``Neural computing'' is a research field based on perceiving the human brain as an information system. This system reads its input continuously via the different senses, encodes data into various biophysical variables such as membrane potentials or neural firing rates, stores information using different kinds of memories (e.g., short-term memory, long-term memory, associative memory), performs some operations called ``computation'', and outputs onto various channels, including motor control commands, decisions, thoughts, and feelings. We show a natural model of neural computing that (...) gives rise to hyper-computation. Rigorous mathematical analysis is applied, explicating our model's exact computational power and how it changes with the change of parameters. Our analog neural network allows for supra-Turing power while keeping track of computational constraints, and thus embeds a possible answer to the superiority of the biological intelligence within the framework of classical computer science. We further propose it as standard in the field of analog computation, functioning in a role similar to that of the universal Turing machine in digital computation. In particular an analog of the Church-Turing thesis of digital computation is stated where the neural network takes place of the Turing machine. (shrink)

Modern insan eleştiriyi, neredeyse hava kadar, su kadar yaşamsal saymaktadır. Daha iyi bir dünyada yaşama isteği, verili olanlarla yetinmemeyi, gelenekleri, yerleşik değerleri sorgulamayı beraberinde getirmektedir. Felsefi eleştiri, sadece belli bir görüşe itiraz etmekle sınırlı bir tutum değildir; o aynı zamanda kendi dayanaklarının sağlamlığı ile de ilgilidir. Bilimlerde sıklıkla karşılaşılan yapıcı ya da olumlu eleştiri, başta felsefe olmak üzere sosyal bilimlerde yıkıcı bir niteliğe bürünmektedir. Felsefi eleştirinin yıkıcılığının nihilizmle sonuçlanmaması için bu eleştiri türünün de yapıcı bir nitelikle donatılması gerekir. Bu (...) çalışmada felsefi eleştirinin normları olabileceği öne sürülmektedir. Bu normlardan en bilinen ve kabul gören üç ilke tespit edilerek bu ilkelerin felsefi eleştirinin temellendirilmesinde oynadıkları rolün gösterilmesi amaçlanmaktadır. Böylelikle felsefenin de tıpkı bilimler gibi siyasal iktidarların hizmetinde olmak yerine, gerçeğin peşinden gidebileceğinin olası olduğu gösterilecektir. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Nietzsche, Philosophy and the Arts ed. by Salim Kemal, Ivan Gaskell, and Daniel W. ConwayHans SeigfriedSalim Kemal, Ivan Gaskell, and Daniel W. Conway, editors. Nietzsche, Philosophy and the Arts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. xv + 351. Cloth, $69.95.The editors contend that much contemporary reflection on the relationship between philosophy and art has been shaped by Nietzsche’s “experiments with an ‘aesthetic politics’ and a politization of aesthetics.” (...) For this reason, all contributions examine Nietzsche’s aesthetic account of the origins and ends of philosophy and the transformative power of aesthetic activity in social and personal life. They concentrate on his idea of a strictly aesthetic justification of existence. The editors argue that Nietzsche, more [End Page 686] than other philosophers, understood “art as the basic transformative impulse known to human experience,” that he replaced the traditional theoretical justification of existence with an exclusively aesthetic justification, and that he not only theorized about art, but also had artistic aspirations, and that this “dual relationship to art” accounts for his continued influence. They hope that this collection will “set out the ground for future debate” of these matters.The volume is well organized. Grouped in three parts, four essays discuss basic aspects of Nietzsche’s idea of art as a transformative power, three his understanding of particular arts and the influence of his ideas on them, and five the connection between the transformative power of art and the values that guide our transactions in social and political matters. In Part One, E. Behler, M. Nussbaum, A. Del Caro, and R. Havas discuss the power of art in ironic distancing in passion, “Dionysian rapture,” and the justification of existence. In Part Two, S. Bann explores Nietzsche’s ideas about historical consciousness and representation in French romanticism, T. W. White examines the connection between Utopian vision and genuine truth in Klimt’s “Beethoven Frieze,” and J. Carvalho discusses “improvising without memory” in jazz as an illustration of Nietzsche’s Dionysian model for self-transformation. In Part Three, F. Jenkins compares and contrasts moral and aesthetic self-formation, H. Staten reconstructs “the common matrix of aristocratic-authoritarian and democratic-liberationist tendencies in Nietzsche’s writings,” S. Kemal develops some implications of the final rejection of the “artists’ metaphysics” that Nietzsche still defended in his annus mirabilis (1886), D. W. Conway scrutinizes the political and aesthetic roles philosophers could and should play, and C. Crawford reviews some physiological processes involved in aesthetic transformation in the arts of dance, song, laughter, etc.Although the importance of Nietzsche in the discussion of art in our culture cannot be overestimated, one might want to quarrel with the editors’ claim that there are no other philosophers who believed as strongly as did Nietzsche that art was “the basic transformative impulse” in human experience. The same view was carefully developed by Dewey in Art as Experience and expanded in many other contributions to cover almost all areas of experience. But Nietzsche’s view of art and his idea that all human efforts need a strictly aesthetic justification still belong to the very best we have, and they deserve further discussion more than anything else in his writings.While these essays go a long way toward explaining the transformative power of art and aesthetic justification, they ultimately do not make clear what precisely Nietzsche’s reasons were for insisting that the meaning of existence can be justified only aesthetically and not conceptually, or why he thought that human experience is a process of transfiguration, or transformation, and not one of representation or conformation. It might help to review the reasons Nietzsche initially gave for abandoning the belief that existence can be transparently organized by the received “mechanism of concepts, judgments, and inferences,” and why he rejected the principle of sufficient reason as the basis of knowledge and dismissed the idea of “correct perception.” His description of experience as the “aesthetic operation”—Verhalten, not Verhältnis, as translated—of tentatively transferring things into a delicately woven web of changing human needs and interests does not mean that Nietzsche abandoned the conceptualization of experience. [End Page 687] Rather, it shows why we must recognize conceptualization as an... (shrink)

La corrélation entre l’éthique de la responsabilité de Jonas d’une part et les hypothèses théo-goniques ou -logiques de sa philosophie de la vie d’autre part, implique-t-elle une dépendance de la première vis-à-vis des secondes? C’est cette dépendance qui est interrogée dans le remarquable recueil co-édité en 2010 par Hava-Tirosh Samuelson et Christian Wiese The Legacy of Hans Jonas. Si ce volume interroge surtout l’inspiration théologique juive de Jonas, William R. LaFleur a bien vu dans sa...

Transplantation is a medically successful and cost-effective way to treat people whose organs have failed--but not enough organs are available to meet demand. T. M. Wilkinson explores the major ethical problems raised by policies for acquiring organs. Key topics include the rights of the dead, the role of the family, and the sale of organs.

Partial grounding is often thought to be formally analogous to proper parthood in certain ways. Both relations are typically understood to be asymmetric and transitive, and as such, are thought to be strict partial orders. But how far does this analogy extend? Proper parthood is often said to obey the weak supplementation principle. There is reason to wonder whether partial grounding, or, more precisely, proper partial grounding, obeys a ground-theoretic version of this principle. In what follows, I argue that it (...) does not. The cases that cause problems for the supplementation principle for grounding also serve as counterexamples to another principle, minimality, defended by Paul Audi. (shrink)

A very clear and powerfully argued defence of a most important and surprisingly neglected view."--Derek Parfit, All Souls College, Oxford. "If Dr. Olson is right, we are living animals and what goes on in our minds is wholly irrelevant to questions about our persistence through time....[Should] transform philosophical thinking about personal identity."--Peter van Inwagen, University of Notre Dame.

Though it enjoys widespread support, the claim that perceptual experiences possess nonconceptual content has been vigorously disputed in the recent literature by those who argue that the content of perceptual experience must be conceptual content. Nonconceptualism and conceptualism are often assumed to be well-defined theoretical approaches that each constitute unitary claims about the contents of experience. In this paper I try to show that this implicit assumption is mistaken, and what consequences this has for the debate about perceptual experience. I (...) distinguish between two different ways that nonconceptualist (and conceptualist) proposals about perceptual content can be understood: as claims about the constituents that compose perceptual contents or as claims about whether a subject. (shrink)

Neuroscience cannot and should not be allowed to replace normative questions with scientific onesOver the past few years considerable attention has been paid to a variety of issues that are now placed collectively under the heading of “Neuroethics”. In both the academic and the popular press there have been discussions about the possibilities and problems offered by cognitive enhancement and neuroimaging as well as debate about the implications of these emerging “neurotechnologies” for morality and the law. This issue of the (...) journal contains eight papers that discuss a broad range of important topics in neuroethics, from cognitive enhancement and the moral status of animals and cyborgs, to the challenges of neurological consults in end of life cases. As these papers demonstrate, advances in neuroscience raise a number of important ethical questions, but can neuroscience help provide any answers?FACT AND VALUEAccording to the received philosophical wisdom, there is a fundamental distinction between fact and value—between how things are and how they ought to be. On the basis of this distinction one cannot draw normative conclusions from descriptive premises because there is nothing in the premises that would warrant such conclusions: from the fact that happiness is desired it does not follow that it ought to be. This received wisdom applies to neuroethics in the following way: whereas neuroscience might be able to identify the neurophysical correlates for evaluative notions such as preferences and attitudes,1,2 lying,3 and the distinction between in control and out of control behaviour,4 neuroscience cannot, in and by itself, provide the basis for their evaluation. The reason for this is that, in the absence of factors external to these neurophysical states, one neurophysical state is no better or worse than another—internal neurophysical states are logically …. (shrink)

It is clearly impermissible to kill one person because his organs can be used to save five others who are in need of transplants. It has seemed to many that the explanation for this lies in the fact that in such cases we would be intending the death of the person whom we killed, or failed to save. What makes these actions impermissible, however, is not the agent's intention but rather the fact that the benefit envisaged does not justify an (...) exception to the prohibition against killing or the requirement to give aid. The difference between this explanation and one appealing to intention is easily overlooked if one fails to distinguish between the prospective use of a moral principle to guide action and its retrospective use to appraise the way an agent governed him or herself. Even if this explanation is accepted, however, it remains an open question whether and how an agent's intention may be relevant to the permissibility of actions in other cases. \\\ [Jonathan Dancy] My first four sections concentrate on the second section of Professor Scanlon's contribution, where he lays out his conception of moral principles and of the role they play in theory and practice. I will raise questions on the following issues: 1. Scanlon's initial introduction of the notion of a principle. 2. His rejection of the standard view that principles are concerned with the forbidding, permitting and requiring of actions. 3. His rejection of pro tanto conceptions of principles in favour of a conception of them as conclusive. 4. The resulting account of what it is for a principle to face and survive exceptions. Scanlon's discussion of these matters here both appeals to and is in some respects more detailed than the relevant section of his recent What We Owe to Each Other. The topic is interesting both for the role played by principles in Scanlon's present discussion of intention and permissibility, and more generally because of his account of wrongness: an act is wrong iff it is ruled out by principles that nobody could reasonably reject. The remainder of my contribution is concerned with the ostensible focus of IP, namely the relevance of agent-intentions to the permissibility of what is done. (shrink)

Classical text on Nyaya and Vaiśeṣika philosophy; with Āloka Sanskrit commentary.

Critical edition with eight commentaries, on Nyaya and Vaiśeṣika philosophy.

Classical work on the basic concepts and terminology of Nyaya and Vaiśeṣika school in Hindu philosophy; includes Phakkikā commentary by Kṣamākalyāṇagaṇi, 18th cent.

Aphoristic work on Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika school of Hindu philosophy; includes Sanskrit commentary with Hindi translation.

Aphoristic work on Nyaya and Vaiśeṣika school of Hindu philosophy; includes two Sanskrit commentaries.

Discourses on the Bhagavadgītā, Bhakti, and Hindu ethics.

Contributed research papers on Indic philosophy.

Medical Ethics, to quote the authors, is intended as a practical introduction to the ethical questions doctors and other health professionals meet. The book is divided into three main sections, Foundations, Clinical ethics and Medicine and society; each section is further subdivided into topics dealt with in a single chapter. The first section deals very well with the basic background and theories of ethics and does not lay too much stress on the well established “four principles” (chs 1 and 2). (...) I have rarely read such a seamless introduction to the underlying principles of medical ethics and teachers would do well to read this. Later chapters in this …. (shrink)

Auditors' virtue comprises those qualities of character that manifest the ideals of the audit community ), and are instrumental in ensuring that auditors' professional judgment is exercised according to a high moral standard ). Nevertheless, the lack of valid and reliable quantitative measures of auditors' virtue impedes research that furthers our understanding of how best to promote virtue in the audit community. To address this gap, we develop two measures of auditors' virtue. We report the results of the validity and (...) reliability of the scales. In addition, we use the findings from the administration of these scales to professional accountants to refine and validate the theoretical characterization of virtues developed by Pincoffs and Libby and Thorne. In so doing, this study provides a foundation by which future audit research can study ways to ensure that auditors' virtue is promoted throughout the audit community. (shrink)