Generic statements, such as "Bees are striped" are thought to be a central vehicle by which essentialist beliefs are transmitted. But work on generics and essentialism almost never focuses on the type of properties mentioned in generic statements. We test the hypothesis that teleological properties, what something is for, affect categorization judgments more strongly than behavioral, biological, or social properties. In Experiment 1, participants categorized properties as being either behavioral, biological, social, or teleological. In Experiment 2, we used the top (...) four properties from each group to describe a generic noun or a specific individual. Participants then categorized creatures that had one of their properties transformed. We found that changes to teleological properties had the strongest impact on categorization judgments. In Experiment 3, we also found that teleological properties mattered more in an induction task. We suggest that teleological properties play this privileged role in categorization because they are treated as essential properties. (shrink)

The oil and gas industry is a complex data-driven industry with compute-intensive, data-intensive and business-intensive features. Cloud computing and big data have a broad application prospect in the oil and gas industry. This research aims to highlight the cloud computing and big data issues and challenges from the informatization in oil and gas industry. In this paper, the distributed cloud storage architecture and its applications for seismic data of oil and gas industry are focused on first. Then,cloud desktop for oil (...) and gas industry applications are also introduced in terms of efficiency, security and usability. Finally, big data architecture and security issues of oil and gas industry are analyzed. Cloud computing and big data architectures have advantages in many aspects, such as system scalability, reliability, and serviceability. This paper also provides a brief description for the future development of Cloud computing and big data in oil and gas industry. Cloud computing and big data can provide convenient information sharing and high quality service for oil and gas industry. (shrink)

The gradation of know-how is a prominent challenge to intellectualism. Know-how is prima facie gradable, whereas know-that is not, so the former is unlikely to be a species of the latter. Recently, Pavese refuted this challenge by explaining the gradation of know-how as concerning either the quantity or the quality of practical answers one knows to a question. Know-how per se remains absolute. This paper argues, however, that in addition to the quantity and quality of practical answers, know-how also differs (...) in how reliably the agent is supposed to fulfil the task given her default constitution. Intellectualism is still troubled by the gradability challenge. (shrink)

The Cartesian thesis that some justifications are infallible faces a gradation puzzle. On the one hand, infallible justification tolerates absolutely no possibility for error. On the other hand, infallible justifications can vary in evidential force: e.g. two persons can both be infallible regarding their pains while the one with stronger pain is nevertheless more justified. However, if a type of justification is gradable in strength, why can it always be absolute? This paper explores the potential of this gradation challenge by (...) rejecting Fumerton's recent ‘semantic decision' solution. On Fumerton's suggestion, the putative gradation of infallible justifications is essentially semantic. It concerns only how we use the relevant term but not how well we perceive the truth. Regardless of its intuitive appeal, Fumerton's solution does not cover all the related situations. There is an irreducibly epistemic sense in which infallible justifications vary in degrees. (shrink)

Ratio, Volume 34, Issue 4, Page 303-311, December 2021.

Truth pluralism is the view that there is more than one truth property. The strong version of it (i.e. strong pluralism) further contends that no truth property is shared by all true propositions. In this paper, I help strong pluralism solve two pressing problems concerning mixed discourse: the problem of mixed inferences (PI) and the problem of mixed compounds (PC). According to PI, strong pluralism is incompatible with the truth- preservation notion of validity; according to PC, strong pluralists cannot find (...) any appropriate truth property for mixed compound propositions, whose atomic constituents are from different domains of discourse (e.g., <sky is blue and chocolate is tasty>). I argue that the strong pluralist is motivated to take the truth predicate in truth-involving universal statements to be deflationary to avoid the two pressing problems. Such a move entails that the truth predicate in the platitude of validity (V) for any argument, it is valid if and only if necessarily its conclusion is true when its premises are all true does not denote any substantive truth property. Instead, it is merely an expressive device to help people generalize instances of (V) to (V). Analogous stories hold for the truth predicate in the platitudes of compound (e.g., conjunction). The upshot is that, the strong pluralist can solve PI and PC by further conceding that mixed compounds are true/false in a deflationary way. (shrink)

The author argues in this paper that consciousness may never be defined or explained with entities and properties, neither with brains and neurons, nor with particles, waves, and fields. Instead, a system is proposed in this paper, with matter, energy and lives as its components, and with all its components defined as changes. Based on the systematic relationships among those components, the author’s definitions or explanations of consciousness are: • Ontologically, consciousness is universal, since it may only be the systematic (...) distinction between matter and energy. • Epistemologically, consciousness is unique, since it may only be the energy that is formalized, qualified or diversified systematically by the matter. • Semantically, consciousness is a meaningless language with lives as its only meanings. In other words, only lives are, but consciousness is not, the causality of mental activities. Such defined or explained consciousness might be useful for us to find a more unified framework for neuroscience, psychology, the philosophy of mind, and the studies of artificial intelligence. (shrink)

Considerable evidence proves that causal learning and causal understanding greatly enhance our ability to manipulate the physical world and are major factors that distinguish humans from other primates. How do we enable unintelligent robots to think causally, answer the questions raised with "why" and even understand the meaning of such questions? The solution is one of the keys to realizing artificial intelligence. Judea Pearl believes that to achieve human-like intelligence, researchers must start by imitating the intelligence of children, so he (...) proposed a "causal inference engine" to help future artificial intelligence make causal inference, pass the Minimal Turing Test, and even become a moral subject who can discern good from evil. This study attempts to provide some insights into the development of children's education from basic assumptions and construction goals of artificial intelligence, and to reflect on the causal model of artificial intelligence through children's education. (shrink)

This paper sums up the fundamental features of intelligence through the common features stated by various definitions of "intelligence": Intelligence is the ability of achieving systematic goals (functions) of brain and nerve system through selecting, and artificial intelligence or machine intelligence is an imitation of life intelligence or a replication of features and functions. Based on the definition mentioned above, this paper discusses and summarizes the development routes of ideas on computable intelligence, including Godel's "universal recursive function", the computation activities (...) of "selection", recursive function and Turing machine, mathematical expression of computable intelligence, core nature of computable intelligence, and computability and strong artificial intelligence. At the end of this paper is the conclusion drawn by the authors. (shrink)

This paper addresses the concept of play concerning human formation, especially as manifested in the philosophies of Gadamer and Schiller. Gadamer depicted understanding as an organic motion that unfolds through seeing differences and characterized play as a flexible back-and-forth movement or interplay between possibilities and transformations. Schiller structured play as the playful impulse similarly as an interactive moving force that connects the two seemingly oppositional impulses of reason and sensation and lets the two affect the other dialogically. Both Gadamer and (...) Schiller suggest that play, as in essence an inter-play, orients us into seeing more possibilities of making a refreshing sense of our intellectual and perceptual abilities and thereby transfiguring our living being into richer and fuller meaningfulness. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine why moral exemplars are useful and even necessary in moral education despite several critiques from researchers and educators. To support my point, I review recent AI research demonstrating that exemplar-based learning is superior to rule-based learning in model performance in training neural networks, such as large language models. I particularly focus on why education aiming at promoting the development of multifaceted moral functioning can be done effectively by using exemplars, which is similar to exemplar-based learning (...) in AI model training. Furthermore, I discuss the potential limitations and issues related to exemplar-applied moral education with findings from recent studies in AI research raising concerns about model biases and toxic outcomes. I attempt to propose ways to address the concerns regarding employing moral exemplars as well. As remedies, I suggest that autonomy-supporting deliberative and reflective learning processes should be utilized. Furthermore, based on the discussion, I examine how macroscopic socio-cultural aspects influence the effectiveness of exemplar-applied moral education. Suggestions for moral educators and future directions for research in moral education are briefly discussed. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In the present study, we examined how the perceived attainability and relatability of moral exemplars predicted moral elevation and pleasantness among both adult and college student participants. Data collected from two experiments were analyzed with Bayesian multilevel modeling to explore which factors significantly predicted outcome variables at the story level. The analysis results demonstrated that the main effect of perceived relatability and the interaction effect between attainability and relatability shall be included in the best prediction model, and thus, were (...) deemed to predict the outcome variables significantly. The main effect of relatability as well as its interaction with attainability positively predicted elevation and pleasantness. We discussed educational implications of the findings in terms of how relatability may be the first point of emphasis for moral educators to focus on and attainability can then bolster the effectiveness. These relatable and attainable moral exemplars can be sources for moral elevation and pleasantness, which promote motivation to emulate moral behavior presented by the exemplars. (shrink)

Mystical religious experiences typically purport to engage with the transcendent and often claim to involve encounters with spiritual entities or a detachment from the material world. Daoism diverges from this paradigm. This paper examines Daoist mystical experiences of bodily transformations and explores their epistemological implications. Specifically, we defend the justificatory power of Daoist somatic experiences against the disanalogy objection. The disanalogy objection posits that mystical experiences, in contrast to sense perceptions, are not socially verifiable and thereby lack prima facie epistemic (...) value. We argue that some Daoist mystical bodily states, being essentially spatiotemporal, are exempt from this challenge. This leads to a broader understanding of mysticism and offers a partial resolution to the disanalogy objection. (shrink)

Scientism denies change and creation in science, and humanism denies change and creation in humanity. They leave no room for freedom, equality and fraternity. This book is written as the deconstruction of both scientism and humanism.

Consciousness may not only be a problem how to know the brain but also a problem how to understand what known. Understanding is always an ontological system created as the explanation of what known by us. And, if all brains, including human brains, may be defined as the mind, consciousness must be part of our understanding of the mind. The author argues that no mind may exist if not be a life or lives, no life may exist if not be (...) a mind or a part of it, and, if it is the mind that needs to be explained, it must finally and fundamentally be explained as a life or a living system. An ontological definition of life is proposed first in this article, which is also applicable to fields such as physics, biology, psychology, and sociology. Based on an analysis of two kinds of lives and their relationship with matter and energy, a living system is modeled as the organization of two system relations, which explains not only consciousness but also wakefulness, emotion, intelligence, language and mind-body relationship. And finally, a semantic theory is reached, which takes lives as the only meaning of all symmetrical and conservative changes, such as the location changes or form changes of consciousness, or the state changes of memories. The concept of life, the model of living systems and the semantic theory together provide a framework for us to understand what and how consciousness is, why there is consciousness, where and when consciousness occurs. (shrink)

First published in 1949 expressly to introduce logical positivism to English speakers. Reichenbach, with Rudolph Carnap, founded logical positivism, a form of epistemofogy that privileged scientific over metaphysical truths.

Based on a crowdsourced truth value judgment experiment, we provide empirical evidence challenging two classical views in semantics, and we develop a novel account of counterfactuals that combines ideas from inquisitive semantics and causal reasoning. First, we show that two truth-conditionally equivalent clauses can make different semantic contributions when embedded in a counterfactual antecedent. Assuming compositionality, this means that the meaning of these clauses is not fully determined by their truth conditions. This finding has a clear explanation in inquisitive semantics: (...) truth-conditionally equivalent clauses may be associated with different propositional alternatives, each of which counts as a separate counterfactual assumption. Second, we show that our results contradict the common idea that the interpretation of a counterfactual involves minimizing change with respect to the actual state of affairs. We propose to replace the idea of minimal change by a distinction between foreground and background for a given counterfactual assumption: the background is held fixed in the counterfactual situation, while the foreground can be varied without any minimality constraint. (shrink)

Judging works of art is one thing. Loving a work of art is something else. When you visit a museum like the Louvre you make hundreds of judgements in the space of just a couple of hours. But you may grow to love only one or a handful of works over the course of your entire life. Depending on the art form you are most aligned with, this can be a painting, a novel, a poem, a song, a work of (...) architecture, or some other art object or performance. As it happens, however, we have fallen in love with a series of films: Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and Before Midnight. But what does it mean to love a film? What’s the difference between liking a film, loving a film, and being a film lover? How rational or irrational is it to fall in love with a film? What are the constitutive elements of such a love? These are the questions we seek to address in this paper. -/- . (shrink)

Radical democratic thinking is becoming intrigued by the material situatedness of its political agents and by the role of nonhuman participants in political interaction. At stake here is the displacement of narrow anthropocentrism that currently guides democratic theory and practice, and its repositioning into what we call ‘the nonhuman condition’. This Critical Exchange explores the nonhuman condition. It asks: What are the implications of decentering the human subject via a new materialist reading of radical democracy? Does this reading dilute political (...) agency? Or should this be seen, on the contrary, as an invitation for new voices and demands to enter into democratic assemblages? How might engagement with the more-than-human disrupt or extend theories of radical democracy? Hans Asenbaum and Amanda Machin discuss the human democratic subject both through radical democratic and new materialist lenses. They suggest that a new materialist decentred subject does not lose agency but further gains political responsibility in radical democracy. Jean-Paul Gagnon highlights the possibility of becoming through loss. In losing our anthropocentric arrogance—our understanding of being other and better than animal—we become more connected and discover our place in human-nonhuman assemblages. Melissa Orlie agrees that something can be gained through renouncing dominant human fantasies and presents a ‘radical democratic naturalism’. By renouncing land violence and acknowledging nature’s subjectivity, we can further nonexploitative radical democratic politics. This is where the notion of ‘tidalectic’ processes introduced by James L. Smith is helpful. Focusing on water and the Indigenous knowledges around rivers, he considers how democracy and community can be reimagined as plural, cyclical and attentive to the nonhuman with which the human is inevitably entangled. Diana Leong offers a different approach. Considering the nonhuman from the perspective of Black Studies demands an awareness to how blackness has long been constituted as non- or partially human. (shrink)

This paper looks at the critical reception of two central claims of Peter Auriol’s theory of cognition: the claim that the objects of cognition have an apparent or objective being that resists reduction to the real being of objects, and the claim that there may be natural intuitive cognitions of nonexistent objects. These claims earned Auriol the criticism of his fellow Franciscans, Walter Chatton and Adam Wodeham. According to them, the theory of apparent being was what had led Auriol to (...) allow for intuitive cognitions of nonexistents, but the intuitive cognition of nonexistents, at its turn, led to scepticism. Modern commentators have offered similar readings of Auriol, but this paper argues, first, that the apparent being provides no special reason to think there could be intuitions of nonexistent objects, and second, that despite his idiosyncratic account of intuition, Auriol was no more vulnerable to scepticism than his critics. (shrink)

Current radical democratic politics is characterized by new participatory spaces for citizens’ engagement, which aim at facilitating the democratic ideals of freedom and equality. These spaces are, however, situated in the context of deep societal inequalities. Modes of discrimination are carried over into participatory interaction. The democratic subject is judged by its physically embodied appearance, which replicates external hierarchies and impedes the freedom of self-expression. To tackle this problem, this article seeks to identify ways to increase the freedom of the (...) subject to explore its multiple self. Understanding the self as inherently fugitive, the article investigates participatory, deliberative and agonistic concepts of self-transformation. As all of them appear limited, it introduces a transformative perspective in democratic thought. Enriching the transformative perspective with queer and gender theory, the article generates the concept of a politics of becoming, which, through radical democratic practices of disidentification, advances the freedom of the subject to change. (shrink)

The work of Thomas White represents a systematic attempt to combine the best of the new science of the seventeenth century with the best of Aristotelian tradition. This attempt earned him the criticism of Hobbes and the praise of Leibniz, but today, most of his attempts to navigate between traditions remain to be explored in detail. This paper does so for his ontology of accidents. It argues that his criticism of accidents in the category of location as entities over and (...) above substances was likely aimed at Francisco Suárez, and shows how White’s worries about the analysis of location were linked with his broader cosmological views. White rejects real qualities, but holds that the quantity of a substance is somehow distinct from its bearer. This reveals a common ground with some of his scholastic interlocutors, but lays bare a deep disagreement with thinkers like Descartes on the nature of matter. (shrink)

In response to its current crisis, scholars call for the revitalisation of democracy through democratic innovations. While they make ample use of life metaphors describing democracy as a living organism, no comprehensive understanding of ‘life’ has been established within democratic theory. The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement articulates the urgency of refocusing on life and its meaning through radical democratic practice. This article employs a grounded theory approach, enriched with participatory methods, to develop a radical democratic concept of life in (...) conversation with BLM. It conceptualises life as the existence of a perspective that constantly transforms through its fundamental interconnectedness. Building on this concept, the article outlines four principles of a living democracy that go beyond the revitalisation discourse. A living democracy (1) safeguards the existence of all humans and nonhumans, (2) nurtures a diversity of perspectives, (3) fosters social and planetary connectivity, and (4) enables self- and collective transformation. (shrink)

The main goal of this paper is to investigate the relation between the meaning of a sentence and its truth conditions. We report on a comprehension experiment on counterfactual conditionals, based on a context in which a light is controlled by two switches. Our main finding is that the truth-conditionally equivalent clauses (i) "switch A or switch B is down" and (ii) "switch A and switch B are not both up" make different semantic contributions when embedded in a conditional antecedent. (...) Assuming compositionality, this means that (i) and (ii) differ in meaning, which implies that the meaning of a sentential clause cannot be identified with its truth conditions. We show that our data have a clear explanation in inquisitive semantics: in a conditional antecedent, (i) introduces two distinct assumptions, while (ii) introduces only one. Independently of the complications stemming from disjunctive antecedents, our results also challenge analyses of counterfactuals in terms of minimal change from the actual state of affairs: we show that such analyses cannot account for our findings, regardless of what changes are considered minimal. (shrink)

The present study aimed to develop effective moral educational interventions based on social psychology by using stories of moral exemplars. We tested whether motivation to engage in voluntary service as a form of moral behavior was better promoted by attainable and relevant exemplars or by unattainable and irrelevant exemplars. First, experiment 1, conducted in a lab, showed that stories of attainable exemplars more effectively promoted voluntary service activity engagement among undergraduate students compared with stories of unattainable exemplars and non-moral stories. (...) Second, experiment 2, a middle school classroom-level experiment with a quasi-experimental design, demonstrated that peer exemplars, who are perceived to be attainable and relevant to students, better promoted service engagement compared with historic figures in moral education classes. (shrink)

When we participate in political debate or protests, we are judged by how we look, which clothes we wear, by our skin colour, gender and body language. This results in exclusions and limits our freedom of expression. The Politics of Becoming explores radical democratic acts of disidentification to counter this problem. Anonymity in masked protest, graffiti, and online de-bate interrupts our everyday identities. This allows us to live our multiple selves. In the digital age, anonymity becomes an inherent part of (...) everyday communication. Through our smart devices we express our selves differently. As cyborgs, our identities are disrupted and reassembled. We curate self-representations on social media, create avatars, share selfies and choose the skin colour of our emojis. The Politics of Becoming encourages us to engage in a revolution of the self. Democratic pluralism is not only a matter of institutional design but also about how we express our identities. Inner revolutions change our personal realities and plant a seed for democratic futures. (shrink)

In this paper, findings from research in neuroscience of morality will be reviewed to consider the purposes of moral education. Particularly, I will focus on two main themes in neuroscience, novel neuroimaging and experimental investigations, and Bayesian learning mechanism. First, I will examine how neuroimaging and experimental studies contributed to our understanding of psychological mechanisms associated with moral functioning while addressing methodological concerns. Second, Bayesian learning mechanism will be introduced to acquire insights about how moral learning occurs in human brains. (...) Based on the reviewed neuroscientific research on morality, I will examine how evidence can support the model of moral education proposed by virtue ethics, Neo-Aristotelian moral philosophy in particular. Particularly, two main aims of virtue ethics-based moral education, the habituation of virtues and the cultivation of phronesis, will be discussed as the important purposes of moral education based on neuroscientific evidence. (shrink)

Morality is intrapersonally permissive: cases abound in which an agent has more than one morally permitted option. In contrast, there is a dearth of cases in which an agent has more than one epistemically permitted response to her evidence. Given the structural parallels between morality and epistemology, why do sources of moral permissiveness fail to have parallel permissive effects in the epistemic domain? This asymmetry between morality and epistemology cries out for explanation. The paper's task is to offer an answer (...) to that call. We explain the asymmetry by tracing moral permissiveness to two factors to which rationality is morally but not epistemically sensitive. (shrink)

The Handbook of Metaphysics and Ontology reflects the conviction that the history of metaphysics and current work in metaphysics and ontology can each throw valuable light on the other. Thus it is designed to serve both äs a means of making more widely accessible the results of recent scholarship in the history of philosophy, and also äs a unique work of reference in reladon to the metaphysical themes at the centre of much current debate in analyüc philosophy. The work contains (...) more man 450 shorter articies on specific themes and methods in metaphysics and ontology, together with biographical essays summarizing the thinking of the most important philosophers within the traditions dealt with. In addition, it contains about 20 longer survey arücles mapping out both historically and systemadcally the main areas of metaphysics and ontology. AU contributions have been speciaüy commissioned for this project from leading authorities in their respective fields. A special feature of the work is the pardcular attention that is paid to topics and issues of relevance to contemporary philosophical debates. The work includes also a series of arücles on the logical and mathematical tools of metaphysics and on the applications of metaphysical ideas within linguisdcs, psychology, cognitive science, and mathemadcs. (shrink)

The hole argument purportedly shows that spacetime substantivalism implies a pernicious form of indeterminism. We show that the argument is seductive only because it mistakes a trivial claim (viz. there are isomorphic models) for a significant claim (viz. there are hole isomorphisms). We prove that the latter claim is false -- thereby closing the debate about whether substantivalism implies indeterminism.

The results revealed that students who remained in China experienced challenges which included anxiety, closure of campuses, lockdown, their parents’ concern regarding health issues, and not being able to meet with friends. On the other hand, students who had left China during the pandemic were confined to their home countries. This group of students experienced more severe problems than the students who remained in China. Since the transition to home countries was “unplanned,” they were not ready to readjust to their (...) native culture and were vulnerable to severe reverse culture shock. Upon returning to their home countries, international students faced a number of challenges, including readjustment to their home countries and changes in their lives in host and home countries. In addition, they lost social and academic resources, such as the disruption of study environment, losing important group memberships, financial constraints, visa expiry, graduation delay, and academic suspension. (shrink)

Is it possible for an individual that has gone out of being to come back into being again? The English Aristotelian, Thomas White, argued that it is not. Thomas Hobbes disagreed, and used the case of the Ship of Theseus to argue that individuals that have gone out of being may come back into being again. This paper provides the first systematic account of their arguments. It is doubtful that Hobbes has a consistent case against White. Still his criticism may (...) have prompted White to clarify his views on identity over time in his later work. (shrink)

The mind thoughts of Wang Yangming come from long-term moral and spiritual practices. After the knowledge and action are honed, they fall on the level of conscience. In the early years, Yangming paid close attention to the mind. With the help of the concentrated observation amendments of law in Buddhism, Yangming looked at the ideas that have been developed and not developed from the perspective of the doctrine of the mean. Yangming believes that the essence of the dynamic mind is (...) natural. Therefore, it realizes the subtle purity of the mind from keeping one and settling down and from pure to spontaneous. At the same time, Yangming believes that the depth of Tao has a charm that is different from ordinary consciousness. However, Yangming criticized Buddhism for obtaining the silence of the no mind and the immobile mind through the practice of emptiness. Contrarily, Yangming paid more attention to the experience of "light" in moral practice, which made Confucianism standardize the practice of knowledge and action to the practice of mindfulness and doing instead of being in vain. The paper explored the philosophy of mind of Wang Yangming from three dimensions: one mind, no mind, and Mindfulness. (shrink)

Paisley Livingston claims that an artist’s intentions are successfully realized and hence determinate of the meaning of a work if and only if they are compatible and “mesh” with the linguistic and conventional meanings of the text or artefact taken in its target or intended context. I argue that this specific standard of success is not without its difficulties. First, I show how an artist’s intention can sometimes be constitutive of a work’s meaning even if there is no significant meshing (...) between the artist’s intention and his work. Second, I argue against the claim that the artist’s intentions need to be compatible with the linguistic and conventional meanings of a text. Third, I discuss a case that creates a particular puzzle for Livingston since the intentions of the artist concerned are clearly not successfully realized, though they are compatible and mesh with all the relevant data. I conclude my paper by suggesting a solution to this puzzle. (shrink)

The present study aims to examine the relationship between the cortical midline structures (CMS), which have been regarded to be associated with selfhood, and moral decision making processes at the neural level. Traditional moral psychological studies have suggested the role of moral self as the moderator of moral cognition, so activity of moral self would present at the neural level. The present study examined the interaction between the CMS and other moral-related regions by conducting psycho-physiological interaction analysis of functional images (...) acquired while 16 subjects were solving moral dilemmas. Furthermore, we performed Granger causality analysis to demonstrate the direction of influences between activities in the regions in moral decision-making. We first demonstrate there are significant positive interactions between two central CMS seed regions—i.e., the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) and posterior cingulate cortex (PCC)—and brain regions associated with moral functioning including the cerebellum, brainstem, midbrain, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, orbitofrontal cortex and anterior insula (AI); on the other hand, the posterior insula (PI) showed significant negative interaction with the seed regions. Second, several significant Granger causality was found from CMS to insula regions particularly under the moral-personal condition. Furthermore, significant dominant influence from the AI to PI was reported. Moral psychological implications of these findings are discussed. The present study demonstrated the significant interaction and influence between the CMS and morality-related regions while subject were solving moral dilemmas. Given that, activity in the CMS is significantly involved in human moral functioning. (shrink)

This article develops the concept of cyborg activism as novel configuration of democratic subjectivity in the Information Age by exploring the online collectivity Anonymous as a prototype. By fusing elements of human/machine and organic/digital, the cyborg disrupts modern logics of binary thinking. Cyborg activism emerges as the reconfiguration of equality/hierarchy, reason/emotion and nihilism/idealism. Anonymous demonstrates how through the use of contingent and ephemeral digital personae hierarchies in cyborg activism prove more volatile than in face-to-face settings. Emotions appear as an essential (...) part of a politics of passion, which enables pursuing laughter and joy, expressing anger and experiencing empowerment as part of a reasoned, strategic politics. Anonymous’ political content reconfigures nihilist sentiments, frustration and political disenchantment, on one hand, with idealist world views, on the other. This enables the cohabitation and partial integration of a great diversity of political claims rooted in various ideologies. (shrink)

Herman Philipse considers “religious beliefs, faith and religion [to be] incompatible with science or reason”; he defines religion scientifically and specifically rejects religious doctrine. He describes reason “… as the whole of methods of empirical scientific research and critical discursive thinking as they have evolved in the scientific tradition and will continue to develop in the future” and he defines “… the phenomenon of conscience as a mental organ that can be scientifically explained and that makes the religious explanation superfluous (...) …”. Herman Philipse classifies science as the highest in rank, discards religion and sees philosophy, a rational view of the world, as based solely on the sciences. For his subject, Hans Achterhuis “… primarily cites biologists, ethologists and evolutionary psychologists with a philosophical interest” because “they presently have more to offer [him] than do his immediate colleagues”. Furthermore, “… it will be clear that ethologists and sociobiologists are of the opinion that the violent behaviour of human beings must be understood in part from the point of view of the evolutionary history of the sort ….. most philosophers and anthropologists are not aware of this. Their considerations suggest that violence only entered our world together with humankind”. Achterhuis’s choice is a “historic concept of violence”. (shrink)

W. V. Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, first published in 1951, is one of the most influential articles in the history of analytic philosophy. It does not just question central semantic and epistemological views of logical positivism and early analytic philosophy, it also marks a momentous challenge to the ideas that conceptual analysis is a main task of philosophy and that philosophy is an a priori discipline which differs in principle from the empirical sciences. These ideas dominated early analytic philosophy, (...) but similar views are to be found in the Kantian tradition, in phenomenology and in philosophical hermeneutics. In questioning this consensus from the perspective of a radical empiricism, Quine’s article has had a sustained and lasting impact across all these philosophical divisions. Quine himself moved from the abandonment of the analytic/synthetic distinction to a thoroughgoing naturalism, and many analytic philosophers have followed his lead. The current collection differs from other anthologies devoted to Quine in two respects. On the one hand, it focuses on his attack on analyticity, apriority and necessity; on the other, it considers implications of that attack that far transcend the limits of Quine scholarship, and lie at the heart of the current self-understanding of philosophy. The contributors include both opponents and proponents of the dichotomies attacked by Quine. Furthermore, they include both eminent figures such as Boghossian, Burge, and Davidson, and up and coming younger philosophers. (shrink)

W. V. Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, first published in 1951, is one of the most influential articles in the history of analytic philosophy. It does not just question central semantic and epistemological views of logical positivism and early analytic philosophy, it also marks a momentous challenge to the ideas that conceptual analysis is a main task of philosophy and that philosophy is an a priori discipline which differs in principle from the empirical sciences. These ideas dominated early analytic philosophy, (...) but similar views are to be found in the Kantian tradition, in phenomenology and in philosophical hermeneutics. In questioning this consensus from the perspective of a radical empiricism, Quine’s article has had a sustained and lasting impact across all these philosophical divisions. Quine himself moved from the abandonment of the analytic/synthetic distinction to a thoroughgoing naturalism, and many analytic philosophers have followed his lead. The current collection differs from other anthologies devoted to Quine in two respects. On the one hand, it focuses on his attack on analyticity, apriority and necessity; on the other, it considers implications of that attack that far transcend the limits of Quine scholarship, and lie at the heart of the current self-understanding of philosophy. The contributors include both opponents and proponents of the dichotomies attacked by Quine. Furthermore, they include both eminent figures such as Boghossian, Burge, and Davidson, and up and coming younger philosophers. (shrink)

This is a study of the treatment of library patron privacy in licenses for electronic journals in academic libraries. We begin by distinguishing four facets of privacy and intellectual freedom based on the LIS and philosophical literature. Next, we perform a content analysis of 42 license agreements for electronic journals, focusing on terms for enforcing authorized use and collection and sharing of user data. We compare our findings to model licenses, to recommendations proposed in a recent treatise on licenses, and (...) to our account of the four facets of intellectual freedom. We find important conflicts with each. (shrink)

Mathematical cognition is one of the most important cognitive functions of human beings. The latest brain and cognitive research have shown that mathematical cognition is a system with multiple components and subsystems. It has phylogenetic root, also is related to ontogenetic development and learning, relying on a large-scale cerebral network including parietal, frontal and temporal regions. Especially, the parietal cortex plays an important role during mathematical cognitive processes. This indicates that language and visuospatial functions are both key to mathematical cognition. (...) All of those advances have important implications for basic mathematical education. (shrink)

The Defining Issues Test (DIT) has been widely used in psychological experiments to assess one’s developmental level of moral reasoning in terms of postconventional reasoning. However, there have been concerns regarding whether the tool is biased across people with different genders and political and religious views. To address the limitations, in the present study, I tested the validity of the brief version of the test, that is, the behavioral DIT, in terms of the measurement invariance and differential item functioning (DIF). (...) I could not find any significant non-invariance at the test level or any item demonstrating practically significant DIF at the item level. The findings indicate that neither the test nor any of its items showed a significant bias toward any particular group. As a result, the collected validity evidence supports the use of test scores across different groups, enabling researchers who intend to examine participants’ moral reasoning development across heterogeneous groups to draw conclusions based on the scores. (shrink)

This paper reconsiders Ockham's critique of the species theory of cognition. As Ockham understands this theory, it says that the direct objects of cognition are mental representations, or species. According to many commentators, one of Ockham's main objections to this theory was that, if the direct objects of cognition are species rather than external objects, we will never be able to establish whether or not a given species is a veridical representation of the world. In this paper I argue that (...) this line of interpretation sits uneasily with Ockham's epistemology, and offer a new interpretation of Ockham's critique of species. (shrink)

This paper presents a simple pair of first-order theories that are not definitionally (nor Morita) equivalent, yet are mutually conservatively translatable and mutually 'surjectively' translatable. We use these results to clarify the overall geography of standards of equivalence and to show that the structural commitments that theories make behave in a more subtle manner than has been recognized.

Abstract Much has been written about the socio-cultural functions of religion. It is equally important to discuss the role and impact of religion and ethics on development and promoting reform in civil society. In today's South Asian context it is necessary to analyse religion both as a tradition and a representation of modernity. Otherwise it is difficult to clearly understand not only the relationship of domination-subordination, together with processes of exclusions and violence prevalent in the sub-continent but also the emerging (...) perspectives, lineages and languages of sociology in general and religion in particular. An attempt is made in this paper to examine the relationship and to evaluate the processes in the evolving discourse of sociology. It also analyses the 'moral' as embedded in religion and as an autonomous category emerging with secularisation. The subtleties of rights and righteousness in the method and metamorphosis of development are also dealt with in this paper. -/- . (shrink)

In the remainder of this article, we will disarm an important motivation for epistemic contextualism and interest-relative invariantism. We will accomplish this by presenting a stringent test of whether there is a stakes effect on ordinary knowledge ascription. Having shown that, even on a stringent way of testing, stakes fail to impact ordinary knowledge ascription, we will conclude that we should take another look at classical invariantism. Here is how we will proceed. Section 1 lays out some limitations of previous (...) research on stakes. Section 2 presents our study and concludes that there is little evidence for a substantial stakes effect. Section 3 responds to objections. The conclusion clears the way for classical invariantism. (shrink)

_Wittgenstein_ presents a concise, comprehensive, and systematic treatment of Ludwig Wittgenstein's thought from his early work, _Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,_ to the posthumous publication of _On Certainty_, notes written just prior to his death. A substantial scholarly addition to our understanding of one of the most original and influential thinkers of the twentieth century, by renowned Wittgenstein scholar, Hans Sluga Proposes an original new interpretation of Wittgenstein's work Written to also be accessible to readers unfamiliar with Wittgenstein's thought Includes discussion of the (...) social and political background and contemporary relevance of Wittgenstein's thoughts. (shrink)