Idiopathic Parkinson’s disease impairs working memory, but the exact nature of this deficit in terms of the underlying cognitive mechanisms is not well understood. In this study patients with mild clinical symptoms of PD were compared with matched healthy control subjects on a computerized battery of tests designed to assess spatial working memory and verbal working memory. In the spatial working memory task, subjects were required to recall a sequence of four locations. The verbal working memory task was methodologically identical (...) except for the modality of the stimuli used, requiring subjects to orally recall a sequence of six digits. In either case, half of the sequences were structured in a way that allowed ‘chunking’, while others were unstructured. This manipulation was designed to dissociate the strategic component of task performance from the memory-load component. Mild medicated patients with PD were impaired only on the structured versions of the verbal working memory tasks. The analogous deficit in the spatial working memory was less pronounced. These findings are in agreement with the hypothesis that working memory deficits in PD reflect mainly the executive component of the tasks and that the deficits may be at least partly modality-independent. (shrink)

FN:s allmänna förklaring om de mänskliga rättigheterna innehåller en katalog över ett antal mänskliga fri- och rättigheter. I den här uppsatsen argumenterar jag för att det krävs en kvantifierad deontisk logik för att förstå den logiska formen hos flera av de normer som uttrycks i denna förklaring. Jag kommer att gå igenom ett antal argument som intuitivt är giltiga, men som inte kan bevisas i klassisk logik. Därefter kommer jag att visa hur dessa argument kan formaliseras och bevisas med hjälp (...) av kvantifierad deontisk logik. Diskussionen ger stöd åt uppfattningen att vi behöver en kvantifierad deontisk logik för att analysera många typer av normativa uttryck och kastar också förhoppningsvis nytt ljus över hur vissa centrala utsagor i FN:s allmänna förklaring bör tolkas och vilken logisk form de har. (shrink)

Den här uppsatsen handlar om fritt val (FV) tillåtelser (FVT). Jag går igenom den s.k. fritt val tillåtelser paradoxen och nämner några möjliga lösningar på denna. Därefter presenterar jag mitt eget förslag på hur man bör förstå tillåtelser av detta slag och hur man kan lösa (FVT) paradoxen. Jag tar upp några potentiella invändningar mot denna analys och visar hur dessa kan bemötas. Ibland har (FVT) paradoxen använts som ett argument emot s.k. standard deontisk logik (SDL). Jag argumenterar för att (...) man kan acceptera förekomsten av (FV) tillåtelser utan att behöva förkasta (SDL). Däremot pekar diskussionen på behovet av en kvantifierad deontisk logik. (shrink)

Logiska Övningar är en övningsbok i logik och en introduktionsbok i teoretisk filosofi. Den är indelad i sju kapitel. Varje kapitel, förutom det första, behandlar en eller flera klassiska grenar av den teoretiska filosofin. Det första kapitlet är en allmän inledning till boken och till filosofi som ämne. Övriga kapitel behandlar följande områden. Logik & Argumentationsteori (kapitel 2). Hur bör vi tänka och argumentera? Kunskapsteori (kapitel 3). Vad är kunskap och hur får vi kunskap om verkligheten? Metafysik (kapitel 4). Hur (...) är verkligheten ytterst beskaffad? Vad existerar? Vetenskapsfilosofi (kapitel 5). Vad är vetenskap? Hur får vi vetenskaplig kunskap? Språkfilosofi (kapitel 6). Vad är ett språk? Hur förhåller sig språket till vårt tänkande och till verkligheten? Medvetandefilosofi (kapitel 7). Vad är en människa? Hur förhåller sig kropp och själ till varandra? Logiska Övningar innehåller mer än 5000 tankekedjor eller argument. Genom att studera dessa kan läsaren öva upp sin förmåga att analysera och värdera olika filosofiska härledningar, samt att tänka och resonera logiskt. Boken kan användas i undervisning i filosofi och logik på en grundläggande nivå eller för självstudier. Läsningen kompletteras lämpligen med en eller flera introduktionsböcker till logik, som behandlar olika fundamentala logiska fakta och metoder. -/- Produkt information Publicerad: September 14, 2019 Språk: Svenska Format: Paperback Antal sidor: 708 sidor. (shrink)

Logiska Övningar är en övningsbok i logik och en introduktionsbok i praktisk filosofi. Den är indelad i sju kapitel. Varje kapitel, förutom det första, behandlar en eller flera klassiska grenar av den praktiska filosofin. Det första kapitlet är en allmän inledning till boken och till filosofi som ämne. Övriga kapitel behandlar följande områden. Metaetik (kapitel 2). Finns det objektiva normer och värderingar? Hur vet vi vad som är rätt eller fel, gott eller ont? Normativ etik (kapitel 3). Hur bör vi (...) leva våra liv och vad bör vi sträva efter? Tillämpad etik (kapitel 4). Hur kan vi tillämpa våra normativa teorier på praktiska problem? Politisk filosofi & Rättsfilosofi (kapitel 5). Hur ser det goda samhället ut? Hur bör våra lagar vara utformade? Estetik (kapitel 6). Vad är konst? Vad innebär det att påstå att någonting är vackert? Religionsfilosofi (kapitel 7). Vad är en religion? Finns det en övernaturlig verklighet? Logiska Övningar innehåller mer än 5000 tankekedjor eller argument. Genom att studera dessa kan läsaren öva upp sin förmåga att analysera och värdera olika filosofiska härledningar, samt att tänka och resonera logiskt. Boken kan användas i undervisning i filosofi och logik på en grundläggande nivå eller för självstudier. Läsningen kompletteras lämpligen med en eller flera introduktionsböcker till logik, som behandlar olika fundamentala logiska fakta och metoder. -/- Produkt information Publicerad: November 24, 2020 Språk: Svenska Format: Paperback Antal sidor: 826 sidor. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger and Ernst Jünger rightly count among the signal examples of intellectual complicity with National Socialism. But after supporting the National Socialist movement in its early years, they both withdrew from political activism during the 1930s and considered themselves to be in “inner emigration” thereafter. How did they react to the end of National Socialism, to the Allied occupation and finally to the foundation of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949? Did they abandon their stance of seclusion and (...) engage once more with political issues? Or did they persist in their withdrawal from the political sphere? In analyzing the intellectual relationship of Heidegger and Jünger after 1945, the article reevaluates the assumption of a “deradicalization” of German conservatism after the Second World War by showing that Heidegger's and Jünger's postwar positions were no less radical than their earlier thought, although their attitude towards the political sphere changed fundamentally. (shrink)

Many libertarians believe that self-ownership is a separate matter from ownership of extra-personal property. “No-proviso” libertarians hold that property ownership should be free of any “fair share” constraints, on the grounds that the inability of the very poor to control property leaves their self-ownership intact. By contrast, left-libertarians hold that while no one need compensate others for owning himself, still property owners must compensate others for owning extra-personal property. What would a “self” have to be for these claims to be (...) true? I argue that both of these camps must conceive of the boundaries of the self as including one's body but no part of the extra-personal world. However, other libertarians draw those boundaries differently, so that self-ownership cannot be separated from the right to control extra-personal property after all. In that case, property ownership must be subject to a fair share constraint, but that constraint does not require appropriators to pay compensation. This view, which I call “right libertarianism,” differs importantly from the other types primarily in its conception of the self, which I argue is independently more plausible. (shrink)

Many Christian theodicists believe that God's creating us with the capacity to love Him and each other justifies, in large part, God's permitting evil. For example, after reminding us that, according to Christian doctrine, the supreme good for human beings is to enter into a reciprocal love relationship with God, Vincent Brümmer recently wrote: In creating human persons in order to love them, God necessarily assumes vulnerability in relation to them. In fact, in this relation, he becomes even more vulnerable (...) than we do, since he cannot count on the steadfastness of our love the way we can count on his steadfastness… If God did not grant us the ability to sin and cause affliction to him and to one another, we would not have the kind of free and autonomous existence necessary to enter into a relation of love with God and with one another… Far from contradicting the value which the free will defence places upon the freedom and responsibility of human persons, the idea of a loving God necessarily entails it. In this way we can see that the free will defence is based on the love of God rather than on the supposed intrinsic value of human freedom and responsibility. (shrink)

L'attachement aux coutumes locales tient à tous les sentiments désintéressés, nobles et pieux. Quelle politique deplorable que celle qui en fait de la rébellion! Qu'arrive-t-il? Que dans tous les États où l'on détruit ainsi toute vie partielle, un petit État se forme au centre: dans la capitale s'agglomèrent tous les intérêts: là vont s'agiter toutes les ambitions: le reste est immobile. Les individus, perdus dans un isolement contre nature, étrangers au lieu de leur naissance, sans contact avec le passé, ne (...) vivant que dans un présent rapide, et jetés comme des atomes sur une plaine immense et nivelée, se détachent d'une patrie qu'ils n'aperçoivent nulle part, et dont l'ensemble leur devient indifférent, parce que leur affection ne peut se reposer sur aucune de ses parties. (shrink)

In this interview, Daniel Little provides an overview of his life and work in academia. Among other things, he discusses an actor-centred approach to theory of social ontology. For Little, this app...

The psychological condition of happiness is normally considered a paradigm subjective good, and is closely associated with subjectivist accounts of well-being. This article argues that the value of happiness is best accounted for by a non-subjectivist approach to welfare: a eudaimonistic account that grounds well-being in the fulfillment of our natures, specifically in self-fulfillment. And self-fulfillment consists partly in authentic happiness. A major reason for this is that happiness, conceived in terms of emotional state, bears a special relationship to the (...) self. These arguments also point to a more sentimentalist approach to well-being than one finds in most contemporary accounts, particularly among Aristotelian forms of eudaimonism. (shrink)

Joshua Daniel offers a reconstruction of the influence of Josiah Royce and George Herbert Mead on H. Richard Niebuhr to counter predominate strains in Christian ethics that overemphasize the role of socialization in moral formation at the expense of acknowledging the agency of individuals and their importance in preventing communities from turning in on themselves or becoming static. Daniel characterizes the driving worry of postliberal Christian ethics as “the accommodation of Christian communities to prevailing social forces and norms, (...) which is understood to radically undermine the churches’ existence and mission”. The primary accusation against these prevailing social norms is individualism. The modern... (shrink)

In this paper on Karl Barth's conception of truth I shall try to state his position regarding the nature of truth and the criterion of truth, and secondly I shall draw from his position some propositions which I believe exhibit a pattern in his theology which brings it into close relationship to a philosophical tradition.

In ordinary circumstances, human actions have a myriad of unintended and often unforeseen consequences for the lives of other people. Problems of pollution are serious examples, but spillovers and side effects are the rule, not the exception. Who knows what consequences this essay may have? This essay is concerned with the problems of justice created by spillovers. After characterizing such spillovers more precisely and relating the concept to the economist's notion of an externality, I shall then consider the moral conclusions (...) concerning spillovers that issue from a natural rights perspective and from the perspective of welfare economics supplemented with theories of distributive justice. I shall argue that these perspectives go badly awry in taking spillovers to be the exception rather than the rule in human interactions. I. Externalities Economists have discussed spillovers under the heading of “externalities.” To say this is not very helpful, since there is so much disagreement concerning both the definition and significance of externalities. (shrink)

It is extraordinary, when one thinks about it, how little attention has been paid by theorists of the nature and justification of punishment to the idea that punishment is essentially a matter of self-defense. H. L. A. Hart, for example, in his famous “Prolegomenon to the Principles of Punishment,” is clearly committed to the view that, at bottom, there are just three directions in which a plausible theory of punishment can go: we can try to justify punishment on purely consequentialist (...) grounds, which for Hart, I think, would be to try to construct a purely utilitarian justification of punishment; we can try to justify punishment on purely retributive grounds; or we can try to justify punishment on grounds that are some sort of shrewd combination of consequentialist and retributive considerations. Entirely absent from Hart's discussion is any consideration of the possibility that punishment might be neither a matter of maximizing the good, nor of exacting retribution for a wrongful act, nor of some imaginative combination of these things, but, rather, of something altogether different from either of them: namely, the exercise of a fundamental right of self-protection. Similarly, but much more recently, R. A. Duff, despite the fact that he himself introduces and defends an extremely interesting fourth possibility, begins his discussion by writing as though, apart from his contribution, there are available to us essentially just the options previously sketched by Hart. Again, there is no mention here, any more than in Hart's or any number of other recent discussions, of the possibility that we might be able to justify the institution of punishment on grounds that are indeed forward-looking, to use Hart's famous term, but that are not at all consequentialist in any ordinary sense of the word. (shrink)

By embodying the hopes of a set of qualitative liberals who believed that postwar economic abundance opened up opportunities for self-development, David Riesman's bestselling The Lonely Crowd influenced the New Left. Yet Riesman's assessment of radical youth protest shifted over the course of the 1960s. As an antinuclear activist he worked closely with New Left leaders during the early 1960s. By the end of the decade, he became a sharp critic of radical protest. However, other leading members of Riesman's circle, (...) such as Kenneth Keniston, author of the influential Young Radicals, applied Riesman's ideas to create more sympathetic understandings of the New Left. Examining reactions to the New Left by Riesman and his associates allows historians to go beyond the common understanding of the key ideological divisions of the 1960s as existing between liberalism and radicalism or between liberalism and conservatism to better appreciate the significance of splits among liberals themselves. (shrink)

This interview explores the key themes and ideas in Daniel Chernilo’s recent book Debating Humanity: Towards a Philosophical Sociology. It is a hugely ambitious book that tackles a range of questions around the notion of humanity and the category of the human. Drawing on a wide range of thinkers, the book pushes at a number of far-reaching issues, problems and questions concerning humanity. It’s a rich text that develops themes that are likely to be of interest across the social (...) sciences and humanities, not least because it tackles some of the most difficult and crucial questions that face social theory today. The interview was conducted in October 2017. (shrink)

Distinguished contributors take up eminent scholar Daniel R. Schwarz’s reading of modern fiction and poetry as mediating between human desire and human action. The essayists follow Schwarz’s advice, “always the text, always historicize,” thus making this book relevant to current debates about the relationships between literature, ethics, aesthetics, and historical contexts.

In this interview, Cornelius Castoriadis explains and develops many of the central themes in his later writings on politics and social criticism. In particular, he poignantly articulates his critique of contemporary pseudo-democracy, while advocating a form of democracy founded on collective education and self-government. He also explores how the “insignificance” in the current political arena relates to insignificance in other areas, such as the arts and philosophy, to form the core feature of our Zeitgeist. Finally, he seeks to break through (...) the ideological fog of liberalism and privatization in order to voice a radical appeal for an autonomous, self-limiting society. (shrink)