We question the ecological plausibility as a general model of cognition of van der Velde's & de Kamps's combinatorial blackboard architecture, where knowledge-binding in space and time relies on the structural rules of language. Evidence against their view of the brain and an ecologically plausible, alternative model of cognition are brought forward.

L'espere humaine est conflictuelle et gregaire, menacee de toutes parts par la montee aux extremes de la violence. Aussi se trouve-t-elle confrontee a ce probleme urgent: comment vivre ensemble sans s'entre-tuer? Le politique est l'ordre humain en charge de ce probleme, et son objectif est la paix par la justice. Dans ce bref precis didactique, Jean Baechler prouve que le seul moyen d'eviter la guerre et de resoudre des problemes communs dans un monde dangereux et imprevisible est de s'efforcer (...) a l'union politique, meme si celle-ci est bien evidemment extremement difficile a realiser. (shrink)

No single theoretician provoked a greater tradition of the reception of his thought throughout changing times and across diverse cultures than did Aristotle, and so Hegel, who calls him the 'teacher of the human race', well describes the man known for ages simply as 'the philosopher'. The present volume examines from a philosophical-historical standpoint the intellect-theory of De Anima III 4-5, which stands in the center of the Aristotelian system and composes one of the most provocative Aristotelian theories. It concentrates (...) on the critical engagement with Aristotle's conception of nous in Theophrastus and his colleagues (Dicaearchus, Aristoxenus) and students (Demetrius of Phaleron, Menander, Erasistratus) in the Peripatos as well as in the Academic, Socratic, Epicurean and Stoic schools. The analysis of the relevant texts leads to a new assessment of Theophrastus's philosophical-historical significance in the Aristotelian tradition and documents that in early Hellenism the Aristotelian theory itself played a surprisingly limited role, so that the loss of the original Aristotelian manuscripts as reported by Strabo and Plutarch — a matter hotly debated in recent studies — was of only marginal importance.Kein Theoretiker provozierte über eine ähnlich lange Zeitspanne eine so intensive, kontinuierliche und multikulturelle Rezeption wie Aristoteles. Die Geschichte der Philosophie verlangt es daher geradezu, unter der Perspektive der ebenso konstanten wie vielgestaltigen Auseinandersetzung mit “dem Philosophen” analysiert zu werden. Den geeignetsten Kristallisationspunkt hierfür stellt die in “De Anima” G 4-5 präsentierte Nous-Theorie dar, denn zum einen stand sie im Zentrum des aristotelischen “Systems”, zum anderen handelt es sich bei ihr um die mit gröîter Kontinuität, höchster Intensität und unterschiedlichsten Resultaten rezipierte philosophische Theorie überhaupt. Der vorliegende Band thematisiert, im Anschluî am die “Topographie” der aristotelischen Noetik, die frühhellenistische Resonanz. Den ersten Schwerpunkt bildet Theophrasts philosophisch-kritische Auseinandersetzung mit der Nous-Konzeption seines Lehrers, den zweiten die “De Anima”-Rezeption in der damaligen Philosophie-Szene, die im wesentlichen durch drie Gruppen konstituiert wurde: Theophrasts Kollegen im “Peripatos” (Dikaiarch, Aristoxenos); Theophrasts eingene Hörerschaft (Demetrios v. Phaleron, Menander, Erasistratos); und die zahlreichte philosophische Konkurrenz: die “Akademiker”, “Sokratiker”, und die Schulen Epikurs bzw. Zenons. Die Analyse der relevanten Texte führt erstens zu einder grundsätzlichen Neubewertung der philosophiehistorischen Position Theophrasts. Zweitens dokumentiert sie, daî die aristotelische Theorie entgegen der heutigen opinio communis gerade im Frühhellenismus eine erstaunlich bescheidene Rolle spielte. Rezeptionsgeschichtlich kommt dem von Strabon/Plutarch berichteten und in der neueren Forschung heiîdiskutierten Verlust der aristotelischen Originalmanuscripte deshalb allenfalls eine sekondäre Bedeutung zu. (shrink)

Preface This book is about semantics and logic. More specifically, it is about the semantics and logic of natural language; and, even more specifically than ...

Hauser, H. La response de Jean Bodin à M. de Malestroit.--Levron, J. Jean Bodin et sa famille.--Kamp, M. E. Die Staatswirtschaftslehre Jean Bodins.--Mesnard, P. La pensée religieuse de Bodin.--Bezold, F. von, Jean Bodin als Occultist und seine Démonomanie.--Bezold, F. von. Jean Bodins Colloquium Heptaplomeres und der Altheismus des 16.--Feist, E. Weltbild und Staatsidee bei Jean Bodin.--Mayer, J. P. Jefferson as reader of Bodin.

Name der Zeitschrift: Naharaim Jahrgang: 11 Heft: 1-2 Seiten: 103-113.

Dans les sociétés démocratiques contemporaines, les individus revendiquent le droit d'aimer librement. Ils sont attachés à la réussite de leur vie sentimentale et à l'épanouissement de leur sexualité. Mais le corps épris nous permet-il d'accéder à l'existence heureuse que nous désirons? Dans ce livre, Jean-Marie Frey met au jour les ressorts de l'inquiétude suscitée par l'amour charnel. Il montre comment la pudibonderie et le libertinage expriment, chacun à leur manière, une tentative pour se rassurer. Les prudes désireux de voiler (...) les femmes et les libertins exhibant un corps morcelé dans l'imagerie pornographique, n'éprouvent-ils pas les uns et les autres une crainte devant la chair désirable? L'auteur oppose les figures du pudibond et du libertin à celle d'un amant disposé à jouer le jeu d'une passion amoureuse à la fois inquiétante et joyeuse. (shrink)

This paper proposes a method for computing the temporal aspects of the interpretations of a variety of Germa sentences. The method is strictly modular in the sense that it allows each meaning-bearing sentence constituent to make its own, separate, contribution to the semantic representation of any sentence containing it. The semantic representation of a sentence is reached in several stages. First, an ‘initial semantic representation’ is constructed, using a syntactic analysis of the sentence as input. This initial representation is then (...) transformed into the definitive representation by a series of transformations which reflect the ways in which the contributions from different constituents of the sentence interact. Since the different constituents which make their respective contributions to the meaning of the sentence are in most instances ambiguous, the initial representations are typically of a high degree of underspecification. (shrink)

A 62-year-old female with Huntington’s disease presented after a suicide attempt. Her advance directive stated that she did not want intubation or resuscitation, which her family acknowledged and supported. Despite these directives, she was resuscitated in the emergency department and continued to state that she would attempt suicide again. Her suicidality in the face of a chronic and advancing illness, and her prolonged consistency in her desire to take her own life, left careproviders wondering how to provide ethical, respectful care (...) to this patient. Tension between the ethical principles of autonomy and beneficence is central in this case. The patient’s narrative demonstrated that her suicide was an autonomous decision, free from coercion or disordered thinking from mental illness. Beneficence then would seem to necessitate care aligned with the patient’s desire to end her life, which created ethical uneasiness for her family and careproviders. The case highlights several end-of-life ethical considerations that have received much recent attention. With ongoing discussions about the legalization of aid in dying across the country, caregivers are challenged to understand what beneficence means in people with terminal illnesses who want a say in their death. This case also highlights the profound moral distress of families and careproviders that arises in such ethically challenging scenarios. (shrink)

In 2016, the Colorado legislature passed an amendment to Colorado’s medical proxy law that established a process for the appointment of a physician to act as proxy decision maker of last resort for an unrepresented patient (Colorado HB 16-1101: Medical Decisions For Unrepresented Patients). The legislative process brought together a diverse set of stakeholders, not all of whom supported the legislation. Following passage of the statutory amendment, the Colorado Collaborative for Unrepresented Patients (CCUP), a group of advocates responsible for initiating (...) the legislative process, coordinated a unique effort to engage these stakeholders in the creation of a set of voluntary guidelines to assist facilities and individual careproviders in the implementation of policies and procedures enabled by the statute. This article delineates the questions and concerns of stakeholders, describes how those issues were addressed within the guidelines, and proposes additional opportunities for research to assess the impact of the legislation in Colorado. (shrink)

La philosophie ne se réduit pas à la pure réflexion ni à la quête d'une sagesse intemporelle. Elle est aussi invention ou création de concepts. Elle s'expose volontiers à traverser le cours des sciences, à inscrire son histoire dans le contrepoint de leurs développements. Quand il se veut ainsi passeur de savoirs, le philosophe expérimente des concepts qui filtrent des interprétations, établissent des relations inattendues, modifient des approches trop abstraites : le temps, l'infini, la matière, le cosmos. L'enquête astrophysique ou (...) les recherches sur le cerveau offrent autant d'occasions de mises en perspective propices à la pédagogie que d'invitations à reconstituer le tissu des idées qui fondent la culture et les idéaux de nos sociétés. Même s'il analyse parfois des méthodes et des paradigmes scientifiques, ce livre ne relève pas de la philosophie des sciences telle que l'Université en définit la discipline. Il entend surtout questionner les conceptions scientifiques du monde qui justifient, transforment ou bouleversent nos croyances, nos comportements et aussi nos décisions. Il témoigne que les seuls savoirs qui vaillent sont toujours déconcertants. (shrink)

Hans Kamp; IV*—Free Choice Permission, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 74, Issue 1, 1 June 1974, Pages 57–74, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristoteli.

This paper studies the uses of proper names within a communication-theoretic setting, looking at both the conditions that govern the use of a name by a speaker and those involved in the correct interpretation of the name by her audience. The setting in which these conditions are investigated is provided by an extension of Discourse Representation Theory, MSDRT, in which mental states are represented as combinations of propositional attitudes and entity representations . The first half of the paper presents the (...) features of this framework that are needed to understand its application to the account of names that follows. N-labelled entity representations, where N is a proper name, play a pivotal part in this account: A speaker must have an N-labelled ER in order to be in a position to use a name N, and the interpreter must either have such a representation, or else construct one as part of his interpretation. The paper distinguishes different types of name uses in terms of what they presuppose about the role of N-labelled ERs on the side of the interpreter. (shrink)

Hans Kamp; XIII*—Context, Thought and Communication, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 85, Issue 1, 1 June 1985, Pages 239–262, https://doi.org/10.

This paper develops a metaphysically flexible theory of quantification broad enough to incorporate many distinct theories of objects. Quite different, mutually incompatible conceptions of the nature of objects and of reference find representation within it. Some conceptions yield classical first-order logic; some yield weaker logics. Yet others yield notions of validity that are proper extensions of classical logic.

Aging is accompanied by a decline in associative memory, whereas item memory remains relatively stable compared to young adults. This age-related associative deficit is well replicated, but its mechanisms and influencing factors during learning are still largely unclear. In the present study, we examined mediators of the age-related associative deficit, including encoding intentionality, strategy instructions, the timing of the memory test and the material being learned in a within-subject design. Older and younger adults performed seven encoding tasks on word pairs (...) and picture pairs on two consecutive days, followed by item and associative recognition tests. The associative deficit was evident after all encoding tasks. We found no evidence for a difference in the magnitude of the associative deficit between incidental vs. intentional learning conditions. However, there was some evidence for a larger associative memory deficit with pictures versus words when the encoding task was held equal. Sentence generation and interactive imagery instructions in which participants generated their own mediators reduced the magnitude of the associative deficit. However, increased encoding guidance through the provision of mediators did not lead to an alleviation of the deficit, potentially because the specified mediators were implausible or difficult for the older adults to reconcile with prior knowledge. Finally, we found some evidence for a reduced age-related associative deficit with a test delay of 24 h. These results contribute to a better understanding of the factors affecting the relative difficulty of older adults with encoding and retrieving novel associations. (shrink)

One of the strongest strands in Nancy's philosophy is an attempt to rethink community and the very idea of the social in a way that does not ground these ideas in some individual subject or subjectivity. The fundamental argument of this book is that being is always 'being with', that 'I' is not prior to 'we', that existence is essentially co-existence. He thinks this being together, not as a comfortable enclosure in a pre-existing group, but as a mutual abandonment and (...) exposure to each other, one that would preserve the 'I' and its freedom in a mode of imagining community as neither a 'society of spectacle' nor via some form of 'authenticity'. (shrink)

Hans Kamp; XIII*—Context, Thought and Communication, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 85, Issue 1, 1 June 1985, Pages 239–262, https://doi.org/10.

In mainstream or strong university education, the teacher selects and transmits knowledge and skills that students are to acquire and reproduce. Many researchers of radical embodied cognitive science still adhere to this way of teaching, even though this prescriptive pedagogy deeply contrasts with the theoretical underpinnings of their science. In this paper, we search for alternative ways of teaching that are more aligned with the central non-prescriptive and non-representational tenets of radical embodied cognitive science. To this end, we discuss recent (...) views on education by Tim Ingold and Gert Biesta, which are based upon Dewey’s philosophy of pragmatism and Gibsons’ ecological approach. The paper starts by introducing radical embodied cognitive science, particularly as it relates to motor skill learning, one of our prime interests in research and teaching. Next, we provide a synopsis and critique of the still dominant prescriptive and explicating pedagogy of strong education. Following Ingold and Biesta, we search for a weak alternative through a careful consideration of the education of attention and the participating teacher. To illustrate our arguments, we use examples of the first author’s teaching about/of motor skill learning. The paper is concluded by briefly considering the implications of weak education for a radical embodied science of motor skill learning. (shrink)

Theoria, Volume 88, Issue 2, Page 296-325, April 2022.

A study is reported testing two hypotheses about a close parallel relation between indicative conditionals, if A then B , and conditional bets, I bet you that if A then B . The first is that both the indicative conditional and the conditional bet are related to the conditional probability, P(B|A). The second is that de Finetti's three-valued truth table has psychological reality for both types of conditional— true , false , or void for indicative conditionals and win , lose (...) , or void for conditional bets. The participants were presented with an array of chips in two different colours and two different shapes, and an indicative conditional or a conditional bet about a random chip. They had to make judgements in two conditions: either about the chances of making the indicative conditional true or false or about the chances of winning or losing the conditional bet. The observed distributions of responses in the two conditions were generally related to the conditional probability, supporting the first hypothesis. In addition, a majority of participants in further conditions chose the third option, “void”, when the antecedent of the conditional was false, supporting the second hypothesis. (shrink)

This paper presents a sound and complete proof system for the first order fragment of Discourse Representation Theory. Since the inferences that human language users draw from the verbal input they receive for the most transcend the capacities of such a system, it can be no more than a basis on which more powerful systems, which are capable of producing those inferences, may then be built. Nevertheless, even within the general setting of first order logic the structure of the formulas (...) of DRS-languages, i.e. of the Discourse Representation Structures suggest for the components of such a system inference rules that differ somewhat from those usually found in proof systems for the first order predicate calculus and which are, we believe, more in keeping with inference patterns that are actually employed in common sense reasoning.This is why we have decided to publish the present exercise, in spite of the fact that it is not one for which a great deal of originality could be claimed. In fact, it could be argued that the problem addressed in this paper was solved when Gödel first established the completeness of the system of Principia Mathematica for first order logic. For the DRS-languages we consider here are straightforwardly intertranslatable with standard formulations of the predicate calculus; in fact the translations are so straightforward that any sound and complete proof system for first order logic can be used as a sound and complete proof system for DRSs: simply translate the DRSs into formulas of predicate logic and then proceed as usual. As a matter of fact, this is how one has chosen to proceed in some implementations of DRT, which involve inferencing as well as semantic representation; an example is the Lex system developed jointly by IBM and the University of Tübingen ). (shrink)

The new paradigm in the psychology of reasoning adopts a Bayesian, or prob- abilistic, model for studying human reasoning. Contrary to the traditional binary approach based on truth functional logic, with its binary values of truth and falsity, a third value that represents uncertainty can be introduced in the new paradigm. A variety of three-valued truth table systems are available in the formal literature, including one proposed by de Finetti. We examine the descriptive adequacy of these systems for natural language (...) indicative condi- tionals and bets on conditionals. Within our framework the so-called “defective” truth table, in which participants choose a third value when the antecedent of the indicative conditional is false, becomes a coherent response. We show that only de Finetti’s system has a good descriptive fit when uncer- tainty is the third value. (shrink)

Along with Husserl's Ideas and Heidegger's Being and Time, Being Given is one of the classic works of phenomenology in the twentieth century. Through readings of Kant, Husserl, Heidegger, Derrida, and twentieth-century French phenomenology (e.g., Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and Henry), it ventures a bold and decisive reappraisal of phenomenology and its possibilities. Its author's most original work to date, the book pushes phenomenology to its limits in an attempt to redefine and recover the phenomenological ideal, which the author argues has never (...) been realized in any of the historical phenomenologies. Against Husserl's reduction to consciousness and Heidegger's reduction to Dasein, the author proposes a third reduction to givenness, wherein phenomena appear unconditionally and show themselves from themselves at their own initiative. Being Given is the clearest, most systematic response to questions that have occupied its author for the better part of two decades. The book articulates a powerful set of concepts that should provoke new research in philosophy, religion, and art, as well as at the intersection of these disciplines. Some of the significant issues it treats include the phenomenological definition of the phenomenon, the redefinition of the gift in terms not of economy but of givenness, the nature of saturated phenomena, and the question “Who comes after the subject?” Throughout his consideration of these issues, the author carefully notes their significance for the increasingly popular fields of religious studies and philosophy of religion. Being Given is therefore indispensable reading for anyone interested in the question of the relation between the phenomenological and the theological in Marion and emergent French phenomenology. (shrink)