We argue on consequentialist grounds for the transfer of Sandai, an orangutan, to an orangutan sanctuary. First, we show that satisfying his interest in being transferred brings far greater value than the value achieved by keeping him confined. Second, we show that he has the capacities sufficient for personhood. Third, we show that all persons have a right to relative liberty insofar as they have interests they can exercise only under conditions of relative liberty. Fourth, we show that individuals need (...) not be able to assume social obligations and duties in order to be rights holders. -/- Our argument reflects commitments, as we say, to consequentialist reasoning about moral problems. However, we note that influential representatives of the other dominant ethical traditions—the deontological and Aristotelian traditions—reach our conclusion, too. It makes no difference, in this instance, which ethical theory one adopts. Under all of them, Sandai is a person with an interest in relative liberty entitled to habeas corpus protection. (shrink)

Should the law recognize an elephant’s right to be released from solitary confinement? The New York State Court of Appeals—the highest court in the State of New York—will consider this question on May 18. At issue is an Asian elephant named Happy. But happy she is not. Every human being has a right to bodily liberty because they have strong interests that this right protects. Since Happy has the same strong interests, the Court should recognize Happy’s right to be freed (...) from solitary confinement. (shrink)

We present ethical reasons that the court should grant the Nonhuman Rights Project’s (NhRP) request for habeas corpus relief for Happy, an elephant. Happy has a basic interest in not being confined, an interest that should be legally protected just as the human interest in not being confined is legally protected. Since the decision in The Nonhuman Rights Project, Inc. v Breheny failed to weigh Happy’s interests properly, we ask this body to correct the error.

FOREWORD. Gilbert Gottlieb and the Developmental Point of View. I. INTRODUCTION. 1. Developmental Systems, Nature-Nurture, and the Role of Genes in Behavior and Development: On the Legacy of Gilbert Gottlieb. 2. Normally Occurring Environmental and Behavioral Influences on Gene Activity: From Central Dogma to Probabilistic Epigenesis. II. THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS FOR THE DEVELOPMENTAL STUDY OF BEHAVIOR AND GENETICS. 3. Historical and Philosophical Perspectives on Behavioral Genetics and Developmental Science. 4. Development and Evolution Revisited. 5. Probabilistic Epigenesis and Modern Behavioral and Neural (...) Genetics. 6. The Roles of Environment, Experience, and Learning in Behavioral Development. 7. Contemporary Ideas in Physics and Biology in Gottlieb’s Psychology. III. EMPIRICAL STUDIES OF BEHAVIORAL DEVELOPMENT AND GENETICS. 8. Behavioral Development during the Mother-Young Interaction in Placental Mammals: The Development of Behavior in the Relationship with the Mother. 9. Amniotic Fluid as an Extended Milieu Interieur. 10. Developmental Effects of Selective Breeding for an Infant Trait. 11. Emergence and Constraint in Novel Behavioral Adaptations. 12. Nonhuman Primate Research Contributions to Understanding Genetic and Environmental Influences on Phenotypic Outcomes across Development. 13. Interactive Contributions of Genes and Early Experience to Behavioural Development: Sensitive Periods and Lateralized Brain and Behaviour. 14. Trans-Generational Epigenetic Inheritance. 15. The Significance of Non-Replication of Gene-Phenotype Associations. 16. Canalization and Malleability Reconsidered: The Developmental Basis of Phenotypic Stability and Variability. IV. APPLICATIONS TO DEVELOPMENT. 17. Gene-Parenting Interplay in the Development of Infant Emotionality. 18. Genetic Research in Psychiatry and Psychology: A Critical Overview. 19. On the Limits of Standard Quantitative Genetic Modeling of Inter-Individual Variation: Extensions, Ergodic Conditions and a New Genetic Factor Model of Intra-Individual Variation. 20. Songs My Mother Taught Me: Gene-Environment Interactions, Brain Development and the Auditory System: Thoughts on Non-Kin Rejection, Part II. 21. Applications of Developmental Systems Theory to Benefit Human Development: On the Contributions of Gilbert Gottlieb to Individuals, Families, and Communities. (shrink)

Gary Ebbs shows that this appearance is illusory.

The first Dr. Lerner -- Super doctor -- Illness hits home -- The second Dr. Lerner -- Forging my own path -- Treating the whole patient -- Family practitioner -- Growing disillusionment -- Slowing down -- Epilogue.

Theorists have had less success in analyzing the truth conditions of generics. Philosophers of language have offered a number of theories. This chapter surveys several semantic accounts of generics. However, the focus is on generics and experimental philosophy. It briefly reviews empirical work that bears on these semantic accounts. While generics constitute an interesting linguistic phenomenon worthy of study in their own right, the study of generics also has wide‐ranging implications for questions beyond the philosophy of language, including questions in (...) social psychology and cognitive science more generally. The chapter also reviews empirical work on the relationship between generics and cognition. Existing empirical work strongly supports the generics‐as‐defaults hypothesis: the hypothesis that generics reflect a cognitively default, fundamental mode of generalizing in humans. Finally, the chapter elucidates evidence that generic language and generic modes of generalizing play an important role in stereotyping and prejudice. (shrink)

I argue for an alternative to Quine’s conception of observation sentences, one that better satisfies the roles Quine envisages for them, and that otherwise respects Quinean constraints. After reviewing a certain predicament Quine got into in balancing the needs of the intersubjectivity of observation sentences with his notion of the stimulus meaning of an observation sentence, I push for replacing the latter with what I call the ‘stimulus field’ of an observation sentence, a notion that remains ‘proximate’ but is shared (...) between different language users. Throughout, I emphasize the epistemological role of observation sentences. (shrink)

Jean-Paul Sartre is an undisputed giant of twentieth-century philosophy. His intellectual writings popularizing existentialism combined with his creative and artistic flair have made him a legend of French thought. His tumultuous personal life - so inextricably bound up with his philosophical thinking - is a fascinating tale of love and lust, drug abuse, high profile fallings-out and political and cultural rebellion. This substantial and meticulously researched biography is accessible, fast-paced, often amusing and at times deeply moving. Existentialism and Excess covers (...) all the main events of Sartre's remarkable seventy-five-year life from his early years as a precocious brat devouring his grandfather's library, through his time as a brilliant student in Paris, his wilderness years as a provincial teacher-writer experimenting with mescaline, his World War II adventures as a POW and member of the resistance, his post-war politicization, his immense amphetamine fueled feats of writing productivity, his harem of women, his many travels and his final decline into blindness and old age. Along the way there are countless intriguing anecdotes, some amusing, some tragic, some controversial: his loathing of crustaceans and his belief that he was being pursued by a giant lobster, his escape from a POW camp, the bombing of his apartment, his influence on the May 1968 uprising and his many love affairs. Cox deftly moves from these episodes to discussing his intellectual development, his famous feuds with Aron, Camus, and Merleau-Ponty, his encounters with other giant figures of his day: Roosevelt, Hemingway, Heidegger, John Huston, Mao, Castro, Che Guevara, Khrushchev and Tito, and, above all, his long, complex and creative relationship with Simone de Beauvoir. Existentialism and Excess also gives serious consideration to Sartre's ideas and many philosophical works, novels, stories, plays and biographies, revealing their intimate connection with his personal life. Cox has written an entertaining, thought-provoking and compulsive book, much like the man himself. (shrink)

This book is about a twenty- to forty- year life journey. It recounts ten randomly selected personal quotes, saved in a cookie jar, and creates a life-learning narrative using the origin of the quote. Each story evolves by looking back at the signposts and hints of wisdom sprinkled along the author's life path. Many of these evens whispered subtle quotes of wisdom to his conscience. It was up to the author to make sense of them or proceed on life's path, (...) having missed an opportunity to obtain wisdom. All of us are on a similar journey cluttered with obstacles of the human condition. It is the author's desire that this little book of hope and inspiration will serve as a torchlight to illuminate the way on the reader's journey toward a more joyful life -- one filled with knowledge, truth, and wisdom. (shrink)

Moral emotions are evolved mechanisms that function in part to optimize social relationships. We discuss two moral emotions— disgust and the “cuteness response”—which modulate social-engagement motives in opposite directions, changing the degree to which the eliciting entity is imbued with mental states (i.e., mentalized). Disgust-inducing entities are hypo-mentalized (i.e., dehumanized); cute entities are hyper-mentalized (i.e., “humanized”). This view of cuteness—which challenges the prevailing view that cuteness is a releaser of parental instincts (Lorenz, 1950/1971)—explains (a) the broad range of affiliative behaviors (...) elicited by cuteness, (b) the marketing of cuteness to children (by toy makers and animators) to elicit play, and (c) the apparent ease and frequency with which cute things are anthropomorphized. (shrink)

Berel Dov Lerner is Lecturer in Philosophy, Western Galilee College, Israel. [email protected].

I argue for the moral relevance of a category of individuals I characterize as far-persons. Following Gary Varner, I distinguish near-persons, animals with a " robust autonoetic consciousness " but lacking an adult human's " biographical sense of self, " from the merely sentient, those animals living "entirely in the present." I note the possibility of a third class. Far-persons lack a biographical sense of self, possess a weak autonoetic consciousness, and are able to travel mentally through time a (...) distance that exceeds the capacities of the merely sentient. Far-persons are conscious of and exercise control over short-term cognitive states, states limited by their temporal duration. The animals in question, human and nonhuman, consciously choose among various strategies available to them to achieve their ends, making them subjects of what I call "lyrical experience:" brief and potentially intense pleasures and pains. But their ends expire minute-by-minute, not stretching beyond, I say metaphorically, the present hour. I conclude by discussing the moral status of far-persons. (shrink)

Three correctives can get researchers out of the trap of constructing unitary theories of “thinking”: (1) Strong inference methods largely avoid problems associated with universal prescriptive normativism; (2) theories must recognize that significant modularity of cognitive processes is antithetical to general accounts of thinking; and (3) consideration of the domain-specificity of rationality render many of the present article's issues moot.

There is no doubt science is currently suffering from a credibility crisis. This thought-provoking book argues that, ironically, science's credibility is being undermined by tools created by scientists themselves. Scientific disinformation and damaging conspiracy theories are rife because of the internet that science created, the scientific demand for empirical evidence and statistical significance leads to data torturing and confirmation bias, and data mining is fuelled by the technological advances in Big Data and the development of ever-increasingly powerfulcomputers. Using a wide (...) range of entertaining examples, this fascinating book examines the impacts of society's growing distrust of science, and ultimately provides constructive suggestions for restoring the credibility of the scientific community. (shrink)

The view, in Quine, that all there are are pure sets is presented and endorsed.

In the early modern period, many authors held that sensation or sensory reception is in some way passive and that perception is in some way active. The notion of a more passive and a more active aspect of perception is already present in Aristotle: the senses receive forms without matter more or less passively, but the “primary sense” also recognizes the salience of present objects. Ibn al-Haytham distinguished “pure sensation” from other aspects of sense perception, achieved by “discernment, inference and (...) recognition,” which included perception of properties such as size and distance as well as similarity, difference, and beauty. Descartes regarded light and color as experiences passively caused in the mind by bodily processes, but he also included distance, perceived through accommodation and convergence, as an immediately caused sensory idea. On the perception side, most theorists held that size and distance perception occurs through unnoticed psychological operations, whether mediated by judgment or associative processes. Association is, in a sense, passive, as it occurs through nonreflective habit formation. But such habits mark a contribution of the subject to perception and are in that way active. The decision of whether sensation and perception are active or passive is highly sensitive to what counts as activity and to what is included as sensation or perception. There is no simple formula, but the generalization that sensation is for the most part passive and perception for the most part active may stand as an imprecise summary of early modern thought on the topic. (shrink)

This is a book about the need for redemptive narratives to ward off despair and the dangers these same narratives create by raising expectations that are seldom fulfilled. The quasi-messianic expectations produced by the election of President Barack Obama in 2008, and their diminution, were stark reminders of an ongoing struggle between ideals and political realities. Redemptive Hope begins by tracing the tension between theistic thinkers, for whom hope is transcendental, and intellectuals, who have striven to link hopes for redemption (...) to our intersubjective interactions with other human beings. Lerner argues that a vibrant democracy must draw on the best of both religious thought and secular liberal political philosophy. By bringing Richard Rorty's pragmatism into conversation with early-twentieth-century Jewish thinkers, including Martin Buber and Ernst Bloch, Lerner begins the work of building bridges, while insisting on holding crucial differences in dialectical tension. Only such a dialogue, he argues, can prepare the foundations for modes of redemptive thought fit for the twenty-first century. (shrink)

Dallas Willard was a personal mentor and inspiration to hundreds of pastors, philosophers, and average churchgoers. In Gary W. Moon’s candid and inspiring biography, we read about the development of Willard's personal character, philosophical writing, and spiritual teaching, and how he has inspired some of the most influential books on spirituality of the last generation.

Berel Dov Lerner argues for inconsistency. ‘Consistency is a virtue for trains: what we want from a philosopher is insights, whether he comes by them consistently or not.’ Stephen Vizinczey.

For courses in Transition to Advanced Mathematics or Introduction to Proof. Meticulously crafted, student-friendly text that helps build mathematical maturity Mathematical Proofs: A Transition to Advanced Mathematics, 4th Edition introduces students to proof techniques, analyzing proofs, and writing proofs of their own that are not only mathematically correct but clearly written. Written in a student-friendly manner, it provides a solid introduction to such topics as relations, functions, and cardinalities of sets, as well as optional excursions into fields such as number (...) theory, combinatorics, and calculus. The exercises receive consistent praise from users for their thoughtfulness and creativity. They help students progress from understanding and analyzing proofs and techniques to producing well-constructed proofs independently. This book is also an excellent reference for students to use in future courses when writing or reading proofs. 0134746759 / 9780134746753 Chartrand/Polimeni/Zhang, Mathematical Proofs: A Transition to Advanced Mathematics, 4/e. (shrink)

Volume XXIX contains papers and commentaries presented to the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy during academic year 2012-13. The papers feature Plato's Republic and Timaeus, examine Aristotle on generation, analogy and method, and analyze Proclus on first principles.

What is cognition? What makes a process cognitive? These questions have been answered differently by various investigators and theoretical traditions. Even so, there are some commonalities, allowing us to specify a few contrasting answers to these questions. The main commonalities involve the notion that cognition is information processing that explains intelligent behavior. The differences concern whether early perceptual processes are cognitive, whether representations are needed to explain cognition, what makes something a representation, and whether cognitive processes are limited to the (...) nervous system and brain or include other bodily structures or the environment itself. After unearthing some root notions of cognition in the development of cognitive psychology and cognitive science, this chapter considers the commonalities and differences just scouted, examines Wheeler’s (2005) reference to Descartes’ works in describing “Cartesian” cognitive theory, finds the real target of situated approaches in classical symbolic cognitive science, and suggests that instead of revisiting that target attention should turn to the varieties of intelligent (adaptive, appropriate, flexible) behavior. (shrink)

Einstein's General Theory of Relativity links the metrical structure of the cosmic order (or "cosmology") to the contingent distributions of matter and energy throughout the universe, one of the chief areas of investigation in astrophysics. However, presently we have neither devised nor discovered system of uniform relations whereby we can make our cosmological measurements intelligible. This is "the measurement problem of cosmology." Using both historical ideas (such as A.N. Whitehead's work in the 1920s) and contemporary evidence and theories, argue that (...) the measurement problem has neither been fully understood nor rightly interpreted. With better grasp of this problem, such as am attempting to provide, the prospects for solution look brighter. (shrink)

I make a Quinean case that Quine’s ontological relativity marked a wrong turn in his philosophy, that his fundamental commitments point toward the classical view of ontology that was worked out in most detail in hisWord and Object. This removes the impetus toward structuralism in his later philosophy.

Descartes is widely regarded to be the father of modern philosophy and his Meditations is among the most important philosophical texts ever written. _The Routledge Guidebook to Descartes’ Meditations_ introduces the major themes in Descartes’ great book and acts as a companion for reading this key work, examining: The context of Descartes’ work and the background to his writing; Each separate part of the text in relation to its goals, meanings and impact; The reception the book received when first seen (...) by the world; The relevance of Descartes’ work to modern philosophy, it’s legacy and influence. With further reading included throughout, this text follows Descartes’ original work closely, making it essential reading for all students of philosophy, and all those wishing to get to grips with this classic work. This edition revises the earlier guidebook entitled _Descartes and the Meditations_ (2003). It has been thoroughly revised, and contains expanded treatment of the method of doubt, theory of ideas, and new discussion of Descartes' theory of vision. (shrink)

Laying foundations -- Rejecting aggression -- Safeguarding cooperation -- Enforcing law -- Rectifying injury -- Liberating society -- Situating liberation.

With its unique combination of depth, clarity, and humor that has enchanted millions, this beloved classic by bestselling author Gary Zukav opens the fascinating world of quantum physics to readers with no mathematical or technical background. "Wu Li" is the Chinese phrase for physics. It means "patterns of organic energy," but it also means "nonsense," "my way," "I clutch my ideas," and "enlightenment." These captivating ideas frame Zukav's evocative exploration of quantum mechanics and relativity theory. Delightfully easy to read, (...) The Dancing Wu Li Masters illuminates the compelling powers at the core of all we know. (shrink)

It might seem unnecessary to define what a person is, but the issue of personhood has been a longstanding source of debate. The scope of personhood has been questioned in many applications, including human slavery, right to life and right to end life, animal rights, bioethics, corporate rights, and theology. It is believed the question will arise again as robots and artificial intelligence become more sophisticated and ingrained in our culture. What makes a person, and who gets to define personhood? (...) Viewpoints in this volume address this fascinating topic from a number of angles. (shrink)

In this essay, I want to explore one of the most ironic episodes in the history of propaganda, the attempt by various federal agencies to moderate American WWII anti-Japanese propaganda films. My texts will be four films, two produced by the military, and two by Hollywood: December 7th (1943), directed by Gregg Toland and revised by John Ford; Air Force (1943), directed Howard Hawks; Know Your Enemy: Japan (1945), directed by Frank Capra; and Betrayal for the East (1945), directed by (...) William Berke. As all of these films are readily available on YouTube, I will be brief in my description of them. Instead, I will focus on how they served to intensify racial hatred of Japanese in general and Japanese-Americans in particular, and how the federal government tried to control that propaganda—but was limited by its own policies regarding Japanese-Americans. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Philosophy vs. Science, Continental vs. Analytic France: Neo‐Kantians and Bergson Germany: Neo‐Kantians and Phenomenology France: From Existentialism to Foucault Germany: Habermas and the Frankfurt School France: Poststructuralism and the Abuse of Science?

Suppose that, for reasons of animal welfare, it would be better if everyone stopped eating chicken. Does it follow that you should stop eating chicken? Proponents of the “inefficacy objection” argue that, due to the scale and complexity of markets, the expected effects of your chicken purchases are negligible. So the expected effects of eating chicken do not make it wrong. -/- We argue that this objection does not succeed, in two steps. First, empirical data about chicken production tells us (...) that the expected effects of consuming *many* chickens are not negligible. Second, this implies that the expected effect of consuming one chicken is ordinarily not negligible. *Parity* between your purchase and other counterfactual purchases and *uncertainty* about others’ consumption behavior each tend to pull the expected effect of a single purchase toward the average large scale effect. While some purchases do have negligible expected effects, many do not. (shrink)