This paper explores the relationship between thinking and decision-making. In the first part, the paper analyzes the process of thinking from three aspects – language, psychology, and behavior. It then proceeds to investigate the implications of different kinds of thinking ondecision-making. The final section of the paper raises some questions and concerns about the role of the scientific method in making decisions under conditions of uncertainty. The author offers specific examples from the book publishing business and the movie industry.

Numerous authors indicate that the influence of academic education extends beyond the growth of specialized knowledge gained by the graduates. Scholars are trying to identify and examine the potential impact of higher learning on students’ attitudes and choices. One of the dimensions considered by the researchers is the effect of university training on students’ moral choices. Our paper attempts to identify differences between the students’ declared moral choices and their majors (fields of studies). Working with a sample of university students (...) of Economics and Sociology (N = 181), and using three variants of the Trolley Problem, the subjects’ responses are used to identify the similarities and differences between their choices. The participants were asked to respond to three hypothetical situations regarding a runaway trolley. Their decision in the first scenario could save a person’s life or let her be run over by the trolley. In the second scenario, their decision could either let one person die and save five lives or save one life and let five people be killed. These two scenarios required pulling a lever to switch the trolley from one track to another. The third scenario requires pushing an obese person in front of the runaway trolley to stop it from killing five persons. As expected, we found a significant difference between the two groups (the economists and the sociologists) in the case of our third scenario, however, we found no evidence supporting the indoctrination hypothesis. We conclude that the existing differences between the choices made by the future economists and sociologists may support the preselection hypothesis. (shrink)

Islamic ethics; Muslims; religious life; biography.

Doubts on Avicenna: A Study and Edition of Sharaf al-Dīn al-Masʿūdī’s Commentary on the Ishārāt. By Ayman Shihadeh. Islamic Philosophy, Theology and Science, Texts and Studies, vol. 95. Leiden: Brill, 2016. Pp. viii + 289. $126, €97.

By focusing on the works and intellectual network of the Timurid historian Sharaf al Dīn ʻAlī Yazdī (d.1454), this book presents a holistic view of intellectual life in fifteenth century Iran. İlker Evrim Binbaş argues that the intellectuals in this period formed informal networks which transcended political and linguistic boundaries, and spanned an area from the western fringes of the Ottoman State to bustling late medieval metropolises such as Cairo, Shiraz, and Samarkand. The network included an Ottoman revolutionary, a (...) Mamluk prophet, and a Timurid occultist, as well as physicians, astronomers, devotees of the secret sciences, and those political figures who believed that the network was a force to be taken seriously. Also discussing the formation of an early modern Islamicate republic of letters, this book offers fresh insights on the study of intellectual history beyond the limitations imposed by nationalist methodologies, established genres, and recognized literary traditions. (shrink)

In Doubts on Avicenna, Ayman Shihadeh offers an extended study and critical edition of Sharaf al-Dīn al-Masʿūdī’s al-Mabāḥith wa-l-Shukūk, a key and hitherto unstudied source for twelfth-century Arabic philosophy. This text inaugurates the long commentarial tradition on Avicenna’s Ishārāt.

The importance of the Treatise on equations by Sharaf al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī has been brought to our attention by R. Rashed, who underlined the analytical aspects of this essentially algebraic work. Following Rashed, this article concentrates on one of these analytical concepts, namely the maximum of a polynomial expression f of degree 3. The purpose is to clarify the techniques that led al-Ṭūsī, when computing the maximum of f, to systematically display algebraic equations equivalent to f = 0. By demonstrating (...) that al-Ṭūsī's essentially algebraic proofs were also based on analytical procedures, we show that the presence of these equations was not fortuitous, but resulted from a correct understanding of the maximum of f. The accompanying geometrical representations were primarily for illustration. L'importance du Traité des équations de Sharaf al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī, a été mise en évidence par les travaux de R. Rashed, qui ont souligné les aspects analytiques de cette œuvre essentiellement algébrique. Parmi les notions analytiques qui figurent dans le Traité d'al-Ṭūsī, nous évoquerons uniquement celle du maximum d'une expression polynomiale du 3 e degré, f. La présente étude pourrait apporter une contribution à une problématique posée par R. Rashed: élucider les moyens et les techniques qui, lors du calcul du maximum, auraient conduit al-Ṭūsī à mettre systématiquement en valeur des équations équivalentes à fʹ = 0. Notre étude confirme que la présence de telles expressions n'est pas fortuite; elle découle d'une conception correcte du maximum de f. À cet effet, nous montrons que si les démonstrations utilisées par al-Ṭūsī sont essentiellement algébriques, elles s'appuient sur des procédés analytiques; les représentations géométriques qui les accompagnent constituent surtout des moyens de visualisation. (shrink)

This interview with N. Katherine Hayles, one of the foremost theorists of the posthuman, explores the concerns that led to her seminal book How We Became Posthuman, the key arguments expounded in that book, and the changes in technology and culture in the ten years since its publication. The discussion ranges across the relationships between literature and science; the trans-disciplinary project of developing a methodology appropriate to their intersection; the history of cybernetics in its cultural and political context ; the (...) changed role for psychoanalysis in the technoscientific age; and the altering forms of mediated ‘embodiment’ in the posthuman context. (shrink)

Much attention has been directed to the philosophical implications of quantum field theory (QFT) in recent years; this paper attempts a survey in low-technical terms. First the relations of QFT to other kinds of theory, classical and quantum, particle and field, are discussed. Then various formulations of QFT are introduced, along with related interpretations. Finally a review is made of some of the most interesting foundational problems.

Sensations represent our subjective 'take' on sensory stimulation — how we feel about red light falling on the retina, salt dissolving on the tongue, a thorn piercing the skin. They tell — in the language of phenomenal properties -- what the experience is like for us. In so far as they represent the reality of this subjective relationship, they cannot be said to be illusory. The relationship, magical as it may seem, is not being misrepresented as something it is not. (...) If anything, it is being represented as something 'super-real'. (shrink)

Researchers in artificial intelligence and robotics often include a timeline stretching into the future in which they predict the convergence between human and artificial intelligence. Ray Kurzweil, for example, predicts that in a mere 100 years humans and intelligent machines will become indistinguishable from one another, both ceasing to have permanent corporeal forms. This article argues that the one thing we can know for sure about the future is that when it arrives, it will be different from what we imagined. (...) The cultural work that predictions like Kurzweil’s perform is less to prognosticate the future than to shape our understanding of what it means to be human in the present. Working from the ‘sense-think-act’ paradigm foundational to work in artificial intelligence and robotics, this article argues that predictions in all three areas feed back to affect how the human is envisioned in the present. The reconfigurations these predictions bring about are to downplay consciousness, embodied cognition, and evolutionary inertia. The article concludes by critically evaluating contemporary resistances to the posthuman, especially in the writings of Rodney Brooks and Francis Fukuyama. (shrink)

We introduce Kripke models for propositional substructural logics with strong negation, and show the completeness theorems for these logics using an extended Ishihara's canonical model construction method. The framework presented can deal with a broad range of substructural logics with strong negation, including a modified version of Nelson's logic N$^-$, Wansing's logic COSPL, and extended versions of Visser's basic propositional logic, positive relevant logics, Corsi's logics and M\'endez's logics.

On Buddhist philosophies and forecasting.

According to Anselm, all Divine qualities are tightly interrelated: they are implied by the unique central property of being absolutely perfect. In the second chapter of the Proslogium , Anselm claims that it is the essence of our concept of God that He is a being greater than which nothing can be conceived. From this, he argues, it is possible to infer that He is eternal, omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, and so on. In other words, given an absolutely perfect being we (...) can derive all the attributes commonly ascribed to Him. (shrink)