Criminal attempts, it is often said, are crimes of intention. While many complete crimes can be committed recklessly, criminal attempts require “purposive conduct”; in attempts “the intent is the essence of the crime.” But what kind of intention is required; what must be intended, or purposed, by someone who is to be guilty of a criminal attempt?

We present an account of processing capacity in the ACT-R theory. At the symbolic level, the number of chunks in the current goal provides a measure of relational complexity. At the subsymbolic level, limits on spreading activation, measured by the attentional parameter W, provide a theory of processing capacity, which has been applied to performance, learning, and individual differences data.

Introduction, by R. A. Markus.--St. Augustine and Christian Platonism, by A. H. Armstrong.--Action and contemplation, by F. R. J. O'Connell.--St. Augustine on signs, by R. A. Markus.--The theory of signs in St. Augustine's De doctrina Christiana, by B. D. Jackson.--Si fallor, sum, by G. B. Matthews.--Augustine on speaking from memory, by G. B. Matthews.--The inner man, by G. B. Matthews.--On Augustine's concept of a person, by A. C. Lloyd.--Augustine on foreknowledge and free will, by W. L. Rowe.--Augustine on free will (...) and predestination, by J. M. Rist.--Time and contingency in St. Augustine, by R. Jordan.--Empiricism and Augustine's problems about time, by H. M. Lacey.--Political society, by P. R. L. Brown.--The development of Augustine's ideas on society before the Donatist controversy, by F. E. Cranz.--De Civitate Dei, XV, 2, and Augustine's idea of the Christian society, by F. E. Cranz.--Chronological table.--Note on further reading (p. [422]-423). (shrink)

How can a system of criminal punishment be justified? In particular can it be justified if the moral demand that we respect each other as autonomous moral agents is taken seriously? Traditional attempts to justify punishment as a deterrent or as retribution fail, but Duff suggests that punishment can be understood as a communicative attempt to bring a wrong-doer to repent her crime. This account is supported by discussions of moral blame, of penance, of the nature of the law's demands, (...) and of the proper meaning and purpose of the criminal process of trial and verdict: it deals both with the ideals that should inform a system of criminal law and the extent to which those ideals are actualised in existing institutions and practices. The conclusion is pessimistic: punishment cannot be justified within our legal system; and this gap between the ideal and the actual presents us with serious moral dilemmas. (shrink)

An extension of game theory to the two-person game involving collaboration. In a detailed discussion of a simple case, the author argues persuasively that his methods yield a strategy which is sensible, prudent and fair for both participants. One of the more interesting by-products is a method for comparing inter-personal preference scales, thus providing an answer to one of the standard objections to the Hedonistic calculus. Braithwaite's approach is novel, and should be of interest to game-theorists as well as philosophers.--A. (...) R. A. (shrink)

This book consists of three parts: a general theory of descriptive ethics, a general theory of ethical discourse, and an application of II to the ethical discourse of the Navaho Indians, based on the writer's own field studies. The work is careful, clear, thorough, and detailed, and the inclusion of field notes is helpful in understanding and evaluating Ladd's reconstructions. There are questions of detail where one might cavil, but the book is an important contribution to the relatively unexplored area (...) where philosophy and the social sciences overlap. --A. R. A. (shrink)

An excellent introduction to symbolic logic. Part I, "Principles of Inference and Definition," carries the reader through the first order predicate calculus with identity, and relates the formal theory of inference to many standard informal arguments. Chapter 8 contains by far the best elementary discussion of the theory of definition now in print. Part II, "Elementary Intuitive Set Theory," gives a clear introduction to the fundamental concepts, and prepares the way for more advanced work in the field. The book is (...) distinguished by the number and variety of the applications of logic considered, both in formal mathematical reasoning, and in the axiomatization of various scientific theories. The final sections contain material which should be of interest to experts as well as novices.--A. R. A. (shrink)

This is an able book of essays, written by well-qualified scholars, about an unjustly neglected nineteenth century German philosopher. He is known in this country primarily as the founder of "formal sociology," but much of what he has to say belongs with equal propriety to the philosophy of culture. The aim of the volume is to rehabilitate Simmel's reputation, which suffered much among sociologists from attacks by Abel and Sorokin. The volume also contains about 100 pages of Simmel's own essays (...) in translation: "The Ruin," "The Handle," and "The Aesthetic Significance of the Face," among others.--A. R. A. (shrink)

The paper argues that the rich cognitive abilities of humans are the result of a unique functional system in the human brain which is absent in the nonhuman brain. This "frontal feedback system" is suggested to have evolved in the transition from the great apes to humans and is a product of a reversal in the preferred direction of information flow in the human cortex due to the phylogenetic enlargement of the human frontal lobe. The frontal feedback system forms an (...) autonomous functional unit in the cortex whereby action-schemes in frontal cortices continually create fictitious sensory scenarios in posterior sensory cortices by manipulating the release of sensory representations there. These internal scenarios are created free of environmental constraints and reflect the human's internal cognitive and language processes. Nonhumans do not have a frontal feedback system and their internal cognitive processes are stimulus-bound. Evidence in support of the proposal is presented and some implications of the frontal feedback model for human experience are discussed. (shrink)

A revised and expanded version of studies by McKinsey, Winet and the authors, in axiomatic theories of value, together with a report of experiments designed to test the formal theories. This volume makes an important contribution to the theoretical and experimental investigation of values and decision-making, both of which subjects are still in their infancy. Experimental studies by Mosteller and Nogee and theoretical discussions of von Neumann and Morgenstern are criticized and improved. Ch. IV contains original suggestions for a theory (...) of utility involving incomparable values. -- A. R. A. (shrink)

After distinguishing different species of Legal Moralism I outline and defend a modest, positive Legal Moralism, according to which we have good reason to criminalize some type of conduct if it constitutes a public wrong. Some of the central elements of the argument will be: the need to remember that the criminal law is a political, not a moral practice, and therefore that in asking what kinds of conduct we have good reason to criminalize, we must begin not with the (...) entire realm of wrongdoing, but with conduct falling within the public realm of our civic life; the need to look at the different processes of criminalization, and to ask what kinds of consideration can properly figure in those processes; the need to attend to the relationship, and the essential differences, between criminal law and other modes of legal regulation. (shrink)

Вследствие общности и широты своих законов физика всегда оказывала определяющее воздействие на развитие всех естественных наук, включая их теоретические основы, методологию.

Вследствие общности и широты своих законов физика всегда оказывала определяющее воздействие на развитие всех естественных наук, включая их теоретические основы, методологию.

The fourth volume in the Criminalization series, this volume explores some of the most general principles and theories of criminalization. It includes not only philosophical work, but also historical, legal, and sociological investigations into criminalization, clarifying the state of the discipline today.