What happens during a near-death experience? In an accessible style, this text reviews recent research about unbelievable events, creating an account of activity at the boundaries of science. It also examines research concerns, current theories, methodological issues and clinical implications.

COnstantien Sandis speaks to Nassim Taleb about inductive knowledge,black swans, Hume, Popper, and Wittgenstein.

This volume brings together a collection of essays on the history and philosophy of probability and statistics by one of the eminent scholars in these subjects. Written over the last fifteen years, they fall into three broad categories. The first deals with the use of symmetry arguments in inductive probability, in particular, their use in deriving rules of succession. The second group deals with four outstanding individuals who made lasting contributions to probability and statistics in very different ways: Frank Ramsey, (...) R. A. Fisher, Alan Turing, and Abraham de Moivre. The last group of essays deals with the problem of 'predicting the unpredictable' - making predictions when the range of possible outcomes is unknown in advance. The essays weave together the history and philosophy of these subjects and document the fascination that they have exercised for more than three centuries. (shrink)

This paper examines the relation between the various forces which underlie human action and verbal reports about our reasons for acting as we did. I maintain that much of the psychological literature on confabulations rests on a dangerous conflation of the reasons for which people act with a variety of distinct motivational factors. In particular, I argue that subjects frequently give correct answers to questions about the considerations they acted upon while remaining largely unaware of why they take themselves to (...) have such reasons to act. Pari passu, experimental psychologists are wrong to maintain that they have shown our everyday reason talk to be systematically confused. This is significant because our everyday reason-ascriptions affect characterizations of action that are morally and legally relevant. I conclude, more positively, that far from rendering empirical research on confabulations invalid, my account helps to reveal its true insights into human nature. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article examines accounts of the moral basis of compensatory duties that explain such duties as the continuation, in some way, of the pre-wrong normative situation. I identify, contrast, and assess three versions of this view—duty continuity, right continuity, and reasons continuity. I argue that each version is defensible, once properly articulated. The article responds to a range of objections to these views that have not received much critical attention by their proponents.

The starting point for my reading of the exchanges between Marx and Balzac is the repetition in The Eighteenth Brumaire of a striking image employed in Colonel Chabert to represent the force of ideology as experienced by a man forcibly set outside the conventions it endorses. Balzac first: “The social and judicial world weighted on his breast like a nightmare.”3 Marx’s appropriation occurs in a much-quoted meditation on the past as impediment to the future.Men make their own history, but they (...) do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.4What is the weight of an nightmare, and why do Balzac and Marx agree that invoking it is a valid means to express humanity’s relation to its history?5 4. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, p. 15; my emphasis. Further references to this work, abbreviated EB, will be included in the text.5. In French and German: “Le monde social et judiciare lui pesait sur la poitrine comme un cauchemar”; “Die Tradition aller toten Geschlechter lastet wie ein Alp auf dem Gehirne der Lebenden.” This strikes me as so obvious a borrowing that I have to wonder why it does not seem to be generally known. On contributing factor may be that the standard French translation of The Eighteenth Burmaire gives a fanciful version of the sentence in Marx: “La tradition de toutes les generations mortes pèse d’un poids très lourd sur le cerveau des vivants”. Does this poids très lourd come from a misreading of ein Alp as eine Alp? Sandry Petrey is professor of French and comparative literature at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. The author of History in the Text: Quatrevingt-Treize and the French Revolution, he is completing a book entitled Realism and Revolution. (shrink)

Where most discussions of trust focus on the rationality of trust, in this paper I explore the doxastic justification of beliefs formed through trust. I examine two forms of trust: the self-trust that is involved when one trusts one’s own basic cognitive faculties, and the interpersonal trust that is involved when one trusts another speaker. Both cases involve regarding a source of information as dependable for the truth. In thinking about the epistemic significance regarding a source in this way, I (...) call upon Process Reliabilism (PR). With its core idea that the epistemic goodness of a belief tracks the reliability of the process through which the belief was formed, PR suggests one way to think about the (potential) epistemic benefits and risks of trust: in cases of trust the process through which belief is formed includes reliance on an information source, where the reliability with which the source produced its information is the main determinant of the epistemic status of the beliefs formed through trusting that source. While it is much more common to find something like this picture endorsed in connection with cases of self-trust, I argue that it ought to be endorsed for cases of interpersonal trust as well. The failure to do so, I submit, reflects a commitment to an individualistic orientation that proponents of PR need not, and should not, endorse. (shrink)

This paper has the aim of making Johannes von Kries’s masterpiece, Die Principien der Wahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung of 1886, a little more accessible to the modern reader in three modest ways: first, it discusses the historical background to the book ; next, it summarizes the basic elements of von Kries’s approach ; and finally, it examines the so-called “principle of cogent reason” with which von Kries’s name is often identified in the English literature.

Las Tecnologías de Información y Comunicación se presentaron como una alternativa “efectiva o no”, tanto para quienes enseñan su uso como para quienes las utilizan; es un hecho, se quiera o no, que arribaron a nuestra sociedad para permanecer y multiplicarse, una realidad compleja ante la cual tenemos dos alternativas: las proporcionamos, las profundizamos. Tecnológicamente hablando, hasta el ocaso de la era paleolítica, nuestros congéneres no tenían nada que decir…, sin embargo, si podían hablar y comunicarse por medio de la (...) palabra. El lenguaje es consustancial al ser humano; es importante hacer esta aclaración. El cuerpo humano, sobre todo ambas extremidades, fueron los primeros instrumentos que empleó la humanidad como apoyo para recordar y contar. Los dedos de la mano, pueden considerarse los primeros apoyos de los que se valieron hombres y mujeres de la antigüedad para contar y constituyen, por tanto, la noción más elemental de la aritmética, anterior incluso a la noción de número. Es muy probable que los dedos de las manos y los pies hayan sido el origen de los sistemas numéricos quinario, decimal y vigesimal: es decir, el Hombre podía contar cinco, diez o veinte. Los constantes cambios tecnológicos —políticos y filosóficos— que se manifestaron en el Siglo XX dieron como resultado la aparición a lo que se ha dado en llamar “Era de las Tecnologías o Informática” que ha cambiado radicalmente la situación mundial en todos los aspectos, y que ha dado origen a una revolución tecnológica presente cada día. (shrink)

Este artículo revisa el proceso histórico de la ‘Conquista del desierto’ y la existencia de campos de concentración para indígenas en Argentina a través de una lectura de hermenéutica filosófica. El objetivo del artículo es interpretar el periodo y el uso de campos como instancias que configuraron la diferenciación del pueblo mapuche como sujeto racializado en la sociedad argentina. Los resultados de la exposición muestran que la marginación del cuerpo mapuche ocurre por el registro de excepciones y que aquella es (...) disputada por sujetos mapuche. This paper reviews the historical process of the ‘Conquest of the Desert’ and the existence of concentration camps for indigenous people in Argentina. The research is conducted through philosophical hermeneutics. The objective of the paper is to read the period and the use concentration camps as instances that shaped the differentiation of the Mapuche people as a racialized subject in Argentine society. The results of the argumentation show that marginalization of the Mapuche body occurs through the registration of exceptions, which is disputed by Mapuche subjects. (shrink)

This article analyses the multimodal representations of public space in Chilean broadcast news reports on the figure of the hooded rioter and its alleged connections with the student movement. We seek to identify how space is constructed as a legitimation strategy in relation to the actors involved and the actions taking place across four different news broadcast pieces in the light of Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis and Systemic Functional Linguistics. Results show that the multimodal representations of space are crucial to (...) identify and functionalize hooded rioters as belonging to the student movement. Actions are dependent on the spaces in which actors operate, restricting the occupation of certain spaces to specific actors. Thus, transgressive protest actions are to be contained to educational spaces and represented as naturalized vandalism, ignoring the students’/demonstrators’ motivations to recuperate/vindicate the public space. (shrink)

This paper introduces an innovative curricular approach—the Health Humanities Portrait Approach —and its pedagogical tool—the Health Humanities Portrait. Both enable health professions learners to examine pressing social issues that shape, and are shaped by, experiences of health and illness. The Portrait Approach is grounded in a set of “critical portraiture” principles that foster humanities-driven analytical skills. The HHP’s architecture is distinctively framed around a pressing social theme and utilizes a first-person narrative and scholarship to explore how the dimensions of the (...) personal and the structural are mutually constituted. We argue that when creator-educators adopt the Portrait Approach and its critical portraiture principles to design and teach the HHP, they enable learners to become proficient in synthesizing and analyzing—with both depth and breadth—the human and social dimensions of patients’ lives. This inventive curricular intervention provides a needed contribution to health professions education in that it utilizes health humanities methodologies to elucidate the multiple aspects of health, illness, disability, and healthcare. (shrink)

This paper documents a conversation between a philosopher and a human computer interaction researcher whose research has been enormously influenced by Wittgenstein. In particular, the in vivo use of categories in the design of communications and AI technologies are discussed, and how this meaning needs to evolve to allow creative design to flourish. The paper will be of interest to anyone concerned with philosophical tools in everyday action.

This chapter contains sections titled: Basic Actions Action Individuation References Further reading.

In this paper I formulate the thesis of the Division of Epistemic Labor as a thesis of epistemic dependence, illustrate several ways in which individual subjects are epistemically dependent on one or more of the members of their community in the process of knowledge acquisition, and draw conclusions about the cognitively distributed nature of some knowledge acquisition.

ResumenEn este artículo me propongo realizar una defensa del naturalismo como fundamento metafísico de la ciencia, mostrando para ello que el “nuevo realismo” de Markus Gabriel es otra versión contemporánea del relativismo y del idealismo y a pesar de que Gabriel acepta la distinción fregeana de sentido y referencia, sus implicaciones son explícitamente antinaturalistas. En concreto, la defensa al naturalismo que intento ofrecer aquí es una crítica abierta a las consecuencias antinaturalistas y pseudocientíficas del “nuevo realismo” de Gabriel. Otra manera (...) de comprender este trabajo es mostrar que el naturalismo puede ser una pieza clave para entender la discusión contemporánea entre la ciencia y la pseudociencia.Palabras clave: Gabriel; naturalismo; nuevo realismo; demarcación; ciencia. (shrink)

What can nurse scientists learn from Rorty in the development of a philosophical foundation? Indeed, Rorty in his 1989 text entitled Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity tantalizes the reader with debates of reason 'against' philosophizing. Forget truth seeking; move on to what matters. Rorty would rather the 'high brow' thinking go to those that do the work in order to make the effort useful. Nursing as an applied science, has something real that is worth looking at, and that nurse researchers need (...) to think about. And as a profession built upon relationships, we should be thinking of the exchanges we have with those around us, of the contrasts in vocabularies used and of the contingencies involved, letting this launch us into our imaginings and areas of enquiry. The business of nurse researchers is to study what nurses do – how we care; Rorty would have us care. But, not to dismiss the reflective thinker as Rorty advocates for the self-doubting ironist to continue to seek the final vocabulary, the ideal of what 'this' means, accepting this as the best to be offered at the time. As a science struggling to find foundation, we need only to look at what we do and value – as antifoundational as Rorty portrays himself, Rorty 'ironically' may have revealed a foundation for nursing science that is consistent with its path. (shrink)

Tracking the career development of a Nursery Nurse into a managerial role, this book: Clearly identifies and explains the managerial roles of team leader, senior supervisor, deputy and manager Focuses on the sudden change that takes place as you transcend from colleague to boss Offers advice on what is expected from you as you move into a managerial role Chris Ashman is Senior Manager at Bridgewater college, Somerset and has ten years experience teaching childcare and managing. He also writes course (...) content for the FE sector. Sandy Green is an Early Years Consultant and Trainer in south-west England. (shrink)

La biología utiliza múltiples criterios para individuar fenómenos biológicos. Frente a esta diversidad, los enfoques monistas proponen criterios fundamentales para el reconocimiento unívoco de individuos, esto es, formas únicas de dividir el mundo biológico en entidades individuales. El pluralismo, por otro lado, argumenta que no deberíamos restringir el estudio de la individualidad a concepciones únicas, reconociendo, en su lugar, diferentes tipos de individuos. En este artículo, analizaré cómo ciertos enfoques monistas y pluralistas enfrentan la pluralidad de criterios de individuación utilizados (...) por la práctica científica. Siguiendo las recientes aproximaciones epistemológicas y pragmáticas en filosofía de la individualidad biológica, argumentaré por qué la diversidad de individuaciones no suele representar un inconveniente para la biología y por qué contribuye a nuestro conocimiento del mundo biológico. La conclusión general será que requerimos múltiples maneras de individuar la naturaleza para poder cumplir los diversos objetivos epistémicos de la biología, una labor que las aproximaciones monistas no suelen visibilizar. Palabras clave: Individuo Biológico, Pluralidad, Pluralismo, Monismo. (shrink)

This article presents a description and a critical reflection of some methodological issues involved in a number of participative planning projects that have been carried out in several cities and/or communities in Mexico and other Latin-American countries since 1994. The projects involved the design of regional development plans based on a vision shared by the corresponding communities. The projects include the participation of a large number of people, representing the various sectors of the populations concerned as well as the leading (...) opinion groups of those communities. The methodological approach of the projects is based on prospective and participative planning techniques. (shrink)

A hypnotic induction produces different patterns of spontaneous experiences across individuals. The magnitude and characteristics of these responses covary moderately with hypnotic suggestibility, but also differ within levels of hypnotic suggestibility. This study sought to identify discrete phenomenological profiles in response to a hypnotic induction and assess whether experiential variability among highly suggestible individuals matches the phenomenological profiles predicted by dissociative typological models of high hypnotic suggestibility. Phenomenological state scores indexed in reference to a resting epoch during hypnosis were submitted (...) to a latent profile analysis. The profiles in the derived four-class solution differed in multiple experiential dimensions and hypnotic suggestibility. Highly suggestible individuals were distributed across two classes that exhibited response patterns suggesting an inward attention subtype and a dissociative subtype. These results provide support for dissociative typological models of high hypnotic suggestibility and indicate that highly suggestible individuals do not display a uniform response to a hypnotic induction. (shrink)

This article derives from a doctoral thesis in which a particular discourse was used as a ‘paradigm case’. From this discourse an ethic set within a South African culture arose. Using many cultural ‘voices’ to aid the understanding of this narrative, the ethic shows that one can build on both a ‘justice’ and a ‘care’ ethic. With further development based on African culture one can take the ethic of care deeper and reveal ‘layers of understanding’. Care, together with compassion, forms (...) the foundation of morality. Nursing ethics has followed particular western moral philosophers. Often nursing ethics has been taught along the lines of Kohlberg’s theory of morality, with its emphasis on rules, rights, duties and general obligations. These principles were universalistic, masculine and noncontextual. However, there is a new ethical movement among Thomist philosophers along the lines to be expounded in this article. Nurses such as Benner, Bevis, Dunlop, Fry and Gadow - to name but a few - have welcomed the concept of an ‘ethic of care’. Gilligan’s work gave a feminist view and situated ethics in the everyday aspects of responsiveness, responsibility, context and concern. Shutte’s search for a ‘philosophy for Africa’ has resulted in finding similarities in Setiloane and in Senghor with those of Thomist philosophers. Using this African philosophy and a research participant’s narrative, an African ethic evolves out of the African proverb: ‘A person is a person through other persons’, or its alternative rendering: ‘I am because we are: we are because I am.’ This hermeneutic narrative reveals ‘the way affect imbues activity with ethical meaning’ within the context of a black nursing sister in a rural South African hospital. It expands upon the above proverb and incorporates the South African constitutional idea of ‘Ubuntu’ (compassion and justice or humanness). (shrink)

I explore Mandeville’s account of moral judgement and its implications for the understanding of hypocrisy. According to Mandeville, we have a psychological need to like ourselves sufficiently, so as to carry on with our lives. Because our self-liking necessarily depends on the opinions others form of us, we are extraordinarily sensitive to praise and condemnation. The practice of moral judgement exploits this sensitivity. Hypocrisy is an intrinsic element of this practice.

The aim of this paper is to defend a novel characterization of epistemic luck. Helping myself to the notions of epistemic entitlement and adequate explanation, I propose that a true belief suffers from epistemic luck iff an adequate explanation of the fact that the belief acquired is true must appeal to propositions to which the subject herself is not epistemically entitled. The burden of the argument is to show that there is a plausible construal of the notions of epistemic entitlement (...) and adequate explanation on which the resulting characterization of epistemic luck, though admittedly programmatic, has several important virtues. It avoids difficulties which plague modal accounts of epistemic luck; it can explain the conflicting temptations one can feel in certain alleged cases of epistemic luck; it offers a novel account of the value of knowledge, without committing itself to any particular analysis of knowledge; and it illuminates the significance for epistemology of the phenomenon of epistemic luck itself. (shrink)

In the context of the mandated phaseout of methyl bromide, California’s strawberry industry has increased its use of chloropicrin, another soil fumigant that has long been on the market. However, due to its 2010 designation as a toxic air contaminant, the US Environmental Protection Agency and California’s Department of Pesticide Regulation have developed enhanced application protocols to mitigate exposures of the chemical to bystanders, nearby residents, and farmworkers. The central feature of these mitigation technologies are enhanced buffer zones between treated (...) fields and nearby buildings. Not only do buffer zones inherently privilege neighbors over farmworkers, but the determinations of the size of these buffer zones are also based on acceptable threshold levels and probabilities that allow significant exposures to those they are designed to protect. Moreover, these protocols require human monitors to detect sensory irritation. While the science and technology studies literature is highly useful for understanding the inextricability of science and politics in developing protective measures and is attentive to what counts as data in setting acceptable thresholds, it tends to overlook that social sorting is intrinsic to such regulation. We thus turn to Foucault’s biopolitics to make sense of regulations that are designed to protect but inherently allow some to become ill. Doing so illuminates how determinations of the bright line are at once technical–political as well as implicit decisions about whose bodies count. (shrink)

Since van Fraassen first put forward the suggestive idea that many philosophical positions should be construed as ‘stances’ rather than factual beliefs, there have been various attempts to spell out precisely what a philosophical stance might be, and on what basis one should be adopted. In this paper I defend a particular account of stances, the view that they are pragmatically justified perspectives or ways of seeing the world, and compare it to some other accounts that have been offered. In (...) Sect. 2 I consider van Fraassen’s argument for construing empiricism as a stance, and look at some responses to it. In Sect. 3 I outline my conception of stances as perspectives or ways of seeing, and explain how stances so understood may be justified. I illustrate this conception by way of a discussion of the model pluralist position with respect to the units of selection debate in biology, and suggest that on the model pluralist view different perspectives on the units of selection, such as the gene’s eye view, are in fact van Fraassian stances. In Sect. 4 I discuss the view put forward by Teller and Chakravartty among others that stances should be understood as epistemic policies, and argue that it is consistent with the conception of stances as perspectives. In the final section I criticise Rowbottom’s attempt to assimilate stances to Kuhnian paradigms. I argue that he has overlooked some important disanalogies between stances and paradigms, so that the comparison obscures more than it reveals. (shrink)

The Things We Do and Why We Do Them argues against the common assumption that there is a kind of thing called "action" which all reason-giving explanation of action are geared towards. Sandis explains why all theories concerned with the form which any such explanation must take fail from the outset, and shows how various debates on the nature of so-called motivating reasons only arise because the participants all share a number of mistaken views which follow from the basic assumption (...) under attack. In so doing, he urges philosophers and psychologists alike to stop asking whether the explanation of action is causal, and to focus instead on its multifarious objects. This book will appeal to anyone interested in motivational psychology, the reasons for which we act, and the philosophy of explanation in general. (shrink)

In recent years there has been a noticeable yet largely unacknowledged ‘pragmatic turn’ in the scientific realism debate, inspired in part by van Fraassen’s work on ‘epistemic stances’. Features of this new approach include: an ascent to the meta-level (the focus is not so much on whether scientific realism is true, but on the prior questions of the nature of the positions in this debate, how to decide whether to be a scientific realist, etc.); a reinterpretation of scientific realism and (...) anti-realism as (or as closely associated with) stances or frameworks, rather than theories or beliefs; a move away from the previously dominant empirical-explanatory (i.e. quasi-scientific or naturalistic) conception of scientific realism, anti-realism, and their justification; and a stress on the pragmatic and values-based elements in the debate. The traditional scientific realism debate is concerned with determining which position is true, or most epistemically justified. The new approach by contrast is concerned with determining which position best serves certain values, e.g. is most useful, fruitful, or otherwise prudentially preferable. In this paper we try to bring together the various strands in this new orientation, summarise its key features, contrast it with superficially similar but opposing views, and explore the similarities and differences among some of its adherents. Given we are advocates of the turn, we also offer a defence of the value and fruitfulness of this reconceptualization of the debate. (shrink)

In his general philosophical remarks, scattered across different oeuvres, Mach subscribed to a number of doctrines. First, the thesis of the economy of science: The primary, perhaps the only legitimate goal of scientific theories is to achieve the economy of thought. Instead of recording many facts, science codifies them under the heading of laws. Instead of attending to individual diverse sensations, science postulates the existence of bodies. Then we have evolutionism: Human activities must ultimately be understood in terms of Darwin’s (...) theory. A man is a biological product of evolutionary development. But only human activities: history of knowledge, ideas, thoughts is only intelligible by the lights of evolutionary theory. Finally, phenomenalism: Sensations are denizens of the world, whereas bodies are symbols constructed in thought, chiefly to serve the purposes of economy. Are these views jointly consistent? I argue that the role of naturalism, prominent in the endorsement of the evolutionary theory, creates an unresolved tension among those views. Phenomenalism in particular is deeply revisionary. It appears to be a remnant of empiricist metaphysics casting doubt on pretty much every area of scientific discourse. The adoption of full-fledged philosophical naturalism should be able to resolve the tension without ruling out the possibility of a methodological critique of scientific theories. (shrink)

In his recent book Peirce and the Threat of Nominalism, Paul Forster presented how Peirce understood the nominalist scruple to individualise concepts for collections at the cost of denying properties of true continua. In that process Peirce showed some vibrant problems, as for example, the classic one of universals. Nonetheless that work is still incomplete; as long as that should be adequately related with what Peirce called his ‘scholastic realism’. Continuity is started by the theory of multitude and frees his (...) analysis from any constraints of the nominalist theories of reality as integrated by incognizable things-in-themselves. His theory of multitude, instead, can be derived with mathematics: By drawing in the work of the ways of abstraction in diagrammatic reasoning made by Sun Jo Shin and in continuum theories by Cathy Legg I will show the device of diagrammatic reasoning as a plausible pragmatic tool to represent those continua and make sense of his scholastic realism. The analysis of continuity is a perfect example of how the method of diagrammatic reasoning helps unblock the road of philosophical inquiry and also helps to clarify other problems as, for example, the applicability of Mathematics. General concepts define continua, and, while the properties of true continua are not reducible to properties of the individuals they comprise, they are still intelligible and necessary to ground any science of inquiry. (shrink)

I consider the broad perspectives in biology known as ‘functionalism’ and ‘structuralism’, as well as a modern version of functionalism, ‘adaptationism’. I do not take a position on which of these perspectives is preferable; my concern is with the prior question, how should they be understood? Adapting van Fraassen’s argument for treating materialism as a stance, rather than a factual belief with propositional content, in the first part of the paper I offer an argument for construing functionalism and structuralism as (...) stances also. The argument draws especially on Gould’s insights concerning functionalism and structuralism, in particular their apparent historical continuity from the pre-Darwinian period through to today. In the second part of the paper I consider Godfrey-Smith’s distinction between empirical and explanatory adaptationism, and suggest that while the former is an empirical scientific hypothesis, the latter is closely related to the functionalist stance. (shrink)

The anthology contains twenty-two essays and is divided into two parts. The essays are, in the main, critical responses to aspects of what has come to be known in action theory as the ‘Standard View’ – the view that traces back to Donald Davidson's contribution to twentieth-century philosophy of action. The view under criticism treats actions as bodily movements caused in a non-deviant way by belief–desire pairs, construes these belief–desire pairs as the primary reasons for the actions that they cause, (...) and embraces event-causality.The issue of how we should conceive of action is taken up in several essays. For example: in Essay 1, Fred Dretske challenges the view that actions are external events that are the effect of the reasons for which the action is done. In Essay 16, Helen Steward, proposes that, instead of treating the availability of a reason-giving explanation as essential to action, we should construe action as ‘an exercise of the power of bodily control by an animal’. In Essay 21, Jonathan Dancy argues for a deflationary approach to actions, which forgoes treating actions ‘as individuals, with identity conditions’.Other authors – for example, Stephen Everson, Rowland Stout and Maria Alvarez – focus on the issue of what reasons for action are. Are they psychological states, or propositions, or states of affairs? Also under review is how to distinguish different kinds of reason: normative and explanatory reasons, and even explanatory and motivating reasons. (shrink)

Sandys, Sir John Edwin. Aristotle's Constitution of Athens. A Revised Text with an Introduction Critical and Explanatory Notes Testimonia and Indices. Second edition, Revised and Enlarged. London: Macmillan & Co., Limited, 1902. xcii, 331 pp. Frontis. Illus. Reprinted 2000 by The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd. LCCN 99-23952. ISBN 1-58477-004-X. Cloth. $75. * By the author of the standard comprehensive history of classical scholarship, A History of Classical Scholarship. This scholarly examination of the textual evidence of the papyrus of what is known (...) to be Aristotle's Constitution of Athens, which dated from 328 and 325 B.C., is enhanced by notes that pertain to the legal aspects of the work. A thorough introduction surveys Greek political literature prior to Aristotle's time and that ascribed to him, and concludes with a history of the Constitution itself. While other scholars may have already deciphered the papyrus, this work is distinguished by the provision of the text with critical notes on each page, followed by the Testimonia, which contain further evidence on the text, in the form of quotations in Greek, often providing passages in full for immediate reference. With a bibliography and English as well as Greek index. (shrink)

Gregory Bateson is well known for defining information by stating “In fact what we mean by information – the elementary unit of information – is a difference which makes a difference…” This conceptual perspective has the merit of simplicity and generality. Simplicity, in addressing the complexity of information. Generality, in seeking applicability to any and every field of human experience. The purpose of this paper is to focus the applicability of this conceptual approach by Bateson and use it to perform (...) a calculation of taking the difference between two grey-level digital images that are shifted one relative to the other. The digital images take the place of the field of view that a human being would have access through her sense of vision at two different spatial/temporal instances. The results show that it is possible to highlight the edges of the objects under scrutiny, as well as to highlight other differences within the object. Bateson’s “difference that makes a difference” would seem to provide a first step in the elusive meaning making process of humans. (shrink)