There is general acknowledgement that both the anterior cingulate and orbitofrontal cortex are implicated in reinforcement-guided decision making, and emotion and social behaviour. Despite the interest that these areas generate in both the cognitive neuroscience laboratory and the psychiatric clinic, ideas about the distinctive contributions made by each have only recently begun to emerge. This reflects an increasing understanding of the component processes that underlie reinforcement- guided decision making, such as the representation of reinforcement expectations, the exploration, updating and representation (...) of action values, and the appreciation that choices are guided not just by the prospect of reward but also by the costs that action entails. Evidence is emerging to suggest that the anterior cingulate and orbitofrontal cortex make distinct contributions to each of these aspects of decision making. (shrink)

van Behrens, Dierk Review(s) of: Darwin, God and the meaning of life: How evolutionary theory undermines everything you thought you knew, by Steve Stewart-Williams Cambridge University Press, 2010, ISBN 9780521762786.

von Behrens, Dierk Review of: Brief encounters: Literature and beyond, by Satendra Nandan, IVY Press International Publishers LPO Box 8069, ANU, Acton, 0200, ACT, Australia, 1st Edition, 2015, pbk. pp. 257, $ 20.00.

von Behrens, Dierk Review of: How Echidna got its quills, by L and G Adams, illustrated by Barry Olive; Ali the Bold Heart, sensitively written by Jane Jolly and beautifully illustrated in watercolour by Elise Hurst.

von Behrens, Dierk Assimilation is a process by which a person or group belonging to one culture adopts the practices of another, thereby becoming a member of that culture.

von Behrens, Dierk Review(s) of: Philosophers without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life Edited by Louise Antony New York: OUP; 2010; 320 pp.

von Behrens, Dierk Review of: The great philosophers, by Jeremy Stangroom and James Garvey, Arcturus Publishing, 160 pgs. 9.99 pounds Hard back. 69 pictures. 2005. Index. 978-1-84837-018-02005.

von Behrens, Dierk Review of: Snakes, by Barbara Taylor, 64-pages; Novum organum scientiarum, by Francis Bacon; The origin of species, by Charles Darwin.

One of the goals of computerized tutoring systems is to optimize the learning of facts. Over a hundred years of declarative memory research have identified two robust effects that can improve such systems: the spacing and the testing effect. By making optimal use of both and adjusting the system to the individual learner using cognitive models based on declarative memory theories, such systems consistently outperform traditional methods. This adjustment process is driven by a continuously updated estimate of the rate of (...) forgetting for each item and learner on the basis of the learner's accuracy and response time. In this study, we investigated to what extent these estimates of individual rates of forgetting are stable over time and across different materials. We demonstrate that they are stable over time but not across materials. Even though most theories of human declarative memory assume a single underlying rate of forgetting, we show that, in practice, it makes sense to assume different materials are forgotten at different rates. If a computerized, adaptive fact-learning system allowed different rates of forgetting for different materials, it could adapt to individual learners more readily. (shrink)

A long-standing theme in discussion of perception and thought has been that our primary cognitive contact with individual objects and events in the world derives from our perceptual contact with them. When I look at a duck in front of me, I am not merely presented with the fact that there is at least one duck in the area, rather I seem to be presented withthisthing (as one might put it from my perspective) in front of me, which looks to (...) me to be a duck. Furthermore, such a perception would seem to put me in a position not merely to make the existential judgment that there is some duck or other present, but rather to make a singular, demonstrative judgment, that that is a duck. My grounds for an existential judgment in this case derives from my apprehension of the demonstrative thought and not vice versa. (shrink)

One of the goals of computerized tutoring systems is to optimize the learning of facts. Over a hundred years of declarative memory research have identified two robust effects that can improve such systems: the spacing and the testing effect. By making optimal use of both and adjusting the system to the individual learner using cognitive models based on declarative memory theories, such systems consistently outperform traditional methods (Van Rijn, Van Maanen, & Van Woudenberg, 2009). This adjustment process is driven by (...) a continuously updated estimate of the rate of forgetting for each item and learner on the basis of the learner's accuracy and response time. In this study, we investigated to what extent these estimates of individual rates of forgetting are stable over time and across different materials. We demonstrate that they are stable over time but not across materials. Even though most theories of human declarative memory assume a single underlying rate of forgetting, we show that, in practice, it makes sense to assume different materials are forgotten at different rates. If a computerized, adaptive fact‐learning system allowed different rates of forgetting for different materials, it could adapt to individual learners more readily. (shrink)

On Inception is a translation of Martin Heidegger's Gesamtausgabe 70. This work belongs to the crucial period, before and during WWII, when Heidegger was at work on a series of treatises that begins with "Contributions to Philosophy" and includes "The Event" and "The History of Beyng." These works are difficult, even hermetic, but represent a crucial development in Heidegger's thinking. On Inception deepens the investigation underway in the other volumes of the series and provides a unique perspective on Heidegger's (...) thinking of Being and of Event. Here, Heidegger asks, with a greater insistence than anywhere else in his work, what it might mean to think of being as event, and not as presence. Event cannot be thought without the sense of a beginning - an inception - and so, Heidegger insists, we must try to think of being as inception, as fundamentally inceptive. On Inception pursues rigorously the difficult and puzzling implications of this speculation. It does not merely extend work already undertaken but also opens doors onto wholly other pathways. (shrink)

Is it OK to lie to Siri? Is it bad to mistreat a robot for our own pleasure? Under what condition should we grant a moral status to an artificial intelligence (AI) system? This paper looks at different arguments for granting moral status to an AI system: the idea of indirect duties, the relational argument, the argument from intelligence, the arguments from life and information, and the argument from sentience. In each but the last case, we find unresolved issues with (...) the particular argument, which leads us to move to a different one. We leave the idea of indirect duties aside since these duties do not imply considering an AI system for its own sake. The paper rejects the relational argument and the argument from intelligence. The argument from life may lead us to grant a moral status to an AI system, but only in a weak sense. Sentience, by contrast, is a strong argument for the moral status of an AI system—based, among other things, on the Aristotelian principle of equality: that same cases should be treated in the same way. The paper points out, however, that no AI system is sentient given the current level of technological development. (shrink)

Erstmals werden in einem deutschsprachigen Werk zentrale Theorien sowie theoretische Konzepte der Internationalen Politischen Ökonomie vorgestellt. Der Band gibt einen fundierten Überblick über verschiedene theoretische Perspektiven mit ihren jeweiligen Stärken und Schwächen und verortet diese in der internationalen Diskussion. Der Band ermöglicht es, sich in die Vielfalt der verschiedenen Theorien einzuarbeiten – von Rational Choice, Keynesianismus und Institutionalismus über feministische Theorie, Regulations- und Weltsystemtheorie bis hin zu konstruktivistischen und poststrukturalistischen Theorien. Weiterhin werden wichtige Konzepte wie Laissez-Faire-Liberalismus, Finanzialisierung, Macht und die (...) Veränderung von Staatlichkeit diskutiert. ​. (shrink)

This article suggests evidence for and reasons why prior acquisition may either facilitate or inhibit acquisition of a new construction. It investigates acquisition of the German passive and future constructions which contain a lexical verb with either the auxiliary sein “to be” or werden “to become”, and are related through these to potential supporting constructions. We predicted that a supported construction should be acquired earlier, faster, and unusually rapidly. An inhibited construction should show an extended depressed usage. We analyzed a (...) dense corpus of a German boy between 2;0 and 5;0. He acquired the sein- before the werden-passive. The former was supported by his prior acquisition of the sein copula, whereas the werden-passive itself supported one werden copula construction. He acquired the werden-future extremely slowly due to the hindrance of a semantically identical construction. These results fit with an emergentist approach in which apparently “sudden” acquisition is still due to gradual learning mechanisms. (shrink)

Over the past three decades, the philosophy of biology has emerged from the shadow of the philosophy of physics to become a respectable and thriving philosophical subdiscipline. The authors take a fresh look at the life sciences and the philosophy of biology from a strictly realist and emergentist-naturalist perspective. They outline a unified and science-oriented philosophical framework that enables the clarification of many foundational and philosophical issues in biology. This book will be of interest both to life scientists and philosophers.

We provide a battery of examples of delusions against which theoretical accounts can be tested. Then, we identify neuropsychological anomalies that could produce the unusual experiences that may lead, in turn, to the delusions in our battery. However, we argue against Maher’s view that delusions are false beliefs that arise as normal responses to anomalous experiences. We propose, instead, that a second factor is required to account for the transition from unusual experience to delusional belief. The second factor in the (...) aetiology of delusions can be described superficially as a loss of the ability to reject a candidate for belief on the grounds of its implausibility and its inconsistency with everything else that the patient knows. But we point out some problems that confront any attempt to say more about the nature of this second factor. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy reflects his famous philosophical "turning." In this work, Heidegger returns to the question of being from its inception in Being and Time to a new questioning of being as event.

What exactly is hope and how does it influence our decisions? In How We Hope, Adrienne Martin presents a novel account of hope, the motivational resources it presupposes, and its function in our practical lives. She contends that hoping for an outcome means treating certain feelings, plans, and imaginings as justified, and that hope thereby involves sophisticated reflective and conceptual capacities. Martin develops this original perspective on hope--what she calls the "incorporation analysis"--in contrast to the two dominant philosophical (...) conceptions of hope: the orthodox definition, where hoping for an outcome is simply desiring it while thinking it possible, and agent-centered views, where hoping for an outcome is setting oneself to pursue it. In exploring how hope influences our decisions, she establishes that it is not always a positive motivational force and can render us complacent. She also examines the relationship between hope and faith, both religious and secular, and identifies a previously unnoted form of hope: normative or interpersonal hope. When we place normative hope in people, we relate to them as responsible agents and aspire for them to overcome challenges arising from situation or character. Demonstrating that hope merits rigorous philosophical investigation, both in its own right and in virtue of what it reveals about the nature of human emotion and motivation, How We Hope offers an original, sustained look at a largely neglected topic in philosophy. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger is one of the most important and influential philosophers of the 20th Century. A major figure in the development of phenomenology, his work also profoundly influenced many of the intellectual movements that followed in his wake, from Sartre's Existentialism to Derrida's deconstructionism. Towards the Definition of Philosophy brings together two seminal lectures that mark a breakthrough moment in Heidegger's thought and introduces the major themes that he would develop in his opus Being and Time.

Eric Martin and Daniel N. Osherson present a theory of inductive logic built on model theory. Their aim is to extend the mathematics of Formal Learning Theory to a more general setting and to provide a more accurate image of empirical inquiry. The formal results of their study illuminate aspects of scientific inquiry that are not covered by the commonly applied Bayesian approach.

A landmark discussion between two great thinkers, vital to an understanding of twentieth-century philosophy and intellectual history.

A ‘lottery belief’ is a belief that a particular ticket has lost a large, fair lottery, based on nothing more than the odds against it winning. The lottery paradox brings out a tension between the idea that lottery beliefs are justified and the idea that that one can always justifiably believe the deductive consequences of things that one justifiably believes – what is sometimes called the principle of closure. Many philosophers have treated the lottery paradox as an argument against the (...) second idea – but I make a case here that it is the first idea that should be given up. As I shall show, there are a number of independent arguments for denying that lottery beliefs are justified. (shrink)

This paper proposes a view of time that takes passage to be the most basic temporal notion, instead of the usual A-theoretic and B-theoretic notions, and explores how we should think of a world that exhibits such a genuine temporal passage. It will be argued that an objective passage of time can only be made sense of from an atemporal point of view and only when it is able to constitute a genuine change of objects across time. This requires that (...) passage can flip one fact into a contrary fact, even though neither side of the temporal passage is privileged over the other. We can make sense of this if the world is inherently perspectival. Such an inherently perspectival world is characterized by fragmentalism, a view that has been introduced by Fine in his ‘Tense and Reality’ (2005). Unlike Fine's tense-theoretic fragmentalism though, the proposed view will be a fragmentalist view based in a primitive notion of passage. (shrink)

I give an account how the principle of ‘respect for autonomy’ dominates the field of bioethics, and how it came to triumph over its competitors, ‘respect for persons’ and ‘respect for free power of choice’. I argue that ‘respect for autonomy’ is unsatisfactory as a basic principle of bioethics because it is grounded in too individualistic a worldview, citing concerns of African theorists and other communitarians who claim that the principle fails to acknowledge the fundamental importance of understanding persons within (...) the nexus of their communal relationships. I defend the claim that ‘respect for persons’ is a more appropriate principle, as it is able to acknowledge both individual decision making and the essential relationality of persons. I acknowledge that my preference for ‘respect for persons’ is problematic because of the important debate around the definition of ‘personhood’ in bioethics discourse. Relying on Thaddeus Metz's conception of moral status, I propose a relational definition of personhood that distinguishes between persons with agency and persons without agency, arguing that we have different moral obligations to these distinct categories of persons. I claim that this conception of personhood is better able to accommodate our moral intuitions than conventional approaches, and that it is able to do so without being speciesist or question-begging. (shrink)

An essential all-in-one introduction, Ethics for Engineers provides in-depth coverage of major ethical theories, professional codes of ethics, and case studies in a single volume. Incorporating numerous practical examples and about 100 review questions, it helps students better understand and address ethical issues that they may face in their future careers. Topics covered include whistle-blowing, the problem of many hands, gifts, bribes, conflicts of interest, engineering and environmental ethics, privacy and computer ethics, ethical technology assessment, and the ethics of cost-benefit (...) analysis and risk and uncertainty. (shrink)

There is a pervasive presumption that African thought is inherently anthropocentric and has little to contribute to environmental ethics. Against this view, a promising African environmentalism can be be found in a belief in a fundamental interrelatedness between natural objects. What establishes moral considerability on this African view is that entities are part of the interconnected web of life. This position accords moral standing to all living things, groups of living things, as well as inanimate natural entities. This view is (...) not only plausible, but also theoretically appealing. (shrink)

The Liar paradox arises when we consider a sentence that says of itself that it is not true. If such self-referential sentences exist? and examples like?This sentence is not true? certainly suggest this?, then our logic and standard notion of truth allow to infer a contradiction: The Liar sentence is true and not true. What has gone wrong? Must we revise our notion of truth and our logic? Or can we dispel the common conviction that there are such self-referential sentences? (...) The present study explores the second path.0After comparing the Liar reasoning in formal and informal logic and showing that there are no Gödelian Liar sentences, the study moves on from the semantics of self-reference to the metaphysics of expressions and proposes a novel solution to the Liar paradox: Meaningful expressions are distinct from their syntactic bases and exist only relative to contexts. Detailed semantico-metaphysical arguments show that in this dynamic setting, an object can be referred to only after it has started to exist. Hence the circular reference needed in the Liar paradox cannot occur, after all. As this solution is contextualist, it evades the expressibility problems of other proposals. (shrink)

With biobank research on the increase and the history of exploitation in Africa, it has become necessary to manage the transfer of human tissues across national boundaries. There are many accepted templates of Material Transfer Agreements that currently exist internationally. However, these templates do not address the specific concerns of South Africa and even of Africa as a continent. This article will examine three significantly important ethico-legal concepts that were deliberated and carefully adapted by a South African Institution to suit (...) the transfer of Human Biological Materials and associated data for biobank research, namely: informed consent; benefit sharing arrangements; and ownership together with intellectual property rights in human tissues. The discussion includes an analysis of current practice; the ethico-legal challenges in the South African/African context; the decisions made with regard to how the related ethico-legal challenges were addressed in the MTA; and justifications for implementing these decisions. The processes considered could be of benefit to other developing world countries who consider it necessary to manage the transfer of HBMs across national boundaries. (shrink)

This book provides the first systematic presentation of anthropology's 'ontological turn', placing it in the landscape of contemporary social theory.

_ Source: _Volume 6, Issue 2-3, pp 120 - 142 This paper aims to contribute to the debate over epistemic versus non-epistemic readings of the ‘hinges’ in Wittgenstein’s _On Certainty_. I follow Marie McGinn’s and Daniele Moyal-Sharrock’s lead in developing an analogy between mathematical sentences and certainties, and using the former as a model for the latter. However, I disagree with McGinn’s and Moyal-Sharrock’s interpretations concerning Wittgenstein’s views of both relata. I argue that mathematical sentences as well as certainties are (...) true and are propositions; that some of them can be epistemically justified; that in some senses they are not prior to empirical knowledge; that they are not ineffable; and that their primary function is epistemic as much as it is semantic. (shrink)

Humanity has reached a critical moment. Our world is unsettled and rapidly changing, and we face existential risks over the next century. Various outcomes--good and bad--are possible. Yet our approach to the future is characterized by short-term thinking, polarizing debates, alarmist rhetoric, and pessimism. In this short, exhilarating book, renowned scientist and bestselling author Martin Rees argues that humanity's prospects depend on our taking a very different approach to planning for tomorrow. The future of humanity is bound to the (...) future of science and hinges on how successfully we harness technological advances to address our challenges. If we are to use science to solve our problems while avoiding its dystopian risks, we must think rationally, globally, collectively, and optimistically about the long term. Advances in biotechnology, cybertechnology, robotics, and artificial intelligence--if pursued and applied wisely--could empower us to boost the developing and developed world and overcome the threats humanity faces on Earth, from climate change to nuclear war. At the same time, further advances in space science will allow humans to explore the solar system and beyond with robots and AI. But there is no "Plan B" for Earth--no viable alternative within reach if we do not care for our home planet. Rich with fascinating insights into cutting-edge science and technology, this accessible book will captivate anyone who wants to understand the critical issues that will define the future of humanity on Earth and beyond."-- Provided by publisher. (shrink)

Richard Rorty (1931 - 2007) ist einer der wichtigsten amerikanischen Philosophen der Gegenwart, der die analytische Philosophie sowohl geprägt als auch maßgeblich zu ihrer Kritik beigetragen und damit die Wiederentdeckung des Pragmatismus vorangetrieben hat. In diesem Handbuch werden alle wichtigen Aspekte seines Lebens und seiner philosophischen Arbeit dargestellt und einer wissenschaftlichen Diskussion unterzogen.

Objective: The establishment of patient-centered measures capable of empirically determining meaningful cognitive change after surgery can significantly improve the medical care of epilepsy patients. Thus, this study aimed to develop reliable change indices (RCIs) and standardized regression-based (SRB) change norms for a comprehensive neuropsychological test battery in the German language. Methods: Forty-seven consecutive patients with temporal lobe epilepsy underwent neuropsychological assessments, both before and 12 months after surgery. Practice-effect-adjusted RCIs and SRB change norms for each test score were computed. To (...) assess their usefulness, the presented methods were applied to a clinical sample, and binary logistic regression analyses were conducted to model the odds of achieving improvement in quality of life (QOL) after surgery. Results: The determined RCIs at 90% confidence intervals, and the SRB equations for each test score included in the test battery are provided. Cohen’s kappa analyses revealed a moderate mean agreement between the two measures, varying from slight to almost perfect agreement across test scores. Using these measures, a negative association between improvement in QOL and decline in verbal memory functions after surgery was detected. Significance: To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to provide RCIs and SRB change norms necessary for the objective determination of neuropsychological change in a comprehensive test battery in the German language, facilitating the individual monitoring of improvement and decline in each patients’ cognitive functioning and psychosocial situations after epilepsy surgery. The application of the described measures revealed a strong negative association between improvement in QOL and decline in verbal memory functions after surgery. (shrink)