Le traite sur les vertus, a moins d'etre simplement un traite sur des valeurs differentes, n'a sa place que dans une ethique finaliste, c'est-a-dire dans une ethique quie considere l'action morale comme un phenomene interieur, destine a perfectionner l'homme. C'est a partir de la qu'on peut se demander comment l'homme prepare son action, en acquerant des forces "doublant" la nature. Quant a savoir quelles sont les capacites naturelles exigeant une vertu, cela depend principalement de la question de savoir dans quelles (...) puissances la spontaneite naturelle ne forme pas suffisamment la fermete de caractere, necessaire a la recherche du bien. Pour Thomas d'Aquin, comme pour Aristote, la raison pratique, la volonte et les appetits sensibles sont le siege des vertus. Pour ce qui est de la raison pratique et de la volonte. l'experience commune suffirait a verifier cette opinion. en ce qui concerne les appetits sensibles, il faut d'abord resoudre la question de savoir s'ils ont vraiment un caractere moral, ou s'ils sont simplement des phenomenes psychiques. Dans ce dernier cas ils ne font que suivre les directives de la volonte morale comme les forces motrices physiques. Nous avons essaye de montrer que les appetits sensibles (Passions) ont un caracter moral. (shrink)

1. T. Die Prinzipien der Gesellschaftslehre.--2. T. Rechtsphilosophie.--3. T. Die soziale Ordnung.--4. T. Wirtschaftsethik Galen -- 5. T. Politische Ethik.

There are competing ethical concerns when it comes to designing any clinical research study. Clinical trials of possible treatments for Ebola virus are no exception. If anything, the competing ethical concerns are exacerbated in trying to find answers to a deadly, rapidly spreading, infectious disease. The primary goal of current research is to identify experimental therapies that can cure Ebola or cure it with reasonable probability in infected individuals. Pursuit of that goal must be methodologically sound, practical and consistent with (...) prevailing norms governing human subjects research. Some maintain that only randomized controlled trials with a placebo or standard-of-care arm can meet these conditions. We maintain that there are alternative trial designs that can do so as well and that sometimes these are preferable to RCTs. (shrink)

A long tradition of research including classical rhetoric, esthetics and poetics theory, formalism and structuralism, as well as current perspectives in (neuro)cognitive poetics has investigated structural and functional aspects of literature reception. Despite a wealth of literature published in specialized journals like Poetics, however, still little is known about how the brain processes and creates literary and poetic texts. Still, such stimulus material might be suited better than other genres for demonstrating the complexities with which our brain constructs the world (...) in and around us, because it unifies thought and language, music and imagery in a clear, manageable way, most often with play, pleasure, and emotion (Schrott and Jacobs, 2011 ). In this paper, I discuss methods and models for investigating the neuronal and cognitive-affective bases of literary reading together with pertinent results from studies on poetics, text processing, emotion, or neuroaesthetics, and outline current challenges and future perspectives. (shrink)

A study of the philosophical problems associated with the concept of action. Professor Danto is concerned to isolate logically the notion of a 'basic action' and to examine the way in which context and intention, for example, can convert physiological movements into significant actions. He finds many suggestive parallels between the concepts - the logical architecture - of action and cognition and in developing this theme he becomes involved in and proposes new approaches to various long-standing problems connected with causality, (...) determinism and materialism. As in his earlier books, Analytical Philosophy of History and Analytical Philosophy of Knowledge, Professor Danto places the discussion in a broad historical and philosophical perspective and brings to it a wide reading and an unusual range of interests. He is always prepared to venture novel ideas to stimulate further debate and research and the book as a whole is presented as an original contribution to a subject which is attracting increasing attention from philosophers and from psychologists with an interest in the conceptual assumptions behind their work. (shrink)

Reading is not only “cold” information processing, but involves affective and aesthetic processes that go far beyond what current models of word recognition, sentence processing, or text comprehension can explain. To investigate such “hot” reading processes, standardized instruments that quantify both psycholinguistic and emotional variables at the sublexical, lexical, inter-, and supralexical levels (e.g., phonological iconicity, word valence, arousal-span, or passage suspense) are necessary. One such instrument, the Berlin Affective Word List (BAWL) has been used in over 50 published studies (...) demonstrating effects of lexical emotional variables on all relevant processing levels (experiential, behavioral, neuronal). In this paper, we first present new data from several BAWL studies. Together, these studies examine various views on affective effects in reading arising from dimensional (e.g., valence ) and discrete emotion features (e.g., happiness ), or embodied cognition features like smelling. Second, we extend our investigation of the complex issue of affective word processing to words characterized by a mixture of affects. These words entail positive and negative valence, and/or features making them beautiful or ugly. Finally, we discuss tentative neurocognitive models of affective word processing in the light of the present results, raising new issues for future studies. (shrink)

We present a game mechanic called pseudo-visibility for games inhabited by non-player characters (NPCs) driven by reinforcement learning (RL). NPCs are incentivized to pretend they cannot see pseudo-visible players: the training environment simulates an NPC to determine how the NPC would act if the pseudo-visible player were invisible, and penalizes the NPC for acting differently. NPCs are thereby trained to selectively ignore pseudo-visible players, except when they judge that the reaction penalty is an acceptable tradeoff (e.g., a guard might accept (...) the penalty in order to protect a treasure because losing the treasure would hurt even more). We describe an RL agent transformation which allows RL agents that would not otherwise do so to perform some limited self-reflection to learn the training environments in question. (shrink)

In "De l’Allemagne", Mme de Staël develops a sophisticated philosophical psychology that centers not on reason, but imagination. She does this by bringing French Enlightenment philosophy, particularly Rousseau and Diderot, into dialogue with German thinkers, including Kant and Herder. For Mme de Staël, imagination transcends the epistemic limits of sensibility and reason by incorporating sentiment.

A fundamental question asked in modal logic is whether a given theory is consistent. But consistent with what? A typical way to address this question identifies a choice of background knowledge axioms (say, S4, D, etc.) and then shows the assumptions codified by the theory in question to be consistent with those background axioms. But determining the specific choice and division of background axioms is, at least sometimes, little more than tradition. This paper introduces generic theories for propositional modal logic (...) to address consistency results in a more robust way. As building blocks for background knowledge, generic theories provide a standard for categorical determinations of consistency. We argue that the results and methods of this paper help to elucidate problems in epistemology and enjoy sufficient scope and power to have purchase on problems bearing on modalities in judgement, inference, and decision making. (shrink)

This essay constructs philosophical defenses against criticisms of my theory of the end of art. These have to do with the definition of art; the concept of artistic quality; the role of aesthetics; the relationship between philosophy and art; how to answer the question “But is it art?”; the difference between the end of art and “the death of painting”; historical imagination and the future; the method of using indiscernible counterparts, like Warhol's Brillo Box and the Brillo cartons it resembles; (...) the logic of imitation—and the differences between Hegel's views on the end of art and mine. These defenses amplify and fortify the thesis of the end of art as set forth in my After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History. (shrink)

Legal doctrine often focuses on means rather than ends. In an action for breach of contract, the court asks only whether promisor performed as promised, and takes no account of what either promisor or promisee expected to gain by the transaction. The criminal law inquires into how the criminal was trying to accomplish some purpose, not what the purpose was. Most crimes are committed to get money, a purpose of which the law otherwise approves. This focus on means is often (...) said to be superficial, and to be the manifestation of an underlying concern either with the ends sought by a person or the ends that are served by placing legal restrictions on which means a person may use, or the manner in which they may be used. In this paper Professor Ripstein takes up Kant's suggestion that 'right abstracts from all ends' to explain the law's focus on means rather than ends, exploring its application to both public and private law. (shrink)

A central theme of this book is that the main problems of philosophy and certainly the main traditional problems in the theory of knowledge, concern the space between language and the world. Professor Danto distinguishes between descriptive concepts, concerned with saying how the world is and semantic concepts, which have to do with the application of descriptions of the world. Failure to make these distinctions is responsible for a class of seemingly irresolvable disputes over the foundations of knowledge; but when (...) the distinction is appreciated, a plausible philosophical theory of what it is to know the world can be framed which is free from the standard scepticisms. (shrink)