The condition, known as mirror-touch synesthesia, is related to the activity of mirror neurons, cells recently discovered to fire not only when some animals perform some behavior, such as climbing a tree, but also when they watch another animal do the behavior. For "synesthetes," it's as if their mirror neurons are on overdrive.

Daodejing by Chinese philosopher Laozi is one of the most popular Chinese texts, with more than 100 translations available. Why another? Author Charles Q. Wu believes that his explorations of the infinite nature of the Daodejing can “bring the readers yet another step closer to what Laozi actually says and how he says it through still another translation.” The strength of Wu’s version comes from his superior bilingual talents and unique cross-cultural perspective, drawing widely from both Chinese and Western (...) sources. He provides his target audience of nonacademics and non-Chinese readers with line-by-line bilingual text and commentaries, and tries to retain the original beauty of the poetry and paradoxes of Laozi’s writings. His ambition here is for English-speaking readers to experience what Laozi “sounds” like, as if they were reading the work in Chinese. Taking a fresh look at what is known as the Wang Bi edition of Laozi’s immortal work, Wu makes use of new findings from recent archaeological discoveries, and invites readers to “participate in the translation and interpretation as an open-door, open-ended process.” Rather than claiming finality in his translation Wu sees himself as a tour guide, leading readers toward unexpected aha! moments as they encounter a more thorough understanding the Daodejing. (shrink)

In information theory there is a fundamental principle, usually referred to as the informational “uncertainty principle”, which expresses a limitation of any information processing system (or agent) in terms of a relation between the system's response property and its inherent processing capacity. From this principle, it can be argued that a salutary strategy for dealing with conflicting information processing requirements is to adopt various complementary processes (or channels). Donald M. MacKay had attempted to relate the informational uncertainty principle to spatial (...) and temporal response properties of neurons in the mammalian visual cortex, and suggested that the spatial and the temporal aspects of such neurons are complementary. I attempt to extend his efforts and to show that the informational uncertainty principle may indeed underlie many complementary relations exhibited in human perception and cognition, such as the relation between the two principal processing streams in vision and the relation between parallel and serial processes in cognition. (shrink)

This article argues that while Charles Taylor's commitment to anti-naturalism in the human sciences has been constant, the grounds for that commitment have changed significantly over time. What began as his critique of naturalism on empirical grounds was refashioned into a commitment on moral grounds, or more accurately, on the basis of there being no distinctly separable grounds between the scientific and the moral. Taylor shifted his descriptive phenomenological defence of anti-naturalism to cast a much broader critique against an (...) empiricist epistemology he saw underpinning all naturalist approaches in the human sciences. He calls attention to the speciousness of the ontological commitments of an empiricist epistemological outlook that tries to separate human agency from moral ontology, which he argues is itself a moral position. Whether we want to go along with Taylor's specific moral outlook or not, what his arguments about the human sciences teach us is twofold: (1) Taylor's descriptive phenomenology shows how the scientific language of the natural sciences often cannot explain human phenomena without contradiction; (2) Taylor's hermeneutic realism teaches us the extent to which defending an anti-naturalist philosophy of human sciences today necessitates moral argument. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 9, Issue 3, pp 327 - 346 This paper explores the place of historicism in Anglophone and especially analytic philosophy. Analytic philosophy arose as part of a general modernist revolt against the developmental historicisms of the nineteenth century with their faith in progress. Modernism inspired more formal approaches to knowledge, philosophy, and the human sciences. It is, however, a mistake to assume the rise of modernism and analytic philosophy left no space for historicism. Three main traditions of (...) historicism continued to persist in Anglophone philosophy through the twentieth century. First, the lingering presence of idealism continued to inspire the historicism of philosophers such as R. G. Collingwood and later Charles Taylor. Second, modernist historians, such as Quentin Skinner, sometimes grabbed at arguments from analytic philosophy to defend their methodological agendas. Third, the rise of holistic themes in analytic philosophy opened the way to historicist moments and themes in philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Donald Davidson, and Richard Rorty. (shrink)

Isaiah Berlin and Stuart Hampshire's early engagements with logical positivism and ordinary language philosophy are examined as historical and philosophical reference points for locating an alternative – interpretive and humanist – tradition that developed within analytic philosophy at Oxford in the 20th C. Berlin and Hampshire's writings show the legacy of an enduring Idealist philosophy, one that nonetheless had to be revised and reinvented against the new empiricist challenges brought on by the rise of analytic philosophy. Berlin and Hampshire rejected (...) idealism's metaphysical pretensions of the Absolute in favor of the new empiricism's insistence on grounding philosophy in experience, but staunchly opposed applying the latter's narrowly ‘scientistic’ view of knowledge to human experience, re-affirming the indivisible connections between epistemological issues and moral and political issues. The idealist themes they expounded are most clearly evident in their arguments for an interpretive philosophy in opposition to the reductivist tendencies of logical positivism, and in their defense of humanist liberalism against the drive of analysis toward naturalism where inquiry into human life is concerned. Such themes include: an anti-naturalist, vitalist, philosophy of human sciences, an insistence on the intrinsic force and importance of human values against moral relativism, and the recognition of the political significance of the plurality of human values. As such, Berlin and Hampshire reveal the strong interpretive and humanist ways of reasoning from within the analytic tradition itself. Moreover, these interpretive and humanist themes continue to have strong echoes, this paper argues, in the development of post-analytic political theory in the latter half of the 20th century through today, as further evinced in the ideas of Bernard Williams and Charles Taylor . By calling attention to such continuities, this paper reveals how moral and political philosophy in the Anglophone world lay not moribund but continued to develop in the heyday of analytic philosophy from the late ‘30s to the ‘50s and onward, thereby challenging the commonplace of the ‘death’ of normative political theorizing until Rawls reinvigorated it in the ‘70s. (shrink)

Stephen Barker argues that a possible worlds semantics for the counterfactual conditional of the sort proposed by Stalnaker and Lewis cannot accommodate certain examples in which determinism is true and a counterfactual Q > R is false, but where, for some P, the compound counterfactual P > (Q > R) is true. I argue that the completeness theorem for Lewis’s system VC of counterfactual logic shows that Stalnaker–Lewis semantics does accommodate Barker’s example, and I argue that its doing so should (...) be understood as showing that the example is an exception to Lewis’s Time’s Arrow requirements. (shrink)

I show that given Jonathan Bennett's theory of 'even if,' the following statement is logically true iff the principle of conditional excluded is valid: (SE) If Q and if P wouldn't rule out Q, then Q even if P. Hence whatever intuitions support the validity of (SE) support the validity of Conditional Excluded Middle, too. Finally I show that Bennett's objection to John Bigelow's theory of the conditional can be turned into a (perhaps) more telling one, viz. that on Bigelow's (...) theory 'if P then Q' and 'if P and Q then R' do not jointly entail 'if P then R'. (shrink)

Dretske's conclusive reasons account of knowledge is designed to explain how epistemic closure can fail when the evidence for a belief does not transmit to some of that belief's logical consequences. Critics of Dretske dispute the argument against closure while joining Dretske in writing off transmission. This paper shows that, in the most widely accepted system for counterfactual logic , conclusive reasons are governed by an informative, non-trivial, logical transmission principle. If r is a conclusive reason for believing p in (...) Dretske's sense, and if p logically implies q, and if p and q satisfy one additional condition, it follows that r is a conclusive reason for believing q. After introducing this additional condition, I explain its intuitive import and use the condition to shed new light on Dretske's response to scepticism, as well as on his distinction between the so-called ‘lightweight’ and ‘heavyweight’ implications of a piece of perceptual knowledge. (shrink)

Our response to this symposium on our 2006 paper centers on three questions. First, what motivations exist in the political wild, and do our experimental manipulations realistically capture them? We agree that strong accuracy motivations are likely (but not certain) to reduce biases, but we are not at all confident that the real world supplies stronger accuracy motivations than our subjects received. Second, how can we square our findings of stubbornly persistent beliefs and attitudes with the well-established literatures on framing (...) and persuasion, which find political opinion to be more malleable? We argue that our John Q. Public theory of political information accounts for both persistence and persuasion and explains when we should expect one or the other. Citizens will be more responsive to contextual information or persuasive appeals when prior feelings are weak, knowledge is sparse, and information is encountered outside of awareness. Resistance to information or arguments is most likely when prior feelings are strong, attitudes are embedded within dense knowledge networks, and appeals are consciously perceived. Third, is belief persistence driven by feelings and emotions, as we claim, or is it more the result of a conviction that one's priors are accurate? We suggest that the distinctions that stand behind this question are suspect. We see in some of our commentators a tendency to align accuracy motivation, central processing, and cognition on one side of the dual-processing framework, with directional motivation, peripheral processing, and feelings on the other side. On the contrary, we argue that beliefs in the truth of one's priors often result from feelings and wishes and are themselves sources of motivated bias in processing new information. Moreover, directional motivations are also often a source of central processing, so it is not easy to disentangle these processes. (shrink)

O objetivo do presente artigo é desenvolver uma reflexão acerca de relações existentes entre informação e ação, no contexto das tecnologias informacionais de comunicação. O problema central que guiará o artigo pode ser assim formulado: Qual é a influência da informação disponível nas TICs na ação autônoma? O direcionamento de pesquisas em relação ao conceito de informação possui geralmente uma orientação técnica, não focalizando questões éticas, ontológicas e epistemológicas, que são igualmente relevantes ao se tratar desse conceito. Em contraste com (...) a orientação técnica vigente, ressaltamos a abordagem proposta por Charles S. Peirce, que caracteriza informação a partir de diferentes perspectivas: lógico-semântica, pragmática e semiótica. Partindo da hipótese que processos informacionais têm uma participação fundamental no direcionamento da ação, investigamos impactos das TICs presentes nas relações cotidianas. Discutimos transformações que as TICs têm possibilitado na relação agente-ambiente, ressaltando recursos computacionais de mineração de dados, que propiciam ações, muitas vezes direcionadas por interesses alheios àqueles dos usuários. Argumentamos que o estudo da informação é importante para entender possíveis implicações das TICs no direcionamento da ação humana. (shrink)

This article analyzes positions on pornography using Q-methodology. Eighty-five respondents sorted a sample of 86 opinion statements on definitions of pornography, personal reactions to it, its causes and effects, and social policy recommendations. Factor analysis was used to identify clusters of individuals in the United States who share common subjectively defined points of view on pornography. The three patterns of responses that emerged from the analysis were labeled Religious-Conservative, Liberal, and Antipornography Feminist. Using the empirical data, we examine the logical (...) and ethical structures of these points of view and their political and legal implications. We conclude that the viewpoints are too incompatible to sustain stable and effective political alignments among the adherents. (shrink)

PRINCIPLES OF PHILOSOPHY" CHAPTER 1 LESSONS FROM THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY §1. NOMINALISM* 15. Very early in my studies of logic, before I had really been ...

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) is considered to be among the half dozen most important philosophers the United States has produced. The Charles S. Peirce Sesquicentennial International Congress opened at Harvard University on September 5, 1989 and concluded on the 10th - Peirce's birthday. The Congress was host to approximately 450 scholars from 26 different nations. Papers concerning Peirce's philosophy of science were given at the Congress by representatives from Italy, France, Sweden, Finland, Korea, India, Denmark, Greece, Brazil, Belgium, (...) Spain, Germany, and the United States. The present volume is a compilation of some of the papers that were presented at that Congress. (shrink)

Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species is unquestionably one of the chief landmarks in biology. The Origin (as it is widely known) was literally only an abstract of the manuscript Darwin had originally intended to complete and publish as the formal presentation of his views on evolution. Compared with the Origin, his original long manuscript work on Natural Selection, which is presented here and made available for the first time in printed form, has more abundant examples and illustrations (...) of Darwin's argument, plus an extensive citation of sources. (shrink)

Volume 8 of this landmark edition follows Peirce from May 1890 through July 1892—a period of turmoil as his career unraveled at the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey. The loss of his principal source of income meant the beginning of permanent penury and a lifelong struggle to find gainful employment. His key achievement during these years is his celebrated Monist metaphysical project, which consists of five classic articles on evolutionary cosmology. Also included are reviews and essays from The Nation in (...) which Peirce critiques Paul Carus, William James, Auguste Comte, Cesare Lombroso, and Karl Pearson, and takes part in a famous dispute between Francis E. Abbot and Josiah Royce. Peirce's short philosophical essays, studies in non-Euclidean geometry and number theory, and his only known experiment in prose fiction complete his production during these years. Peirce's 1883-1909 contributions to the Century Dictionary form the content of volume 7 which is forthcoming. (shrink)

"The volumes are handsomely produced and carefully edited,... For the first time we have available in an intelligible form the writings of one of the greatest philosophers of the past hundred years... " —The Times Literary Supplement "... an extremely handsome and impressive book; it is an equally impressive piece of scholarship and editing." —Man and World.

"Highly recommended." —Choice "... an important event for the world of philosophy. For the first time we have available in an intelligible form the writings of one of the greatest philosophers of the past hundred years." —The Times Literary Supplement Volume 5 of this landmark edition covers an important transition in Peirce's life, marked by a rekindled enthusiasm for speculative philosophy. The writings include essays relating to his all-embracing theory of categories as well as papers on logic and mathematics.

Volume 6 of this landmark edition contains 66 writings mainly from the unsettled period in Peirce’s life just after he moved from New York to Milford, Pennsylvania, followed shortly afterward by the death of his mother. The writings in this volume reveal Peirce’s powerful mind probing into diverse issues, looking for an underlying unity, but, perhaps, also looking for direction.

This volume offers to the English-speaking world a collection of important works by the eminent twentieth century logician, Jan Lukasiewicz, many of which are here translated into English for the first time. This edition differs significantly from the Polish edition which appeared in 1961—containing ten logic papers not appearing there and omitting articles primarily of interest to the Polish reader. In addition to writing in Polish, Lukasiewicz also published works in French, English, and notably in German, and sometimes translated his (...) own works from one language to another. One of the most valuable works on the history of logic is Lukasiewicz’ paper, "On the History of the Logic of Propositions". Lukasiewicz points out the difference between the two basic areas of formal logic, the logic of propositions and the logic of terms, undifferentiated before the development of modern mathematical logic. The understanding of this distinction leads Lukasiewicz to trace the history of propositional logic back to its original development by the Stoics, its further development by the medieval Scholastics, and its axiomatization by Gottlob Frege. The status of mathematical logic is discussed in various works. The most basic system is propositional logic, upon which depend the other logical disciplines and also mathematics. Mathematical logic, also called logistic, is independent of philosophy and espouses no philosophical viewpoint. Early in his career, Lukasiewicz refers to mathematical logic as the logic of algebra and uses mathematical symbolism to represent logical propositions. Later he introduces what we now call "Polish notation," in particular, "Cpq" for "if p, then q" and "Np" for "it is not the case that p" for the primitive functions, eliminating the need for punctuation. He adopts the symbols Π and Σ for quantification from Charles S. Peirce, and also brings to light the almost unknown fact that it was Peirce who invented the matrix method in 1885. The paper, "Investigations into the Sentential Calculus", written by Lukasiewicz and Tarski embodies the results of a decade of research on the sentential calculus initiated by Lukasiewicz at the University of Warsaw systematically compiling the contributions of five logicians: Lindenbaum, Sobocinski, Wajsberg, Tarski, and Lukasiewicz. The approach is metalogical and depends heavily upon set theoretic concepts; it covers both the matrix and axiomatic methods. One of the problems that preoccupied Lukasiewicz was that of determinism, which led to his development of three-valued logic. A proposition such as "I shall be in Warsaw at noon on 21 December of next year" is neither true nor false; a third truth value is needed, one which Lukasiewicz calls "the possible." Another area to which Lukasiewicz contributed is modal logic, proving that modal logic cannot be two-valued. Lukasiewicz’ analysis and axiomatization of Aristotle’s syllogistic is not included in the present volume since an English edition by Lukasiewicz on this topic is available. We have here briefly touched upon a few of Lukasiewicz’ numerous achievements in logic; the best means of appreciating them is to read his works.—T. G. N. (shrink)

The dissertation is an attempt to provide a formal semantics for occurrences of anaphoric pronouns and definite descriptions whose quantifier antecedents occur in sentences other than those in which the anaphoric pronouns and descriptions themselves occur, . The predominant view of anaphoric pronouns whose quantifier antecedents occur in the same sentence as they do is that they function as bound variables . Chapter 1 of this dissertation is constituted by a series of arguments against a bound variable treatment of q (...) - terms and the observation that the semantic behavior of q - terms is similar to that of certain singular terms in English arguments. Given the similarity of semantic behavior between the latter and q - terms, it seems plausible to suppose that a theory of the semantic behavior of these singular terms in English arguments would provide a model for the eventual production of a semantic theory of q - terms. In Chapter 2, a formal semantics for these singular terms in arguments is produced. In Chapter 3, a formal semantics for q - terms is produced, on the model of the semantics in Chapter 2. Finally, in Chapter 4 it is shown that the formal semantics of Chapter 3 can be extended to handle pronouns in discourses containing verbs of propositional attitudes such as 'wants', 'dreams' etc. It is also shown that some occurrences of sentences containing q - terms have truth conditions not expressible by any quantified first order sentence. One must use finite partially ordered quantifiers to express the truth conditions of such occurrences of sentences. ;The dissertation contains two appendices: the first is a technical discussion of the formal semantics of Hans Kamp which shows that his theory cannot accomodate the linguistic data mine is designed to handle. The second examines the views of Gareth Evans, Charles Chastain and Keith Donnellan on certain anaphoric pronouns. (shrink)

This volume is a Festschrift dedicated to Charles Kahn comprised of more than 20 papers presented at the conference "Presocratics and Plato: Festschrift Symposium in Honor of Charles Kahn", 3-7 June 2009. The conference was held at the European Cultural Center of Delphi, Greece, and was organized and sponsored by the HYELE Institute for Comparative Studies and Parmenides Publishing, with endorsement from the International Plato Society, and the Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pennsylvania. (...) Contributors: Julia Annas - University of Arizona; Sarah Broadie - University of St. Andrews; Lesley Brown - University of Oxford; Tomás Calvo-Martínez - Universidad Complutense de Madrid; Diskin Clay - Duke University; John M. Dillon - Trinity College, Dublin; Dorothea Frede - Humbolt University, Berlin; Arnold Hermann - HYELE Institute for Comparative Studies; Carl A. Huffman - DePauw University; Enrique Hülsz Piccone - Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico; D.M. Hutchinson - St. Olaf College; Paul Kalligas - National and Kapodistrian University, Athens; Vassilis Karasmanis - National Technical University, Athens; Aryeh Kosman - Haverford College; Anthony A. Long - University of California, Berkeley; Richard McKirahan - Pomona College; Susan Sauvé Meyer - University of Pennsylvania; Alexander P.D. Mourelatos - University of Texas at Austin; Satoshi Ogihara - Tohoku University, Japan; Richard Patterson - Emory University; Christopher J. Rowe - Durham University; David Sedley - University of Cambridge; Richard Sorabji - University of Oxford. (shrink)

Physicist, mathematician, and logician Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914) was America's first internationally recognized philosopher, the man who created the concept of "pragmatism," later popularized by William James. Charles S. Peirce: The Essential Writings is a comprehensive collection of the philosopher's writings, including: "Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man" (1868), which outlines his theory of knowledge; a review of the works of George Berkeley; papers from between 1877 and 1905 developing the ground of pragmatism and Peirce's theory of (...) scientific inquiry; his basic concept of metaphysics (1891-93); and the important 1902 articles in Baldwin's dictionary on his later pragmatism (or pragmaticism), uniformity, and synechism. Included are Peirce's well-known essays: "The Fixation of Belief" and "How to Make Our Ideas Clear." Book jacket. (shrink)

Charles Taylor’s idea of “deep diversity” has played a major role in the debates around multiculturalism in Canada and around the world. Originally, the idea was meant to account for how the different national communities within Canada – those of the English-speaking Canadians, the French-speaking Quebeckers, and the Aboriginals – conceive of their belonging to the country in different ways. But Taylor conceives of these differences strictly in terms of irreducibility; that is, he fails to see that they also (...) exist in such a way that the country cannot be said to form a unified whole. After giving an account of the philosophical as well as religious reasons behind his position, the chapter goes on to describe some of its political implications. (shrink)

Complementing the publication of Darwin's notebooks and correspondence, this work provides access to the last remaining unpublished source of Darwin manuscript materials. It is a catalog to and a complete transcription of the marks and annotations he made in the margins of his books. The margin comments throw light on Darwin's immediate reactions to his reading matter; further comments on slips of paper stuck inside the covers of the books reveal more considered evaluation. These comments are also fully transcribed. Annotation (...) copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR. (shrink)

On 27th December 1831, HMS Beagle set out from Plymouth under the command of Captain Robert Fitzroy on a voyage that lasted nearly 5 years. The purpose of the trip was to complete a survey of the southern coasts of South America, and afterwards to circumnavigate the globe. The ship's geologist and naturalist was Charles Darwin. Darwin kept a diary throughout the voyage in which he recorded his daily activities, not only on board the ship but also during the (...) several long journeys that he made on horseback in Patagonia and Chile. His entries tell the story of one of the most important scientific journeys ever made with matchless immediacy and vivid descriptiveness. (shrink)

The American thinker Charles Sanders Peirce, best known as the founder of pragmatism, has been influential not only in the pragmatic tradition but more recently in the philosophy of science and the study of semiotics, or sign theory. Strands of System provides an accessible overview of Peirce's systematic philosophy for those who are beginning to explore his thinking and its import for more recent trends in philosophy.

These volumes provide the Arabic, Latin and English versions of the major text on political astrology of the Middle Ages, generally attributed to Abū Ma‘šar , with a commentary and Latin-Arabic and Arabic-Latin glossaries.

The Writings of Charles De Koninck, Volume 1, introduces a projected three-volume series that presents the first English edition of the collected works of the Catholic Thomist philosopher Charles De Koninck. Ralph McInerny is the project editor and has prepared the excellent translations. The first volume contains writings ranging from De Koninck's 1934 dissertation at the University of Louvain on the philosophy of Sir Arthur Eddington, to two remarkable early essays on indeterminism and the unpublished book "The Cosmos." (...) The short essay "Are the Experimental Sciences Distinct from the Philosophy of Nature?" is also included and demonstrates for the first time De Koninck's distinctive view on the relation between philosophy of nature and the experimental sciences. A comprehensive introductory essay by Leslie Armour outlines the structure and themes of De Koninck's philosophy. The volume begins with a biographical essay by De Koninck's son, Thomas. "Charles De Koninck, perhaps because of his untimely death, is not as well known to English-speaking readers as Etienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain, but his work belongs to that same world-class scholarship as his notable contemporaries. It is almost an understatement to say that his contribution to the philosophy of science remains timely. Readers are fortunate that his former student, Ralph McInerny, has seen fit to collect and to translate, where necessary, some of De Koninck's most important work for this volume." --Jude P. Dougherty, The Catholic University of America "Ralph McInerny is doing us the incalculable good of making available to a general public the writings of Charles De Koninck. This volume, the first of many to come, begins a chronological presentation of the books, articles, essays, and addresses of one of the strongest and most penetrating thinkers of the last century, who was at once an extraordinary philosopher and theologian, with the profound and simple faith of the proverbial peasant. May we continue now to learn from the great De Koninck, and include in our prayers the intentions of his gracious disciple, who is so felicitously discharging the office of piety to a revered and unforgettable master." --Ronald P. Mc Arthur, President Emeritus, Thomas Aquinas College. (shrink)

Charles Robert Darwin (1809–1882) has been widely recognized since his own time as one of the most influential writers in the history of Western thought. His books were widely read by specialists and the general public, and his influence had been extended by almost continuous public debate over the past 150 years. New York University Press's new paperback edition makes it possible to review Darwin's public literary output as a whole, plus his scientific journal articles, his private notebooks, and (...) his correspondence. This is complete edition contains all of Darwin's published books, featuring definitive texts recording original pagination with Darwin's indexes retained. The set also features a general introduction and index, and introductions to each volume. (shrink)