A Lorentz-invariant gauge theory for massive fermions on R × S 3 spacetime is built up. Using the symmetry of S 3,we obtain Dirac-type equation and derive the expression of the fermionic propagator. Finally, starting from the SU(N) gauge-invariant Lagrangian, we obtain the set of Dirac-Yang-Mills equations on R × S 3 spacetime, pointing out major differences from the Minkowskian case.

A powerful movement is afoot to create a national computerized system of health records. Advocates claim it could save the health delivery system billions of dollars and improve the quality of health services. According to Lawrence Gostin, a leading commentator on privacy and health records, this new infrastructure is “already under way and [has] an aura of inevitability.” When it is in place, almost any information that is viewed as relevant to a decision in the health care delivery system (...) would be available to a large and yet undetermined number of individuals. The transformation of the collection and communication of health information from texts housed by health care providers and facilities to data electronically transmitted through networks of linked computers has significant implications for confidentiality and for data collection in scientific research. The best evidence clearly indicates that most people in the United States consider confidentiality for health information important and worry that the increased computerization of health records will result in inappropriate disclosure. (shrink)

A powerful movement is afoot to create a national computerized system of health records. Advocates claim it could save the health delivery system billions of dollars and improve the quality of health services. According to Lawrence Gostin, a leading commentator on privacy and health records, this new infrastructure is “already under way and [has] an aura of inevitability.” When it is in place, almost any information that is viewed as relevant to a decision in the health care delivery system (...) would be available to a large and yet undetermined number of individuals. The transformation of the collection and communication of health information from texts housed by health care providers and facilities to data electronically transmitted through networks of linked computers has significant implications for confidentiality and for data collection in scientific research. The best evidence clearly indicates that most people in the United States consider confidentiality for health information important and worry that the increased computerization of health records will result in inappropriate disclosure. (shrink)

In a variety of synaesthesia, photisms result from affect-laden stimuli as emotional words, or faces of familiar people. For R, who participated in this study, the sight of a familiar person triggers a mental image of "a human silhouette filled with colour". Subjective descriptions of synaesthetic experiences induced by the visual perception of people's figures and faces show similarities with the reports of those who claim to possess the ability to see the aura. It has been proposed that the (...) purported auric perception may be easily explained by the presence of a specific subtype of cross-modal perception. We analyse the subjective reports of four synaesthetes who experience colours in response to human faces and figures. These reports are compared with descriptions of alleged auric phenomena found in the literature and with claims made by experts in esoteric spheres. The discrepancies found suggest that both phenomena are phenomenologically and behaviourally dissimilar. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Dimensions of Agency in Lincoln’s Second InauguralAndrew C. HansenSix days before he delivered his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln strode into his White House office. Greeting him were G. B. Lincoln, John A. Bingham, and Francis Carpenter, the last of whom had been living with Lincoln in the White House for six months, painting a portrait of the president reading the Emancipation Proclamation to the cabinet. It is Carpenter's (...) delineation of the president's entrance that contains the "only known description of the preliminaries of the Second Inaugural" (Barondess 1954, 62). "Mr. Lincoln came in through the side passage which had lately been constructed," Carpenter writes, "holding in his hand a roll of manuscripts." Lincoln turned to his guests and quipped, "Lots of wisdom in that document, I suspect; it is what will be called my 'second inaugural' " (quoted in Barondess, 62).The content and modesty of Carpenter's description of the "preliminaries of the Second Inaugural" give the rhetorical critic a telling preview of what might be discovered in a reading of Lincoln's composition of that manuscript. The understatement in the length and simplicity of the address subtly and poignantly charms the reader. And there is "lots of wisdom" in the Second Inaugural: along with the Gettysburg Address, it contains the words of Lincoln that most abide. In a letter to an admiring Thurow Weed, who had penned Lincoln that his inaugural was "the neatest but the most pregnant and effective use to which the English Language was ever put," Lincoln wrote that he "expected" the Second Inaugural to "wear as well as—perhaps better than—anything I have ever produced" (quoted in Barondess 1954, 78).Underscoring Lincoln's perspicacity when he wrote to Weed that he "expected" the speech to "wear well," Carl Schulz's designation of the address as a "sacred poem" and the frequency with which that epithet is quoted by other critics confirm Lincoln's assessment of the oratorical endurance [End Page 223] of the piece. The estimation of the rhetorical durability of the address is perhaps best proven by its ability to withstand the polemics of its detractors, both immediately after its delivery and in successive generations, and the encomia of its admirers, both the obscure journalists and the renowned poets.1 Lately, only praise surrounds the Second Inaugural. Ronald C. White's thorough overview of the Second Inaugural's basic stylistic characteristics and how the oration resonates within Lincoln's social, political, and intellectual context is modestly entitled Lincoln's Greatest Speech (2002). In the last line of Lincoln at Gettysburg, Wills concludes that the Second Inaugural "is the only speech worthy to stand with" the Gettysburg Address (1992, 189) and later argues in the Atlantic Monthly that Lincoln "was at the peak of his creativity when he wrote the Second Inaugural Address" (1999, 70). The Second Inaugural seemingly speaks beyond its content and situation.Contained within the aura of adoration that surrounds the Second Inaugural is a significant charge to the rhetorical critic: what is it particularly about the address that sustains its agency and permits it to escape the evanescence accorded to most rhetorical efforts? When the agency of discourse helps to eliminate or extenuate the immediate exigency that calls forth that speech, it usually becomes remanded to the annals of history and is examined by the public or by scholars only when that historical nidus forces itself back upon the public's or the scholar's attention. The speech is exhausted by its situation and swallowed by its surrounding and future events. There are, however, those speeches like the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural that practice their persuasion on audiences beyond the immediate exigency. They persist, they talk to us still, and their agency endures. Why is this true of Lincoln's Second Inaugural? This is the question that motivates my close reading of Lincoln's speech; and, as I hope to demonstrate, it is only through a close reading that such a question even makes sense. After explicating the scholarship that the Second Inaugural has generated and the critical assumptions that drive my close textual analysis, the essay will proceed with the work... (shrink)

Everyone agrees that consciousness is a very special phenomenon, unique in several ways, but there is scant agreement on just how special it is, and whether or not an explanation of it can be accommodated within normal science. John Searle's view, defended with passion in this book, is highly idiosyncratic: what is special about consciousness is its "subjective ontology," but normal science can accommodate subjective ontology alongside (not within) its otherwise objective ontology. Once we clear away some widespread confusions about (...) what science requires, and dismiss the misbegotten field of cognitive science that has been engendered by those confusions, the subjective ontology of the mind, he claims, will lose its aura of unacceptable mystery. (shrink)

Dr. Cyril Bailey and Dr. C. M. Bowra have most recently analysed Virgil's method of using the expressions of Lucretius and Ennius respectively, and Mile A.-M. Guillemin has lately added significant considerations to Father F.-X. M. J. Roiron's long examination of Virgil's method of using again his own former expressions. Since then other work has been done with the purpose of clarifying the less rational part of Virgil's self-repetition; it might be called complementary to the well-known researches of Mr. John (...) Sparrow. With such a purpose I have tried to suggest how Virgil reached the strange phrase in the first Eclogue, rapidum Cretae, or cretae, Oaxen, by a not unparalleled confusion of the names of several different rivers and at least one town. (shrink)

“Probably Peirce’s best-known works are the first two articles in a series of six that originally were collectively entitled Illustrations of the Logic of Science and published in Popular Science Monthly from November 1877 through August 1878. The first is entitled ‘The Fixation of Belief’ and the second is entitled ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear.’ In the first of these papers Peirce defended, in a manner consistent with not accepting naive realism, the superiority of the scientific method over other (...) methods of overcoming doubt and ‘fixing belief.’” — Robert Burch, “Charles Sanders Peirce,” entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2021 revision) -/- “Pragmatist epistemologies often explore how we can carry out inquiries in a self-controlled and fruitful way. (Where much analytic epistemology centres around the concept of knowledge, considered as an idealised end-point of human thought, pragmatist epistemology centres around the concept of inquiry, considered as the process of knowledge-seeking and how we can improve it.) So pragmatists often provide rich accounts of the capacities or virtues that we must possess in order to inquire well, and the rules or guiding principles that we should adopt. A canonical account is Peirce’s classic early paper ‘The Fixation of Belief‘. Here Peirce states that inquiry is a struggle to replace doubt with “settled belief“, and that the only method of inquiry that can make sense of the fact that at least some of us are disturbed by inconsistent beliefs, and will subsequently reflect upon which methods of fixing belief are correct is the Method of Science, which draws on the Pragmatic Maxim described above. This contrasts with three other methods of fixing belief: i) refusing to consider evidence contrary to one’s favored beliefs (the Method of Tenacity), ii) accepting an institution’s dictates (the Method of Authority), iii) developing the most rationally coherent or elegant-seeming belief-set (the A Priori Method).“ — Catherine Legg, “Pragmatism,” entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2021 revision). (shrink)

According to most accounts of trust, you can only trust other people (or groups of people). To trust is to think that another has goodwill, or something to that effect. I sketch a different form of trust: the unquestioning attitude. What it is to trust, in this sense, is to settle one’s mind about something, to stop questioning it. To trust is to rely on a resource while suspending deliberation over its reliability. Trust lowers the barrier of monitoring, challenging, checking, (...) and questioning. Trust sets up open pipelines between yourself and parts of the external world. Trust permits external resources to have a similar relationship to one as one’s internal cognitive faculties. This creates efficiency, but at the price of exquisite vulnerability. We must trust in this way because we are cognitively limited beings in a cognitively overwhelming world. Crucially, we can hold the unquestioning attitude towards objects and technologies. When I trust my climbing rope, I stop worrying about its reliability. When I trust my online calendaring system, I simply go to the events indicated, without question. But, one might worry, how could one ever hold such a normatively loaded attitude as trust towards mere objects? How could it ever make sense to feel betrayed by an object? Trust is our engine for expanding and outsourcing our agency — for binding external processes into our practical selves. Thus, we can be betrayed by our smartphones in the same way that we can be betrayed by our memory. When we trust, we try to make something a part of our agency, and we are betrayed when our part lets us down. To unquestioningly trust something is to let it in—to attempt to bring it inside one’s practical functioning. This suggests a new form of gullibility: agential gullibility, which occurs when agents too hastily and carelessly integrate external resources into their own agency. (shrink)

Value capture occurs when an agent’s values are rich and subtle; they enter a social environment that presents simplified — typically quantified — versions of those values; and those simplified articulations come to dominate their practical reasoning. Examples include becoming motivated by FitBit’s step counts, Twitter Likes and Re-tweets, citation rates, ranked lists of best schools, and Grade Point Averages. We are vulnerable to value capture because of the competitive advantage that such crisp and clear expressions of value have in (...) our private reasoning and our public justification. There is, however, a price. In value capture, we take a central component of our autonomy — our ongoing deliberation over the exact articulation of our values — and we outsource it. And the metrics to which we outsource usually engineered for the interests of some external force, like a large-scale institution’s interest in cross-contextual comprehensibility and quick aggregability. That outsourcing cuts off one of the key benefits to personal deliberation. In value capture, we no longer adjust our values and their articulations in light of own rich experience of the world. Our values should often be carefully tailored to our particular selves or our small-scale communities, but in value capture, we buy our values off the rack. In some cases – like decreasing CO2 emissions – the costs of non-tailored values are outweighed by the benefit of precise collective coordination. In other cases, like in our aesthetic lives, they are not. This suggests that we should want different values suited to different scales. We should want value federalism. Some values are perhaps best pursued at the largest-scale level, others at smaller scales. The problem occurs when we exhibit an excess preference for the largest-scale values – when we consistently let the universal metrics swamp our quieter interests. (shrink)

Recent conversation has blurred two very different social epistemic phenomena: echo chambers and epistemic bubbles. Members of epistemic bubbles merely lack exposure to relevant information and arguments. Members of echo chambers, on the other hand, have been brought to systematically distrust all outside sources. In epistemic bubbles, other voices are not heard; in echo chambers, other voices are actively undermined. It is crucial to keep these phenomena distinct. First, echo chambers can explain the post-truth phenomena in a way that epistemic (...) bubbles cannot. Second, each type of structure requires a distinct intervention. Mere exposure to evidence can shatter an epistemic bubble, but may actually reinforce an echo chamber. Finally, echo chambers are much harder to escape. Once in their grip, an agent may act with epistemic virtue, but social context will pervert those actions. Escape from an echo chamber may require a radical rebooting of one's belief system. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to show that in Western postmodernism, both religion and the university are under the sign of simulacra. Friedrich Nietzsche’s “death of God” instigates a discussion of postmodernism and a simulacrum of religion. According to Jean Baudrillard and the theory of the Three Orders of the Simulacra, reality died and “hyperreality” took its place and now governs our existence. If, for Michel Foucault, the religious phenomenon today is outside theological beliefs and traditions, oriented towards the (...) body, power and panoptic supervision, for Jacques Derrida the phenomenon appears more as a negative theology of deconstruction. The theoretical objective seeks to explore the mutations that have occurred both in the academic environment and in religion under the phenomenon of globalisation and the technologisation of humanity. Here, the study of religion in universities is a third order simulacrum, the consequence of which is the illusion of knowledge and the unconditional independence of humanity, manipulated by technological evolution. The methodology used is Derridarian decon­struction, Nietzschean nihilism and the Baudrillardian criticism of the postmodern consumerist system. (shrink)

This article offers a reading of Ken Loach’s 2016 film I, Daniel Blake, a fictionalised account of experiences of the UK welfare system in conditions of austerity. We consider, firstly, the significant challenge the film poses to dominant figurations of welfare recipients under austerity, through a focus on vulnerability to state processes. We follow with a reading of some of the film’s interventions in relation to reciprocity, drawing on the important trajectories of care, community and resistance that the film renders (...) visible through the collective stories of the major characters. Finally, we conclude with reflections on citizenship, subject narratives and alternative imaginaries of ‘deservingness’. Our article offers an ‘against the grain’ reading (hooks, 1996; Wearing, 2013) of the film, highlighting some of the radical possibilities of the more minor moments, character arcs and subject positionalities within the film’s central narrative of Daniel’s experiences in the shadow of the steadily crumbling welfare state. (shrink)

The present study focuses on the situation in which mind-reading machines will be connected, initially through the incorporation of weak AI, and then in conjunction to strong AI, an aspect that, ongoing, will no longer have a simple medical role, as is the case at present, but one of surveillance and monitoring of individuals—an aspect that is heading us towards a future techno-panoptic singularity. Thus, the general objective of this paper raises the problem of the ontological stability of human nature (...) which, within the limits of the technological singularity of mind-reading machines, leads to the loss of autonomy and a reduction in freedom when it comes to human thoughts. In this paradigm, the hypothesis of a future era of technological singularity is prefigured to be a cumulation of factors in which artificial intelligence holds a dominant position in relation to the human agent, in a techno-panoptic system of human supervision, in the form of a new world order of manifestation/imposition of power—that of a “singleton.” The theoretical objective analyzes the phenomenon of “deterritorrialization” of the Foucauldian panoptic mechanism —which is based on the “biopolitical” system of “biopower”—and its “reterritorialization” in the “territory” of the techno-panoptic singularity, where the scenario of a strong AI “singleton”, represents the alienation of the Being into a hard technological determinism. (shrink)

Technological augmentation in the field of communication is a new way of controlling and manipulating the interface between current political communications and information. This is because, within the new paradigms of power, political communication is under the influence of netocracy, a new and mythical form of cybertechnological superpanopticism. The general objective of this paper is to analyze the phenomenon of cybertechnological globalization where, according to Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist, this new form of political and communicative superpanopticism is the result (...) of netocracy. This is related not just to the undermining of capitalism, but also to the myth of internet transparency as the site for communicational freedom. In theoretical terms, this paper seeks to deconstruct this hypothesis based on Slavoj Žižek’s position on netocracy. He claims this phenomenon is little more than a new and perverse form of capitalism which engages new methods of manipulating political communication. The methodology used in this paper draws on Bard and Söderqvist’s arguments, Žižek’s critique and Gilles Deleuze’s deconstruction. (shrink)

In his celebrated masterpiece, Symposium, Plato imagines a high-society dinner-party in Athens in 416 BC at which the guests - including the comic poet Aristophanes and, of course, Plato's mentor Socrates - each deliver a short speech in praise of love. The sequence of dazzling speeches culminates in Socrates' famous account of the views of Diotima, a prophetess who taught him that love is our means of trying to attain goodness. And then into the party bursts the drunken Alcibiades, the (...) most popular and notorious Athenian of the time, who insists on praising Socrates himself rather than love, and gives us a brilliant sketch of this enigmatic character. The power, humour, and pathos of Plato's creation engages the reader on every page. This new translation is complemented by full explanatory notes and an illuminating introduction. (shrink)

Quando Hegel leciona em Berlim, para onde se muda em 1818, já é uma celebridade na Alemanha: há anos foi publicada a Fenomenologia do Espírito (1806), que lhe concedeu grande destaque, e também já foram legadas ao público suas principais obras. Suas aulas frequentemente lotam e o público é composto por nomes como Rosenkrantz, Bruno Bauer, Feuerbach e Hotho, que em 1835 nos brindaria com as anotações compiladas dos seus Cursos de Estética. Em 1825, Hegel começa a trabalhar numa nova (...) edição da sua Enciclopédia das Ciências Filosóficas; ele a pensa como uma obra de apoio para a realização de seus cursos, e por isso trabalha nela com rapidez e precisão. (shrink)

Many countries have implemented infection control measures directed at carriers of multidrug-resistant organisms. To explore the ethical implications of these measures, we analyzed 227 consultations about multidrug resistance and compared them with the literature on communicable disease in general. We found that control measures aimed at carriers have a range of negative implications. Although moral dilemmas seem similar to those encountered while implementing control measures for other infectious diseases, 4 distinct features stand out for carriage of multidrug-resistant organisms: carriage presents (...) itself as a state of being; carriage has limited relevance for the health of the carrier; carriage has little relevance outside healthcare settings; and antimicrobial resistance is a slowly evolving threat on which individual carriers have limited effect. These features are of ethical relevance because they influence the way we traditionally think about infectious disease control and urge us to pay more attention to the personal experience of the individual carrier. (shrink)

"This edition, which replaces the original Loeb edition..., offers text, translation, and annotation that are fully current with modern scholarship"--Front flap of dust jacket, volume 1.

forthcoming in R. Cameron, B. Hale and A. Hoffmann (ed.s), The Logic, Epistemology and Metaphysics of Modality, Oxford University Press. Presents a concept-grounding account of modal knowledge.

I argue that acknowledging Hume as a doxastic naturalist about belief in a deity allows an elegant, holistic reading of his Dialogues. It supports a reading in which Hume's spokesperson is Philo throughout, and enlightens many of the interpretive difficulties of the work. In arguing this, I perform a comprehensive survey of evidence for and against Philo as Hume's voice, bringing new evidence to bear against the interpretation of Hume as Cleanthes and against the amalgamation view while correcting several standard (...) mistakes. I ultimately isolate the interpretation of Philo's Reversal at the end of the Dialogues as of paramount importance, and show how my naturalistic interpretation makes this, and other notoriously difficult passages, unproblematic. (shrink)

Philosophers of biology typically pose questions about individuation by asking “what is an individual?” For example, we ask, “what is an individual species”, “what is an individual organism”, and “what is an individual gene?” In the first part of this chapter, I present my account of the gene concept and how it is used in investigative practices in order to motivate a more pragmatic approach. Instead of asking “what is a gene?”, I ask: “how do biologists individuate genes?”, “for what (...) purposes?”, and “do their practices of individuating genes serve these purposes?" In the second part of this chapter, I propose that we use this approach when analyzing concepts of organisms and biological individuals. Following philosophical pragmatism, I argue that we should abstain from attempts to situate individuation of Darwinian individuals or of holobionts in a philosophy of nature. Instead, we should analyze practices of individuating organisms in terms of three-place relations between the world, ideas, and human purposes and actions. I conclude with three lessons: an ontological, an epistemological, and a meta-philosophical lesson, which I suggest, apply to philosophy of science generally and to philosophy and metaphysics at large. (shrink)

In this critique, Martha Nussbaum argues that our dominant theories of development have given us policies that ignore our most basic human needs for dignity and self-respect.

The abstract structure of inquiry - the process of acquiring and changing beliefs about the world - is the focus of this book which takes the position that the "pragmatic" rather than the "linguistic" approach better solves the philosophical problems about the nature of mental representation, and better accounts for the phenomena of thought and speech. It discusses propositions and propositional attitudes (the cluster of activities that constitute inquiry) in general and takes up the way beliefs change in response to (...) potential new information, suggesting that conditional propositions should be understood as projections of epistemic policies onto the world.Robert C. Stalnaker is a professor in the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University. A Bradford Book. (shrink)

This third edition offers increased coverage of sustainability and more chances for illustration and discussion of ethics in the messy day to day practicalities ...

Metaphysicians speak of laws of nature in terms of necessity and universality; scientists, in terms of symmetry and invariance. In this book van Fraassen argues that no metaphysical account of laws can succeed. He analyzes and rejects the arguments that there are laws of nature, or that we must believe there are, and argues that we should disregard the idea of law as an adequate clue to science. After exploring what this means for general epistemology, the author develops the empiricist (...) view of science as a construction of models to represent the phenomena. (shrink)

This edition of Martin Ostwald's revised version of J. B. Skemp's 1952 translation of _Statesman_ includes a new selected bibliography, as well as Ostwald's interpretive introduction, which traces the evolution in Plato's political philosophy from _Republic_ to _Statesman to Laws_--from philosopher-king to royal statesman.