With the diversification of philosophy, and the dismantling of stark divides in philosophical methodology in the West, the character of philosophy appears more indeterminate than ever—and demands fresh investigations not only into the character of philosophy, but also the concept of indeterminacy itself. The over-arching aim of this collection, which brings together a wide range of philosophical and inter-disciplinary perspectives, is to bring into focus the prominence and significance of indeterminacy as a common thread in recent Asian philosophy, continental thought, (...) and other philosophical approaches. The theme of indeterminacy can be traced throughout the history of both Western and Asian philosophy. Among the pre-Socratics, Anaximander stands out as recognizing (though not fully clarifying) its significance in his famous formulation of the first principle of philosophy as the apeiron—the indeterminate. In modern philosophy, indeterminacy appears time and again as a recurrent theme in post-Kantian idealism, phenomenology, and continental philosophy. This volume shines a spotlight on the way indeterminacy arises as an important theme for relatively neglected thinkers in the Western tradition, such as F.W.J. Schelling, and it offers fresh perspectives on the significance of indeterminacy for well-read thinkers such as Husserl and Hegel. What is more, this volume includes chapters that bring out the presence and importance of indeterminacy in the various schools of Chinese and Japanese philosophy (among others), such as in various forms of Daoist thinking and the Kyoto school, which cannot be underestimated. By bringing these schools of thought into dialogue with each other, we hope that the volume will enrich the thinking of all traditions, East, West, and beyond. (shrink)

Abstract: Many believe that, in addition to cognitive capacities, autonomous robots need something similar to affect. As in humans, affect, including specific emotions, would filter robot experience based on a set of goals, values, and interests. This narrows behavioral options and avoids combinatorial explosion or regress problems that challenge purely cognitive assessments in a continuously changing experiential field. Adding human-like affect to robots is not straightforward, however. Affect in organisms is an aspect of evolved biological systems, from the taxes of (...) single-cell organisms to the instincts, drives, feelings, moods, and emotions that focus human behavior through the mediation of hormones, pheromones, neurotransmitters, the autonomic nervous system, and key brain structures. We argue that human intelligence is intimately linked to biological affective systems and to the unique repertoire of potential behaviors, sometimes conflicting, they facilitate. Artificial affect is affect in name only and without genes and biological bodies, autonomous robots will lack the goals, interests, and value systems associated with human intelligence. We will take advantage of their general intelligence and expertise, but robots will not enter our intellectual world or apply for legal status in the community. -/- . (shrink)

This work constitutes the proceedings of a New York Academy of Sciences conference held in September 2002. It seeks to take stock of understanding of the self and its relation to the brain, and consider future directions for scientific research in a multidisciplinary context.

Drawing on the work of Henri Lefebvre and Barbara Adam, Gender, Space, and Time is a brilliant study that offers a unique and original threefold conceptualization of how space and time is developed and applied in an empirical study of women's lives. Moss conceptualizes women as centers of action and demonstrates the ways in which they construct personal pathways, connect different spheres of experience, intergrate new time demands into the multiple rhythms of their everyday lives, and carve out personal (...) space. (shrink)

Much philosophical attention has been devoted to “The Land Ethic,” especially by Anglo-American philosophers, but little has been paid to A Sand County Almanac as a whole. Read through the lens of continental philosophy, A Sand County Almanac promulgates an evolutionary-ecological world view and effects a personal self- and a species-specific Self-transformation in its audience. It’s author, Aldo Leopold, realizes these aims through descriptive reflection that has something in common with phenomenology-although Leopold was by no stretch of the imagination a (...) phenomenologist. Consideration of human-animal intersubjectivity, thematized in A Sand County Almanac, brings to light the moral problem of hunting and killing animal subjects. Leopold does not confront that problem, but it is confronted and resolved by Jose Ortega y Gassett, Henry Beston, and Paul Shepard in terms of an appropriate human relationship with wild-animal Others. Comparison with the genuinely Other-based Leopold-Ortega-Beston-Shepard wild-animal ethic shows the purportedly Other-based humanand possibly animal ethic of Emmanuel Levinas actually to be Same-based after all. (shrink)

Traditional procedures for rational updating fail when it comes to self-locating opinions, such as your credences about where you are and what time it is. This paper develops an updating procedure for rational agents with self-locating beliefs. In short, I argue that rational updating can be factored into two steps. The first step uses information you recall from your previous self to form a hypothetical credence distribution, and the second step changes this hypothetical distribution to reflect information you have genuinely (...) learned as time has passed. While the second step resembles traditional procedures of updating by conditionalization, the first is best understood by analogy to traditional models of how agents transmit self-locating opinions through ordinary interpersonal communication. (shrink)

The recent federal interest in advancing “scientifically based research,” along with the National Research Council's 2002 report Scientific Research in Education, have provided space and impetus for a more general dialogue across discourse boundaries within the field of educational research. The goal of this article is to develop and illustrate principles for an educative dialogue across research discourses. I have turned to Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics and the critical dialogue that surrounds it to seek guidance about how we might better understand (...) one another's perspectives and learn more about ourselves through the encounter. To illustrate these principles, I consider the dialogue between SRE authors and critics that was published in Educational Researcher shortly after the release of the report. I focus in particular on one of the many issues about which misunderstandings seem to arise — the nature, status, and role of generalizations — and point to some instructive challenges that each of the articles seems to raise for the others. Finally, I propose what I argue is a more prudent aspiration for general principles in educational research: developing the principles through which open critique and debate across differences might occur and through which sound decisions about particular programs for research might be made. (shrink)

We sought to expand on the concept of the moral self to include not just the duty to develop the moral self but the moral duty to develop the self in both moral and non-moral ways. To do this, we focused on how leaders can promote a climate in which individuals feel a sense of duty to develop themselves for the betterment of the team and organization. In our theoretical model, duty orientation plays a key role in determining whether followers (...) will seek performance feedback to develop their work selves. We hypothesized that followers with ethical leaders would experience a greater sense of duty to improve themselves and would therefore be more likely to seek and less likely to avoid leader feedback. Drawing on social learning theory, we hypothesized that duty orientation would mediate the relationship between ethical leadership and feedback-seeking/feedback-avoiding behavior, expert power would moderate the relationship between ethical leadership and duty orientation such that duty orientation would be higher when followers perceived their leader to be both highly ethical and competent, and expert power would moderate the indirect effect of ethical leadership on feedback-seeking/feedback-avoiding behavior through duty orientation. We tested our hypotheses using a sample of 249 followers across two waves of data collection. Results suggest that ethical leadership and leader competence interact to drive followers’ duty orientation, thereby reducing followers’ feedback-avoiding behaviors. Further, ethical leadership had a direct positive relationship with followers’ feedback-seeking behaviors. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Politica of Justus Lipsius and the Commonplace-BookAnn MossThroughout Western Europe in the sixteenth century, schoolboys and grown men educated in the Latin schools of the humanists would recognize the commonplace-book as an indispensable tool for making sense of the books they read, for assimilating the written culture transmitted to them, and for possessing the means of production in their turn. This handy organizer of information and rather effective (...) retrieval mechanism has been treated with a fair amount of contempt after being sidelined towards the end of the seventeenth century and then falling into public disrepute, its rich stock of precious commonplaces devalued into the small change of mere banalities. Nor indeed does it suit the agenda of post-Romantic scholars and critics looking in a simplistic way for signs of originality and innovation. However, the last few years have seen commonplaces in their more sophisticated guise back on the critical agenda, with several particular studies and, latterly, two major overviews published in a single year. 1 The thesis underlying this paper is that the commonplace-book is central to an understanding of how knowledge was organized in the early modern period. More than that, the commonplace-book keys us into procedures of investigation and debate and into the dialectical and rhetorical modes of articulating thought which were agreed to have persuasive force; and it exhibits the commonality of expectations, the common places, which ensured a common route into a shared area of communication when the cultural consensus of Western Europe was strained to breaking point.One test of this thesis will be whether it can be usefully applied to texts which fit badly into interpretative frames familiar to the modern reader. The particular purpose of this paper is to apply the principles of commonplace-book [End Page 421] reading to just such an awkward case, in order at least to suggest the possibility of recovering an historically probable reading strategy which may more fully recuperate the text for the modern reader. The Politica of the eminent Stoic philosopher and scholar of antiquity, Justus Lipsius (1547–1606), is a network of quotations from ancient authorities linked together by Lipsius’s own words. He himself regarded it as one of his most important achievements. His contemporaries and their seventeenth-century descendants knew perfectly well how to read it, and there is plenty of evidence that they regarded it highly. 2 Modern readers find it an embarrassment, not knowing quite what to do with a book from which the author eclipses himself, yet keeps a dead hand on it: “All of it is mine and nothing is.” 3 Modern critics tend to assume it is all Lipsius, riding roughshod over the quotation indicators 4 ; or they prefer to think that nothing is and treat the text solely as a compilation of extracts 5 ; or they get tied in knots trying to rescue Lipsius’s voice drowned out in his quotations. 6 But Lipsius’s original readers in 1589 knew how to read it, because he told them: “For what is it but a well-arranged register of accounts or COMMONPLACES?” 7If we are going to get anywhere near the original point of reception, we must remind ourselves about commonplaces and commonplace-books. It was Erasmus in De copia who gave the first systematic guidelines for making commonplace-books, but by the time of Lipsius schoolboys in every Latin school in Northern Europe were busy excerpting from their [End Page 422] texts as they read, either under the schoolmaster’s instructions or at their own discretion. The commonplace-book was a probe and an instrument for redistributing text so as to ensure maximal retrievability and optimum application. Here is one of the many enthusiastic promoters of the practice, writing in 1564:So that the more important passages in the authors set for reading and the more brilliant sententiae, exempla, similitudes, words, phrases, and outstanding figurative expressions may be the more readily imprinted on the memory and available and ready for use as occasion requires, it is extremely useful to have the common-places of the main intellectual disciplines arranged in a definite order, under which students may note... (shrink)

Derrida defines différance as the “interruption of Hegelian dialectics.” Although scholars have noted that Derrida pursues his critique of Hegel by means of Hegelian concepts, the way that Derrida employs specific Hegelian concepts in his critique, such as non-positionality, self-reference, and contradiction, has not been sufficiently investigated. In this essay, I reconstruct Derrida’s critique of Hegel with special focus on the Hegelian concepts of non-positionality, self-reference, and contradiction.

The ethical and political dilemmas raised byInformation and Communication Technology (ICT)have only just begun to be understood. Theimpact of centralised data collection, masscommunication technologies or the centrality ofcomputer technology as a means of accessingimportant social institutions, all poseimportant ethical and political questions. As away of capturing some of these effects I willcharacterise them in terms of the type of powerand, more particularly, the ‘Power-over’ peoplethat they exercise. My choice of thisparticular nomenclature is that it allows us todescribe, firstly, how specific (...) technologiesoperate and second, exactly what sorts ofconstraints they impose on people. The reasonfor this focus has to do with a further aim ofthe essay, which is to intervene in aparticular type of debate that is often hadaround the appropriate use and scope oftheories of power that are employed in thinkingabout ICT, especially those theories associatedwith the work of Michel Foucault. There isconsiderable use of his work in computerethics, but my claim will be that despite theproductive uses of his work in the areas ofsurveillance, for instance, it does not exhaustthe larger potential of his work on power and,in part, `government.' I will argue that inorder to properly understand the politicalimpact of some aspects of ICT, especially thedigital divide, one needs an account of howpower operates that includes more traditionaltypes of power-over. To the extent that I willdeal with these concerns, the paper is both acontribution to debates about the nature andscope of Foucault's theory of power and to theissue of the effects of the digital divide. (shrink)

This landmark book is now reissued in a new edition that has been vastly rewritten and updated to respond to recent Kantian literature.

In recent decades, historians have become increasingly interested in the logistical challenges and difficulties encountered by those responsible for the collection, preservation and safe transport of specimens from the field to the museum or laboratory. This article builds on this trend by looking beyond apparent successes to consider the practices and practicalities of shipboard travel and maritime and coastal collecting activities. The discussion focuses on the example of William Henry Harvey, who travelled to Australia in pursuit of cryptogams – (...) non-flowering plants like mosses, lichens and algae – in 1853. In his private correspondence to family and friends, Harvey offered insights into the challenges and obstacles faced by all collectors in the period. His experiences were fundamentally shaped by the material culture, embodied knowledge and physical constraints he encountered on the way. On one level, shipboard and onshore collecting activities were facilitated by the connections forged by new technologies and Britain's global empire. But they also depended on specific contexts and relied on local agents and actors, as well as on the physical and technical facilities (and limitations) of those doing the collecting. The examples of Harvey and others shed light on the real, ‘lived’ experiences of individual collectors, the difficulties and challenges they encountered in amassing their collections, and the networks of people on which they relied. (shrink)

In his new book the eminent Kant scholar Henry Allison provides an innovative and comprehensive interpretation of Kant's concept of freedom. The author analyzes the concept and discusses the role it plays in Kant's moral philosophy and psychology. He also considers in full detail the critical literature on the subject from Kant's own time to the present day. In the first part Professor Allison argues that at the centre of the Critique of Pure Reason there is the foundation for (...) a coherent general theory of rational agency. The second part employs this account of rational agency as a key to understanding Kant's concept of moral agency and associated moral psychology. The third part focuses on Kant's attempt to ground both moral law and freedom in the Groundwork and the Critique of Practical Reason. This is a major contribution to the interpretation of Kant which will be of special interest to scholars and graduate students of Kant's moral theory. (shrink)

We construct logical languages which allow one to represent a variety of possible types of changes affecting the information states of agents in a multi-agent setting. We formalize these changes by defining a notion of epistemic program. The languages are two-sorted sets that contain not only sentences but also actions or programs. This is as in dynamic logic, and indeed our languages are not significantly more complicated than dynamic logics. But the semantics is more complicated. In general, the semantics of (...) an epistemic program is what we call aprogram model. This is a Kripke model of ‘actions’,representing the agents' uncertainty about the current action in a similar way that Kripke models of ‘states’ are commonly used in epistemic logic to represent the agents' uncertainty about the current state of the system. Program models induce changes affecting agents' information, which we represent as changes of the state model, called epistemic updates. Formally, an update consists of two operations: the first is called the update map, and it takes every state model to another state model, called the updated model; the second gives, for each input state model, a transition relation between the states of that model and the states of the updated model. Each variety of epistemic actions, such as public announcements or completely private announcements to groups, gives what we call an action signature, and then each family of action signatures gives a logical language. The construction of these languages is the main topic of this paper. We also mention the systems that capture the valid sentences of our logics. But we defer to a separate paper the completeness proof. (shrink)

The Aristotelian syllogistic cannot account for the validity of certain inferences involving relational facts. In this paper, we investigate the prospects for providing a relational syllogistic. We identify several fragments based on (a) whether negation is permitted on all nouns, including those in the subject of a sentence; and (b) whether the subject noun phrase may contain a relative clause. The logics we present are extensions of the classical syllogistic, and we pay special attention to the question of whether reductio (...) ad absurdum is needed. Thus our main goal is to derive results on the existence (or nonexistence) of syllogistic proof systems for relational fragments. We also determine the computational complexity of all our fragments. (shrink)

Traditional philosophical discussions of knowledge have focused on the epistemic status of full beliefs. In this book, Moss argues that in addition to full beliefs, credences can constitute knowledge. For instance, your .4 credence that it is raining outside can constitute knowledge, in just the same way that your full beliefs can. In addition, you can know that it might be raining, and that if it is raining then it is probably cloudy, where this knowledge is not knowledge of (...) propositions, but of probabilistic contents. -/- The notion of probabilistic content introduced in this book plays a central role not only in epistemology, but in the philosophy of mind and language as well. Just as tradition holds that you believe and assert propositions, you can believe and assert probabilistic contents. Accepting that we can believe, assert, and know probabilistic contents has significant consequences for many philosophical debates, including debates about the relationship between full belief and credence, the semantics of epistemic modals and conditionals, the contents of perceptual experience, peer disagreement, pragmatic encroachment, perceptual dogmatism, and transformative experience. In addition, accepting probabilistic knowledge can help us discredit negative evaluations of female speech, explain why merely statistical evidence is insufficient for legal proof, and identify epistemic norms violated by acts of racial profiling. Hence the central theses of this book not only help us better understand the nature of our own mental states, but also help us better understand the nature of our responsibilities to each other. (shrink)

We present a bimodal logic suitable for formalizing reasoning about points and sets, and also states of the world and views about them. The most natural interpretation of the logic is in subset spaces , and we obtain complete axiomatizations for the sentences which hold in these interpretations. In addition, we axiomatize the validities of the smaller class of topological spaces in a system we call topologic . We also prove decidability for these two systems. Our results on topologic relate (...) early work of McKinsey on topological interpretations of S4 with recent work of Georgatos on topologic. Some of the results of this paper were presented at the 1992 conference on Theoretical Aspects of Reasoning about Knowledge. (shrink)

This book constitutes one of the most important contributions to recent Kant scholarship. In it, one of the pre-eminent interpreters of Kant, Henry Allison, offers a comprehensive, systematic, and philosophically astute account of all aspects of Kant's views on aesthetics. The first part of the book analyses Kant's conception of reflective judgment and its connections with both empirical knowledge and judgments of taste. The second and third parts treat two questions that Allison insists must be kept distinct: the normativity (...) of pure judgments of taste, and the moral and systematic significance of taste. The fourth part considers two important topics often neglected in the study of Kant's aesthetics: his conceptions of fine art, and the sublime. (shrink)

Recent research on the metaethical beliefs of ordinary people appears to show that they are metaethical pluralists that adopt different metaethical standards for different moral judgments. Yet the methods used to evaluate folk metaethical belief rely on the assumption that participants interpret what they are asked in metaethical terms. We argue that most participants do not interpret questions designed to elicit metaethical beliefs in metaethical terms, or at least not in the way researchers intend. As a result, existing methods are (...) not reliable measures of metaethical belief. We end by discussing the implications of our account for the philosophical and practical implications of research on the psychology of metaethics. (shrink)