Macphail’s comparative approach to intelligence focused on associative processes, an orientation inconsistent with more multifaceted lay and scientific understandings of the term. His ultimate emphasis on associative processes indicated few differences in intelligence among vertebrates. We explore options more attuned to common definitions by considering intelligence in terms of richness of representations of the world, the interconnectivity of those representations, the ability to flexibly change those connections, knowledge, and individual differences. We focus on marine mammals, represented by the amphibious pinnipeds (...) and the aquatic cetaceans and sirenians, as animals that transitioned from a terrestrial existence to an aquatic one, experiencing major changes in ecological pressures. They adapted with morphological transformations related to streamlining the body, physiological changes in respiration and thermoregulation, and sensory/perceptual changes, including echolocation capabilities and diminished olfaction in many cetaceans, both in-air and underwater visual focus, and enhanced senses of touch in pinnipeds and sirenians. Having a terrestrial foundation on which aquatic capacities were overlaid likely affected their cognitive abilities. Vocal and behavioral observational learning capabilities in the wild and in laboratory experiments suggest versatility in group coordination. Empirical reports on aspects of intelligent behavior like problem-solving, spatial learning, and concept learning by various species of cetaceans and pinnipeds, suggest rich cognitive abilities. The high energy demands of the brain suggest brain-intelligence relationships might be fruitful areas for the study when specific hypotheses are considered, e.g., brain mapping indicates hypertrophy of specific sensory areas in marine mammals. Modern neuroimaging techniques provide ways to study neural connectivity, and the patterns of connections between sensory, motor, and other cortical regions provide a biological framework for exploring how animals represent and flexibly use information in navigating and learning about their environment. At this stage of marine mammal research, it would still be prudent to follow Macphail’s caution that it is premature to make strong comparative statements without more empirical evidence, but an approach that includes learning more about how animals flexibly link information across multiple representations could be a productive way of comparing species by allowing them to use their specific strengths within comparative tasks. (shrink)

ABSTRACTHan Fei’s political theory is widely characterized as eschewing any connection with morality; so, can he have any conception of justice? In this paper, I accept the interpretation of Han Fei jettisoning any moral commitment, but I argue that he gives heed to an understanding of justice. This conception of justice arises naturally from the ordinary human sentiment of resentment for wrongs done and becomes a moral staple in the consciousness of ordinary people. Such a conception of justice has these (...) features: all and only the guilty receive punishment, and the punishments are in some sense proportionate to the crime. Since disregarding this popular conception of justice results in resentment and political instability, Han Fei, without any moral commitment to it, accepts the popular conception of justice on prudential and consequentialist grounds. (shrink)

The classical Chinese philosopher Mengzi shares the idea with David Hume that virtue and vice are dispositions of character that arise from original qualities of the mind. Mengzi is guardedly optimistic that these original qualities can be extended to become fully formed virtues, while Hume is guardedly skeptical about this same enterprise. Yet these two thinkers have something to share with each other. In this essay I will use illustrations from Mengzi to sketch out an interpretation of extending original moral (...) qualities into the virtue of benevolence. I will chart two developmental stages on the pathway to fully developed benevolence, and I will attempt to superimpose Hume’s account of the passions and his double.. (shrink)

Rendell and Whitehead note the necessary, complementary relationship between field and laboratory studies in other species, but conclude their article by de-emphasizing the role of laboratory findings in cetacean research. The ambiguity in field studies of cetaceans should argue for greater reliance on the laboratory, which has provided much of the available research supporting the hypothesis of cetacean culture.

Walters provides commentary on Diderot's translation of Shaftesbury's An Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit. By comparing the translation and notes, he demonstrates the evolution of Diderot's thought and artistic skill, discusses the difference between theism and deism, the question of universal order, and compares atheism with free thought. After an analysis of religious fanaticism and social and political abuses, he turns his attention to virtue, as it relates to happiness, objective values, the moral sense, the passions, and self-interest. A final (...) chapter deals with the style of the Essai. (shrink)

Understanding within the western tradition of civic virtue can be supplemented in important ways by giving attention to the civic tradition as it developed in classical Chinese philosophy. The western tradition of civic virtue originates in the context of the small city-state political dynamics of Athens and Florence. As a result of this developmental context, the traditional civic virtues themselves are geared to the ends associated with small states. Established wisdom before the foundation of the United States suggested that any (...) republic, of necessity, would have to remain small. With the expansion of modern democratic states, failure to sustain citizen participation has been recognized as a threat to continued sustainability of the large-scale republic. As a result of this realization, the revivalist civic theory has emphasized participatory virtues. The development of these virtues, however, is hindered by political alienation resulting from the bureaucratic structure of the large-scale state. The suggestion here is that civic theory in the modern world can be advanced by learning from the classical Chinese civic theorists what civic virtues they associated with large state dynamics, and it is suggested that these virtues can act as antecedents to the participatory virtues necessary for democracy. (shrink)

Understanding within the western tradition of civic virtue can be supplemented in important ways by giving attention to the civic tradition as it developed in classical Chinese philosophy. The western tradition of civic virtue originates in the context of the small city-state political dynamics of Athens and Florence. As a result of this developmental context, the traditional civic virtues themselves are geared to the ends associated with small states. Established wisdom before the foundation of the United States suggested that any (...) republic, of necessity, would have to remain small. With the expansion of modern democratic states, failure to sustain citizen participation has been recognized as a threat to continued sustainability of the large-scale republic. As a result of this realization, the revivalist civic theory has emphasized participatory virtues. The development of these virtues, however, is hindered by political alienation resulting from the bureaucratic structure of the large-scale state. The suggestion here is that civic theory in the modern world can be advanced by learning from the classical Chinese civic theorists what civic virtues they associated with large state dynamics, and it is suggested that these virtues can act as antecedents to the participatory virtues necessary for democracy. (shrink)

The liberal perspective entrusts to civic education the roles of combating declining numbers in national public participation and of closing the civic empowerment gap between privileged and under-privileged groups. Citizens equipped with rationality, on this view, will be able to see that participating in the public arena is a benefit to themselves and to the country. This paper critically examines this position, and finds that liberal forms of education suffer from three failings. First, people’s rationality is more likely to persuade (...) them that public participation is too costly in comparison with the advantages found in private life. Second, cognitive states developed in learning-based education may not provide sufficient motivation for action. Third, the liberal take on education may have exaggerated people’s capacity for making rational choices. These three failings come together to suggest that liberal style civic education is unlikely to increase public participation or diminish the civic empowerment gap. (shrink)

This essay examines Hume’s attitude to suicide, in which he had an ongoing philosophical interest, as found in the dialogue at the end of An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, and in his brief essay on the topic. His attitude to, arguments, and views on suicide are placed in the context of his other writings and biographical elements from his own life. The views of other early modern thinkers to suicide, Locke, Kant, and Montaigne, are presented and their arguments (...) evaluated for contrast and comparison with Hume’s views. The views of other writers, most notably the Stoics and St. Thomas Aquinas, are also examined to further elucidate Hume’s views. By carefully reconstructing and evaluating his argument, Hume’s line of reasoning on suicide is found to be out of harmony with his general moral philosophy. The major weakness of his argument is identified as the failure to realize the harm caused to others by suicide. (shrink)

Women struggling for recognition encounter an important difficulty in structural barriers to property ownership. In this paper, I propose to investigate the possibility of a roughly Confucian conception of property that both eschews the liberal property rights conception and provides more space for women than has been allowed in traditional Confucian property schemes. Western property regimes also failed to provide women with adequate access to property, but this was corrected in a manner in keeping with the Western fixation on the (...) individual. Important social problems arose in connection with the Western individualized approach to property relations. The traditional Confucian approach managed to avoid the Western problems, but, as in the West, it failed to provide women with sufficient access to property. I argue here that Confucianism is adequately supplied to correct this deficiency through two routes: one ritual-based and one canon-based. (shrink)

Explores the interactions of fiduciary law and personal and political trust in private, public and international law.

Sleep strengthens memories by repeatedly reactivating associated neuron ensembles. Our studies show that although long-term memory for a medium number of word-pairs benefits from sleep, a large number does not. This suggests an upper limit to the amount of information that has access to sleep-dependent declarative memory consolidation, which is possibly linked to the availability of reactivation opportunities. Due to competing processes of global forgetting that are active during sleep, we hypothesized that even larger amounts of information would enhance the (...) proportion of information that is actively forgotten during sleep. In the present study, we aimed to induce such forgetting by challenging the sleeping brain with vast amounts of to be remembered information. For this, 78 participants learned a very large number of 640 word-pairs interspersed with periods of quiet awake rest over the course of an entire day and then either slept or stayed awake during the night. Recall was tested after another night of regular sleep. Results revealed comparable retention rates between the sleep and wake groups. Although this null-effect can be reconciled with the concept of limited capacities available for sleep-dependent consolidation, it contradicts our hypothesis that sleep would increase forgetting compared to the wake group. Additional exploratory analyses relying on equivalence testing and Bayesian statistics reveal that there is evidence against sleep having a detrimental effect on the retention of declarative memory at high information loads. We argue that forgetting occurs in both wake and sleep states through different mechanisms, i.e., through increased interference and through global synaptic downscaling, respectively. Both of these processes might scale similarly with information load. (shrink)

This collection of essays, first published two decades ago, presents central feminist critiques and analyses of natural and social sciences and their philosophies. Unfortunately, in spite of the brilliant body of research and scholarship in these fields in subsequent decades, the insights of these essays remain as timely now as they were then: philosophy and the sciences still presume kinds of social innocence to which they are not entitled. The essays focus on Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hobbes, Rousseau, and Marx; on (...) the 'adversary method' model of philosophic reasoning; on principles of individuation on philosophical ontology and philosophy of language; on individualistic assumptions in psychology; functionalism in sociological and biological theory; evolutionary theory; the methodology of political science; and conceptions of objective inquiry in the sciences. In taking insights of both Liberal and Marxian women's movements into the purportedly most abstract and value-free areas of Western thought, these essays chart sexist and androcentric assumptions, claims and practices in the cognitive, technical cores of Western sciences and their philosophies. They begin to identify the distinctive aspects of women's experiences and locations in male-supremacist social structures which can provide resources needed for the creation of post-androcentric thinking in research, scholarship, and public policy. Such uses of feminist insights remain controversial today, and even among some feminists. These authors were all junior researchers and scholars two decades ago; today many are among the most distinguished senior scholars in their fields. Their work here provides a splendid opportunity for upper-level undergraduate and graduate students in philosophy and the social sciences to explore some of the most intriguing and controversial challenges to disciplinary projects and to public policy today. (shrink)

Epictetus was born a slave. His master, Epaphroditus, allowed him to attend the lectures of the Stoic philosopher Musonius Rufus and later gave him his freedom. From numerous references in his Discourses it is clear that Epictetus valued freedom as a precious possession. He would have been on the side of the many people living now who, while not actually enslaved, are denied true freedom by the harsh circumstances of their lives. Epictetus's teachings about freedom and human dignity have echoed (...) through the millennia-in the writings of Spinoza, Thomas Paine and Martin Luther King, Jr., to name a few. He was much concerned with human behavior. His advice to not worry about what is not in our control is pointedly relevant to our busy modern society-which is often fraught with anxiety. Some people might argue that what Epictetus taught is not serious philosophy, more like self-help. But the range of topics addressed by the essays in this book clearly indicates that the teachings of Epictetus provide strong incentive to present day philosophical thinking. "Epictetus: His Continuing Influence and Contemporary Relevance" is the title of a conference on Epictetus held at Rochester Institute of Technology in April 2012, when many of the ideas in these essays were first presented. (shrink)

This paper presents a computational model of the way humans inductively identify and aggregate concepts from the low-level stimuli they are exposed to. Based on the idea that humans tend to select the simplest structures, it implements a dynamic hierarchical chunking mechanism in which the decision whether to create a new chunk is based on an information-theoretic criterion, the Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle. We present theoretical justifications for this approach together with results of an experiment in which participants, exposed (...) to meaningless symbols, have been implicitly encouraged to create high-level concepts by grouping them. Results show that the designed model, called hereafter MDLChunker, makes precise quantitative predictions both on the kind of chunks created by the participants and also on the moment at which these creations occur. They suggest that the simplicity principle used to design MDLChunker is particularly efficient to model chunking mechanisms. The main interest of this model over existing ones is that it does not require any adjustable parameter. (shrink)