Pharmacological substances used to improve cognition and brain function range from dietary supplements and caffeine to drugs targeted at altering particular neurochemical concentrations in the brain. This article considers current scientific research into pharmaceutical cognitive enhancement and likely future directions. Then it discusses the trends in the use of PCEs within patients groups for whom they were intended, as well as in those for whom they were not originally intended, including healthy adults and children. Finally, it provides an overview of (...) current and future ethical considerations and concludes that the use of PCE will likely continue both within patient and healthy individuals in the foreseeable future. Information regarding actual use, benefits, and harms in various populations is severely lacking. Therefore, more emphasis should be placed on obtaining the relevant empirical data, for example, by the long-term monitoring of effectiveness and side effects, and by accurate large-scale surveys to assess actual usage. (shrink)

When the fuzzy indeterminacy of quantum mechanics overthrew the orderly world of Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein and Erwin Schrödinger were at the forefront of the revolution. Neither man was ever satisfied with the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics, however, and both rebelled against what they considered the most preposterous aspect of quantum mechanics: its randomness. Einstein famously quipped that God does not play dice with the universe, and Schrödinger constructed his famous fable of a cat that was neither alive nor (...) dead not to explain quantum mechanics but to highlight the apparent absurdity of a theory gone wrong. But these two giants did more than just criticize: they fought back, seeking a Theory of Everything that would make the universe seem sensible again. In Einstein’s Dice and Schrödinger’s Cat, physicist Paul Halpern tells the little-known story of how Einstein and Schrödinger searched, first as collaborators and then as competitors, for a theory that transcended quantum weirdness. This story of their quest—which ultimately failed—provides readers with new insights into the history of physics and the lives and work of two scientists whose obsessions drove its progress. Today, much of modern physics remains focused on the search for a Theory of Everything. As Halpern explains, the recent discovery of the Higgs Boson makes the Standard Model—the closest thing we have to a unified theory— nearly complete. And while Einstein and Schrödinger failed in their attempt to explain everything in the cosmos through pure geometry, the development of string theory has, in its own quantum way, brought this idea back into vogue. As in so many things, even when they were wrong, Einstein and Schrödinger couldn’t help but get a great deal right. (shrink)

Why read Leibniz today? Can we still learn from him and not just about him? This book argues that Leibniz offers a powerful, productive model for transdisciplinary thinking that can push back against the narrowness of the humanities today. Richard Halpern recasts Leibniz as a great writer as well as a great philosopher, demonstrating that his philosophical project cannot be fully understood without taking its literary elements into account. He shows Leibniz to be a prescient thinker about art and (...) beauty whose insights into the relationship between aesthetic experience and thought remain invaluable. Leibnizing asks readers to follow the dynamic movement of Leibniz’s writing instead of attempting to grasp a static philosophical system and to pay careful attention to the rhetorical and stylistic registers of Leibniz’s work as well as its conceptual and logical dimensions. For philosophers, this book offers a novel approach to reading and interpreting Leibniz. For literary and other theorists, it showcases the relevance of Leibniz’s thought to areas from aesthetics to politics and from metaphysics to computer science. Written in a lucid and even witty style, Leibnizing provides readers with an accessible entryway into Leibniz’s sometimes forbidding but ultimately rewarding philosophical vision. (shrink)

In his essay The Dynamic Analytics of Property Law, Professor Michael Heller describes and criticizes the familiar, current analytical tools of property theory and calls for the adoption of a more dynamic approach. In this comment, I shall address briefly two issues discussed in Heller's paper: his suggestion that we add a fourth type of property – "anticommons property" – to the well-known "property trilogy" of private property, commons property, and state property; and his critique of the "bundle of rights" (...) approach of the courts to the takings problem, which leads to excessive fragmentation of private property. The former issue nicely demonstrates the current tendency of scholars to argue against "too much private property." The latter illustrates the familiar, futile search of property scholars for an all-encompassing metaphor to describe and identify private property. (shrink)

In thinking about which works of Jewish thought can and should be an essential part of every Jewish library, I conceived of the volume you hold in your hand. Each chapter in this book features a scholar of Jewish studies revisiting a particularly foundational and salient work of maḥshevet Yisrael (Jewish thought), from medieval to modern, and discussing its themes, its historical context, the circumstances and background of its author (the "person of the book"), and, most importantly, its contemporary relevance."--Preface, (...) pages ix-x. (shrink)

This monograph aims to mathematically codify the notion of "moral systems" and define a sensible distance between them. It consists of three parts, aimed at an audience with varying interests and mathematical backgrounds. The first part steers philosophical, formally defining moral systems and several related concepts. The second part studies black box algorithms, including questions of inference and metric construction. The third part explores the technical construction of metrics amongst conditional probability distributions.

In this article I attempt to present an explanation that integrates the five features needed for the cognitive (knowledge‐yielding) linking of philosophy and literature. These features are, first, explaining how a literary work can support a general claim. Second, explaining what is uniquely gained through concentrating on such support patterns as they appear in aesthetic contexts in particular. Third, explaining how features of aesthetic response are connected with knowledge. Four, maintaining a distinction between manipulation and adequate persuasion. Five, achieving all (...) this without invoking what David Novitz has called “a shamelessly functional and didactic view of literature.”. (shrink)

I attempt to explain Plato's choice of dialogue through an analysis of what he regarded as the conditions of knowledge acquisition. I see the main contribution of the paper in exposing the way in which time and pain are, for Plato, conditions of knowledge acquisition. Plato endorsed the “learning through suffering,” or pathei mathos, convention, central to Greek drama, and did so not through theory but through the praxis some of the dialogues employ. This addition of experiential components to the (...) more cognitively oriented definitions of knowledge that Socrates uses complicates what these works may say about human knowledge. I analyze these tensions and the bearing they may have on the question of Plato's choice of dialogue, that is, on his rhetoric in practice. The requirements for actual persuasion, as Plato specifies them in the Seventh Letter,, are only partially met by the fictional scenes of argumentation and knowledge conveying that Plato presents. However, such scenes permit transcending some of the limitations of written, systematic, nonpersonal discourse. The presentation of such interactions to a real reader through dialogue turns into a mode of writing that is closer to meeting the demands of actual communication of knowledge – at least knowledge regarding what Plato envisaged as being the highest sort of epistemic communication. (shrink)

The question of whether knowledge is definable in terms of belief, which has played an important role in epistemology for the last 50 years, is studied here in the framework of epistemic and doxastic logics. Three notions of definability are considered: explicit definability, implicit definability, and reducibility, where explicit definability is equivalent to the combination of implicit definability and reducibility. It is shown that if knowledge satisfies any set of axioms contained in S5, then it cannot be explicitly defined in (...) terms of belief. S5 knowledge can be implicitly defined by belief, but not reduced to it. On the other hand, S4.4 knowledge and weaker notions of knowledge cannot be implicitly defined by belief, but can be reduced to it by defining knowledge as true belief. It is also shown that S5 knowledge cannot be reduced to belief and justification, provided that there are no axioms that involve both belief and justification. (shrink)

Reasoning About Knowledge is the first book to provide a general discussion of approaches to reasoning about knowledge and its applications to distributed ...

After revelations of participation by psychiatrists and psychologists in interrogation of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and Central Intelligence Agency secret detention centers, the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association adopted Position Statements absolutely prohibiting their members from participating in torture under any and all circumstances, and, to a limited degree, forbidding involvement in interrogations. Some interrogations utilize very aggressive techniques determined to be torture by many nations and organizations throughout the world. This paper explains why psychiatrists and psychologists (...) involved in coercive interrogations violate the Geneva Conventions and the laws of the United States. Whether done with ignorance of professional ethical obligations or not, these psychiatrists and psychologists have crossed an ethical barrier that may best be averted from re-occurring by teaching medical students and residents in all medical specialties about the ethics principles stemming from the 1946–1947 Nuremberg trials and the Geneva Conventions, together with the Ethics Codes of the World Medical Association and the American Medical Association; and, with regard to psychiatric residents and psychological trainees, by the teaching about The Principles of Medical Ethics With Annotations Especially Applicable to Psychiatry and the Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct, respectively. In this way, all physicians and psychologists will clearly understand that they have an absolute moral obligation to "First, do no harm" to the human beings they professionally encounter. (shrink)

We propose new definitions of explanation, using structural equations to model counterfactuals. The definition is based on the notion of actual cause, as defined and motivated in a companion article. Essentially, an explanation is a fact that is not known for certain but, if found to be true, would constitute an actual cause of the fact to be explained, regardless of the agent’s initial uncertainty. We show that the definition handles well a number of problematic examples from the literature.

We report an experiment on two treatments of an ultimatum minigame. In one treatment, responders’ reactions are hidden to proposers. We observe high rejection rates reflecting responders’ intrinsic resistance to unfairness. In the second treatment, proposers are informed, allowing for dynamic effects over eight rounds of play. The higher rejection rates can be attributed to responders’ provision of a public good: Punishment creates a group reputation for being “tough” and effectively “educate” proposers. Since rejection rates with informed proposers drop to (...) the level of the treatment with non-informed proposers, the hypothesis of responder’s enjoyment of overt punishment is not supported. (shrink)

Enterprise Resource Planning systems are used by universities to handle the academic services and business processes while providing enhanced experience and services to students. This study begins with a background review of ERPs in higher education institutions, the impact on the business processes through optimization and the importance of critical success factors for easier implementation. Secondly, Academic Planning, a core part of the student module of ERPs for higher education, is analyzed in this paper from the prism of data integration, (...) business process workflow, and process optimization. The issues that arise with development of a module are addressed through a case study at SEE-University. The data and business process workflows are based on an actual study by real implementation at this institution. The findings from this study will serve other universities who are in the process of implementation of an ERP to ease their development process and improve the efficiency of the services provided. Main contribution of this study is that it reduces the gap in literature and practice for issues and solutions that arise with the development of a new system, especially in higher education institutions, which in turn are very scarce in nature. (shrink)

Adaptations have varied relations to their source material, making it hard to formulate a general theory. Avoiding the attempt, we characterize a narrower, more unified class of reflective adaptations which communicate an active and sometimes critical relation to the source's framework. We identify the features of reflective adaptations which give them their distinctive interest. We show how these features are embodied in Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood, an adaptation with a radically shifted perspective on the relation between character and situation (...) compared to its Shakespearean source. We identify some of the artistic choices through which this response to the source is conveyed, such choices being a characteristic feature of reflective adaptations. (shrink)

In December 2019 a virus named COVID-19 appeared in China, precisely in the city of Wuhan. This virus was declared a global pandemic by the World Health Organization in March 2020. Since no adequate medical treatment has yet been discovered for this virus, many world institutions are committed to share with each other the data they collect and process in their laboratories. A large amount of these data is shared with citizens in order to inform about the risk that threaten (...) us by virus COVID-19. Various credible world institutions such as the World Health Organization (WHO), Johns Hopkins University (JHU), the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), etc., are providing various statistical data to address the issues raised by this emergent situation, but these reports in some cases are putting doubts on the completeness and the transparency of the data, which are not sufficiently processed and which then create confusion about the risks that we are facing. In this paper we are conducting a study of the quality of current global datasets from the must credible sources related to COVID-19. Also, we are comparing datasets collected from Republic of Kosovo and Republic of North Macedonia with corresponding data from WHO, ECDC and JHU datasets. To analyze datasets from different sources, we are using Power BI tool, making the improvement through the implementation of adequate dimensions and methods of improving the quality of datasets. (shrink)

The Republic of Macedonia has been a part of the Bologna process since 2003. The Ministry of Education, law and policy makers and higher education institutions have actively engaged with its main concepts. In parallel with this, since the adoption of the law on higher education in 2008 and the reform of the Accreditation and Evaluation Board, there have been numerous changes and amendments culminating in the fast-tracked adoption of a new law at the beginning of 2015. Some of its (...) solutions created a huge debate among the academic community, other intellectuals and students themselves, resulting in the postponement of that law and a kind of legal vacuum. In such turbulent circumstances, individual higher education institutions had to consider how and to what extent to adopt and develop relevant standards and guidelines, comply with the legal framework and promote good practice. The aim of this paper is to present how these three aspects, Bologna standards and guidelines for Quality Assurance, a national legal framework and an institutional approach are being reflected, merged and implemented at a relatively young higher education institution. It questions the impact of these three elements on each other and how one institution’s drive for improvement is affected. This is done through a qualitative analysis of the three-fold perspectives. The conclusions and recommendations are expected to be of use to policy makers in the country and region as they evaluate how international trends and good practice fit into the socio-economic and political conditions of RM and similar countries. At the same time, it can demonstrate how far institutional quality assurance and progress can be implemented and recognized in the country itself and by some international stakeholders. It can also prove that the South East European University is a national leader in this field as RM has no functioning QA evaluation system, while SEEU has managed to create a well structured and operating one, based on international and institutional experiences. (shrink)

Three notions of definability in multimodal logic are considered. Two are analogous to the notions of explicit definability and implicit definability introduced by Beth in the context of first-order logic. However, while by Beth’s theorem the two types of definability are equivalent for first-order logic, such an equivalence does not hold for multimodal logics. A third notion of definability, reducibility, is introduced; it is shown that in multimodal logics, explicit definability is equivalent to the combination of implicit definability and reducibility. (...) The three notions of definability are characterized semantically using algebras. The use of algebras, rather than frames, is shown to be necessary for these characterizations. (shrink)

Law, Economics, and Morality examines the possibility of combining economic methodology and deontological morality through explicit and direct incorporation of moral constraints into economic models. Economic analysis of law is a powerful analytical methodology. However, as a purely consequentialist approach, which determines the desirability of acts and rules solely by assessing the goodness of their outcomes, standard cost-benefit analysis is normatively objectionable. Moderate deontology prioritizes such values as autonomy, basic liberties, truth-telling, and promise-keeping over the promotion of good outcomes. It (...) holds that there are constraints on promoting the good. Such constraints may be overridden only if enough good is at stake. While moderate deontology conforms to prevailing moral intuitions and legal doctrines, it is arguably lacking in methodological rigor and precision. Eyal Zamir and Barak Medina argue that the normative flaws of economic analysis can be rectified without relinquishing its methodological advantages and that moral constraints can be formalized so as to make their analysis more rigorous. They discuss various substantive and methodological choices involved in modeling deontological constraints. Zamir and Medina propose to determine the permissibility of any act or rule infringing a deontological constraint by means of mathematical threshold functions. Law, Economics, and Morality presents the general structure of threshold functions, analyzes their elements and addresses possible objections to this proposal. It then illustrates the implementation of constrained CBA in several legal fields, including contract law, freedom of speech, antidiscrimination law, the fight against terrorism, and legal paternalism. (shrink)

Using formal systems to represent and reason about uncertainty.

Many people think that animal liberation would require a fundamental transformation of basic beliefs. We would have to give up "speciesism" and start viewing animals as our equals, with rights and moral status. And we would have to apply these beliefs in an all-or-nothing way. But in Ethics and the Beast, Tzachi Zamir makes the radical argument that animal liberation doesn't require such radical arguments--and that liberation could be accomplished in a flexible and pragmatic way. By making a case (...) for liberation that is based primarily on common moral intuitions and beliefs, and that therefore could attract wide understanding and support, Zamir attempts to change the terms of the liberation debate. Without defending it, Ethics and the Beast claims that speciesism is fully compatible with liberation. Even if we believe that we should favor humans when there is a pressing human need at stake, Zamir argues, that does not mean that we should allow marginal human interests to trump the life-or-death interests of animals. As minimalist as it sounds, this position generates a robust liberation program, including commitments not to eat animals, subject them to factory farming, or use them in medical research. Zamir also applies his arguments to some questions that tend to be overlooked in the liberation debate, such as whether using animals can be distinguished from exploiting them, whether liberationists should be moral vegetarians or vegans, and whether using animals for therapeutic purposes is morally blameless. (shrink)

Hamlet tells Horatio that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in his philosophy. In Double Vision, philosopher and literary critic Tzachi Zamir argues that there are more things in Hamlet than are dreamt of--or at least conceded--by most philosophers. Making an original and persuasive case for the philosophical value of literature, Zamir suggests that certain important philosophical insights can be gained only through literature. But such insights cannot be reached if literature is (...) deployed merely as an aesthetic sugaring of a conceptual pill. Philosophical knowledge is not opposed to, but is consonant with, the literariness of literature. By focusing on the experience of reading literature as literature and not philosophy, Zamir sets a theoretical framework for a philosophically oriented literary criticism that will appeal both to philosophers and literary critics. Double Vision is concerned with the philosophical understanding induced by the aesthetic experience of literature. Literary works can function as credible philosophical arguments--not ones in which claims are conclusively demonstrated, but in which claims are made plausible. Such claims, Zamir argues, are embedded within an experiential structure that is itself a crucial dimension of knowing. Developing an account of literature's relation to knowledge, morality, and rhetoric, and advancing philosophical-literary readings of Richard III, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, and King Lear, Zamir shows how his approach can open up familiar texts in surprising and rewarding ways. (shrink)

Despite some principal similarities, there is no systematic comparison between the different types of synesthesia . This comprehensive review compares the three principal types of synesthesia and focuses on their phenomenological features and their relation to different etiological models. Implications of this comparison for the validity of the different etiological models are discussed.Comparison of the three forms of synesthesia show many more differences than similarities. This is in contrast to their representation in the literature, where they are discussed in many (...) respects as being virtually similar. Noteworthy is the much broader spectrum and intensity with the typical drug-induced synesthesias compared to genuine and acquired synesthesias. A major implication of the phenomenological comparison in regard to the etiological models is that genuine and acquired synesthesias point to morphological substrates, while drug-induced synesthesia appears to be based on functional changes of brain activity. (shrink)

The success of deep brain stimulation (DBS) for movement disorders and the improved understanding of the neurobiologic and neuroanatomic bases of psychiatric diseases have led to proposals to expand current DBS applications. Recent preclinical and clinical work with Alzheimer's disease and obsessive-compulsive disorder, for example, supports the safety of stimulating regions in the hypothalamus and nucleus accumbens in humans. These regions are known to be involved in addiction and overeating associated with obesity. However, the use of DBS targeting these areas (...) as a treatment modality raises common ethical considerations, which include informed consent, coercion, enhancement, threat to personhood, and manipulation of the reward center. Pilot studies for both of these conditions are currently investigational. If these studies show promise, then there is a need to address the ethical concerns related to the initiation of clinical trials including the reliability of preclinical evidence, patient selection, study design, compensation for participation and injury, cost-effectiveness, and the need for long-term follow-up. Multidisciplinary teams are necessary for the ethical execution of such studies. In addition to establishing safety and efficacy, the consideration of these ethical issues is vital to the adoption of DBS as a treatment for these conditions. We offer suggestions about the pursuit of future clinical trials of DBS for the treatment of addiction and overeating associated with obesity and provide a framework for addressing ethical concerns related to treatment. (shrink)

A new approach for defining causality and such related notions as degree of responsibility, degrees of blame, and causal explanation. Causality plays a central role in the way people structure the world; we constantly seek causal explanations for our observations. But what does it even mean that an event C "actually caused" event E? The problem of defining actual causation goes beyond mere philosophical speculation. For example, in many legal arguments, it is precisely what needs to be established in order (...) to determine responsibility. The philosophy literature has been struggling with the problem of defining causality since Hume. In this book, Joseph Halpern explores actual causality, and such related notions as degree of responsibility, degree of blame, and causal explanation. The goal is to arrive at a definition of causality that matches our natural language usage and is helpful, for example, to a jury deciding a legal case, a programmer looking for the line of code that cause some software to fail, or an economist trying to determine whether austerity caused a subsequent depression. Halpern applies and expands an approach to causality that he and Judea Pearl developed, based on structural equations. He carefully formulates a definition of causality, and building on this, defines degree of responsibility, degree of blame, and causal explanation. He concludes by discussing how these ideas can be applied to such practical problems as accountability and program verification. Technical details are generally confined to the final section of each chapter and can be skipped by non-mathematical readers. (shrink)

The Covid‐19 crisis has accelerated a trend toward burnout in health care workers, making starkly clear that burnout is especially likely when providing health care is not only stressful and sad but emotionally alienating; in such situations, there is no mental space for clinicians to experience authentic clinical empathy. Engaged curiosity toward each patient is a source of meaning and connection for health care providers, and it protects against sympathetic distress and burnout. In a prolonged crisis like Covid‐19, clinicians provide (...) care out of a sense of duty, especially the duty of nonabandonment. We argue that when duty alone is relied on too heavily, with fear and frustration continually suppressed, the risk of burnout is dramatically increased. Even before Covid‐19, clinicians often worked under dehumanizing and unjust conditions, and rates of burnout were 50 percent for physicians and 33 percent for nurses. The Covid‐19 intensification of burnout can serve as a wake‐up call that the structure of health care needs to be improved if we are to prevent the loss of a whole generation of empathic clinicians. (shrink)

What are the limits of the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the relational aspects of medical and nursing care? There has been a lot of recent work and applications showing the promise and efficiency of AI in clinical medicine, both at the research and treatment levels. Many of the obstacles discussed in the literature are technical in character, regarding how to improve and optimize current practices in clinical medicine and also how to develop better data bases for optimal parameter (...) adjustments and predictive algorithms. This paper argues that there are also in principle obstacles to the application of AI in clinical medicine and care where empathy is important, and that these problems cannot be solved with any of the technical and theoretical approaches that shape the current application of AI in specific areas of clinical medicine in which care for patients is fundamental. This is important, because it generates specific risks that may be overlooked otherwise, and it justifies the necessity of human monitoring and emotional intervention in clinical medicine. Consequently, difficult issues concerning moral and legal responsibility may ensue if these in principle problems are ignored. (shrink)

Cognitive‐enhancing drugs are prescribed to patients with psychiatric disorders, such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and Alzheimer's disease, to treat cognitive deficits. This chapter discusses the use of pharmacological agents to improve the cognition of both those with cognitive impairments and of the general population, as well as some of the benefits, risks, and ethical issues associated with the use of cognitive‐enhancing drugs. The chapter also talks about a survey run by the journal Nature, which was prompted by a (...) commentary by the authors of this chapter, that asked readers for their views on the issues surrounding cognitive enhancement. It can be seen that the ethical issues surrounding the use of cognitive‐enhancing drugs are complex and require discussion among different groups. With the development of new drugs and methods of enhancing cognition, such as brain stimulation, the need for further research and discussion is likely to become more pressing. (shrink)