This study investigates whether the host personality and the primary alterpersonality of a woman with multiple personality disorder are controlled by the left and right hemispheres, respectively. Results support the hypothesis. Behavioral and preference measures indicate that Pe is strongly right handed and Pa is left handed. Verbal and musical dichotic tests show significantly greater accuracy for stimuli presented to the left ear for Pa and to the right ear for Pe. It is concluded that shifts in hemisphericity involve redistribution (...) of attentional resources and callosal suppression. “Conditional handedness” is proposed as a handedness subtype, characterizing persons who alternate personalities and consistently display alternate hand preferences linked to specific personality characteristics. (shrink)

What role does “discursive consciousness” play in decision-making? How does it interact with “practical consciousness?” These two questions constitute two important gaps in strong practice theory that extend from Pierre Bourdieu's habitus to Stephen Vaisey's sociological dual-process model and beyond. The goal of this paper is to provide an empirical framework that expands the sociological dual-process model in order to fill these gaps using models from cognitive neuroscience. In particular, I use models of memory and moral judgment that highlight the (...) importance of executive functions and semantic memory. I outline each model as it pertains to the aforementioned gaps in strong practice theory. I then use the models from cognitive neuroscience to create an expanded dual-process model that addresses how and when conscious mental systems override and interact with subconscious mental systems in the use of cultural ends for decision-making. Finally, using this expanded model I address the sociological debate over the use of interview and survey data. My analysis reveals that surveys and interviews both elicit information encoded in declarative memory and differ primarily in the process of information retrieval that is required of respondents. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 63.3 (2002) 371-397 [Access article in PDF] How the "New Science" of Cannons Shook up the Aristotelian Cosmos Mary J. Henninger-Voss [Figures]Approximately halfway through the "Second Day" of Galileo's Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems Galileo's mouthpiece, the mathematician Salviati, scoffs at his Aristotelian colleague Simplicio: "I see that you have hitherto been of that herd who, in order to learn (...) how matters such as this [motion] take place, and in order to acquire a knowledge of natural effects, do not betake themselves to ships or crossbows or cannons, but retire to their studies... to see whether Aristotle has said anything about them."1 Silly, simple Simplicio! He has been searching for natural philosophical wisdom in the books of natural philosophers rather than in the world of docks and arsenals. Indeed this quotation appears near the outset of Day Two wherein Salviati offers cannonshot as proof for the opposing Aristotelian position that the experience of projectiles proves the motionless state of the earth. Obviously, if the earth rotates toward the east, cannonballs shot point-blank to the west ought to travel much further than to the east. And clearly this is not so. Simplicio agrees that the new arguments offered by the cannon are excellent, "and now I see with how many elegant experiments nature graciously wishes to aid us in coming to the recognition of the truth," Simplicio enthusiastically enjoins. "What a shame there were no cannons in Aristotle's time!" exclaims the third interlocutor, Sagredo. "With them he would indeed have battered down ignorance, and spoken without [End Page 371] [Begin Page 373] the least hesitation concerning the universe."2 The irony here is not only that Aristotle might have used cannons in order to explain the workings of the universe but also that Galileo does so in the following pages. His demonstrations with reference to artillery demolish the Aristotelian position, but he has had Simplicio open the door for him by recognizing this most violent of artifices as an elegant experiment provided by nature.3The cannon provides a primary referent for Galileo's new mathematical physics of motion from his very first dialogue to his very last. The early De Motu culminated in a series of questions about the shot of cannons, while the conversation in his final masterwork, Discourses Concerning Two New Sciences, was set in the Venetian arsenal, and to it Galileo appended a table of the parabolic paths that could be expected from cannons shot at various elevations.4 In some sense Galileo turned inside-out a much older problem, one that had haunted military engineers of sixteenth-century Italy—and Galileo had been trained, and trained others, in military engineering.5 State organizers of war and captain generals were less interested in the implications the arts of fortifications and artillery held for the existing science of natural motion than in the necessity to reduce to a science, that is, a coherent body of knowledge, the rules for manufacturing cannons, planting artillery battery, aiming guns, and fortifying camps, cities, and castles.What Galileo gives us is recognizable as early physics, as a sophisticated mechanical science, a neat triumph of mathematical method in natural philosophy. But the ways and means by which mathematics came together with natural philosophy to address problems of both technology and nature are by no means neat. My claim is that attention to the military sphere will help us sort out some of those ways and means. The curious thing about the historiography on the relationship between early modern science and warfare is that the fact of a connection seems to have been taken for granted, while the implications have seldom been investigated.6 This essay is an attempt to trace those implications by [End Page 373] looking at a mathematician who specifically tried to reduce to a mathematical science the military arts, Niccolò Tartaglia.7 Tartaglia's story shows how the minutia of Aristotelian philosophy was transmuted in early attempts to understand cannonshot... (shrink)

This is the first complete edition of the later work of the medieval philosopher and theologian Henry of Harclay. In colloboration with Raymond Edwards, an English translation is printed on facing pages, making this work available to a much wider audience. The twenty-nine Quaestiones Ordinariae cover a range of topics in metaphysics, theology, physical science, philosophical anthropology and ethics, which were among the most important of those debated in the early fourteenth century. The articles provide a window to this era, (...) as Harclay discusses many of the main questions of his day: whether and why we choose what is evil, how God can know the future and we can still be free, what a virtue is, whether the human soul survives death, whether all things are made up of atoms. This edition enables us to evaluate Harclay, not only in relation to other notable thinkers of his time but to appreciate the inner coherence of his own thought. An extensive introduction to Harclay's life, works and doctrine is provided. The volumes will also benefit scholars following the debates among lesser-studied thinkers such as William of Alnwick, Thomas of Sutton, Nicholas Trivet, and Robert Walsingham, whom this edition shows to have been in dialogue with Harclay during the years of the composition of his Quaestiones, 1310-1317. Because of the clarity of Harclay's thought and style, now mirrored in the English translation, the Quaestiones Ordinariae are an ideal way to introduce students to key problems in medieval philosophy, as well as to enable scholars to deepen their knowledge of the debates of this period. A further volume will publish Questions XV-XXIX. (shrink)

This volume completes the first full edition of the later work of the medieval philosopher and theologian Henry of Harclay. In colloboration with Raymond Edwards, an English translation is printed on facing pages, making this work available to a much wider audience. The twenty-nine Quaestiones Ordinariae cover a range of topics in metaphysics, theology, physical science, philosophical anthropology and ethics, which were among the most important of those debated in the early fourteenth century. The articles provide a window to this (...) era, as Harclay discusses many of the main questions of his day: whether and why we choose what is evil, how God can know the future and we can still be free, what a virtue is, whether the human soul survives death, whether all things are made up of atoms. This edition enables us to evaluate Harclay, not only in relation to other notable thinkers of his time but to appreciate the inner coherence of his own thought. An extensive introduction to Harclay's life, works and doctrine is provided. The volumes will also benefit scholars following the debates among lesser-studied thinkers such as William of Alnwick, Thomas of Sutton, Nicholas Trivet, and Robert Walsingham, whom this edition shows to have been in dialogue with Harclay during the years of the composition of his Quaestiones, 1310-1317. Because of the clarity of Harclay's thought and style, now mirrored in the English translation, the Quaestiones Ordinariae are an ideal way to introduce students to key problems in medieval philosophy, as well as to enable scholars to deepen their knowledge of the debates of this period. Questions 1-14, together with an extensive introduction, were published as volume XVII in the Auctores series. (shrink)

An argument for an updated definition of 'human being'.

The aim of this paper is to argue that lying differs from mere misleading in a way that can be morally relevant: liars commit themselves to something they believe to be false, while misleaders avoid such commitment, and this difference can make a moral difference. Even holding all else fixed, a lie can therefore be morally worse than a corresponding misleading utterance. But, we argue, there are also cases in which the difference in commitment makes lying morally better than misleading, (...) as well as cases in which the difference is not morally relevant. This view conflicts with the two main positions philosophers have defended in the ethics of lying and misleading, which entail either that lying is in virtue of its nature worse than misleading or that there is no morally relevant difference between lying and misleading. (shrink)

Computational models have shown how polarisation can rise among deliberating agents as they approximate epistemic rationality. This paper provides further support for the thesis that polarisation can rise under condition of epistemic rationality, but it does not depend on limitations that extant models rely on, such as memory restrictions or biased evaluation of other agents’ testimony. Instead, deliberation is modelled through agents’ purposeful introduction of arguments and their rational reactions to introductions of others. This process induces polarisation dynamics on its (...) own. A second result is that the effect size of polarisation dynamics correlates with particular types of argumentative behaviour. Polarisation effects can be soothed when agents take into account the opinions of others as premises, and they are amplified as agents fortify their own beliefs. These results underpin the relevance of argumentation as a factor in social-epistemic processes and indicate that rising issue polarisation is not a reliable indicator of epistemic shortcomings. (shrink)

This book provides a comprehensive investigation into Hans Morgenthau's life and work. Identifying power, knowledge, and dissent as the fundamental principles that have informed his worldview, this book argues that Morgenthau's lasting contribution to the discipline of International Relations is the human condition of politics.

ABSTRACT The sense of kairos is of time as having an event-like character. Fundamental here is a split between quantitative time and a qualitatively distinct moment. The decisive moment connects the kairological to crisis. By exploring the accounts of kairos in three contemporaries responding to the sense of crisis in 1920s Germany—Benjamin, Heidegger, and Tillich—this article shows the manner in action in the kairos can be understood as both responsive and non-opportunist. Themes such as the “tiger leap” (Benjamin), the “moment (...) of vision” (Heidegger), and the “shuddering” of time (Tillich) are analyzed to demonstrate how these accounts taken in dialogue with one another give an understanding of kairos, as a displacement and disruption of time as chronos and not simply as an interruption in chronological time. Such a disruption of chronological time is a necessary condition for responsible action, giving a measure also for the present. (shrink)

States act wrongly. Sometimes, they are held responsible, or take responsibility of their own accord, to remediate their wrongdoing: they cease to act wron.

What exactly do we need to do in order to make a promise, or to exercise some other normative power? On a view relied on by many philosophers writing on promising, consent, and related phenomena, the answer is that we must communicate a suitable kind of intention. On this view, power-conferring principles assert that specific normative consequences, determined in part by the content of the communicated intention, attach to such communicative acts, and these principles need not be socially practised or (...) accepted to be true. The paper offers a defense of this convention-independent view against the forceful challenge developed by Jed Lewinsohn in ‘The “Natural Unintelligibility” of Normative Powers’. Lewinsohn appeals to action-theoretic considerations to show that the relevant type of communicative act could not be performed under conditions of rationality and full information, and that therefore promissory power and other normative powers require the existence of social rules conferring such powers. The defense of the view targeted by Lewinsohn turns partly on the exact content of plausible constraints on the intelligibility of actions done with a particular aim, and partly on the question just how the social acceptance of power-conferring rules should be thought to matter. (shrink)

Charles Parsons’ book “Mathematical Thought and Its Objects” of 2008 (Cambridge University Press, New York) is critically discussed by concentrating on one of Parsons’ main themes: the role of intuition in our understanding of arithmetic (“intuition” in the specific sense of Kant and Hilbert). Parsons argues for a version of structuralism which is restricted by the condition that some paradigmatic structure should be presented that makes clear the actual existence of structures of the necessary sort. Parsons’ paradigmatic structure is the (...) so-called ‘intuitive model’ of arithmetic realized by Hilbert’s strings of strokes. This paper argues that Hilbert’s strings, considered as given in intuition, cannot play the role Parsons assigns to them: the criteria of identity of these strings do not have the sharpness that Parsons wants to see in them, and Parsons inadvertently projects abstract structures into his ‘intuitive model’. This diagnosis is exemplified with respect to (a) Parsons’ distinction between addition and multiplication on the one hand and exponentiation on the other and (b) his analysis of arithmetical knowledge in simple cases like “7 + 5 = 12”. All in all, it is claimed that Parsons book contains many important insights with respect to, for example, different versions structuralism, the notion of “natural number” and its uniqueness, induction, predicativity and other things, for which he is rightly famous, but that his way of drawing on the notion of intuition leaves too many questions unanswered. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Considered by many to be one of the major influences on modern Humanistic Judaism, Felix Adler (1851-1933) was a professor of political and social ethics and a social reformer who founded the Ethical Culture movement. First published in 1903 "Life and Destiny" contains quotations from Adler's lectures for the New York Society for Ethical Culture in its early years. It covers such things as the meaning of life, religion, immortality, moral ideas, the ethical outlook, and related topics.

Ist Identität eine Funktion des Gedächtnisses? Mithilfe von Walter Benjamins Erfahrungstheorie kritisiert Felix Denschlag die Theorie des »kollektiven Gedächtnisses« von Maurice Halbwachs sowie Jan und Aleida Assmann und ergänzt sie im Sinne einer Theorie der Vergangenheitsverhältnisse. Der Identitätsbegriff wird - gegenüber der Konstruktion einer bruchlosen Kontinuität - als »kontinuierliche Diskontinuität« begriffen und dem willentlich verfügbaren Gedächtnis wird ein weit darüber hinaus gehender Bereich einer »schöpferischen Unordnung« entgegensetzt. Auf diese Weise lässt sich das individuelle Erfahrungsmoment gegenüber der intersubjektiv verfügbaren und (...) beherrschbaren sozialen Identität betonen. (shrink)

Scholars have known that a variety of medieval theories on relation existed, but no full-length systematic study has been attempted until now. With this book Henninger fills an important gap in our knowledge of medieval philosophy. Dealing with such varied thinkers as Aquinas, Henry of Ghent, Richard of Mediavilla, John Duns Scotus, Henry of Harclay, William of Ockham, and Peter Aureoli, the book will interest anyone concerned with late medieval philosophy and the transition to the early modern period.

In moral and political philosophy, collective obligations are promising “gap-stoppers” when we find that we need to assert some obligation, but can not plausibly ascribe this obligation to individual agents. Most notably, Bill Wringe and Jesse Tomalty discuss whether the obligations that correspond to socio-economic human rights are held by states or even by humankind at large. The present paper aims to provide a missing piece for these discussions, namely an account of the conditions under which obligations can apply to (...) loose collections of agents that do not qualify as collective agents in their own right. I first explain the notion of joint obligations of loose collections of agents as opposed to collective obligations of collections of agents that are collective agents in their own right, and argue that the conditions under which agents can jointly have obligations are the conditions under which they are jointly able to do what is required. I then build on Virginia Held’s seminal work on the moral responsibility of “random collections” to develop such conditions for joint ability. My discussion shows that collections of individuals can more easily be subject to moral obligations than previously assumed. It also shows that putative joint obligations need to be carefully time-indexed, and that it is largely an empirical question whether a given collection can be subject to a moral obligation to perform a given joint action at a particular time. (shrink)

In the past few decades world architecture has seen radical changes as the result of industrialization, standardization and mass production. For Soviet architecture this half century of scientific and technical revolution along with the growth of economic potential has been the most fruitful in its history. If we return to the past and try to form a judgment on the urbanism of our day we will no doubt see that what is offered us by new cities, modern residential zones and (...) social amenities corresponds to our dreams of the cities of the future. From the point of view of the past, we have only to look at the zones of Yassenevo, Tropariovo, the Olympic village or the civic centers of Tashkent or Navoi. (shrink)