The Descartes Dictionary is an accessible guide to the world of the seventeenth-century philosopher René Descartes. Meticulously researched and extensively cross-referenced, this unique book covers all his major works, ideas and influences, and provides a firm grounding in the central themes of Descartes' thought. The introduction provides a biographical sketch, a brief account of Descartes' philosophical works, and a summary of the current state of Cartesian studies, discussing trends in research over the past four decades. The A-Z entries include clear (...) definitions of the key terms used in Descartes' writings and detailed synopses of his works. Also included are entries noting philosophical influences, of both figures that influenced Descartes and those that he in turn influenced. For anyone reading or studying Descartes, rationalism, or modern philosophy more generally, this original resource provides a wealth of useful information, analysis, and criticism. Including clear explanations of often complex terminology, The Descartes Dictionary covers everything that is essential to a sound understanding of Descartes' philosophy. (shrink)

We defend a functionalist approach to emotion that begins by focusing on emotions as central states with causal connections to behavior and to other cognitive states. The approach brackets the conscious experience of emotion, lists plausible features that emotions exhibit, and argues that alternative schemes are unpromising candidates. We conclude with the benefits of our approach: one can study emotions in animals; one can look in the brain for the implementation of specific features; and one ends up with an architecture (...) of the mind in which emotions are fully accommodated through their relations to the rest of cognition. Our article focuses on arguing for this general approach; as such, it is an essay in the philosophy of emotion rather than in the psychology or neuroscience of emotion. (shrink)

Background:Stress can frequently occur in the driving context. Its cognitive effects can be deleterious and lead to uncomfortable or risky situations. While stress detection in this context is well developed, regulation using dedicated advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) is still emergent.Objectives:This systematic review focuses on stress regulation strategies that can be qualified as “subtle” or “mindless”: the technology employed to perform regulation does not interfere with an ongoing task. The review goal is 2-fold: establishing the state of the art on such (...) technological implementation in the driving context and identifying complementary technologies relying on subtle regulation that could be applied in driving.Methods:A systematic review was conducted using search operators previously identified through a concept analysis. The patents and scientific studies selected provide an overview of actual and potential mindless technology implementations. These are then analyzed from a scientific perspective. A classification of results was performed according to the different stages of emotion regulation proposed by the Gross model.Results:A total of 47 publications were retrieved, including 21 patents and 26 studies. Six of the studies investigated mindless stress regulation in the driving context. Patents implemented strategies mostly linked to attentional deployment, while studies tended to investigate response modulation strategies.Conclusions:This review allowed us to identify several ADAS relying on mindless computing technologies to reduce stress and better understand the underlying mechanisms allowing stress reduction. Further studies are necessary to better grasp the effect of mindless technologies on driving safety. However, we have established the feasibility of their implementation as ADAS and proposed directions for future research in this field. (shrink)

Our approach to emotion emphasized three key ingredients. We do not yet have a mature science of emotion, or even a consensus view—in this respect we are more hesitant than Sander, Grandjean, and Scherer or Luiz Pessoa. Relatedly, a science of emotion needs to be highly interdisciplinary, including ecology, psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy. We recommend a functionalist view that brackets conscious experiences and that essentially treats emotions as latent variables inferred from a number of measures. But our version of functionalism (...) is not definitional or ontological. It is resolutely methodological, in good part because it is too early to attempt definitions. (shrink)

We argue for a novel view of suspending judgment properly--i.e., suspending judgment in an ex post justified way. In so doing we argue for a Kantian virtue-theoretic view of epistemic normativity and against teleological virtue-theoretic accounts.

Despite the recent backlash against epistemic consequentialism, an explicit systematic alternative has yet to emerge. This paper articulates and defends a novel alternative, Epistemic Kantianism, which rests on a requirement of respect for the truth. §1 tackles some preliminaries concerning the proper formulation of the epistemic consequentialism / non-consequentialism divide, explains where Epistemic Kantianism falls in the dialectical landscape, and shows how it can capture what seems attractive about epistemic consequentialism while yielding predictions that are harder for the latter to (...) secure in a principled way. §2 presents Epistemic Kantianism. §3 argues that it is uniquely poised to satisfy the desiderata set out in §1 on an ideal theory of epistemic justification. §4 gives three further arguments, suggesting that it (i) best explains the objective normative significance of the subject's perspective in epistemology, (ii) follows from the kind of axiology needed to solve the swamping problem together with modest assumptions about the relation between the evaluative and the deontic, and (iii) illuminates certain asymmetries in epistemic value and obligation. §5 takes stock and reassesses the score in the debate. (shrink)

Kurt Flaschs Buch ist die Summe seiner über sechzig Jahre langen Beschäftigung mit Meister Eckhart und seiner Zeit.

s. A: KIuPKB entwickelte in einer einheitIichen Systematik vollstlindige Interpretationen fiir viele Systeme der Modalitatenlogik, die vorber nur syn­ taktisch fixiert waren. Hiermit ergab sich auf dem Wege tiber eine quantoren­ logische Erweiterung des Modalitatensystems S4 zugleich eine Semantik fUr die intuitionistische Priidikatenlogik:. Der vorliegende Ergebnisbericht behandelt im Rahmen der klassischen Priidikatenlogik: zwei Modalitatensysteme, deren aussagenlogische Teile mit den Systemen M von v. WRIGHT und S4 von LEWIS tibereinstimmen. Es gibt verschiedene Moglichkeiten, aussagenlogische Modalitatensysteme quantoren­ logisch zu erweitem. Die hier (...) gewiihlten Erweiterungen sind in einer nabe­ liegenden Weise so vorgenommen, daB die Barcan-Formel (Seite 7) ungiiltig, aber ihre Umkehrung giiltig ist. Fiir die Kripke-Semantik dieser Systeme wird im m. Kapitel ein Voll­ stlindigkeitsbeweis nach den Methoden von KIuPKE [13] durchgefiihrt. Bin einfacherer Vollstiindigkeitsbeweis, der aber wesentIich weniger konstruktiv ist, wird in § 4 in Verallgemeinerung der Methode von HENKIN [7] gegeben. Durch eine Binbettung der intuitionistischen Priidikatenlogik: in das quan­ torenlogische Modalitatensystem S4' flihrt die Semantik des Systems S4' zur Kripke-Semantik der intuitionistischen Priidikatenlogik. Diese Semantik wird im V. Kapitel systematisch behandelt und im VI. Kapitel (iihnlich wie in KIuPKB [J3D mit der Semantik von BETH in Beziehung gebracht. (shrink)

Ogni tentativo di ripensare le nostre categorie politiche deve muovere dalla consapevolezza che della distinzione classica fra zoé e bios, tra vita naturale ed esistenza politica (o tra l'uomo come semplice vivente e l'uomo come soggetto politico), non ne sappiamo piú nulla. Nel diritto romano arcaico homo sacer era un uomo che chiunque poteva uccidere senza commettere omicidio e che non doveva però essere messo a morte nelle forme prescritte dal rito. È la vita uccidibile e insacrificabile dell' 'uomo sacro' (...) a fornire qui la chiave per una rilettura critica della nostra tradizione politica. Quando la vita diventa la posta in gioco della politica e questa si trasforma in biopolitica, tutte le categorie fondamentali della nostra riflessione, dai diritti dell'uomo alla democrazia alla cittadinanza, entrano in un processo di svuotamento e di dislocazione il cui risultato sta oggi davanti ai nostri occhi. Seguendo il filo del rapporto costitutivo fra nuda vita e potere sovrano, da Aristotele ad Auschwitz, dall'Habeas corpus alle Dichiarazioni dei diritti, il libro di Agamben cerca di decifrare gli enigmi - prima di tutti il fascismo e il nazismo - che il nostro secolo ha proposto alla ragione storica. Fino a vedere, nel campo di concentramento, il paradigma biopolitico nascosto della modernità in cui città e casa sono diventate indiscernibili e la possibilità di distinguere tra il nostro corpo biologico e il nostro corpo politico ci è stata tolta una volta per tutte. (shrink)

Consciousness and emotion feature prominently in our personal lives, yet remain enigmatic. Recent advances prompt further distinctions that should provide more experimental traction: we argue that emotion consists of an emotion state (functional aspects, including emo- tional response) as well as feelings (the conscious experience of the emotion), and that consciousness consists of level (e.g. coma, vegetative state and wake- fulness) and content (what it is we are conscious of). Not only is consciousness important to aspects of emotion but structures (...) that are important for emotion, such as brainstem nuclei and midline cortices, overlap with structures that regulate the level of consciousness. The intersection of consciousness and emotion is ripe for experimental investigation, and we outline possible examples for future studies. (shrink)

Tomus 1. Schriften zur Intellekttheorie.

This paper considers the place of reasons in the metaphysics of epistemic normativity and defends a middle ground between two popular extremes in the literature. Against members of the ‘reasons first’ movement, we argue that reasons are not the sole fundamental constituents of epistemic normativity. We suggest instead that the virtue-theoretic property of competence is the key building block. To support this approach, we note that reasons must be possessed to play a role in the analysis of central epistemically normative (...) properties, and argue that the relation of possession must be analyzed in terms of competence. But while we diverge with reasons-firsters on this score, we also distance ourselves from those who deny reasons any important role in epistemology. For we maintain that possessed reasons do help to ground deontic facts in the epistemic domain (e.g., facts about what one epistemically ought to believe, may believe, or is justified in believing). Indeed, we present an argument that the possession of sufficient epistemic reasons is necessary and sufficient for propositional justification, and that proper basing on such reasons yields doxastic justification. But since possession and proper basing are themselves grounded in competence, reasons are not the end of the explanatory road: competence enables them to do their work, putting them—and us—in the middle. (shrink)

Cognitive test batteries are widely used in diverse research fields, such as cognitive training, cognitive disorder assessment, or brain mechanism understanding. Although they need flexibility according to their usage objectives, most test batteries are not available as open-source software and are not be tuned by researchers in detail. The present study introduces an open-source cognitive test battery to assess attention and memory, using a javascript library, p5.js. Because of the ubiquitous nature of dynamic attention in our daily lives, it is (...) crucial to have tools for its assessment or training. For that purpose, our test battery includes seven cognitive tasks, common in cognitive science literature. By using the test battery, we conducted an online experiment to collect the benchmark data. Results conducted on 2 separate days showed the high cross-day reliability. Specifically, the task performance did not largely change with the different days. Besides, our test battery captures diverse individual differences and can evaluate them based on the cognitive factors extracted from latent factor analysis. Since we share our source code as open-source software, users can expand and manipulate experimental conditions flexibly. Our test battery is also flexible in terms of the experimental environment, i.e., it is possible to experiment either online or in a laboratory environment. (shrink)

Zusammenfassung Zahlreiche Fußballvereine der 1. und 2. Bundesliga sind aus Fusionen hervorgegangen, doch bislang ist kaum etwas über dieses Phänomen in der Sportwissenschaft bekannt. Ziel des Aufsatzes ist es, mittels einer organisationssoziologischen Brille den SC Paderborn 07, als Bundesligaverein, der aus mehreren Fusionen hervorgegangen ist und als solcher verschiedene Traditionslinien in sich vereint, zu beleuchten. Dabei werden insbesondere die sozialen Folgen in den Blick genommen.

Based on studies with infants, we expand on Stoffregen & Bardy's explanation of perceptual motor errors, given the global array. Information pick-up from the global array is not sufficient without adequate exploratory movements and learning to support perceptually guided activity.

Theodor W. Adorno’s writings are often categorized as either political, aesthetic or critical. While all of these characteristics are legitimate, it is problematic to view Adorno from only one of these angles. In fact, many literary critics consider his thoughts about literature to be simple cultural criticism, i.e., something that leaves the realm of pure scholarship by defiling the argumentation with philosophy or politics. Political theorists and philosophers, on the other hand, often view his literary concerns as superfluous. It is (...) my thesis that Adorno’s way of thinking can only be adequately understood when these categories are not seen as mutually exclusive. In order to demonstrate this point, I will concentrate on his use of the term realism which can be seen as paradigmatic for this question. (shrink)

Rationality requires us to respond to apparent normative reasons. Given the independence of appearance and reality, why think that apparent normative reasons necessarily provide real normative reasons? And if they do not, why think that mistakes of rationality are necessarily real mistakes? This paper gives a novel answer to these questions. I argue first that in the moral domain, there are objective duties of respect that we violate whenever we do what appears to violate our first-order duties. The existence of (...) these duties of respect, I argue, ensures that apparent moral reasons are exceptions to the independence of appearance and reality. I then extend these arguments to the domain of overall reason. Just as there are objective duties of respect for moral reasons that explain moral blameworthiness, so there are objective duties of respect for reasons that explain blameworthiness in the court of overall reason. The existence of these duties ensures that apparent reasons are exceptions to the independence of appearance and reality. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and (...) made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Psychiatric and neurological disorders have historically provided key insights into the structure-function rela- tionships that subserve human social cognition and behavior, informing the concept of the ‘social brain’. In this review, we take stock of the current status of this concept, retaining a focus on disorders that impact social behavior. We discuss how the social brain, social cognition, and social behavior are interdependent, and emphasize the important role of development and com- pensation. We suggest that the social brain, and its (...) dysfunction and recovery, must be understood not in terms of specific structures, but rather in terms of their interaction in large-scale networks. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie Jahrgang: 58 Heft: 3 Seiten: 325-336.

The brain and emotion treats emotions as states elicited by reinforcers (reward or punishment), but it is unclear how this view can do justice to the diversity of emotions. It is also unclear how such a view distinguishes emotions from states such as hunger and thirst. A complementary approach to understanding emotions may begin by considering emotions as aspects of social cognition.

A central source of socially meaningful signals is the face, which can be visually analyzed to understand a person's emotions, intentions, beliefs, and desires, along with information about that person's social status, approachability, age, and gender. This article reviews the neural basis of the perception of such signals in humans, focusing on facial expression and gaze, and touching on lesser-studied signals such as pupil dilation and blushing. It discusses the involvement of structures such as the insula, orbitofrontal cortex, amygdala, and (...) superior temporal gyrus, which are studied in some detail with respect to how they process social stimuli. It reveals that social perception also involves information from other modalities and depends on the context in which signals occur. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie Jahrgang: 57 Heft: 4 Seiten: 501-520.

Many meta-ethicists have thought that rationality requires us to heed apparent normative reasons, not objective normative reasons. But what are apparent reasons? There are two kinds of standard answers. On de dicto views, R is an apparent reason for S to \ when it appears to S that R is an objective reason to \ . On de re views, R is an apparent reason for S to \ when R’s truth would constitute an objective reason for S to \ (...) , and it appears to S that R. De re views are currently more popular because they avoid overintellectualizing rationality. But they face problems owing to the way in which they do so. Some assume that we can escape these problems by requiring more information to be apparent or by appealing to defeat. But these strategies fail. So, I defend a new view: apparent reasons are apparent facts that agents are competently attracted to treat like objective reasons, where competence is indirectly defined in terms of objective reasons and a competence/performance distinction is honored. Since one can treat X like an F without having the concept of an F, the view does not overintellectualize rationality. But it is also strong enough to dodge the pitfalls of de re views. (shrink)

Studies of normal individuals reveal an asymmetry in the folk concept of intentional action: an action is more likely to be thought of as intentional when it is morally bad than when it is morally good. One interpretation of these results comes from the hypothesis that emotion plays a critical mediating role in the relationship between an action’s moral status and its intentional status. According to this hypothesis, the negative emotional response triggered by a morally bad action drives the attribution (...) of intent to the actor, or the judgment that the actor acted intentionally. We test this hypothesis by presenting cases of morally bad and morally good action to seven individuals with deficits in emotional processing resulting from damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPC). If normal emotional processing is necessary for the observed asymmetry, then individuals with VMPC lesions should show no asymmetry. Our results provide no support for this hypothesis: like normal individuals, those with VMPC lesions showed the same asymmetry, tending to judge that an action was intentional when it was morally bad but not when it was morally good. Based on this finding, we suggest that normal emotional processing is not responsible for the observed asymmetry of intentional attributions and thus does not mediate the relationship between an action’s moral status and its intentional status. (shrink)

The significance of the behavior of biological entities cannot be fully explained in terms of the physical and chemical processes upon which contemporary biological and medical research depends. The characteristic proper of biological entities is that they are systems marked by ‘inwardness’, that is, a capacity to interpret meanings in order to reach goals. The significance of this characteristic is given in examples from the author's morphological research. Keywords: biological research, inwardness, organism CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this?