A reply to contemporary skepticism about intuitions and a priori knowledge, and a defense of neo-rationalism from a contemporary Kantian standpoint, focusing on the theory of rational intuitions and on solving the two core problems of justifying and explaining them.

During the 1920s, researchers from the American Museum of Natural History led by Roy Chapman Andrews exported a large collection of valuable fossils from the Gobi Desert. While their expedition was celebrated across Europe and the United States, it aroused enormous controversy in China and Mongolia, especially after a new Nationalist government was formed in Nanjing during the late 1920s. Whereas Chinese scholars accused American scientists of plundering their natural heritage, Andrews argued that because dinosaurs went extinct (...) long before the creation of China, prehistoric fossils belonged equally to all mankind. This essay locates the Central Asiatic Expedition within a broader history of epistemic imperialism to explore what the controversy that it engendered reveals about the production, circulation, and accumulation of knowledge in a global context. (shrink)

It deals with the problems of the Latin text (taking account of Michael Winterbottom's new edition), it delineates the work's structure and sometimes elusive train of thought, clarifies the underlying Greek and Latin concepts, and provides starting points for approaching the philosophical and historical problems that De Officiis raises.

Four experiments supported the hypothesis that ordinary people understand free will as meaning unconstrained choice, not having a soul. People consistently rated free will as being high unless reduced by internal constraints (i.e., things that impaired people’s mental abilities to make choices) or external constraints (i.e., situations that hampered people’s abilities to choose and act as they desired). Scientific paradigms that have been argued to disprove free will were seen as reducing, but usually not eliminating free will, and the reductions (...) were because of constrained conscious choice. We replicated findings that a minority of people think lacking a soul reduces free will. These reductions in perceived free will were fully explained by reductions in people’s perceived abilities to make conscious decisions. Thus, some people do think you need a soul to have free will—but it is because they think you need a soul to make conscious decisions. (shrink)

Morsella et al. argue that science should not focus on high forms of consciousness. We disagree. An understanding of high forms of consciousness is invaluable to the scientific study of consciousness. Moreover, it poses challenges to the passive frame theory. Specifically, it challenges the notions that conscious thoughts are not connected and that consciousness serves skeletomotor conflict only.

Volume 19, Issue 6, June 2019, Page 22-25.