Conscious experience is one of the most difficult and thorny problems in psychological science. Its study has been neglected for many years, either because it was thought to be too difficult, or because the relevant evidence was thought to be poor. Bernard Baars suggests a way to specify empirical constraints on a theory of consciousness by contrasting well-established conscious phenomena - such as stimulus representations known to be attended, perceptual, and informative - with closely comparable unconscious ones - such (...) as stimulus representations known to be preperceptual, unattended, or habituated. Adducing data to show that consciousness is associated with a kind of global workplace in the nervous system, and that several brain structures are known to behave in accordance with his theory, Baars helps to clarify many difficult problems. (shrink)

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion.

This article is extracted from a discussion between Camel Gupta, Jay Bernard and Sita Balani. We took as our starting point ‘Becoming visible: Black lesbian discussions’ (Carmen et al, 1984), featured in the 1984 special issue of Feminist Review on black feminism. Here, we reflect on the political, cultural and technological transformations of queer life since the publication of ‘Becoming visible’. The original discussion focused on questions of identity, safety, the public and the private, and the tensions between race (...) and sexuality. The discussants took personal and political risks to be active organisers. As the beneficiaries of that activism, we interrogate not only the broader ideas of race, sexuality and feminism, but critique some of the discussions circulating within our own ranks. We also consider our responsibility to follow our predecessors and to learn from their mistakes. We are more visible than ever, but at what price? What has been gained and lost? Beyond visibility, what is our responsibility? In an attempt to understand these questions we cover contemporary notions such as QTIPOC, monolithic whiteness and online activism. (shrink)

The goal of human life, according to Plato, Aristotle, and the Bible, is to become as much like god as possible. This book, written in vivid and lucid English, illuminates Greek philosophy by showing how it grows out of ancient Greek religion and how it compares to biblical religion.

[Open access] In this book symposium the author takes up questions from phenomenology, hermeneutics, ethical theory, and intellectual history raised by a group of scholarly interlocutors from a range of backgrounds. In the course of engaging with these issues, he discusses, inter alia, McDowell’s realism, Jonathon Lear’s work on the end of a world, Michael Oakeshott’s view of selfhood, Heidegger’s conception of Jemeinigkeit, Uexküll’s notion of Umwelt, and Gadamer’s hermeneutic conception of truth.

Intentionalism is the claim that the phenomenological properties of a perceptual experience supervene on its intentional properties. The paper presents a counter-example to this claim, one that concerns visual grouping phenomenology. I argue that this example is superior to superficially similar examples involving grouping phenomenology offered by Peacocke (Sense and Content, Oxford: Oxford University Press), because the standard intentionalist responses to Peacocke’s examples cannot be extended to mine. If Intentionalism fails, it is impossible to reduce the phenomenology of an experience (...) to its content. (shrink)

Bernard Berofsky addresses that metaphysical picture directly.Nature's Challenge to Free Willoffers an original defense of Humean Compatibilism.

In this important new book, Jacques Derrida talks with Bernard Stiegler about the effect of teletechnologies on our philosophical and political moment. Improvising before a camera, the two philosophers are confronted by the very technologies they discuss and so are forced to address all the more directly the urgent questions that they raise. What does it mean to speak of the present in a situation of "live" recording? How can we respond, responsibly, to a question when we know that (...) the so-called "natural" conditions of expression, discussion, reflection, and deliberation have been breached? As Derrida and Stiegler discuss the role of teletechnologies in modern society, the political implications of Derrida's thought become apparent. Drawing on recent events in Europe, Derrida and Stiegler explore the impact of television and the internet on our understanding of the state, its borders and citizenship. Their discussion examines the relationship between the juridical and the technical, and it shows how new technologies for manipulating and transmitting images have influenced our notions of democracy, history and the body. The book opens with a shorter interview with Derrida on the news media, and closes with a provocative essay by Stiegler on the epistemology of digital photography. In Echographies of Television, Derrida and Stiegler open up questions that are of key social and political importance. Their book will be of great interest to all those already familiar with Derrida's work, as well as to students and scholars of philosophy, literature, sociology and media studies. (shrink)

Ethical aspects of management control systems are attracting increasing attention among scholars and practitioners. Much of the work centers on their aims. We complement this scholarship by applying the ethical principle of “no harm,” i.e., non-maleficence, to examine how those aims are achieved. We illustrate this approach by exploring the effects of four MCS designs on job-related stress drawing on the differentiation of stress into two dimensions: a challenge and a threat dimension. Results from a lagged field-survey with 471 managers (...) and employees from the UK and the U.S. support key predictions and offer first insights into designing MCS based on a “no harm” ethics. Our study highlights the benefits of interdisciplinary research in business ethics and hopefully encourages more work on MCS from a perspective based on the non-maleficence principle. (shrink)

Ethics, Value, and Reality is a collection of essays written after Kolnai settled in England in 1955. These essays from Kolnai's mature years sit atop a remarkable gestation of moral and political thinking. At the heart of his thought is the special role of privilege in a good social order. Kolnai relies heavily on the work of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century value theorists such as Alexius Meinong, Nicolai Hartmann, and Max Scheler. He blends this continental tradition of ethics with (...) British intuitionism and Scottish Enlightenment articulations. For Kolnai, ethical life cannot be adequately understood except by reference to moral emphasis, and thus, Kolnai can be thought of as a liberal conservative. He acknowledges myriad values, moral and non-moral, and accepts that all can have some claim upon us. Low values as much as high values have a legitimate claim. His is a tolerant conservatism though not for a moment does he forgo the necessity of judgment: a readily graspable hierarchy keeps the respective demands of values in proportion. Kolnai welcomes the call to seriousness, which is the hallmark of existentialism. The ground of Kolnai's thought is the idea of emotion as cognitive. He saw the typical analytical philosopher's fascination with simplicity of explanation not only thoroughly refuted by the gains in understanding wrought by phenomenological method, with its deference to the richness of phenomena, but sensed in the monistic inclination he dreaded a harbinger of totalitarianism. Never denying his emotionalism, he nonetheless made his points well enough by adopting an analytical approach to philosophy and ethics. This is a major work crossing moral and political philosophy. (shrink)

The Metaphysical Society was founded in 1869 at the instigation of James Knowles (editor of the Contemporary Review and then of the Nineteenth Century) with a view to "collect, arrange, and diffuse Knowledge (whether objective or subjective) of mental and moral phenomena" (first resolution of the Society in April 1869). The Society was a private club which gathered together a latter-day clerisy. Building on the tradition of the Cambridge Apostles, they elected talented members from across the Victorian intellectual spectrum: Bishops, (...) one Cardinal, philosophers, men of science, literary figures, and politicians. The Society included in its 62 members prominent figures such as T. H. Huxley, William Gladstone, Walter Bagehot, Henry Edward Manning, John Ruskin and Alfred Lord Tennyson. The papers they produced are key primary sources which shed new light on the ideas of their authors on the burning subjects of the day, ranging from the existence and personality of God to the nature of conscience or the existence of the soul. They are a legacy of a period when intellectuals were wondering how, and what, to believe in a time of social change, spiritual crisis, and scientific progress. The dissolution of the Society in 1880 did not diminish the value of the papers: they illustrate a tradition of private, open discussion among famous men of the most widely varying views; they offer detailed insight into the evolution of the relationships between different schools of Victorian scientific and religious thought; and they bring to light heretofore under-represented points of conflict and harmony. All 95 papers are included, accompanied by introductions and scholarly notes that set each paper into their proper context. (shrink)

Physicians and patients rely on medical journals as trusted sources of medical information. Unfortunately, conflicts of interest may undermine the credibility of the medical literature. Improved policies and practices at journals should address the conflicts of interest of authors, reviewers, editors, and journals. Medical journals should manage and eliminate conflicts, not just improve the disclosure of financial relationships.

To mark the centenary of the 1910 to 1913 publication of the monumental Principia Mathematica by Alfred N. Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, this collection of fifteen new essays by distinguished scholars considers the influence and history of PM over the last hundred years.

I outline some of my work and results on my matter-gravity entanglement hypothesis, according to which the entropy of a closed quantum gravitational system is equal to the system’s matter-gravity entanglement entropy. The main arguments presented are: that this hypothesis is capable of resolving what I call the second-law puzzle, i.e. the puzzle as to how the entropy increase of a closed system can be reconciled with the asssumption of unitary time-evolution; that the black hole information loss puzzle may be (...) regarded as a special case of this second law puzzle and that therefore the same resolution applies to it; that the black hole thermal atmosphere puzzle can be resolved by adopting a radically different-from-usual description of quantum black hole equilibrium states, according to which they are total pure states, entangled between matter and gravity in such a way that the partial states of matter and gravity are each approximately thermal equilibrium states ; that the Susskind–Horowitz–Polchinski string-theoretic understanding of black hole entropy as the logarithm of the degeneracy of a long string cannot be quite correct but should be replaced by a modified understanding according to which it is the entanglement entropy between a long string and its stringy atmosphere, when in a total pure equilibrium state in a suitable box, which ) goes over, at strong-coupling, to a black hole in equilibrium with its thermal atmosphere. The modified understanding in is based on a general result, which I also describe, which concerns the likely state of a quantum system when it is weakly coupled to an energy-bath and the total state is a random pure state with a given energy. This result generalizes Goldstein et al.’s ‘canonical typicality’ result to systems which are not necessarily small. (shrink)

Philosophy has always been parasitic on other bodies of knowledge, especially religious thought. Greek philosophy in Italy emerged as a purification of Orphic religious traditions. Orphic votaries adopted various disciplines in the attempt to become divine, which led Pythagoras and Empedocles to define philosophy as a path to divinity. According to Plato and Aristotle, the goal of philosophy is to become “as much like a god as is humanly possible.” Classical Greek philosophy is not the study of the divine but (...) the project of becoming divine, a project which it shares with Christianity. Greek philosophy and Christianity have different paths to the divine, but they share a common aspiratio. (shrink)

There are two types of fluctuations in the quantum vacuum: type 1 vacuum fluctuations are on shell and can interact with matter in specific, limited ways that have observable consequences; type 2 vacuum fluctuations are off shell and cannot interact with matter. A photon will polarize a type 1, bound, charged lepton–antilepton vacuum fluctuation in much the same manner that it would polarize a dielectric, suggesting the method used here for calculating the permittivity $$\epsilon _{0}$$ϵ0 of the vacuum. In a (...) model that retains only leading terms, $$\epsilon _{0} \cong ^{2}= 9.10\times 10^{-12}$$ϵ0≅2=9.10×10-12 C/. The calculated value for $$\epsilon _{0}$$ϵ0 is 2.7% more than the accepted value. The permittivity of the vacuum, in turn, determines the speed c of light in the vacuum. Since the vacuum is at rest with respect to every inertial frame of reference, c is the same in every inertial reference frame. (shrink)

As media reports have made widely known, in November 2009, the ethics committee of St. Joseph’s Hospital in Phoenix, Arizona, permitted the abortion of an eleven-week-old fetus in order to save the life of its mother. This woman was suffering from acute pulmonary hypertension, which her doctors judged would prove fatal for both her and her previable child. The ethics committee believed abortion to be permitted in this case under the so-called principle of double effect, but Thomas J. Olmsted, the (...) bishop of Phoenix, disagreed with the committee and pronounced its chair, Sister Margaret McBride, excommunicated latae sententiae, “by the very commission of the act.” In this article, I take the much discussed Phoenix case as an occasion to subject the principle of double effect to another round of philosophical scrutiny. In particular, I examine the third condition of the principle in its textbook formulation, namely, that the evil effect in question may not be the means to the good effect. My argument, in brief, is that the textbook formulation of the principle does not withstand philosophical scrutiny. Nevertheless, in the end, I do not claim that we should then “do away” with the principle altogether. Instead, we do well to understand it within the context of casuistry, the tradition of moral reasoning from which it issued. (shrink)

The Prague Philosopher Bernard Bolzano (1781-1848) has long been admired for his groundbreaking work in mathematics: his rigorous proofs of fundamental theorems in analysis, his construction of a continuous, nowhere-differentiable function, his investigations of the infinite, and his anticipations of Cantor's set theory. He made equally outstanding contributions in philosophy, most notably in logic and methodology. One of the greatest mathematician-philosophers since Leibniz, Bolzano is now widely recognised as a major figure of nineteenth-century philosophy. Praised by Husserl as “one (...) of the greatest logicians of all times,” he has also been recognised by Michael Dummett as one of the first modern analytic philosophers and by Alberto Coffa as the founder of the “semantic tradition.” This volume contains English translations of the essay “On the Mathematical Method,” a concise introduction to Bolzano’s logic and philosophy of mathematics, as well as substantial selections from his correspondence with Franz Exner, Professor of Philosophy at the Charles University in Prague in the 1830s and 40s. It will be of interest to students of Austrian philosophy, the development of analytic philosophy, the philosophy of language, and the history and philosophy of logic and mathematics. (shrink)

Bernard Boxill has bought together eighteen contemporary articles to explore the nature of race and racism, and their far-reaching social and political implications. Both highly contested ideas, this new book covers a wide variety of viewpoints that make clear that the way we resolve them will determine whether we judge controversial social policies like affirmative action, racial profiling for potential criminals and current immigration policies to be justified and wise.

Après avoir présenté une conception radicale des recherches participatives, ce texte montre que les savoirs produits dans un tel cadre sont de nature hybride et peuvent être qualifiés de transdisciplinaires, au sens fort de ce qualificatif qui souligne que ces savoirs vont au-delà de toute catégorisation de savoirs constitués. Cette transdisciplinarité forte pose la question de la vérité et de l’objectivité des énoncés ainsi produits. La réponse à cette double question conditionne à la fois l’excellence épistémique et la pertinence sociale (...) de ces énoncés, qui ont pour vocation de déboucher sur des actions aptes à répondre aux attentes cognitives et sociales de toutes les parties prenantes. Une telle vocation implique une conduite inédite de l’évaluation des savoirs impliqués, du point de vue de leur pertinence épistémique comme de celui de leur pertinence sociale. (shrink)

The article describes the background of Roman Ingarden's 1922 review of Leon Chwistek's book Wielość rzeczywistości, and the back-and-forth that followed. Despite the differences, the two shared some interesting similarities. Both authors had important ties to the intellectual happenings outside Poland and were not considerd mainstream at home. In the end, however, it is these connections that allowed them to gain recognition. Ingarden, who had been a student of Husserl, became the leading phenomenologist in the postwar Poland. For Chwistek, a (...) painter, philosopher, and logician interested in Russell’s work, such connections meant that he won the competition for a professorship at the university in Lwów over Alfred Tarski. Until recently, Chwistek’s place in Polish logic remains unclear and Ingarden’s interactions with Polish logic and the Vienna Circle have not been investigated extensively. A deeper look at this intellectual fracas between Ingarden and Chwistek helps one in the study of the complicated mesh of alliances within the Lwów-Warsaw School. The article also identifies the origins of the split between phenomenology and the analytic philosophical tradition in Poland. The article is also accompanied by the translations of the reviews. (shrink)

It is common to say that the origin of the membrane potential is attributed to transmembrane ion transport, but it is theoretically possible to explain its generation by the mechanism of ion adsorption. It has been previously suggested that the ion adsorption mechanism even leads to potential formulae identical to the famous Nernst equation or the Goldman-Hodgkin-Katz equation. Our further analysis, presented in this paper, indicates that the potential formula based on the ion adsorption mechanism leads to an equation that (...) is a function of the surface charge density of the material and the surface potential of the material. Furthermore, we have confirmed that the equation holds in all the different experimental systems that we have studied. This equation appears to be a key equation that governs the characteristics of the membrane potential in all systems. (shrink)

Beliefs should conform to some norms. Epistemic instrumentalism holds that your beliefs should conform to these epistemic norms just because conforming is useful. But there seems to be cases where conforming to the epistemic norms isn’t useful at all, as in so-called “too-few-reasons” cases. In response to these cases, universal epistemic instrumentalists argue that despite first appearances, it is always useful to conform to the epistemic norms. I argue that all current versions of this universalist response are objectionable. I conclude (...) with a conjecture about why no version of universalism will succeed. (shrink)

This book examines the question of what parental obligations procreators incur by bringing children into being. Prusak argues that parents, as procreators, have obligations regarding future children that constrain the liberty of would-be parents to do as they wish. Moreover, these obligations go beyond simply respecting a child’s rights. He addresses in turn the ethics of adoption, child support, gamete donation, surrogacy, prenatal genetic enhancement, and public responsibility for children.

Le problème posé par la pluralité des religions au sein des sociétés comme problème politique n'est-il pas, plutôt que celui des rapports entre pouvoirs religieux et politiques, celui du type d'unité qu'il convient de réaliser au sein de la société et de la manière de le réaliser politiquement? Une pensée éclaire d'un jour nouveau cette interrogation intempestive : celle de Stanislas Breton, prêtre de la congrégation des passionistes. Une pensée qui puise paradoxalement dans la lecture de Spinoza son idée régulatrice (...) : "l'essence éthique du théologique implique le politique, le politique comme pouvoir implique la détermination du théologique comme éthique". (shrink)

Until today, an externally imposed epistemological paradigm is dominant in most educational curricula at universities in Africa. Despite ongoing Eurocentrism and Western hegemony in mainstream agricultural trainings in Africa, Indigenous knowledge on agriculture still exists: it has been preserved for generations by farmers and wise elders in rural communities who often are knowledge authorities on African agrarian Indigenous knowledge, values and practices. An imposed epistemological paradigm on the African continent reinforces epistemic injustice by dominating and ignoring Indigenous African ways of (...) doing and knowing, which is deeply dehumanizing. Inspired by Paulo Freire’s ‘humanising pedagogy’ and Mogobe Ramose’s call for mothofatso in human relations, we explore a re-humanising pedagogy for African agrarian philosophy, which addresses the following questions: Can African agrarian philosophy contribute to re-humanization by reviving and restoring Indigenous agricultural knowledge, values and practices? If so, what pedagogy and educational methods are appropriate? In search for answers to these questions, we reflect on a two-week educational program on an endogenous approach to community resilience in Ghana, as a pedagogy that is emerging. In doing so, the chapter is firmly rooted in African soil, both practically—through trainings in Ghana—and theoretically—through African agrarian philosophy. By connecting educational experiences with insights from theory, seven themes for a pedagogy for African agrarian philosophy come to the front: an African agrarian philosophy with memory; a dialogical student–teacher relation; the value of lived experiences; intergenerational and spiritual methods of education; relationality of human beings and Mother Earth; unity between theory and practice; critical consciousness about people’s rights. The thesis defended is that African agrarian philosophy is without relevance if it remains a theoretical exercise that is not developed and put to use with farmers, wise elders and youth in the communities. Instead, when combined with a re-humanising pedagogy, African agrarian philosophy can contribute to reconnecting and reviving African agricultural knowledge, values and practices, which subsequently contributes to transforming African food systems that heals the environment and produces enough food to feed communities. (shrink)