The purpose of this article is to introduce, interpret, and develop two incompatible process -ontological theories of personal identity that have received little attention in analytic metaphysics. The first theory derives from the notion of personal identity proposed in Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy, but I interpret this notion differently from previous commentators. The Whiteheadian theory may appeal to those who believe that personal identity involves an entity or entities that are essentially dynamic, but has nothing to do with diachronic objectual (...) identity : the binary equivalence relation that every entity bears to itself, and only to itself, even after undergoing intrinsic change. The Whiteheadian theory may also find favor with those who, like Whitehead, reject the possibility of pure processes and hold that in every becoming, something—which need not be an object, thing, or individual substance—becomes. The second theory derives from the notion of recurrent dynamics presented in Johanna Seibt’s General Process Theory. The Seibtian theory may appeal to those who believe that personal identity involves not only an entity or entities that are essentially dynamic, but also the relation of diachronic objectual identity. The Seibtian theory may also find favor with those who, like Broad and Sellars, find reason to postulate pure processes. (shrink)

The Study of Time XVI: Time's Urgency celebrates the 50th anniversary of the International Society for the Study of Time. It includes a keynote speech by renowned physicist Julian Barbour, a dialogue between British author David Mitchell, Katie Paterson and ISST's previous president Paul Harris. The volume is divided into dialogues and papers that directly address the issue of urgency and time scales from various disciplines. This book offers a unique perspective on the contemporary status of the interdisciplinary study of (...) time. It will open new paths of inquiry for different approaches to the important issues of narrative structure and urgency. These are themes that are becoming increasingly relevant during our times. (shrink)

The loss or absence of vision is probably one of the most incapacitating events that can befall a human being. The importance of vision for humans is also reflected in brain anatomy as approximately one third of the human brain is devoted to vision. It is therefore unsurprising that throughout history many attempts have been undertaken to develop devices aiming at substituting for a missing visual capacity. In this review, we present two concepts that have been prevalent over the last (...) two decades. The first concept is sensory substitution, which refers to the use of another sensory modality to perform a task that is normally primarily sub-served by the lost sense. The second concept is cross-modal plasticity, which occurs when loss of input in one sensory modality leads to reorganization in brain representation of other sensory modalities. Both phenomena are training-dependent. We also briefly describe the history of blindness from ancient times to modernity, and then proceed to address themeansthat have been used to help blind individuals, with an emphasis on modern technologies, invasive (various type of surgical implants) and non-invasive devices. With the advent of brain imaging, it has become possible to peer into the neural substrates of sensory substitution and highlight the magnitude of the plastic processes that lead to a rewired brain. Finally, we will address the important question of the value and practicality of the available technologies and future directions. (shrink)

Given the difficulty of characterizing the quandary introduced in Hume’s Appendix to the Treatise, coupled with the alleged “underdetermination” of the text, it is striking how few commentators have considered whether Hume addresses and/or redresses the problem after 1740—in the first Enquiry, for example. This is not only unfortunate, but ironic; for, in the Appendix, Hume mentions that more mature reasonings may reconcile whatever contradiction(s) he has in mind. I argue that Hume’s 1746 letter to Lord Kames foreshadows a subtle, (...) but significant, shift in Hume’s reasonings regarding the relevance of “real connexions”; that the Enquiry of 1748 provides evidence for this shift; and that this shift obviates Hume’s second thoughts by reconciling the contradiction that he had in mind. In short, Hume’s letter to Kames and Enquiry supply the retrodictive keys to a systematically satisfactory account. (shrink)

Five symposia from the 25th annual Oberlin Colloquium in Philosophy focus on cognitive suicide, the explanatory role of content, Cartesian error and the objectivity of perception, social content and psychological content, and belief attribution and context.

Christopher Hookway has been influential in promoting engagement with pragmatist and naturalist perspectives from classical and contemporary American philosophy. This book reflects on Hookway’s work on the American philosophical tradition and its significance for contemporary discussions of the understanding of mind, meaning, knowledge, and value. -/- Hookway’s original and extensive studies of Charles S. Peirce have made him among the most admired and frequently referenced of Peirce’s interpreters. His work on classical American pragmatism has explored the philosophies of William James, (...) John Dewey, and Josiah Royce, and examined the influence of pragmatist ideas outside of the United States. Additionally, Hookway has participated in a number of celebrated exchanges with some of the most high-profile figures of twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosophy, including Karl-Otto Apel, Philip Pettit, Hilary Putnam, and W.V.O. Quine, through which his treatments of a large range of topics in epistemology and the philosophies of mind and language have been developed and promoted. The chapters in this book—which include contributions from several of Hookway’s former students and colleagues—include studies of Hookway’s engagement with the works of Peirce, James, and Dewey, his contributions to virtue epistemology, and his discussions of hope and pragmatist metaphysics. -/- Pragmatic Reason will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working on American philosophy, the history of analytic philosophy, and epistemology. (shrink)

1 The Zero-Force Evolutionary Law 2 Randomness, Hierarchy, and Constraint 3 Diversity 4 Complexity 5 Evidence, Predictions, and Tests 6 Philosophical Foundations 7 Implications.

Barrett et al. present four puzzles for the ZFEL-view of evolution that we present in our 2010 book, Biology’s First Law: The Tendency for Diversity and Complexity to Increase in Evolutionary Systems. Our intent in writing this book was to present a radically different way to think about evolution. To the extent that it really is radical, it will be easy to misunderstand. We think Barrett et al. have misunderstood several crucial points and so we welcome the opportunity to clarify.

This is a new release of the original 1930 edition.

In this Element, we extend our earlier treatment of biology's first law. The law says that in any evolutionary system in which there is variation and heredity, there is a tendency for diversity and complexity to increase. The law plays the same role in biology that Newton's first law plays in physics, explaining what biological systems are expected to do when no forces act, in other words, what happens when nothing happens. Here we offer a deeper explanation of certain features (...) of the law, develop a quantitative version of it, and explore its consequences for our understanding of diversity and complexity. (shrink)

Four predictors were posited to affect business student attitudes about the social responsibilities of business, also known as corporate social responsibility (CSR). Applying Forsyth's (1980, "Journal of Personality and Social Psychology" 39, 175–184, 1992, "Journal of Business Ethics" 11, 461–470) personal moral philosophy model, we found that ethical idealism had a positive relationship with CSR attitudes, and ethical relativism a negative relationship. We also found materialism to be negatively related to CSR attitudes. Spirituality among business students did not significantly predict (...) CSR attitudes. Understanding the relationship between CSR attitudes and the significant predictors has important implications for researchers and teachers in particular. (shrink)

Arguably the biggest challenge in analyzing English tense is to account for the double access interpretation, which arises when a present tensed verb is embedded under a past attitude—e.g., "John said that Mary is pregnant". Present-under-past does not always result in a felicitous utterance, however—cf. "John believed that Mary is pregnant". While such oddity has been noted, the contrast has never been explained. In fact, English grammars and manuals generally prohibit present-under-past. Work on double access, on the other hand, has (...) either disregarded the oddity (e.g., Abusch 1997: 39) or treated it as a reflex of a particular dialect (e.g., Kratzer 1998: 14). The goal of the paper is to argue—based on a corpus study—that a present-under-past sentence is grammatical, but modulated by two, interacting pragmatic phenomena: cessation and parentheticality. (shrink)

This survey explores interactions between syntax and discourse, through a case study of patterns of extraction from coordinate structures. The theoretical breadth of the volume makes it the most complete account of extraction from coordinate structures to date: at first glance, it appears to be a syntactic matter, but the survey raises theoretical and empirical questions not just for syntax, but also across semantics, pragmatics, and discourse structure. Rather than promoting a single analysis, Daniel Altshuler and Robert Truswell (...) outline reasonable hypotheses that allow theoretical conclusions to be deducted from empirical facts. The theoretical conclusions show that coordinate structures have the potential to discriminate between current syntactic theories, and to inform work on the interfaces between syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and discourse. In many cases, however, the necessary empirical work has not yet been carried out, and too much of the literature revolves around the same handful of primarily English examples. The volume offers a starting point for further research on extraction from coordinate structures, particularly in understudied languages, and provides a guide to how to tease out the theoretical implications of empirical findings. (shrink)

Scientific advancement is inextricably linked to cultural advancement, and historically the arts have worked hand in hand with technological change. This essay explores some of the connections that exist between science, technology, and the arts, privileging instances where technological change resulted in new forms of artistic creation. Although the role of the arts in contemporary society has ebbed in comparison to that of technology and science, the essay argues that quality, meaningfulness, and longevity are key components in how the arts (...) can retain cultural value in today’s technocentric world. It explores significant instances from the history of music and visual art as the authors make the case that the methods of science and art are both distinct yet commensurate in their ability to shape the values and ideas of contemporary society. (shrink)

Boddy and his colleagues have published several articles on “corporate psychopathy” using what they refer to as a Psychopathy Measure—Management Research Version. They based this measure on the items that comprise the Interpersonal and Affective dimensions of the Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised, a widely used copyrighted and controlled instrument. The PM-MRV not only misspecifies the construct of psychopathy, but also serves as an example of the problems associated with an attempt to form a “new” scale by adapting items from a proprietary (...) scale. The PCL-R measures a superordinate construct underpinned by four correlated dimensions or first-order factors, not just the two in the PM-MRV. The other two dimensions are Lifestyle and Antisocial, which together form Factor 2 of the PCL-R. As defined by the PCL-R, psychopathy requires high scores on both Factor 1 and Factor 2. Lack of validity aside, even if the PM-MRV were to be a useful measure of Factor 1, it would not discriminate between psychopathy and other “dark personalities,” such as Machiavellianism and narcissism, which, along with psychopathy, form the Dark Triad. This lack of discrimination stems from the fact that each of these personalities shares features measured by Factor 1 and, by implication, by the PM-MRV. Research findings based on the PM-MRV may have some meaning with respect to dark personalities in general, but their relevance to psychopathy, as measured with the PCL-R, is tenuous at best. (shrink)

Are similar, or even identical, mechanisms used in the computational modeling of speech segmentation, serial image processing, and music processing? We address this question by exploring how TRACX2, a recognition‐based, recursive connectionist autoencoder model of chunking and sequence segmentation, which has successfully simulated speech and serial‐image processing, might be applied to elementary melody perception. The model, a three‐layer autoencoder that recognizes “chunks” of short sequences of intervals that have been frequently encountered on input, is trained on the tone intervals of (...) melodically simple French children's songs. It dynamically incorporates the internal representations of these chunks into new input. Its internal representations cluster in a manner that is consistent with “human‐recognizable” melodic categories. TRACX2 is sensitive to both contour and proximity information in the musical chunks that it encounters in its input. It shows the “end‐of‐word” superiority effect demonstrated by Saffran et al. (1999) for short musical phrases. The overall findings suggest that the recursive autoassociative chunking mechanism, as implemented in TRACX2, may be a general segmentation and chunking mechanism, underlying not only word‐ and image‐chunking, but also elementary melody processing. (shrink)

Bruineberg et al. provide compelling clarity on the roles Markov blankets could (and perhaps should) play in the study of life and mind. However, here we draw attention to a further role blankets might play: as a hypothesis about cognition itself. People and other animals may use blanket-like representations to model the boundary between themselves and their worlds.

Chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) is a cancer of the hematopoietic system initiated by a single genetic mutation which results in the oncogenic fusion protein Bcr-Abl. Untreated, patients pass through different phases of the disease beginning with the rather asymptomatic chronic phase and ultimately culminating into blast crisis, an acute leukemia resembling phase with a very high mortality. Although many processes underlying the chronic phase are well understood, the exact mechanisms of disease progression to blast crisis are not yet revealed. In (...) this paper we develop a mathematical model of CML based on causal Bayesian networks in order to study possible disease progression mechanisms. Our results indicate that an increase of Bcr-Abl levels alone is not sufficient to explain the phenotype of blast crisis and that secondary changes such as additional mutations are necessary to explain disease progression and the poor therapy response of patients in blast crisis. (shrink)

Prestigious University is a large, private educational institution with a medical school, a university hospital, a law school, and graduate and undergraduate colleges all on a single campus. In the face of the Covid‐19 pandemic, students were told during spring break to return to campus only briefly to retrieve their belongings. Classes then went online. On March 23, 2020, the faculty, students, and staff were emailed the following by the university's director of infection control and public health: We have become (...) aware that a Prestigious University staff member has tested positive for the virus that causes Covid‐19. The individual, who was last on campus on March 16, is now in isolation at their permanent residence and is doing well clinically. The university has already identified those members of our community who may have been in close contact with this individual, and we are working to notify them. Further, this individual's local health department has a protocol for identifying people who have been in direct contact with anyone testing positive for Covid‐19 (such as this Prestigious University staff member) so that they can self‐quarantine and watch for COVID‐19 symptoms for a period of 14 days from their last contact with the infected individual.A professor in the Philosophy Department has asked the ethicists at the medical school whether such contact tracing suffices. “Don't the members of the community deserve to know who this is? Isn't there a mandate to identify this person in order to maximize public health benefits and slow the spread of this deadly virus?”. (shrink)

This paper draws out from Kierkegaard’s work a distinctive critical perspective on an influential contemporary approach in moral philosophy: namely, Christine Korsgaard’s transcendental argument for the value of humanity. From Kierkegaard’s perspective, we argue, Korsgaard argument goes too far, in attributing absolute value to humanity – but also that she is required to make this claim if her transcendental argument is to work. From a Kierkegaardian perspective, to place this sort of value in humanity is problematic since it threatens to (...) make the relation between individuals too claustrophobic. Finally, we explore the possibility of a rival approach, in which we should view others as ethically significant because they too are related to the kind of ‘third’ which Kierkegaard argues is needed to bring stability to the structure of the self. In this way, we claim, a different and more successful transcendental argument to the value of humanity can be found in the work of Kierkegaard. (shrink)

This popular reader has been vastly updated with ten stimulating new selections on the natural and the social sciences: feminism; postmodernism, relativism, and science; confirmation, acceptance, and theory; explanatory unification; and science and values. Retaining the best essays from the previous editions, the editors have added important new pieces to maintain this influential text's relevance.