Through the use of such "folk" concepts as belief, desire, intention, and expectation, Daniel Dennett asserts in this first full scale presentation of...

Essays discuss reason, self-control, self-definition, time, cause and effect, accidents, and responsibility, and explain why people want free will.

A pioneering work in the philosophy of mind, Content and Consciousness brings together the approaches of philosophers and scientists to the mind--a connection that must occur if genuine analysis of the mind is to be made. This unified approach permits the most forbiddingly mysterious mental phenomenon--consciousness--to be broken down into several distinct phenomena, and these are each given a foundation in the physical activity of the brain. This paperback edition contains a preface placing the book in the context of recent (...) work in the area. (shrink)

Daniel C. Dennett is a brilliant polemicist, famous for challenging unexamined orthodoxies. Over the last thirty years, he has played a major role in expanding our understanding of consciousness, developmental psychology, and evolutionary theory. And with such groundbreaking, critically acclaimed books as Consciousness Explained and Darwin's Dangerous Idea (a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist), he has reached a huge general and professional audience. In this new book, Dennett shows that evolution is the key to resolving the ancient (...) problems of moral and political freedom. Like the planet's atmosphere on which life depends, the conditions on which our freedom depends had to evolve, and like the atmosphere, they continue to evolve-and could be extinguished. According to Dennett, biology provides the perspective from which we can distinguish the varieties of freedom that matter. Throughout the history of life on this planet, an interacting web and internal and external conditions have provided the frameworks for the design of agents that are more free than their parts-from the unwitting gropings of the simplest life forms to the more informed activities of animals to the moral dilemmas that confront human beings living in societies. As in his previous books, Dennett weaves a richly detailed narrative enlivened by analogies as entertaining as they are challenging. Here is the story of how we came to be different from all other creatures, how our early ancestors mindlessly created human culture, and then, how culture gave us our minds, our visions, our moral problems-in a nutshell, our freedom. (shrink)

An enlightening discussion that will motivate students to think critically, the book opens with Plantinga's assertion that Christianity is compatible with evolutionary theory because Christians believe that God created the living world, and it is entirely possible that God did so by using a process of evolution.

In our attempt to distinguish two types of social appraisal, we clarify the “knower–learner” relationship in affective social learning, underline the important role that affective observation may have in acculturation processes, and highlight some potential consequences for the recent debate on the benefits of child-directed learning.

Why do we spend so much of our time passing on amusing anecdotes, making wisecracks,watching The Simpsons? In Inside Jokes, Matthew Hurley, DanielDennett, and Reginald Adams offer an evolutionary and cognitive perspective.

Some things are funny -- jokes, puns, sitcoms, Charlie Chaplin, The Far Side, Malvolio with his yellow garters crossed -- but why? Why does humor exist in the first place? Why do we spend so much of our time passing on amusing anecdotes, making wisecracks, watching _The Simpsons_? In _Inside Jokes_, Matthew Hurley, Daniel Dennett, and Reginald Adams offer an evolutionary and cognitive perspective. Humor, they propose, evolved out of a computational problem that arose when our long-ago ancestors were (...) furnished with open-ended thinking. Mother Nature -- aka natural selection -- cannot just order the brain to find and fix all our time-pressured misleaps and near-misses. She has to bribe the brain with pleasure. So we find them funny. This wired-in source of pleasure has been tickled relentlessly by humorists over the centuries, and we have become addicted to the endogenous mind candy that is humor. (shrink)

Essays from some of the 20th century's greatest thinkers explore topics as diverse as artificial intelligence, evolution, science fiction, philosophy, reductionism, and consciousness, presenting a variety of conflicting visions of the self and the soul. Illustrations.

La distopía o utopía negativa es un subgénero que ha hecho famoso la literatura inglesa, particularmente desde las obras de George Orwell (1984, de 1948) y Aldous Huxley (Brave New World, de 1932). Sin embargo, suele pasarse por alto que la primera antiutopía moderna pertenece a un autor ruso, Evgueni Zamiátin: la novela Nosotros (My), de 1922, producto de una modernidad tardía. Esta obra estableció los paradigmas que caracterizarían de ahí en más formalmente a la distopía. En 1968, los hermanos (...) Arcadi y Boris Strugatsky, principales referentes de la ciencia ficción soviética en aquellos años, reelaboraron a partir de estas bases una ciudad ya no distópica sino infernal y oscuramente irracional, eje de su novela Ciudad maldita (Grab obrechonni), una distopía ya en clave posmoderna, llevándola a un auténtico (e irresuelto) planteo sobre la naturaleza del mal. A partir de un marco teórico que vincula la evolución de las utopías negativas con la ciencia ficción, nuestra hipótesis implica que esta novela, curiosa síntesis de ciencia, política, esoterismo y literatura, define un nuevo tipo de obra distópica. El paisaje de ruinas que implica, tan caro a la ciencia ficción posterior a la caída del Muro de Berlín, se vuelve un sistema de sinécdoques que representa, desde la estética del fragmento, un profundo nihilismo donde la posmodernidad adquiere la forma de abismo. (shrink)

In this paper, we point out that explainability is useful but not sufficient to ensure the legitimacy of algorithmic decision systems. We argue that the key requirements for high-stakes decision systems should be justifiability and contestability. We highlight the conceptual differences between explanations and justifications, provide dual definitions of justifications and contestations, and suggest different ways to operationalize justifiability and contestability.

Social learning is likely to include affective processes: it is necessary for newcomers to discover what value to attach to objects, persons, and events in a given social environment. This learning relies largely on the evaluation of others’ emotional expressions. This study has two objectives. Firstly, we compare two closely related concepts that are employed to describe the use of another person’s appraisal to make sense of a given situation: social appraisal and social referencing. We contend that social referencing constitutes (...) a type of social appraisal. Secondly, we introduce the concept of affective social learning with the hope that it may help to discriminate the different ways in which emotions play a critical role in the processes of socialization. (shrink)

The resting-state human electroencephalogram power spectrum is dominated by alpha and theta oscillations, and also includes non-oscillatory broadband activity inversely related to frequency. Gratton proposed that alpha and theta oscillations are both related to cognitive control function, though in a complementary manner. Alpha activity is hypothesized to facilitate the maintenance of representations, such as task sets in preparation for expected task conditions. In contrast, theta activity would facilitate changes in representations, such as the updating of task sets in response to (...) unpredicted task demands. Therefore, theta should be related to reactive control, while alpha may be more relevant to proactive control. Less is known about the possible relationship between 1/f activity and cognitive control, which was analyzed here in an exploratory fashion. To investigate these hypothesized relationships, we recorded eyes-open and eyes-closed resting-state EEG from younger and older adults and subsequently tested their performance on a cued flanker task, expected to elicit both proactive and reactive control processes. Results showed that alpha power and 1/f offset were smaller in older than younger adults, whereas theta power did not show age-related reductions. Resting alpha power and 1/f offset were associated with proactive control processes, whereas theta power was related to reactive control as measured by the cued flanker task. All associations were present over and above the effect of age, suggesting that these resting-state EEG correlates could be indicative of trait-like individual differences in cognitive control performance, which may be already evident in younger adults, and are still similarly present in healthy older adults. (shrink)

Background: Mental fatigue can impact physical demands and tactical behavior in sport-related contexts. Small-sided games are often used to develop a specific sport-related context. However, the effects of mental fatigue on physical demands and tactical behaviors during soccer SSGs have not been aggregated for systematical assessment.Objective: This systematic review was conducted to compare the effects of mental fatigue vs. control conditions in terms of the total running distance and tactical behavior of soccer players during SSGs.Methods: The data sources utilized were (...) PubMed, PsycINFO, Scielo, Scopus, SPORTDiscus, and Web of Science. The study eligibility criteria were established based on PICOS: Population: healthy youth and young adult men soccer players with regular training practice and belonging to teams with regular competitions; Intervention: exposed to mental fatigue-induced protocols only before SSGs; Comparator: control conditions before SSGs; Outcomes: physical demands and tactical behavior ; Study design: counterbalanced cross-over design; and only full-text and original articles written in English.Results: The database search initially identified 111 titles. From those, six articles were eligible for the systematic review and meta-analysis. Results showed no significant effect of fatigue on total running distance and tactical behavior.Conclusions: A non-significant effect of mental fatigue on total running distance and tactical behaviors performed by soccer players during SSGs was found in this systematic review. (shrink)

Although we applaud the general aims of the target article, we argue that Affective Social Learning completes TTOM by pointing out how emotions can provide another route to acquiring culture, a route which may be quicker, more flexible, and even closer to an axiological definition of culture than TTOM itself.

Background: Heart rate variability (HRV) has been considered as a measure of heart-brain interaction and autonomic modulation, and it is modified by cognitive and attentional tasks. In cognitive tasks, HRV was reduced in participants who achieved worse results. This could indicate the possibility of HRV predicting cognitive performance, but this association is still unclear in a high cognitive load sport such as chess Objective: To analyse modifications on HRV and subjective perception of stress, difficulty and complexity in different chess problem (...) tasks. Design: HRV was assessed at baseline. During the chess problems, HRV was also monitored, and immediately after chess problems the subjective stress, difficulty and complexity were also registered. Method: A total of 16 male chess players, age: 35.19 (13.44) and ELO: 1927.69 (167.78) were analysed while six chess problem solving tasks with different level of difficulty were conducted (two low level, two medium level and two high level chess problems). Participants were classified according to their results into two groups: high performance or low performance. Results: Friedman test showed a significant effect of tasks in HRV indexes and perceived difficulty, stress and complexity in both high and low performance groups. A decrease in HRV was observed in both groups when chess problems difficulty increased. In addition, HRV was significantly higher in the high performance group than in the low performance group during chess problems. Conclusions: An increase in autonomic modulation was observed to meet the cognitive demands of the problems, being higher while the difficulty of the tasks increased. Non-linear HRV indexes seem to be more reactive to tasks difficulty, being an interesting and useful tool in chess training. (shrink)

This book is dedicated to clarify ambiguous concepts from the world of creativity and innovation. One of the initial triggers for the development of the book was the perceived ambiguity of the binomials Design vs. Design Thinking and Innovation vs. Invention. Frequently, designers and innovation consultants are questioned by their clients about the relationships between these kind of concepts. Has the second emerged through the first, or vice-verse? Is one part of the other? Where are the similarities and which are (...) the differences? This conceptual incomprehension makes itself noticeable between many ambiguous concepts in the world of innovation and creativity. What is the difference between Radical and Disruptive Innovation? Or is Social Innovation the same as Social Intervention? And regarding Creativity, are Creativity and Creative Thinking the same? In this book the reader will find answers to these kinds of questions and doubts. 28 authors from 10 different countries and cultural backgrounds are questioning current definitions and perceptions, by comparing different sources and ideas, or simply by giving their personal opinions. Some of the authors have an academic background, others a practical one, being either entrepreneurs, working with innovation in companies, or being innovation/design consultants. (shrink)

Bien que l’ayant rencontré parfois à Paris, je ne fis réellement connaissance de Daniel Charles qu’à partir du moment où il fut nommé professeur à la faculté de lettres de Nice et s’installa dans sa villa d’Antibes. Il y organisait des soirées et des dîners mémorables, préparés par sa femme Jacqueline qui avait le quadruple avantage d’être charmante, québécoise, pianiste et excellente cuisinière. Nous ne tardâmes pas à devenir intimes. L’origine de notre amitié fut...

Science fiction has often been at the forefront of popular renderings and exploration of various “subaltern” groups, including that of nonhuman animals. I argue that science fiction’s freedom from the boundaries of what is currently possible allows writers such as Mary Shelley, H. G. Wells, Philip K. Dick, Olaf Stapledon, Daniel Keyes, Octavia Butler, Cordwainer Smith, and H. Beam Piper to explore ethical possibilities regarding animals that are diverse from those of the context in which they wrote. It is (...) also notable that the earlier science fiction writers only critique majority views regarding animals, whereas their antecessors go so far as to suggest the empowerment of the “Other,” in this case, nonhuman animals. (shrink)

In what particular manner human beings are free moral agents and to what extent they can reasonably expect to attain a good life are two intertwined questions that rose to prominence in antiquity and have remained so to the present day. This book analyzes and compares the approaches of two significant authors from different schools at the turn of the third century CE, Alexander of Aphrodisias and Clement of Alexandria. These contemporaries utilize their respective Peripatetic and Christian commitments in (...) their employment of the shared Greek classics toward these shared ethical questions. (shrink)

This article seeks to interpret the phrase Πάτερ, ημων ο εν τοῖς οὐρανοῖς in the invocation of the Lord’s Prayer in the light of Ewe-Ghanaian cosmology. The article employs a combination of the historical-critical and indigenous mother tongue biblical hermeneutical approaches to explore the implication of the invocation for Ewe-Ghanaian Christian spirituality today. The article firstly discusses the various theological and hermeneutical positions of the invocation in dialogue with Ewe-Ghanaian concept of God and the plurality of his dwelling place. The (...) article argues that Matthew’s use of οὐρανοῖς to suggest a plurality in God’s dwelling place resonates with Ewe cosmology, where it is believed that there are seven states of existence and that Mawugã, the Supreme Being, dwells in the first – the absolute state. Thus God exists in ‘seven heavens’ in Ewe cosmology, with the highest heaven being the eternal state of abode. On the other hand, the inclusive interpretation of the fatherhood of God in Ewe cosmology is discontinuous with the exclusive interpretation in the works of the church fathers such as Cyprian, Origen, Gregory of Nissa, Augustine and Clement of Alexandria. This hermeneutical position, the article observes, was responsible for the theological tensions that characterised the encounter between missionary Christianity and Ewe indigenous religion in the middle of the 19th century. However, the introduction of social services as evangelisation strategy, the legacy of the Ewe Bible and liturgy and the handing over of the Ewe church to the indigenous coworkers may have contributed to a large extent in ensuring religious tolerance among followers of the two religions. Today, Ewe-Ghanaian popular Christianity has shifted from its apologetic stance to a more liberal stance and employs indigenous religious and cultural categories in theologising.Contribution: Matthew’s rendition of the invocation of the Lord’s Prayer in the context of Ewe-Ghanaian cosmology is the focus of this article. The article forms part of the researcher’s contribution to the academic knowledge on the Lord’s Prayer and inspires the use of mother tongue biblical hermeneutics in the development of theological materials for the Ewe-Ghanaian Christian communities in Ghana and Togo. (shrink)

Late Medieval and Early Modern Fight Books offers insights into the cultural and historical transmission and practices of martial arts, based on the corpus of the Fight Books (Fechtbücher) in 14th- to 17th-century Europe. The first part of the book deals with methodological and specific issues for the studies of this emerging interdisciplinary field of research. The second section offers an overview of the corpus based on geographical areas. The final part offers some relevant case studies. This is the first (...) book proposing a comprehensive state of research and an overview of Historical European Martial Arts Studies. One of its major strengths lies in its association of interdisciplinary scholars with practitioners of martial arts. Contributors are Sydney Anglo, Matthias Johannes Bauer, Eric Burkart, Marco Cavina, Franck Cinato, John Clements, Timothy Dawson, Olivier Dupuis, Bert Gevaert, Dierk Hagedorn, Daniel Jaquet, Rachel E. Kellet, Jens Peter Kleinau, Ken Mondschein, Reinier van Noort, B. Ann Tlusty, Manuel Valle Ortiz, Karin Verelst, and Paul Wagner. (shrink)

It is common to hear talk of the aim of belief and to find philosophers appealing to that aim for numerous explanatory purposes. What belief 's aim explains depends, of course, on what that aim is. Many hold that it is somehow related to truth, but there are various ways in which one might specify belief 's aim using the notion of truth. In this article, by considering whether they can account for belief 's standard of correctness and the epistemic (...) norms governing belief, I argue against certain prominent specifications of belief 's aim given in terms of truth, and advance a neglected alternative. (shrink)

In November 1996, Catherine Clément and Julia Kristeva began a correspondence exploring the subject of the sacred. In this collection of those letters Catherine Clément approaches the topic from an anthropologist's point of view while Julia Kristeva responds from a psychoanalytic perspective. Their correspondence leads them to a controversial and fundamental question: is there anything sacred that can at the same time be considered strictly feminine? The two voices of the book work in tandem, fleshing out ideas and blending together (...) into a melody of experience. The result is a dialogue that delves into the mysteries of belief -- the relationship between faith and sexuality, the body and the senses -- which, Clément and Kristeva argue, women feel with special intensity. Although their discourse is not necessarily about theology, the authors consider the role of women and femininity in the religions of the world, from Christianity and Judaism to Confucianism and African animism. They are the first to admit that what they have undertaken is "as impossible to accomplish as it is fascinating." Nevertheless, their wide-ranging and exhilarating dialogue succeeds in raising questions that are perhaps more important to ask than to answer. (shrink)

The _Physics_ is a foundational work of western philosophy, and the crucial one for understanding Aristotle's views on matter, form, essence, causation, movement, space, and time. This richly annotated, scrupulously accurate, and consistent translation makes it available to a contemporary English reader as no other does—in part because it fits together seamlessly with other closely associated works in the New Hackett Aristotle series, such as the _Metaphysics_, _De Anima_, and forthcoming _De Caelo_ and _On Coming to Be and Passing Away_. (...) Eventually the series will include all of Aristotle's works. Sequentially numbered endnotes provide the information most needed at each juncture, while a detailed Index of Terms indicates places where focused discussion of key notions occurs. An illuminating general Introduction describes the book that lies ahead, explaining what sort of work it is and what sorts of evidence it relies on. (shrink)

The first part of this paper proposes a precise definition of what a worldview is, and why there is a necessity to have one. The second part suggests how to construct integrated scientific worldviews. For this attempt, three general scientific approaches are proposed: the general systems theory as the endeavor for a universal language for science, a general problem-solving approach and the idea of evolution, broadly construed. We close with some remarks about limitations of scientific worldviews.

Cet essai présente une description de plusieurs travaux inédits de Jacques Derrida au sujet de Marx et d'Althusser datant des années 1960 et 1970. Au-delà du travail philologique, il s'agit aussi d'une étude théorique de notions telles que 'idéologie', 'fétichisme', 'reproduction', 'division du travail', 'différence sexuelle', 'domination', 'économie politique', 'matérialisme dialectique', ou 'production culturelle' — tout autant à travers les textes marxistes que dans les lectures déconstructives qu'en propose alors Derrida. Durant les années 1970, dans le cadre de son séminaire, (...) Derrida s'efforce de penser une autre économie politique, au-delà de l'économie du propre qu'il identifie aussi bien chez les économistes classiques que chez leurs critiques marxistes. Ces lectures détaillées et combattives de textes marxistes restent aujourd'hui inédites. Leur prise en compte contribue à redéfinir l'image de Derrida et de la déconstruction, en témoignant de ses discussions très avancées de Marx, d'Althusser, et de la pensée marxiste — et ce dès la fin des années 1960 et le début des années 1970, plus de 20 ans avant la publication de Spectres de Marx (1993). -/- Une version plus courte de cet article fut traduite en espagnol par Ramiro Parodi, et publiée en 2019 dans le numéro 7 de la revue Demarcaciones — numéro consacré au 25ème anniversaire de la publication de Spectres de Marx. (shrink)

Thanks to his unsurpassed eye and his fearless willingness to take a stand, Clement Greenberg (1909 1994) became one of the giants of 20th century art criticism a writer who set the terms of critical discourse from the moment he burst onto the scene with his seminal essays Avant Garde and Kitsch (1939) and Towards a Newer Laocoon (1940). In this work, which gathers previously uncollected essays and a series of seminars delivered at Bennington in 1971, Greenberg provides his (...) most expansive statement of his views on taste and quality in art, arguing for an esthetic that flies in the face of current art world fashions. Greenberg insists despite the attempts from Marcel Duchamp onwards to escape the jurisdiction of taste by producing an art so disjunctive that it cannot be judged that taste is inexorable. He argues that standards of quality in art, the artist's responsibility to seek out the hardest demands of a medium, and the critic's responsibility to discriminate, are essential conditions for great art. The obsession with innovation the epidemic of newness leads, in Greenbergs view, to the boringness of so much avant garde art. He discusses the interplay of expectation and surprise in aesthetic experience, and the exalted consciousness produced by great art. Homemade Esthetics allows us particularly in the transcribed seminar sessions, never before published to watch the critics mind at work, defending (and at times reconsidering) his theories. His views, often controversial, are the record of a lifetime of looking at and thinking about art as intensely as anyone ever has. (shrink)