The studies cited by Dijkerman & de Haan (D&dH) stress the distinction between perception and action within the somatosensory system but provide little information about memory functions. Recent findings by our group and by others show that the dorsal stream is also activated during short-term memory maintenance and long-term memory retrieval of haptic information. These data complement and extend the proposed model.

Friedrich Engels: Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen deutschen Philosophie Edition Holzinger. Taschenbuch Berliner Ausgabe, 2013 Vollständiger, durchgesehener Neusatz mit einer Biographie des Autors bearbeitet und eingerichtet von Michael Holzinger Textgrundlage ist die Ausgabe: Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels: Werke. Herausgegeben vom Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus beim ZK der SED, 43 Bände, Band 21, Berlin: Dietz-Verlag, 1962. Herausgeber der Reihe: Michael Holzinger Reihengestaltung: Viktor Harvion Umschlaggestaltung unter Verwendung des Bildes: Friedrich Engels, Fotographie von 1888 von William Elliott Debenham (1839-1924) Gesetzt aus (...) Minion Pro, 10 pt. (shrink)

Historical and philosophical background -- Del Medigo on the material intellect -- Del Medigo on the agent intellect -- Del Medigo on conceptualisation -- Hic homo intelligit?

Judges in multiple US states, such as New York, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, California, and Florida, receive a prediction of defendants’ recidivism risk, generated by the COMPAS algorithm. If judges act on these predictions, they implicitly delegate normative decisions to proprietary software, even beyond the previously documented race and age biases. Using the ProPublica dataset, we demonstrate that COMPAS predictions favor jailing over release. COMPAS is biased against defendants. We show that this bias can largely be removed. Our proposed correction increases overall (...) accuracy, and attenuates anti-black and anti-young bias. However, it also slightly increases the risk that defendants are released who commit a new crime before tried. We argue that this normative decision should not be buried in the code. The tradeoff between the interests of innocent defendants and of future victims should not only be made transparent. The algorithm should be changed such that the legislator and the courts do make this choice. (shrink)

Der Prozess der Formung beginnt in der Auseinandersetzung mit dem Chaos, einer immer wieder aktualisierten Anspielung auf die Schöpfung. Wenn den Dingen ihre Form entzogen wird, so scheint die Gegenhandlung im Spiel zu sein. Im vorliegenden Band wird hingegen versucht, Formwerdung und Formentzug als Vorgänge zu verstehen, die gleichermaßen am Zuge sind, sobald Kunstwerke ihre Wirkmächtigkeit entfalten.

This volume brings together essays by seminal figures and rising stars in the fields of animal ethics and moral theory to analyze and evaluate the moral status of non-human animals, with a special focus on the question of whether or not animals have moral rights. Though wide-ranging in many ways, these fourteen original essays and one reprinted essay direct significant attention to both the main arguments for animal rights and the biggest challenges to animal rights. This volume explores the question (...) of whether or not animals have moral rights through a number of different lenses, including classical deontology, libertarianism, commonsense morality, virtue ethics, and utilitarianism. The volume also addresses what are undoubtedly the most serious challenges to the strong animal rights position, which maintains that animals have moral rights equal in strength to the rights of humans, including challenges posed by rights nihilism, the ‘kind’ argument against animal rights, the problem of predation, and the comparative value of lives. In addition, the volume explores the practical import of animal rights both from a social policy standpoint and from the standpoint of personal ethical decisions concerning what to eat and whether or not to hunt animals. Unlike other volumes on animal rights, which focus primarily on the legal rights of animals, and unlike other anthologies on animal ethics, which tend to cover a wide variety of topics but only devote a few articles to each topic, the volume under consideration is focused exclusively on the question of whether or not animals have moral rights and the practical import of such rights. (shrink)

This article explores the concept of ethical invention in both Jean-Paul Sartre’s and Michel Foucault’s later lectures and interviews, showing that a courageous disposition to invent or transform plays a key role in both thinkers’ visions of ethics. Three of Sartre’s post-Critique of Dialectical Reason lectures on ethics are examined: Morality and History, The Rome Lecture, and A Plea for Intellectuals. It is shown that ethical invention for Sartre requires the use of our freedom to transcend our current circumstances, a (...) willingness to break away from harmful ideologies, and directing our free praxis towards the goal of universal humanism. Examining several of Foucault’s interviews alongside his lecture series The Government of Self and Others and The Courage of Truth, it is shown that ethical invention for Foucault requires a rejection of necessities or inevitabilities in our current landscape, a willingness to reshape our current beliefs, and a philosophical way of life that results in an alteration of the relationship to self and others. For both thinkers, ethical invention should be preceded by a critical reflection on ourselves in our historical moment. Both argue that ethical invention requires a rejection of the inherent value of our world and realization that the conditions of possibility for being subjects are malleable. Last, it is shown that both philosophers specifically call philosophers or intellectuals to invent. (shrink)

Explores how the emotional experience of gratitude has been enlisted in neoliberal governance through the language of debt. In The Art of Gratitude, Jeremy David Engels sketches a genealogy of gratitude from the ancient Greeks to the contemporary self-help movement. One of the most striking things about gratitude, Engels finds, is how consistently it is described using the language of indebtedness. A chief purpose of this, he contends, is to make us more comfortable living lives in debt, with the nefarious (...) effect of pacifying the citizenry so we are less likely to speak out about social and economic injustice. To counteract this, he proposes an alternative art of gratitude-as-thanksgiving that is inspired by Indian philosophy, particularly the yoga philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita and Patanjali’s Yoga-Sutras. He argues that this art of gratitude can challenge neoliberalism by reorienting our politics away from resentment, anger, and guilt and toward a democratic ethic of thanksgiving and the common good. Jeremy David Engels is the Sherwin Early Career Professor in the Rock Ethics Institute and Associate Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences at Penn State University. He is the author of The Politics of Resentment: A Genealogy and Enemyship: Democracy and Counter-Revolution in the Early Republic. (shrink)

Global Health involves, among many things the intensified travelling of people, resources, technologies, knowledge, standards, and ideas. This book describes what happens when innovations are transferred to new settings: What work is needed to make them work, but also how they change the setting into which they are introduced.

Most conceptual models of the organization of the cardiovascular system begin with the premise that the nervous system regulates the metabolic and nonmetabolic reflex adjustments of the circulation. These models assume that all the neurally mediated responses of the circulation are reactive, i.e., reflexes elicited by adequate stimuli. This target article suggests that the responses of the circulation are conditional in three senses. First, as Sherrington argued, reflexes are conditional in that they never operate in a vacuum but in a (...) context together with other reflexes. Guided by functional utility, they interact rather than add. Second, as Pavlov argued, stimuli acquire meanings as a result of experience. This notion of stimulus effect plus the Sherringtonian notion of conditionality suggest that association is one of the ways stimuli eliciting cardiovascular reflexes acquire their meanings and thus their relative strengths. Finally, as Skinner and others have argued, operants are responses that act upon the environment to obtain consequences – that is, stimuli. As operants, cardiovascular responses fulfill a major biological need, functioning proactively. The cardiovascular response is an integral component of the animal's behavior regardless of whether it is an elicited reflex or the eliciting stimulus acquired its properties as a result of the genetic inheritance of the animal or through experience, or the cardiovascular response is emitted in anticipation of an environmental consequence. The main theses of this essay are: (1) behavior is an integrated set of responses and the circulation is one of the response systems comprising behavior; (2) behavior is, in part, determined by its functional significance within a context; (3) the contextual factors operative at the time of the behavior have a major role in determining which of the set of possible responses will determine the final act, that is, which behavior will be the effective response and which other behaviors will be concomitants. (shrink)

Rejecting an eternal, unchanging soul or essence, Jean Paul Sartre praises the beauty of the human experience and definitively declares his preference for a temporary life of change and transformation over an eternity of certainty. In The Good Place, Michael is an immortal demon called an architect, who takes on the ambitious task of designing a neighborhood that will prompt condemned humans Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani, and Jason to unknowingly torture each other. Sartre's existentialism is characterized by his rejection of a (...) pre‐given human essence as well as his focus on the power of individual freedom. In Sartre's view, there is no divine creator, no final judge, and no supernatural moral fabric holding everything together. Throughout the course of four seasons of The Good Place, Michael decides that the project of an eternal certainty is less preferable than a possibly limited lifetime of risk, change, and transformation. (shrink)

Saturday Night Live (SNL) has become a staple of each political season. In this chapter, the authors show how late night comedy programs such as SNL have joined traditional TV news programs as authorities of delimination for defining the boundaries of political truth in historical epoch. SNL is different from other comedy programs such as the The Daily Show because of its focus on parody. SNL featured many sketches focused on the election, which also contributed to the production of the (...) truth. As an authority of delimination for political truth, SNL emphasized the sexist double standard to which Hillary Clinton was held. In short, SNL will continue to play a role in the production of political truth and knowledge. Michel Foucault famously argued that truth and knowledge are neither static nor objective. Foucault shows that different historical epochs and different geographical locations have different frameworks of verification for something to be considered true. (shrink)

Early to mid-nineteenth-century America experienced a cultural fascination with oneness or monism--the notion that individuals are not separate from divinity but, rather, that the individual soul is an incarnation of the universal soul. Everything is one. This buzz of monism was traceable in part to translations of the Vedas by Indian philosopher Rammohun Roy and found some of its fullest expression in the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. This oneness tradition is what animates Jeremy David Engels--not only (...) because we can't understand Emerson, Whitman, and other American philosophers without it, but because Engels thinks this tradition offers a way of thinking and acting that can meet the ethical challenges of everyday democracy in the present. The Ethics of Oneness is not only a brilliant study of the centrality of the Bhagavad Gita in the philosophy of Emerson and Whitman and a compelling reception history of the Gita in America, it is also a constructive project of moral and political philosophy intended to open possibilities for the present. If the lessons of oneness are taken to heart, Engels thinks, it ispossible to counter the pervasive, problematic American ideals of separation, competition, hierarchy, exclusion, and domination. For both Emerson and Whitman, American democracy requires a firm ontological foundation of oneness that is beyond question if it is to survive and thrive. (shrink)

Raisons de croire et éthique de la croyance -- L'éthique première de la croyance. Le problème de Clifford ; Trois défis pour l'éthique de la croyance -- Raisons de croire et raisons d'agir. Y a-t-il un "agir épistémique"? ; Bons et mauvais types de raisons ; Nos croyances ont-elles un but? ; Croyances correctes et raisons de croire ; Deux sortes d'"agir épistémique"? -- Croyances religieuses et certitudes primitives. Les croyances religieuses ont-elles besoin d'être justifiées ? ; Le pragmatisme en (...) matière de croyance religieuse et ses difficultés ; Réfutation du pragmatisme : l'incommensurabilité entre raisons pratiques et raisons épistémiques ; La foi échappe-t-elle aux normes de la croyance ? -- Les prospérités du vice intellectuel -- Ethique seconde de la croyance et vertu intellectuelle. De l'éthique première à l'éthique seconde de la croyance ; Des raisons de croire aux vertus intellectuelles -- Trois défis pour l'éthique seconde de la croyance. Les valeurs et les normes épistémiques sont-elles simplement sociales ? ; Les vertus dépendent-elles des circonstances ? ; Quelle taxinomie pour les vertus et les vices intellectuels ? -- Descartes et la vertu intellectuelle -- Vices ordinaires. Curiosité, foutaise et snobisme. La valeur de la connaissance ; Curiosité ; Impertinence et foutaise ; Snobs ! ; L'attitude correcte -- Bêtise, sottise et esprits faux. La bêtise et ses formes ; La conception intellectualiste de la bêtise ; La bêtise comme défaut du comprendre ; Bêtise et sottise ; Les esprits faux -- Vices politiques. Peut-il y avoir des vices intellectuels collectifs ? ; La fabrique de l'ignorance ; L'injustice épistémique. (shrink)

La Sagrada Familia es un libro escrito por Karl Marx y Friedrich Engels en noviembre de 1844. El libro es una critica hacia los jovenes hegelianos y su corriente de pensamiento, muy popular entre los circulos academicos de la epoca. El titulo fue sugerido por el editor a modo de una referencia ironica a los hermanos Bauer y sus seguidores. La obra genero una controversia en la prensa y motivo a Bruno Bauer a refutar sus argumentos en un articulo salido (...) al ano siguiente. Bauer afirmo que Marx y Engels habian malinterpretado lo que el habia querido decir. Unos meses despues, Marx le replico en otro articulo. Marx y Engels tambien trataron la controversia en el capitulo 2 de La ideologia alemana". (shrink)

La voix de Julien Brenda (1867-1956) nous est devenue inaudible. Quand l'auteur de la Trahison des clercs accuse ses pairs de se détourner des valeurs éternelles, nous n'y voyons qu'un appel à revenir à la tour d'ivoire. Quand l'une des gloires de la NRF, contemporain de Gide et de Valéry, voue ceux-ci aux gémonies et accuse toute la littérature de son époque de byzantinisme, nous avons du mal à le prendre au sérieux. Dans son culte de la vérité en politique (...) nous ne voyons plus que des vieilles lune dreyfusardes. Nous pouvons trouver Eleuthère délicieusement réactionnaire, mais nous ne parvenons pas à le suivre. Ce livre voudrait montrer au contraire que Benda est un penseur français de première grandeur. Sa défense du rationalisme, sa conception des valeurs intellectuelles et sa théorie de la connaissance littéraire méritent encore toute notre attention. On aura compris aussi qu'il n'est pas question seulement de Benda dans ce livre, mais de la nature de la raison et des ses normes. Et de l'incongruité absolue de quelqu'un qui prétendit vivre uniquement pour les valeurs de l'esprit. (shrink)

This chapter evaluates Davidson's influence on contemporary philosophy. Although a number of his views on meaning, truth, interpretation, action, and mind have often been rejected within contemporary philosophy, most of most his central themes and basic concepts are still with us and have had a lasting influence. The heritage of Davidson's philosophy lies in the capacity of contemporary philosophers to modify his views and to expand them in new directions.

Many pragmatists, from J. Dewey to Richard Rorty, hold that their views provide a defense of democracy or are consonant with it. In this chapter, the author presents the distinction between various views of truth and explains which ones are supposed to matter, and in what sense, for a defense of democracy if one is a pragmatist. The first distinction is between a theory of truth and a conception of truth's importance for various purposes, epistemic, practical, or political. The second (...) distinction is between different theories of truth, in particular between substantive theories of truth, on the one hand, and so‐called deflationist or minimalist theories of truth, on the other hand. The author then shows that pragmatism fails to provide an adequate defense of democracy whether or not it eschews truth. He also deals only with the kind of role and justification that pragmatists give to truth within democracy. (shrink)