language and the Hand Personhood Redefined Conclusion: What Kind of Beings Are Dolphins?

This chapter contains section titled: Problem‐solving Summary: problem solving ‐ Gory, Kuczaj, Pryor, Grover, DRC Language Comprehension Commands: FETCH, IN, MIMIC.

This chapter contains section titled: Human Consciousness Nonhumans, Consciousness and Appropriate Treatment Dolphin consciousness Do Dolphins Recognize Other Minds? Moving on: Inner World and Choice Do Dolphins Have Emotions? Do Dolphins Think? Conclusion: Dolphin onsciousness and Moral Standing.

This chapter contains section titled: Human Adaptations to the Water: An Exercise in Imagination Life in the ocean: the importance of other people Dolphin Intelligence in the Wild Dolphin Communication Social Intelligence and Group Cohesion Dolphins and Sex The Cognitive and Affective Skills Involved in Group Living Conclusion: Dolphin Intelligence.

This chapter contains section titled: “Human” Versus “Person” Human, Person and Ethics Philosophical Ethics Ethics and Nonhumans “Alien Intelligence” Two Questions.

This chapter contains section titled: “Interspecies ethics” The Dolphin/Tuna Controversy Dolphins in Captivity So What Do We Do? The Ethics of Human/Dolphin Contact: Two Final Thoughts.