Deep neural networks (DNNs) have had extraordinary successes in classifying photographic images of objects and are often described as the best models of biological vision. This conclusion is largely based on three sets of findings: (1) DNNs are more accurate than any other model in classifying images taken from various datasets, (2) DNNs do the best job in predicting the pattern of human errors in classifying objects taken from various behavioral datasets, and (3) DNNs do the best job in predicting (...) brain signals in response to images taken from various brain datasets (e.g., single cell responses or fMRI data). However, these behavioral and brain datasets do not test hypotheses regarding what features are contributing to good predictions and we show that the predictions may be mediated by DNNs that share little overlap with biological vision. More problematically, we show that DNNs account for almost no results from psychological research. This contradicts the common claim that DNNs are good, let alone the best, models of human object recognition. We argue that theorists interested in developing biologically plausible models of human vision need to direct their attention to explaining psychological findings. More generally, theorists need to build models that explain the results of experiments that manipulate independent variables designed to test hypotheses rather than compete on making the best predictions. We conclude by briefly summarizing various promising modeling approaches that focus on psychological data. (shrink)

On several key issues we agree with the commentators. Perhaps most importantly, everyone seems to agree that psychology has an important role to play in building better models of human vision, and (most) everyone agrees (including us) that deep neural networks (DNNs) will play an important role in modelling human vision going forward. But there are also disagreements about what models are for, how DNN–human correspondences should be evaluated, the value of alternative modelling approaches, and impact of marketing hype in (...) the literature. In our view, these latter issues are contributing to many unjustified claims regarding DNN–human correspondences in vision and other domains of cognition. We explore all these issues in this response. (shrink)

The doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty has long been regarded as the most fundamental element of the British Constitution. It holds that Parliament has unlimited legislative authority, and that the courts have no authority to judge statutes invalid. This doctrine has now been criticized on historical and philosophical grounds and critics claim that it is a relatively recent invention of academic lawyers that superseded an earlier tradition in which Parliament's authority was limited to common law. The critics also argue that it (...) is based on a misunderstanding of the relationship between statutory and common law, and is morally indefensible. The Sovereignty of Parliament: History and Philosophy responds to these criticisms. It first defines and clarifies the concept of legislative sovereignty and then describes the historical origins and the development of the doctrine from the thirteenth to the end of the nineteenth century. Professor Goldsworthy goes on to identify many different reasons why persuaded statesmen, lawyers, and political theorists have endorsed the doctrine. He discusses the ideas of a large number of legal and political thinkers, including Fortescue, St German, Hooker, Coke, Bacon, Parker, Milton, Hobbes, Hale, Locke, Bolingbroke, Blackstone, and Burke. He shows that judges in Great Britain have never had authority to invalidate statutes, and that the doctrine is much older than is generally realized. The book concludes by dealing with philosophical criticisms of the doctrine. Combining the insights of earlier thinkers with those of contemporary legal philosophers, it demonstrates that these criticisms are based on a defective understanding of the nature and foundations of law, and of the relationship between legislative authority and the common law. It argues that the doctrine is morally defensible, and refutes the thesis that the judges have authority to modify or reject it. (shrink)

In Capitalism and the Jews, Jerry Z. Muller attempts to resolve Milton Friedman's paradox: Why is it that Jewish intellectuals have been so hostile to capitalism even though capitalism has so greatly benefited the Jews? In one chapter Muller answers, in effect, that Jewish intellectuals have not been anticapitalist. Elsewhere, however, Muller implicitly explains the leftist tendencies of most intellectuals—Jewish and gentile—by unspooling the anticapitalist thread in the main lines of Western thought, culminating in Marx but by no means (...) ending with him. Thus, Milton Friedman saw a paradox where none existed. This may have been because Friedman was an economist, and economics is the one strand of Western thought that is, by and large, procapitalist. To an economist, opposition to capitalism may be paradoxical; to noneconomists, economics is alienating in its form and in its content. There is thus no mystery as to why intellectuals, including Jewish intellectuals, tend to shun economics and therefore gravitate to the left. (shrink)

In Capitalism and the Jews, Jerry Z. Muller attempts to resolve Milton Friedman's paradox: Why is it that Jewish intellectuals have been so hostile to capitalism even though capitalism has so greatly benefited the Jews? In one chapter Muller answers, in effect, that Jewish intellectuals have not been anticapitalist. Elsewhere, however, Muller implicitly explains the leftist tendencies of most intellectuals—Jewish and gentile—by unspooling the anticapitalist thread in the main lines of Western thought, culminating in Marx but by no means (...) ending with him. Thus, Milton Friedman saw a paradox where none existed. This may have been because Friedman was an economist, and economics is the one strand of Western thought that is, by and large, procapitalist. To an economist, opposition to capitalism may be paradoxical; to noneconomists, economics is alienating in its form and in its content. There is thus no mystery as to why intellectuals, including Jewish intellectuals, tend to shun economics and therefore gravitate to the left. (shrink)

"The demonization of the radical right ill serves us when now, more than ever before, it is vitally important to know all we can about this esoteric milieu's nature and potentialities…by…demonizing the many, we cloak the few, and, however unwittingly, facilitate the existence of evil in the world." —From the Introduction by Jeffrey Kaplan White power groups are universally vilified and feared. But to better understand the threat they pose, scholars and activists must try to better understand their disturbing (...) ideas and practices. In this controversial volume, Jeffrey Kaplan brings to light the workings of white supremacy movements in the United States and Europe in the years since World War II. The first half of the Encyclopedia is made up of over 100 entries—many of them essay-length—describing the people, groups and themes that make up the radical racist right. Some of the entries are written by movement activists themselves, providing useful insider accounts. The second half contains original resources circulated within the movement, each prefaced and placed in scholarly context by the editor. These documents, although offending, are invaluable to researchers and often available nowhere else. Cross-references and an index make the information easily accessible. For scholars of race, religion, politics or social movements, the Encyclopedia of White Power is an essential resource. (shrink)

I critically examine the claim that modal collapse arguments against the traditional doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS) are in general fallacious. In a recent paper, Christopher Tomaszewski alleges that modal collapse arguments against DDS are invalid, owing to illicit substitutions of nonrigid singular terms into intensional contexts. I show that this is not, in general, the case. I show, further, that where existing modal collapse arguments are vulnerable to this charge the arguments can be repaired without any apparent dialectical impropriety. (...) I conclude that the genuine debate over modal collapse and divine simplicity and modal collapse is substantially a controversy over the metaphysics of divine action, and that this constitutes a fruitful direction in which to take future discussions of the subject. (shrink)

Integrating personality, behavioral, and cognitive theories of change, the author examines the operations, measurement, and evolution of behavioral and ethical standards that distinguish capitalism from other ideologies.

The consequence argument purports to show that determinism is true only if no one has free will. Judgments about whether the argument is sound depend on how one understands locutions of the form 'p and no one can render p false'. The main interpretation on offer appeals to counterfactual sufficiency: s can render p false just in case there is something s can do such that, were s to do it, p would be false; otherwise, s cannot render p false. (...) Here I show that, in the context of the consequence argument, this interpretation conflicts with widely endorsed principles governing the logic of counterfactuals. (shrink)

There is not, of course, a one-to-one relation between policy conclusions and the conclusions of positive economics; if there were, there would be no ...

Jeffrey Barrett presents the most comprehensive study yet of a problem that has puzzled physicists and philosophers since the 1930s.

We present a new puzzle about logical truth, necessity, and moral responsibility. We defend one solution to the puzzle. A corollary of our preferred solution is that prominent arguments for the incompatibility of determinism and moral responsibility are invalid.

Eliminativists sometimes invoke evolutionary debunking arguments against ordinary object beliefs, either to help them establish object skepticism or to soften the appeal of commonsense ontology. I argue that object debunkers face a self-defeat problem: their conclusion undermines the scientific support for one of their premises, because evolutionary biology depends on our object beliefs. Using work on reductionism and multiple realizability from the philosophy of science, I argue that it will not suffice for an eliminativist debunker to simply appeal to some (...) object-free surrogate theory of evolution that results from converting any scientific proposition about some object K into a proposition about simples arranged K-wise. In the process, I examine some hazards peculiar to eliminative reductions of scientific theories, and propose a trilemma for eliminativists who attempt to recoup generality for ontologically sparse reducing theories by appealing to pluralities of simples arranged K-wise. The paper is intended to define and develop the object debunker’s self-defeat problem for further study, and to clarify some of the ways sparse and abundant ontologies interact with scientific theory. (shrink)

In this original and compelling book, Jeffrey P. Bishop, a philosopher, ethicist, and physician, argues that something has gone sadly amiss in the care of the dying by contemporary medicine and in our social and political views of death, as shaped by our scientific successes and ongoing debates about euthanasia and the "right to die"--or to live. __The Anticipatory Corpse: Medicine, Power, and the Care of the Dying__, informed by Foucault's genealogy of medicine and power as well as by (...) a thorough grasp of current medical practices and medical ethics, argues that a view of people as machines in motion--people as, in effect, temporarily animated corpses with interchangeable parts--has become epistemologically normative for medicine. The dead body is subtly anticipated in our practices of exercising control over the suffering person, whether through technological mastery in the intensive care unit or through the impersonal, quasi-scientific assessments of psychological and spiritual "medicine." The result is a kind of nihilistic attitude toward the dying, and troubling contradictions and absurdities in our practices. Wide-ranging in its examples, from organ donation rules in the United States, to ICU medicine, to "spiritual surveys," to presidential bioethics commissions attempting to define death, and to high-profile cases such as Terri Schiavo's, __The Anticipatory Corpse__ explores the historical, political, and philosophical underpinnings of our care of the dying and, finally, the possibilities of change. A ground-breaking work in bioethics, this book will provoke thought and argument for all those engaged in medicine, philosophy, theology, and health policy. "With extraordinary philosophical sophistication as well as knowledge of modern medicine, Bishop argues that the body that shapes the work of modern medicine is a dead body. He defends this claim decisively with with urgency. I know of no book that is at once more challenging and informative as __The Anticipatory Corpse. __To say this book is the most important one written in the philosophy of medicine in the last twenty-five years would not do it justice. This book is destined to change the way we think and, hopefully, practice medicine." --_Stanley Hauerwas, Duke Divinity School _ "Jeffrey Bishop carefully builds a detailed, scholarly case that medicine is shaped by its attitudes toward death. Clinicians, ethicists, medical educators, policy makers, and administrators need to understand the fraught relationship between clinical practices and death, and __The Anticipatory Corpse __is an essential text. Bishop's use of the writings of Michel Foucault is especially provocative and significant. This book is the closest we have to a genealogy of death." --_Arthur W. Frank, University of Calgary _ "Jeffrey Bishop has produced a masterful study of how the living body has been placed within medicine's metaphysics of efficient causality and within its commitment to a totalizing control of life and death, which control has only been strengthened by medicine's taking on the mantle of a bio-psycho-socio-spiritual model. This volume's treatment of medicine's care of the dying will surely be recognized as a cardinal text in the philosophy of medicine." --_H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., Rice University, Baylor College of Medicine_. (shrink)

En este artículo deseamos observar, desde el punto de vista literario, el relato de la Creación contado por los indígenas mayas-quichés en el Popol Vuh y compararlo con el relato bíblico del Génesis. Encontrar los puntos en común y las diferencias entre los dos textos nos llevará a observar la idea ..

Epistemic Consequentialism Consequentialism is the view that, in some sense, rightness is to be understood in terms conducive to goodness. Much of the philosophical discussion concerning consequentialism has focused on moral rightness or obligation or normativity. But there is plausibly also epistemic rightness, epistemic obligation, and epistemic normativity. Epistemic rightness is often denoted with talk … Continue reading Consequentialism Epistemic →.

This chapter presents the main formalism of the book, which is used in subsequent chapters to describe a variety of concepts in Husserlian phenomenology, and thereby unify them. A dynamical systems approach to Husserl is introduced, and several dynamical laws of Husserlian phenomenology are described. The first is an expectation rule according to which expectations are determined by what a person knows, sees, and does. The second is a learning rule according to which background knowledge is updated in a specific (...) way when experiences fulfill or frustrate prior expectations. In addition to these rules, a “supervenience function” is described, which associates how a thing is seen with a “trail set,” the set ways that thing is expected to look, relative to all possible ways of moving around it. This function further illustrates the explanatory dimension of phenomenology described in Chap. 2, whereby how we immanently experience things is determined by how we expect them to look relative to counterfactual movement patterns. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Form and Discontent*Rosmarie Waldrop (bio)1. Composition as ExplanationIn the beginning there is Gertrude Stein, who says in “Composition as Explanation”: “Everything is the same except composition and as the composition is different and always going to be different everything is not the same” [520].I could also say, in the beginning is Aristotle: “the fable is simply this, the combination of the incidents” [1460].2. A Look AroundThe forms that (...) have been striking me as “wild” have tended to be Steinian in this sense of stressing the horizontal, the axis of composition. I’m most struck by 3 tendencies: one is literally spatial composition, e.g. Susan Howe’s work; another, an emphasis on discontinuity, leaps on the level of syntax, of logic, of grammar. Breaks that do not immediately fold back into a smooth unity and may occur in mid-sentence:I was on my way from Carthage, it was night. It is not wax I am scorching was dead about her with knots.—Norma Cole, MarsI hide behind a category by misbehaving.—Carla Harryman, Under the BridgeLoop conceived in a line, the spine with its regions, reasons. On another, sweaters hang by the wrist to dry. The list is sweet. You lie. The eye is met by the season.—Ron Silliman, ParadiseYou took my temperature which I had meant to save for a more difficult day.—Rosmarie Waldrop, The Reproduction of ProfilesWent out so I’d take the car and a whole system of banking and money is based on a hierarchy.—Leslie Scalapino, Considering How Exaggerated the Music IsROAST POTATOESRoast Potatoes for.—Gertrude Stein, “Tender Buttons”Or, a subtler example, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s almost unnoticeable shifts from one grammatical structure into another: [End Page 54]Never mind if he calls, the places you get through inwardness take time, and to drift down to the shore of the island, you know by the sand moving, even the coarse sand here It’s hard to say if you can even stand up, there....[13]The third tendency is mathematical. There is a lot of counting. Not stresses, not even syllables—I’m not considering that most unimaginative bunch, the new formalists—but words per line, sentences per paragraph. You all know about Ron Silliman’s love for the Fibonacci number series, or Lyn Hejinian’s My Life, which began with 37 sections of 37 sentences each. When she published a second edition at age 45, she added 8 sentences to each section plus 8 new sections.Jacques Roubaud: “No ideas but in numbers” [291].Then, in a somewhat more remote way, a number of people use ideas of permutation. For example, Jackson Mac Low’s 4 Trains, of which I will quote the first two stanzas:Train rule atom intricate nitrogen. Rule unusual leotard entropy. Atom train ostrich might. Intricate nitrogen train rule intricate casual atom train entropy. Nitrogen intricate train rule ostrich genealogy entropy nitrogen.Rule unusual leotard entropy. Unusual nitrogen unusual social unusual atom leotard. Leotard entropy ostrich train atom rule dies. Entropy nitrogen train rule ostrich pope yearly.[7]As Zukofsky puts it: “[Thus] poetry may be defined as an order of words that as movement and tone (rhythm and pitch) approaches in varying degrees the wordless art of music as a kind of mathematical limit” [27].All these examples draw attention to arrangement, composition. They all listen to language. I once wrote:I don’t even have thoughts, I say, I have methods that make language think, take over and me by the hand. Into sense or offense, syntax stretched across rules, relations of force, fluid the dip of the plumb line, the pull of eyes.... No beginnings. All unrepentant middle.[A Form / of Taking / It All 74]And none of these forms are “organic form.” None relies primarily on metaphor, though from the Romantics on poetry has been more or less identified with it.3. Frameworka. HistoricalLet me step back for a moment to the beginnings of the concept of organic form, what it reacted against.When Goethe started to make a splash writing free verse, around 1770, the dominant aesthetic... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Four Prose PoemsRosmarie Waldrop (bio)Conversation 9 On Varieties of OblivionAfter bitter resistance the river disappears into the night, he says. Washes the daily war out into tides of wounded dream. I know no word to dive from, the dark so dense, so almost without dimension, swallowing the sounds back into eclipse while making love to my body. Fish smell travels the regions of sleep, westward like the dawn. (...) Then I wake, too early to bring anything back, unsure of what I want, terrified I’ll fail to seize it by a hair.We need a grand decor for oblivion, she says. But the sea takes all with equal tenderness. As the past does. Already it suffuses the present with more inclusive tonalities. Not constraining it in melodic sequence, but setting a rooster next to the silence that molds my words. Or injured flesh. Impersonal. Only an animal could be so.An avatar of the holy ghost, he chuckles. Or the angel of the annunciation beating his wings against a door slammed shut. Behind it, love already plays the organ. With or without him. He is invisible because we have rejected his message.On old photos, she says, I see a stranger standing in my skin. As if an apple could fall too far from the tree. Yet she is called my past and functions as near-certainty. The way some beliefs are exempt from doubt, are as it were the hinges on which my doubts and questions turn. So that I seem the same to you while I’ve already moved through the next door. From left to right. [End Page 63]Conversation 10 On SeparationMy separation from the landscape started even earlier, she says. In my mother’s mirror, which staged dialectic and confused my instincts. There are few trains in the thick smoke, the run-down station, more waste of grain, more images lost. I carry a mirror in my cortex, but cannot inhabit my womb. Or the silence that is the matter between parts of speech.A pebble in an eddy, he says, reveals the course of the current. Sometimes it’s a small difference that makes our closeness arch, for a moment, into a solid vault, a space thick with birdsong and green sun. Then it again slips through my fingers. I search for a word, and nothing exists but the gap beckoning me to some strange horizon without event.Only out of body could we be out of the panic of time, she says. Momentarily bracket it maybe, in illness, degrees of withdrawal. But hours reproduce, days go by consumed by heat, the flimmer above the lake. I can’t distinguish gravity from other distortions of space, or sign from symbol. My sense of time begins six billion years ago, when the fish stretched their fins onto dry land though the sea groaned in their belly, or forty, with breasts and monthly bleeding. The now always already darkening, the way a sentence anticipates the period it will stiffen in.The galaxies avoid collapsing onto each other by virtue of their recessional motion, he says. Father and son walk away from the bed in opposite directions. But sweat clings to our names, the secretions of closeness. As if we were submerged in one and the same sleep. If I withdraw into more impermeable regions, your shadow grows. All respiratory passages lead to you. As if you were the certainty the game of doubting presupposes. The niggling voice of death. [End Page 64]Conversation 11 On DepthIt would take more than a pebble, she says, to sound your undertones. Something slips away as you speak, tense with life, like a startled beast in the woods. Is it a lizard, snake, or unused thought that runs alongside your words, while the rustling vines close over the trace of flight?Isn’t this a case, he says, of deep breathing pulled into spasms of interpretation the way children are pulled into the future by the very gravity of their innocence. And with a speed unlimited by the young space. The joints between future and present swell and sweep apart whole galaxies, but even the... (shrink)

Jeffrey E. Brower presents and explains the hylomorphic conception of the material world developed by Thomas Aquinas, according to which material objects are composed of both matter and form. In addition to presenting and explaining Aquinas's views, Brower seeks wherever possible to bring them into dialogue with the best recent literature on related topics. Along the way, he highlights the contribution that Aquinas's views make to a host of contemporary metaphysical debates, including the nature of change, composition, material constitution, (...) the ontology of stuff vs. things, the proper analysis of ordinary objects, the truthmakers for essential vs. accidental predication, and the metaphysics of property possession. (shrink)

El presente trabajo estudia la concepción erótica de la subjetividad en la Fenomenología del espíritu de Hegel. Las tesis que intentamos mostrar son dos. La primera es que la concepción erótica de la subjetividad tiene un sentido muy restringido: es la referencia negativa y puramente inmediata a la cosa viva, la aniquilación del objeto natural que no alcanza la completa negación del ser-otro porque la dimensión erótica de la subjetividad requiere e implica la autonomía del objeto en cuestión. La segunda (...) tesis es que, en cuanto posicionamiento práctico y negativo de la autoconciencia respecto de su objeto, la concepción erótica de la subjetividad no se limita al Capítulo IV, aunque es en este último, y específicamente en su parte introductoria, donde se establecen los caracteres propios de dicha concepción. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is twofold. Firstly, to systematize Butler’s reading of the introductory part and section A of chapter IV of the Phenomenology of Spirit through the joint approach of Subjects of Desire, The Psychic Life of Power and You Be My Body for Me. Secondly, to take a critical position regarding the Butlerian hermeneutics. The existing research lacks a critical approach. We seek to problematize her reading so as to be able to contribute critically to the corpus (...) of complementary bibliography on this issue. (shrink)

El presente trabajo aborda de manera exploratoria la recepción argentina de la Phänomenologie des Geistes de 1807 en los años 60. Nuestro propósito consiste en examinar las obras más destacadas, delimitar los lineamientos interpretativos, las problemáticas de interés más acuciantes, los interlocutores principales y las obras disponibles. En primer lugar, presentamos el tema y señalamos los antecedentes más relevantes. En segundo lugar, nos detenemos en la década de 1960. Sostenemos que los intereses fundamentales de esta etapa se dividen en cuatro (...) temáticas: i. la dialéctica de las figuras de la conciencia, ii. los escritos juveniles de Hegel y su relación con la Phä., iii. las interpretaciones francesas y iv. la relación entre Hegel y Marx. Examinamos las obras más significativas de este periodo a la luz de esta estructuración temática. Finalmente, en tercer lugar, realizamos algunas consideraciones conclusivas que nos permiten dar con una caracterización general de la cuestión desarrollada. (shrink)

Now in paperback, this important book explores the central role of historical thought in the full range of Heidegger’s thought, both the early writings leading up to Being and Time, and after the “reversal” or Kehre that inaugurated his later work. Barash examines Heidegger’s views on history in a richly developed context of debates that transpired in the early 20th-century German philosophy of history. He addresses a key unifying theme—the problem of historical meaning and the search for coherent criteria of (...) truth in an era of historical relativism—as he traces the engagement with historicity throughout all major epochs and works. Barash revises this edition to explore new material, including Heidegger’s lecture course texts from 1910 to 1923, and adds an expanded, updated bibliography. (shrink)

Patrick Grim advances arguments meant to show that the doctrine of divine omniscience—the classical doctrine according to which God knows all truths—is false. In particular, we here have in mind to focus on two such arguments: the set theoretic argument and the semantic argument. These arguments due to Grim run parallel to, respectively, familiar paradoxes in set theory and naive truth theory. It is beyond the purview of this article to adjudicate whether or not these are successful arguments against the (...) classical doctrine of omniscience. What we are here interested in is a way in which these arguments can be generalized. In particular, we show how generalizations of those arguments can target, explicitly, alternatives to the classical doctrine of omniscience, including what we here call 'restricted omniscience' and 'open future open theism'. As a corollary, considerations of Grim-style arguments do not support these alternatives to the classical doctrine of omniscience over the classical doctrine. We conclude that what is paradoxical is not the classical doctrine of omniscience just as such; rather, what is paradoxical is a core commitment shared by the classical doctrine and its more modest alternatives, namely, the thesis that God is a perfectly logical reasoner. (shrink)

Epicureanism after the generation of its founders has been characterised as dogmatic, uncreative and static. But this volume brings together work from leading classicists and philosophers that demonstrates the persistent interplay in the school between historical and contemporary influences from outside the school and a commitment to the founders' authority. The interplay begins with Epicurus himself, who made arresting claims of intellectual independence, yet also admitted to taking over important ideas from predecessors, and displayed more receptivity than is usually thought (...) to those of his contemporaries. The same principles of autonomy and openness figure importantly in the three major areas of focus in these essays: theology, politics and the emotions. (shrink)

Reliabilism—the view that a belief is justified iff it is produced by a reliable process—is often characterized as a form of consequentialism. Recently, critics of reliabilism have suggested that since it is a form of consequentialism, reliabilism condones a variety of problematic trade-offs involving cases where someone forms an epistemically deficient belief now that will lead her to more epistemic value later. In the present paper, we argue that the relevant argument against reliabilism fails because it equivocates. While there is (...) a sense in which reliabilism is a kind of consequentialism, it is not of a kind on which we should expect problematic trade-offs. (shrink)

In the moral vacuum and world of shifting values following World War I, Aldous Huxley was both a sensitive reflector and an articulate catalyst. This work provides a highly illuminating analysis of Huxley's evolution from skeptic to mystic. As Milton Birnbaum shows, in a perceptive interpretation of Huxley's poetry, fiction, essays and biographies--what evolved in Huxley's moral and intellectual pilgrimage was not so much a change in direction as a shift in emphasis. Even in the sardonic Huxley of the (...) 1920s and 1930s, there is a moral concern. In the later Huxley, there are traces of the satirical skepticism which delighted his readers in the decades preceding World War II.A man of letters, a keen observer, seeker of new ways while profoundly knowledgeable in the truths of ancient wisdom, Huxley tried to achieve a symbiotic synthesis of the best of all worlds. In clarifying and interpreting Huxley's intellectual, moral, and philosophical development, Birnbaum touches upon all the subjects that came under the scrutiny of a singularly encyclopedic mind.This book is of great worth to those interested both in Huxley the brilliant satirist and in Huxley the seeker of salvation. In his search, Huxley typified the modern quest for values. Milton Birnbaum's study is an invaluable guide in that journey. His new introduction takes account of research and analysis of Huxley that has occurred since this book's original publication. (shrink)

Despite an explosion of studies on memory in historical and cultural studies, there is relatively little in moral philosophy on this subject. In this book, Jeffrey Blustein provides a systematic and philosophically rigorous account of a morality of memory. Drawing on a broad range of philosophical and humanistic literatures, he offers a novel examination of memory and our relations to people and events from our past, the ways in which memory is preserved and transmitted, and the moral responsibilities associated (...) with it. Blustein treats topics of responsibility for one's own past; historical injustice and the role of memory in doing justice to the past; the relationship of collective memory to history and identity; collective and individual obligations to remember those who have died, including those who are dear to us; and the moral significance of bearing witness. (shrink)

In order to understand ongoing activity, observers segment it into meaningful temporal parts. Segmentation can be based on bottom‐up processing of distinctive sensory characteristics, such as movement features. Segmentation may also be affected by top‐down effects of knowledge structures, including information about actors' intentions. Three experiments investigated the role of movement features and intentions in perceptual event segmentation, using simple animations. In all conditions, movement features significantly predicted where participants segmented. This relationship was stronger when participants identified larger units than (...) when they identified smaller units, and stronger when the animations were generated randomly than when they were generated by goal‐directed human activity. This pattern suggests that bottom‐up processing played an important role in segmentation of these stimuli, but that this was modulated by top‐down influence of knowledge structures. To describe accurately how observers perceive ongoing activity, one must account for the effects of distinctive sensory characteristics, the effects of knowledge structures, and their interactions. (shrink)