Kagan ponders a series of important nodes of debate while challenging us to examine what we know and why we know it. Most critically he presents an elegant argument for functions of mind that cannot be replaced with sentences about brains while acknowledging that mind emerges from brain activity. He relies on the evidence to argue that thoughts and emotions are distinct from their biological and genetic bases. In separate chapters he deals with the meaning of words, kinds of knowing, (...) the powerful influence of social class, the functions of education, emotion, morality, and other issues. And without fail he sheds light on these ideas while remaining honest to their complexity." -- Publisher's description. (shrink)

'Art and Adaptability' argues for a co-evolution of theory of mind and material/art culture. The book covers relevant areas from great ape intelligence, hominin evolution, Stone Age tools, Paleolithic culture and art forms, to neurobiology. We use material and art objects, whether painting or sculpture, to modify our own and other people's thoughts so as to affect behavior. We don't just make judgments about mental states; we create objects about which we make judgments in which mental states are inherent. Moreover, (...) we make judgments about these objects to facilitate how we explore the minds and feelings of others. The argument is that it's not so much art because of theory of mind but art as theory of mind. (shrink)

_Evolution and Human Culture_ surveys disciplines of evolutionary studies to posit that hominin evolved moral sentiments have been integral to the development of artistic culture.

A manifesto for the humanities in the digital age, A New Republic of Letters argues that the history of texts, together with the methods by which they are preserved and made available for interpretation, are the overriding subjects of humanist study in the twenty-first century. Theory and philosophy, which have grounded the humanities for decades, no longer suffice as an intellectual framework. Jerome McGann proposes we look instead to philology--a discipline which has been out of fashion for many decades but (...) which models the concerns of digital humanities with surprising fidelity. For centuries, books have been the best way to preserve and transmit knowledge. But as libraries and museums digitize their archives and readers abandon paperbacks for tablet computers, digital media are replacing books as the repository of cultural memory. While both the mission of the humanities and its traditional modes of scholarship and critical study are the same, the digital environment is driving disciplines to work with new tools that require major, and often very difficult, institutional changes. Now more than ever, scholars need to recover the theory and method of philological investigation if the humanities are to meet their perennial commitments. Textual and editorial scholarship, often marginalized as a narrowly technical domain, should be made a priority of humanists' attention. (shrink)

Second, this collection of cognitive programs evolved in the Pleistocene to solve the adaptive problems regularly faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors-...

Living in the Borderland addresses the evolution of Western consciousness and describes the emergence of the "Borderland," a spectrum of reality that is beyond the rational yet is palpable to an increasing number of individuals. Building on Jungian theory, Jerome Bernstein argues that a greater openness to transrational reality experienced by Borderland personalities allows new possibilities for understanding and healing confounding clinical and developmental enigmas." "Living in the Borderland challenges the standard clinical model, which views normality as an absence of (...) pathology and which equates normality with the rational. Jerome S. Bernstein describes how psychotherapy itself often contributes to the alienation of Borderland personalities by misperceiving the difference between the pathological and the sacred. The case studies included illustrate the potential this has for causing serious psychic and emotional damage to the patient." "This challenge to the orthodoxies and complacencies of western medicine's concept of pathology will interest Jungian Analysts, Psychotherapists, Psychiatrists and other physicians, as well as educators of children. (shrink)

"No soy de los que deploran la especialización; en todo caso, dudo que sea posible, aunque fuere deseable, frenar la persecución de un saber especializado, en complejas sociedades. Pero es que la filosofía del Derecho ha descansado tradicionalmente en una perspectiva muy amplia, y hay que lamentar de modo especial la pérdida de sus funciones unitivas debido a la extraordinaria necesidad presente de comprender y mejorar las instituciones jurídicas. La situación actual no clama por la desvalorización de la especialización, sino (...) que, por el contrario, desafía a los estudiosos a trascender las especializaciones de la filosofía del Derecho, y cualquiera fuere la utilidad que con ello pudiera lograrse, a construir una jusfilosofía que satisfaga más adecuadamente las presentes demandas". Jerome Hall. (shrink)

Proceedings of a conference held in Sept. 2009 in London, England.

An Ape Ethic and the Question of Personhood proposes that differences between humans and apes provide the foundation for the call to recognize forest personhood in the great apes. While all ape species are alike in terms of cognition, intelligence, and social behaviors, great apes, not humans, are efficient ecosystem engineers.

Implemented gradually since 2002 and following in the footsteps of the “Bologna Process” initiated in the late 1990s, successive reforms of university education in France have profoundly changed the landscape of higher professional degrees. The Diplômes d’Enseignement Supérieur Spécialisé (DESS) (Specialized Higher Education Diplomas), which have become professional Masters, offer a paradigmatic example of the tensions between the former aims of professionalization in universities and the teaching to, by, or for research present in these diplomas. The case of the professional (...) Master’s degree in “Strategy and Engineering in Adult Training” (SIFA) at Rennes 2 University illustrates this problem. (shrink)

Few topics in international intellectual property law have been as controversial in recent years as the one we are about to examine. In the 1980s and early 1990s, a Diplomatic Conference attempted to revise the oldest international convention providing some protection for patented inventions outside of the domestic laws. Those efforts broke down, largely because developed and developing countries could not agree on the powers that governments should retain to issue compulsory licenses or on the grounds for which these powers (...) could be exercised. The failure of this Conference, held under the auspices of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), persuaded the technology-exporting countries to link future negotiations concerning international intellectual property protection to the Multilateral Trade Negotiations, known as the Uruguay Round, which got underway in 1986. The end result was Annex IC of the Agreement Establishing the World Trade Organization of 1994, which incorporated a new, comprehensive and relatively elevated set of international minimum standards of patent protection into the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS Agreement). (shrink)

Three experiments explored the effects of word problem cueing on debiasing versions of the bat-and-ball problem. In the experimental condition order, participants solved a simpler isomorphic version of the problem prior to solving a standard version that, critically, had the same item-and-dollar amounts. Conversely, in the control condition order, participants solved the standard version prior to solving the isomorph. Across the first 2 experiments, participants cued with the isomorph were more likely to correctly solve the standard version of the problem. (...) In the third experiment, this cueing effect was not replicated, but importantly cued participants were more likely to correctly solve the standard version of the problem with other item-and-dollar amounts, indicating near transfer. Far transfer was evident in faster response times to other problems in the Cognitive Reflection Test following practice. Along with providing converging evidence for the cueing account, these results are consistent with recent attentional debiasing findings. (shrink)

In examining the puzzle of experience, and its possible solutions, Valberg discusses relevant views of Hume, Kant, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Strawson, as well as ideas from the recent philosophy of perception. Finally, he describes and analyzes a manifestation of the puzzle outside philosophy, in everyday experience.

This paper presents a general computational treatment of how mammals are able to deal with visual objects and environments. The model tries to cover the entire range from behavior and phenomenological experience to detailed neural encodings in crude but computationally plausible reductive steps. The problems addressed include perceptual constancies, eye movements and the stable visual world, object descriptions, perceptual generalizations, and the representation of extrapersonal space.The entire development is based on an action-oriented notion of perception. The observer is assumed to (...) be continuously sampling the ambient light for information of current value. The central problem of vision is taken to be categorizing and locating objects in the environment. The critical step in this process is the linking of visual information to symbolic object descriptions; this is calledindexing, from the analogy of identifying a book from index terms. The system must also identifysituationsand use this knowledge to guide movement and other actions in the environment. The treatment focuses on the different representations of information used in the visual system.The four representational frames capture information in the following forms: retinotopic, head-based, symbolic, and allocentric. The functional roles of the four frames, the communication among them, and their suggested neurophysiological realization constitute the core of the paper. The model is perforce crude, but appears to be consistent with all relevant findings. (shrink)

This remarkable book is the most comprehensive study ever written of the history of moral philosophy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its aim is to set Kant's still influential ethics in its historical context by showing in detail what the central questions in moral philosophy were for him and how he arrived at his own distinctive ethical views. The book is organised into four main sections, each exploring moral philosophy by discussing the work of many influential philosophers of the (...) seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In an epilogue the author discusses Kant's view of his own historicity, and of the aims of moral philosophy. In its range, in its analyses of many philosophers not discussed elsewhere, and in revealing the subtle interweaving of religious and political thought with moral philosophy, this is an unprecedented account of the evolution of Kant's ethics. (shrink)

First published in 1977, Emotion, Thought and Therapy is a study of Hume and Spinoza and the relationship of philosophical theories of the emotions to psychological theories of therapy. Jerome Neu argues that the Spinozists are closer to the truth; that is, that thoughts are of greater importance than feelings in the classification and discrimination of emotional states. He then contends that if the Spinozists are closer to the truth, we have the beginning of an argument to show that Freudian (...) or analytic therapies make philosophic sense. Throughout the book, careful attention is paid to modern discussions in philosophy of mind and psychology, and materials from anthropology and other relevant disciplines are considered. At the centre of the discussion is the notion of ‘thought-dependence’. Therapies for psychological disorders are placed along a spectrum in accordance with the role they assign to thoughts. The Spinozist view of the emotions can be seen as at the extreme thought end of a corresponding spectrum of theories of the emotions. The book suggests that this stream may help explain the spectrum of therapeutic theories and the possibilities that exist for psychological development and change. This book will be of interest to students of philosophy, psychology and counselling. (shrink)

Here in more than a hundred photographs is portrayed Liebling's Minnesota. During two decades marked by social, political and cultural change, Liebling travelled the state and found his largest subject -- the depiction and interpretation of commonplace human experience. The images range from the grain elevators and skid row of Minneapolis to the slaughterhouses in South St. Paul and the poor, working-class streets of St. Paul's West Side; from the Iron Range and the Red Lake Indian reservation in the north (...) to the farming towns in the south. The vision of Minnesota that emerges from the extraordinary photographs is uniquely that of the artist, yet it leads viewers effortlessly to an enhanced understanding of the places, the times, and, always, the people. (shrink)

Christopher Boorse’s biostatistical theory of medical disorder claims that biological part-dysfunction (i.e., failure of an internal mechanism to perform its biological function), a factual criterion, is both necessary and sufficient for disorder. Jerome Wakefield’s harmful dysfunction analysis of medical disorder agrees that part-dysfunction is necessary but rejects the sufficiency claim, maintaining that disorder also requires that the part-dysfunction causes harm to the individual, a value criterion. In this paper, I present two considerations against the sufficiency claim. First, I analyze Boorse’s (...) central argument for the sufficiency claim, the “pathologist argument,” which takes pathologists’ intuitions about pathology as determinative of medical disorder and conclude that it begs the question and fails to support the sufficiency claim. Second, I present four counterexamples from the medical literature in which salient part-dysfunctions are considered nondisorders, including healthy disease carriers, HIV-positive status, benign mutations, and situs inversus totalis, thus falsifying the sufficiency claim and supporting the harm criterion. (shrink)

The sounds produced by animals have been a topic of research into animal behaviour for a very long time. If acoustic signals are undoubtedly a vehicle for exchanging information between individuals, environmental sounds embed as well a significant level of data related to the ecology of populations, communities and landscapes. The consideration of environmental sounds for ecological investigations opens up a field of research that we define with the term ecoacoustics. In this paper, we draw the contours of ecoacoustics by (...) detailing: the main theories, concepts and methods used in ecoacoustic research, and the numerous outcomes that can be expected from the ecological approach to sound. Ecoacoustics has several theoretical and practical challenges, but we firmly believe that this new approach to investigating ecological processes will generate abundant and exciting research programs. (shrink)

Mgr Félix Hedde (1879-1960), o.p., est un personnage-clé de la mission des dominicains de Lyon dans le Haut-Tonkin. Son long ministère au Việt Nam (1926-1960) en fit un témoin privilégié d’une période dramatique de l’histoire du pays. Il a connu les années prospères de la colonisation française jusqu’en 1940, les souffrances de ses compatriotes pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale et la guerre d’Indochine, leur humiliation face à la décolonisation forcée, et enfin la persécution ouverte ou larvée des chrétiens sous le (...) régime communiste. Chez Félix Hedde, l’amour pour la mission du Tonkin, le désir d’y implanter l’Église, se conjuguait à sa volonté d’honorer ses traditions familiales et nationales. L’épreuve de l’occupation japonaise, de la guerre d’Indochine, des défaites de l’armée française, autant que le réconfort de la fidélité des chrétiens vietnamiens de la mission dans une situation de plus en plus critique, détachant Mgr Hedde de ses rêves patriotiques, le conduisirent à l’accomplissement de sa vocation missionnaire. Les conditions particulières de son territoire de mission, où les ethnies montagnardes sont très largement majoritaires, l’amenèrent cependant à proposer pour lui succéder le Français André Jacq, privant ainsi d’évêque les chrétiens du lieu, de 1958 à 1990. (shrink)