This article specifically aims to address both the economic and ethical implications of mixed communities in the US through the lens of market failure, and more specifically, the recent subprime financial crisis. Relative to the research of mixed communities and social integration efforts, I first intend to explore income mix as an explanatory variable of census tract level foreclosure rates in the state of Ohio, USA. I aim to show that counter-homogenous income communities display a greater capacity to absorb the (...) adverse affects of the recent subprime financial crisis than concentrated communities of poverty. Second, I intend to provide an ethical appraisal of foreclosure effect on vulnerable communities using John Rawls' "Veil of Ignorance" as an ethical framework by which to evaluate the "fairness" of social segregation. Ethically speaking, a Rawlsian critique exposes the sub-optimality of concentrated pockets of neighborhood deprivation, where the uneven affects of subprime foreclosures are not only disproportionately shouldered by lower-income communities, but also found to be unjust. This study is not intended to suggest the unqualified support of existing US dispersal efforts, but it does contribute to exposing the sub-optimality and injustices of inert, segregated communities. (shrink)

Emotional states of consciousness, or what are typically called emotional feelings, are traditionally viewed as being innately programed in subcortical areas of the brain, and are often treated as different from cognitive states of consciousness, such as those related to the perception of external stimuli. We argue that conscious experiences, regardless of their content, arise from one system in the brain. On this view, what differs in emotional and non-emotional states is the kind of inputs that are processed by a (...) general cortical network of cognition, a network essential for conscious experiences. Although subcortical circuits are not directly responsible for conscious feelings, they provide non-conscious inputs that coalesce with other kinds of neural signals in the cognitive assembly of conscious emotional experiences. In building the case for this proposal, we defend a modified version of what is known as the higher-order theory of consciousness. (shrink)

This book asks whether evolution can help us to understand human behaviour and explores diverse evolutionary methods and arguments. It provides a short, readable introduction to the science behind the works of Dawkins, Dennett, Wilson and Pinker. It is widely used in undergraduate courses around the world.

What is a human person? Two general accounts have been offered in answer to this question. According to the one, human persons are immaterial minds or souls. According to the other, human persons are identical with the material bodies that constitute them. Both accounts have serious problems. In this dissertation I present a position that is not a version of any of the currently fashionable or unfashionable "isms"--Cartesian dualism, reductive materialism or property dualism. Taking my lead from recent work on (...) the constitution relation by Mark Johnston, E. J. Lowe, Michael Burke and David Wiggins, I argue in my dissertation for a constitution account of human persons. A constitution account of human person solves many of the problems that plague traditional dualist and materialist theories of persons while at the same time doing justice to our well founded intuitions about persons. According to the constitution view, human persons are concrete physical particulars numerically distinct from the concrete physical particulars that constitute them. Not only are the relata involved in the constitution relation--the constituting object and the constituted object--numerically distinct but they are also objects that fall under different sortals. The constitution view is not without costs. Perhaps the biggest is this: it entails that in the same region of space that presently contains my body there is another numerically distinct physical entity--Me--that shares with my body all of the same parts. This seems to raise insurmountable problems for the constitution view. I supply plausible solutions to these problems and show how the "constitution" view preserves our most deeply held and well-founded beliefs about persons. (shrink)

A timely book that uses science fiction to provoke reflection and discussion on philosophical issues From the nature of mind to the ethics of AI and neural enhancement, science fiction thought experiments fire the philosophical imagination, encouraging us to think outside of the box about classic philosophical problems and even to envision new ones. Science Fiction and Philosophy explores puzzles about virtual reality, transhumanism, whether time travel is possible, the nature of artificial intelligence, and topics in neuroethics, among other timely (...) issues. This thought-provoking volume is suitable for students and general readers but also examines new and more advanced topics of interest to seasoned philosophers and scientists. Susan Schneider is Assistant Professor in the department of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania and an Affiliated Faculty Member at the Institutes for Research in Cognitive Science and Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. (shrink)

Recent stories of corporate insiders avoiding losses and, in some cases, generating enormous personal profits as their companies crumbled have led investors to question the integrity of American business and the fairness of the United States stock markets. The SEC tries to ensure the fairness of the stock markets by making and enforcing laws against unfair practices such as insider trading. In the United States, when insiders trade stock based on non-public information, they have broken the law and betrayed the (...) trust that has been placed in them.This study used student subjects to test the relationship between the likelihood of trading based on insider information and subjective probabilities of deterrents and motivations for insider trading. Expected gain, guilt, cynicism, and fairness of laws were the determinants that had a significant relationship with the intent to trade based on insider information. This study also found support for prospect theory with regard to insider trading. The results indicate that subjects are more likely to trade based on insider information to avoid a loss than to achieve an abnormal gain. The study also finds evidence of social desirability response bias. (shrink)

Psychological externalism is the thesis that the contents of many of a person's propositional mental states are determined in part by relations he bears to his natural and social environment. This thesis has recently been thrust into prominence in the philosophy of mind by a series of thought experiments due to Hilary Putnam and Tyler Burge. Externalism is a metaphysical thesis, but in this work I investigate its implications for the epistemology of the mental. I am primarily concerned with the (...) question whether externalism undermines the idea that a person typically knows the contents of her own thoughts, beliefs, and other propositional attitudes directly and authoritatively. I criticize arguments that have been advanced on behalf of a positive answer to this question, and argue that they rest on a faulty conception of the nature of first person authority, one which likens our access to our own minds to perception. An account of the basis of first person authority is sketched that locates our epistemic right to our self-ascriptions of propositional attitude not in our ability to discriminate among the various thought contents we might be thinking, but rather in our ability to express our thoughts, and to think with them in accordance with the norms of rationality. I consider also the question whether first person authority and externalism jointly make possible a refutation of certain forms of global skepticism, as has been famously argued by Putnam. I argue that Putnam's attempted refutation fails, because the crucial externalist claims that drive it are not knowable a priori. (shrink)

The most pressing problems facing humanity today - over-population, energy shortages, climate change, soil erosion, species extinctions, the risk of epidemic disease, the threat of warfare that could destroy all the hard-won gains of civilization, and even the recent fibrillations of the stock market - are all ecological or have a large ecological component. in this volume philosophers turn their attention to understanding the science of ecology and its huge implications for the human project. To get the application of ecology (...) to policy or other practical concerns right, humanity needs a clear and disinterested philosophical understanding of ecology which can help identify the practical lessons of science. Conversely, the urgent practical demands humanity faces today cannot help but direct scientific and philosophical investigation toward the basis of those ecological challenges that threaten human survival. This book will help to fuel the timely renaissance of interest in philosophy of ecology that is now occurring in the philosophical profession. Provides a bridge between philosophy and current scientific findings Covers theory and applications Encourages multi-disciplinary dialogue. (shrink)

The shortage of organs for transplantation by its nature prompts ethical dilemmas. For example, although there is an imperative to save human life and reduce suffering by maximising the supply of vital organs, there is an equally important obligation to ensure that the process by which we increase the supply respects the rights of all stakeholders. In a relatively unexamined practice in the USA, organs are procured from unrepresented decedents without their express consent. Unrepresented decedents have no known healthcare wishes (...) or advance care planning document; they also lack a surrogate. The Revised Uniform Anatomical Gift Act of 2006 sends a mixed message about the procurement of organs from this patient population and there are hospitals that authorise donation. In addition, in adopting the RUAGA, some states included provisions that clearly allow organ procurement from unrepresented decedents. An important unanswered question is whether this practice meets the canons of ethical permissibility. The current Brief Report presents two principled approaches to the topic as a way of highlighting some of the complexities involved. Concluding remarks offer suggestions for future research and discussion. (shrink)

Critics have often misunderstood the higher-order theory (HOT) of consciousness. Here we clarify its position on several issues, and distinguish it from other views such as the global The higher-order theory (HOT) of consciousness has often been misunderstood by critics. Here we clarify its position on several issues, and distinguish it from other views such as the global workspace theory (GWT) and early sensory models (e.g. first-order local recurrency theories). For example, HOT has been criticized for over-intellectualizing consciousness. We show (...) that while higher-order states are cognitively assembled, the requirements are actually considerably less than often presumed. In this sense HOT may be viewed as an intermediate position between GWT and early sensory views. Also, we clarify that most proponents of HOT do not stipulate consciousness as equivalent to metacognition or confidence. Further, compared to other existing theories, HOT can arguably account better for complex everyday experiences, such as of emotions and episodic memories. This makes HOT particularly useful as a framework for conceptualizing pathological mental states. (shrink)

The goal of the modern scientific project, as defined by such thinkers as Descartes and Bacon, is "mastery of nature." Martin Heidegger, in an interpretation of mastery of nature that has left its imprint on post-modern critique of science, maintains that the essence of modern science lies in a projection of "technological being" upon nature. This projective "assault" has its origin in the "self-grounding" project of modern metaphysics, in which the human subject attempts to secure a self-sufficient position over against (...) all possible objects. ;The dissertation examines Heidegger's "technological thesis" from the vantage point of the history and philosophy of science. Adopting the vis viva debate between Leibniz and the Cartesians as a point of departure, it identifies and develops, historically and systematically, two themes upon which hinges the question of the technological essence of modern science and its relationship to the "self-grounding" project: the "rationalism" of modern science, and modern science's view of natural teleology. The main argument of the dissertation is that examination of the relationship between these two themes reveals the "teleology of reason" in modern science. ;Chapter's One and Two focus on Leibniz' disagreement with Descartes over the ontology of corporeal substance. From that discussion emerge our two metaphysical themes, which are addressed in Chapter's Three and Four respectively. On the basis of the results of those chapters it is argued that the problem of "mastery of nature" resides in a clash, indigenous to reason, between the intrinsic teleology of nature, through which nature is rendered intelligible to reason, and the teleology of reason itself, which is freedom. ;The conclusion shows that Heidegger ignores tendencies within science, and within the very self-grounding project itself, which run counter to his pessimistic portrayal of science as an "assault" upon nature. Finally, the prospect for a non-coercive resolution to the clash of teleologies in modern science through the "ravishing of nature" is considered. (shrink)

Distributional semantic models (DSMs) are a primary method for distilling semantic information from corpora. However, a key question remains: What types of semantic relations among words do DSMs detect? Prior work typically has addressed this question using limited human data that are restricted to semantic similarity and/or general semantic relatedness. We tested eight DSMs that are popular in current cognitive and psycholinguistic research (positive pointwise mutual information; global vectors; and three variations each of Skip-gram and continuous bag of words (CBOW) (...) using word, context, and mean embeddings) on a theoretically motivated, rich set of semantic relations involving words from multiple syntactic classes and spanning the abstract–concrete continuum (19 sets of ratings). We found that, overall, the DSMs are best at capturing overall semantic similarity and also can capture verb–noun thematic role relations and noun–noun event-based relations that play important roles in sentence comprehension. Interestingly, Skip-gram and CBOW performed the best in terms of capturing similarity, whereas GloVe dominated the thematic role and event-based relations. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our results, make recommendations for users of these models, and demonstrate significant differences in model performance on event-based relations. (shrink)

Recent years have witnessed the publication of numerous articles that draw a critical alignment between ethics and caring. In essence, this theme suggests that caring is a moral pursuit centred on the beneficent attention of one person shown to another. Yet, if such language is to have real poignancy, it must be geared towards an inclusive agenda that meets the needs of all within the community. Research evidence suggests that this is not always the case, especially in terms of the (...) care offered to members of minority ethnic groups. This article will focus on the findings of a qualitative research study that explored the expectations and perceived experiences of nursing care among members of the Pakistani community in Bradford, West Yorkshire, UK. The findings suggest that nurses should develop a more informed narrative that readily reflects the needs of the Pakistani community. (shrink)

Human beings persist in an extraordinary range of ecological settings, in the process exhibiting enormous behavioural diversity, both within and between populations. People vary in their social, mating and parental behaviour and have diverse and elaborate beliefs, traditions, norms and institutions. The aim of this theme issue is to ask whether, and how, evolutionary theory can help us to understand this diversity. In this introductory article, we provide a background to the debate surrounding how best to understand behavioural diversity using (...) evolutionary models of human behaviour. In particular, we examine how diversity has been viewed by the main subdisciplines within the human evolutionary behavioural sciences, focusing in particular on the human behavioural ecology, evolutionary psychology and cultural evolution approaches. In addition to differences in focus and methodology, these subdisciplines have traditionally varied in the emphasis placed on human universals, ecological factors and socially learned behaviour, and on how they have addressed the issue of genetic variation. We reaffirm that evolutionary theory provides an essential framework for understanding behavioural diversity within and between human populations, but argue that greater integration between the subfields is critical to developing a satisfactory understanding of diversity. (shrink)

This study investigates factors impacting perceptions of ethical conduct of peers of 293 students in four US universities. Self-reported ethical behavior and recognition of emotions in others (a dimension of emotional intelligence) impacted perception of ethical behavior of peers. None of the other dimensions of emotional intelligence were significant. Age, Race, Sex, GPA, or type of major (business versus nonbusiness) did not impact perception of ethical behavior of peers. Implications of the results of the study for business schools and industry (...) professionals are discussed. (shrink)

British philosopher Philippa Foot devoted her life explicating the utility of virtue ethics, aptly summed up as “my attempt to connect good reasoning to goodness.” Shared decision-making is one suc...

Demonstrates the validity of the measure presented in "Estimating Semantic Content" on textbook examples using (binary) resolution [a generalization of disjunctive syllogism] theorem proving; the measure is based on logical probability and is the mirror image of logical form; it dates to Popper.

"Reflections on Relativity" is a comprehensive presentation of the classical, special, and general theories of relativity, including in-depth historical perspectives, showing how the relativity principle has repeatedly inspired advances in our understanding of the physical world.

Psychobiography has been a topical area and an applied research specialty in psychology since Freud’s influential psychoanalytic psychobiography of Leonardo da Vinci. Throughout the last century, psychobiographers have emphasized the importance of anchoring interpretations of life histories in established psychological theories and rigorous historiographic research methods. One topical area receiving less attention in psychobiography is the critical relationship between the psychobiographer and her or his subject as it relates to the process of psychobiographical writing. The present article explores the phenomenology (...) and challenges of this relationship in order to ultimately propose practical strategies for navigating countertransference issues throughout the subject selection, research and publication phases of psychobiography. Freud’s psychobiography of Leonardo da Vinci is used as a model of the stages of psychobiography, the evolution of the psychobiographer-subject relationship, and the challenges of countertransference. (shrink)

Birch et. al. see their model as incompatible with higher-order-thought (HOT) theories of consciousness, on which a state is conscious if one is in some suitable way aware of that state. They see higher-order (HO) awareness as an “extra ingredient”. But since Birch et al go on to say that “[t]his is not the place for a detailed discussion of HOT theories,” they don’t address why they take HO awareness to be an extra ingredient or why HOT theorists are convinced (...) that it’s needed. In this commentary we argue that higher-order theories are a crucial for understanding consciousness. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 7, July 2020, Page 177-180.

McRae, Brown and Elman argue against the view that events are structured as frequently‐occurring sequences of world stimuli. They underline the importance of temporal structure defining event types and advance a more complex temporal structure, which allows for some variance in the component elements.

The theory of embodied cognition makes the claim that our cognitive processes are, at their core, sensorimotor, situated, and action-relevant. Our mental system is built primarily to control action, and so mind is formed by the nature of the body and its interactions with the world. In this paper we will explore the nature of virtue and its formation from the perspective of embodied cognition. We specifically describe exemplars of the virtue of compassion (caregivers of individuals with developmental disabilities in (...) L'Arche communities), speculating as to what might have been the formative influences in their character development. Embodied formation is understood in the context of the openness of human cortical systems to formation by social interactions, and in terms of the openness to reorganization and change of complex dynamical systems. Specific formative influences explored include interpersonal imitation, social attachment, language, and story. (shrink)

For most of the history of prejudice research, negativity has been treated as its emotional and cognitive signature, a conception that continues to dominate work on the topic. By this definition, prejudice occurs when we dislike or derogate members of other groups. Recent research, however, has highlighted the need for a more nuanced and “inclusive” (Eagly 2004) perspective on the role of intergroup emotions and beliefs in sustaining discrimination. On the one hand, several independent lines of research have shown that (...) unequal intergroup relations are often marked by attitudinal complexity, with positive responses such as affection and admiration mingling with negative responses such as contempt and resentment. Simple antipathy is the exception rather than the rule. On the other hand, there is mounting evidence that nurturing bonds of affection between the advantaged and the disadvantaged sometimes entrenches rather than disrupts wider patterns of discrimination. Notably, prejudice reduction interventions may have ironic effects on the political attitudes of the historically disadvantaged, decreasing their perceptions of injustice and willingness to engage in collective action to transform social inequalities.These developments raise a number of important questions. Has the time come to challenge the assumption that negative evaluations are inevitably the cognitive and affective hallmarks of discrimination? Is the orthodox concept of prejudice in danger of side-tracking, if not obstructing, progress towards social justice in a fuller sense? What are the prospects for reconciling a prejudice reduction model of change, designed to get people to like one another more, with a collective action model of change, designed to ignite struggles to achieve intergroup equality? (shrink)