Providing the most thorough coverage available in one volume, this comprehensive, broadly based collection offers a wide variety of selections in four major genres, and also includes a section on film. Each of the five sections contains a detailed critical introduction to each form, brief biographies of the authors, and a clear, concise editorial apparatus. Updated and revised throughout, the new Fourth Edition adds essays by Margaret Mead, Russell Baker, Joan Didion, Annie Dillard, and Alice Walker; fiction by Nathaniel Hawthorne, (...) Ursula K. LeGuin, Anton Chekov, James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Alice Walker, Louise Erdrich, Donald Barthelme, and James McPherson; poems by John Donne, Robert Browning, Walt Whitman, Edwin Arlington Robinson, e.e. cummings, Langston Hughes, W.H. Auden, Philip Levine, and Louise Gluck; and plays by August Wilson, Marsha Norman, Wendy Wasserstein, and Vaclav Havel. The chapter devoted to film examines the relation of film to literature and gives the complete screenplay for Citizen Kane plus close analysis of a scene from the film. With its innovative structure, comprehensive coverage, and insightful and stimulating presentation of all kinds of literature, this is an anthology readers will turn to again and again. (shrink)

There is a deeply entrenched view in philosophy and physics, the closed systems view, according to which isolated systems are conceived of as fundamental. On this view, when a system is under the influence of its environment this is described in terms of a coupling between it and a separate system which taken together are isolated. We argue against this view, and in favor of the alternative open systems view, for which systems interacting with their environment are conceived of as (...) fundamental, and the environment's influence is represented via the dynamical equations that govern the system's evolution. Taking quantum theories of closed and open systems as our case study, and considering three alternative notions of fundamentality: (i) ontic fundamentality, (ii) epistemic fundamentality, and (iii) explanatory fundamentality, we argue that the open systems view is fundamental, and that this has important implications for the philosophy of physics, the philosophy of science, and for metaphysics. (shrink)

It is argued that those who defend the Everett, or ‘many-worlds’, interpretation of quantum mechanics should embrace what we call the general quantum theory of open systems (GT) as the proper framework in which to conduct foundational and philosophical investigations in quantum physics. GT is a wider dynamical framework than its alternative, standard quantum theory (ST). This is true even though GT makes no modifications to the quantum formalism. GT rather takes a different view, what we call the open systems (...) view, of the formalism; i.e., in GT, the dynamics of systems whose physical states are fundamentally represented by density operators are represented as fundamentally open as specified by an in general non-unitary dynamical map. This includes, in principle, the dynamics of the universe as a whole. We argue that the more general dynamics describable in GT can be physically motivated, that there is as much prima facie empirical support for GT as there is for ST, and that GT could be fully in the spirit of the Everett interpretation—that there might, in short, be little reason for an Everettian not to embrace the more general theoretical landscape that GT allows one to explore. (shrink)

Recently, there has been a renaissance of study on knowledge by acquaintance. One reason for this is that many writers believe acquaintance holds the key to understanding consciousness and our conscious experience of the world. For this reason, research on acquaintance has been primarily focused on perception and self-knowledge. While these questions are undoubtedly important, I believe being overly focused on these issues has prevented a defensible theory of knowledge by acquaintance from being developed. In particular, two questions have largely (...) been ignored in the literature. First, what kind of knowledge is knowledge by acquaintance? If knowledge by acquaintance is supposed to give us special epistemic access to its objects, what are the central epistemic features of it and how do they differ from other kinds of knowledge? Second, can we have knowledge by acquaintance beyond cases of perception and self-knowledge, and if so, how? In this dissertation, I answer both of these questions. In response to the first question, I argue that knowledge by acquaintance is a form of non-propositional discriminatory knowledge. Roughly, discriminatory knowledge is the exercise of a discriminatory capacity to single out a particular object from other objects of its kind. It is non-propositional because the object of the mental act of discriminating is not a proposition or truth. It is important that we understand knowledge by acquaintance in terms of discriminatory knowledge because it allows us to move beyond perceptual knowledge and self-knowledge. In this dissertation, I show how this is possible by showing that we can be acquainted with the natural numbers. This provides an answer to the second question. There is, in principle, no reason why acquaintance should only exist in sensory perception, provided we understand it in terms of discriminatory knowledge. The upshot of this is that my account of knowledge by acquaintance has a breadth and unity not often found in the acquaintance literature. (shrink)

Wittgenstein did not write very much on the topic of probability. The little we have comes from a few short pages of the Tractatus, some 'remarks' from the 1930s, and the informal conversations which went on during that decade with the Vienna Circle. Nevertheless, Wittgenstein's views were highly influential in the later development of the logical theory of probability. This paper will attempt to clarify and defend Wittgenstein's conception of probability against some oft-cited criticisms that stem from a misunderstanding of (...) his views. Max Black, for instance, criticises Wittgenstein for formulating a theory of probability that is capable of being used only against the backdrop of the ideal language of the Tractatus. I argue that on the contrary, by appealing to the 'hypothetical laws of nature', Wittgenstein is able to make sense of probability statements involving propositions that have not been completely analysed. G.H. von Wright criticises Wittgenstein's characterisation of these very hypothetical laws. He argues that by introducing them Wittgenstein makes what is distinctive about his theory superfluous, for the hypothetical laws are directly inspired by statistical observations and hence these observations indirectly determine the mechanism by which the logical theory of probability operates. I argue that this is not the case at all, and that while statistical observations play a part in the formation of the hypothetical laws, these observations are only necessary, but not sufficient conditions for the introduction of these hypotheses. (shrink)

To what extent can Nietzsche's idea of the Overman be used in connection with transhumanist notions of highly advanced humans and even posthumans?

For many years there has been a debate about the role of the parietal lobe in the generation of behavior. Does it generate movement plans (intention) or choose objects in the environment for further processing? To answer this, we focus on the lateral intraparietal area (LIP), an area that has been shown to play independent roles in target selection for saccades and the generation of visual attention. Based on results from a variety of tasks, we propose that LIP acts as (...) a priority map in which objects are represented by activity proportional to their behavioral priority. We present evidence to show that the priority map combines bottom-up inputs like a rapid visual response with an array of top-down signals like a saccade plan. The spatial location representing the peak of the map is used by the oculomotor system to target saccades and by the visual system to guide visual attention. (shrink)

In "Frailty Triage: Is Rationing Intensive Medical Treatment on the Grounds of Frailty Ethical?," Wilkinson (2021) argues that the use of frailty scores in ICU triage does not necessarily involve discrimination on the basis of disability. In support of this argument, he claims, “it is not the disability per se that the score is measuring – rather it is the underlying physiological and physical vulnerability." While we appreciate the attention Wilkinson explicitly pays to disability in this piece, we find the (...) distinction between disability and underlying vulnerability untenable both theoretically and practically. In this peer commentary, we begin with a brief overview of research in philosophy of disability concerning the meaning of the concept itself. We argue that this research demonstrates that many forms of disability do not involve underlying vulnerabilities, and, furthermore, that Wilkinson equivocates between "disability" understood as a medical category vs. "disability" understood as a feature of lived experience. We reject Wilkinson’s distinction on these grounds and offer further considerations to avoid disability discrimination in emergency and crisis standards of care contexts. (shrink)

Mystical Theology and Platonism in the Time of Cusanus engages with the history of mystical theology and Neoplatonic philosophy through the lens of the 15th century philosopher and theologian, Nicholas of Cusa. The volume comprises nineteen essays that break down the barriers between medieval and Renaissance studies, reinterpreting Cusanus’ place in the history of thought by exploring the archive that informed his thinking, while also interrogating his works by exploring them from the standpoint of their later reception by modern philosophers (...) and theologians. The volume also offers tribute to the career of Donald F. Duclow, a leading scholar in the field of Cusanus studies in particular and of the history of mystical theology and Neoplatonic philosophy more generally. (shrink)

G. A. Cohen’s pathbreaking book, Karl Marx‘s Theory of History: A Defence (1978), prompted extensive reconsideration of historical materialism. This effort recast ongoing debates about Marx‘s theory of history by defending the view that historical materialism embodies a set of substantive claims as appropriately subject to analytical scrutiny as those of any other viable theory. Specifically, Cohen advances one central substantive claim that summarizes his reading of the “Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. “History is, fundamentally, (...) the growth of productive power, and forms of society rise and fall according as they enable or impede that growth.” This premise affirms that the same set of factors that explain changes societies undergo within a given historical epoch also explain transitions between historical epochs. The theoretical account of intraepochal historical development suffices equally to cover interepochal, revolutionary change. In this paper we reject this premise and argue that even on the most plausible reconstruction of Marx’s theory of history—a reconstruction that employs, among other things, a careful ownership-based criterion of historical epochs and the use of functional explanations—Marx’s theory of history cannot explain social revolutions. -/- . (shrink)

Predication is an indisputable part of our linguistic behavior. By contrast, the metaphysics of predication has been a matter of dispute ever since antiquity. According to Plato—or at least Platonism, the view that goes by Plato’s name in contemporary philosophy—the truths expressed by predications such as “Socrates is wise” are true because there is a subject of predication (e.g., Socrates), there is an abstract property or universal (e.g., wisdom), and the subject exemplifies the property.1 This view is supposed to be (...) general, applying to all predications, whether the subject of predication is a person, a planet, or a property.2 Despite the controversy surrounding the metaphysics of predication, many theistic philosophers—including the majority of contemporary analytic theists—regard Platonism as extremely attractive. At the same time, however, such philosophers are also commonly attracted to a form of traditional theism that has at its core the thesis that God is an absolutely independent.. (shrink)

Editors' introduction to 3rd thematic issue on philosophy of medicine.

Risk Management Strategies and Investment Behaviors are considered important factors in the investing activities of the retail investors. This study seeks to determine the relationship between Risk Management Strategies and Investment Behavior of Generation Z retail investors. The study is a correlational research and purposive sampling was used to select the respondents for this study. Cochran’s formula was utilized to determine the total sample size or total number of respondents. Spearman’s Rank-Order Correlation was employed to assess the significant relationship of (...) Risk Management Strategies and Investment Behaviors. Based on the results, it showed that risk management strategies have a significant relationship with one or more of the investment behaviors. Risk avoidance has a significant relationship with confirmation bias. Risk reduction has a significant relationship with all of the investment behaviors such as overconfidence, loss-aversion, recency bias, and confirmation bias. Risk transfer shows a significant relationship with only loss-aversion and confirmation bias. And lastly, risk acceptance also has a significant relationship with all of the investment behaviors. This study recommends exploring other types of behavioral biases under cognitive bias and emotional bias to determine their correlation with risk management strategies. Also, broadening the sample size, demographic scope, and geographic scope of the study can improve the generalizability of the study and provide a more comprehensive understanding of the relationship between investment behavior and risk management strategies. The researchers also recommend to utilize interviews and focus group discussions to gain an in-depth understanding of the underlying values and attitudes concerning investment behavior. (shrink)

The Christian doctrine of the Trinity poses a serious philosophical problem. On the one hand, it seems to imply that there is exactly one divine being; on the other hand, it seems to imply that there are three. There is another well-known philosophical problem that presents us with a similar sort of tension: the problem of material constitution. We argue in this paper that a relatively neglected solution to the problem of material constitution can be developed into a novel solution (...) to the problem of the Trinity. (shrink)

Understanding everyday behavior relies heavily upon understanding our ability to improvise, how we are able to continuously anticipate and adapt in order to coordinate with our environment and others. Here we consider the ability of musicians to improvise, where they must spontaneously coordinate their actions with co-performers in order to produce novel musical expressions. Investigations of this behavior have traditionally focused on describing the organization of cognitive structures. The focus, here, however, is on the ability of the time-evolving patterns of (...) inter-musician movement coordination as revealed by the mathematical tools of complex dynamical systems to provide a new understanding of what potentiates the novelty of spontaneous musical action. We demonstrate this approach through the application of cross wavelet spectral analysis, which isolates the strength and patterning of the behavioral coordination that occurs between improvising musicians across a range of nested time-scales. Revealing the sophistication of the previously unexplored dynamics of movement coordination between improvising musicians is an important step towards understanding how creative musical expressions emerge from the spontaneous coordination of multiple musical bodies. (shrink)

Various approaches have emerged over the last several decades to meet the challenges and complexities of anticipating and responding to the potential impacts of emerging technologies. Although many of the existing approaches share similarities, they each have shortfalls. This paper takes as the object of its study Anticipatory Ethics for Emerging Technologies (ATE) to technology assessment, given that it was formatted to address many of the privations characterising parallel approaches. The ATE approach, also in practice, presents certain areas for retooling, (...) such as how it characterises levels and objects of analysis. This paper results from the work done with the TechEthos Horizon 2020 project in evaluating the ethical, legal, and social impacts of climate engineering, digital extended reality, and neurotechnologies. To meet the challenges these technology families present, this paper aims to enhance the ATE framework to encompass the variety of human processes and material forms, functions, and applications that comprise the socio-technical systems in which these technologies are embedded. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Sensorimotor Direct Realism: How We Enact Our World” by Michael Beaton. Upshot: In light of the construal of sensorimotor theory offered by the target article, this commentary examines the role the theory should admit for internal representation.

This paper challenges Williamson's "E = K" thesis on the basis of evidential practice. The main point is that most evidence is only approximately true and so cannot be known if knowledge is factive.

This three-part paper presents Gordon Pask’s conversation theory (CT) and interaction of actors theory (IA) and outlines ways to apply these cybernetic approaches to designing technologies and scenarios for both formal and informal learning. The first part of the paper covers concepts central to CT and IA, explaining the relationship between conceptual and mechanical operators, and machines mediating informal and formal learning. The second part of the paper applies visual representations of CT and IA to understanding the use of Pask’s (...) course assembly systems (CASTE and THOUGHTSTICKER), created between the late 1960s and the 1980s, and the ThoughtShuffler search interface, created in the 2010s. The third part proposes two pathways for design based on CT and IA: firstly, the potential for designers and observers to reformulate the qualities of tools and learning scenarios to augment human thinking and collective action; and secondly, the possibility to create tools with malleable interfaces that allow users to become intermediaries rather than consumers of knowledge. (shrink)

Over the last few decades, virtue has become increasingly important in philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, and education. However, as each of these disciplines approaches virtue from a decidedly different perspective, it has proven difficult to come up with an understanding of virtue that satisfies the standards of all four disciplines. In their book, Jennifer Wright, Michael Warren, and Nancy Snow attempt to put forward such an understanding.

Machine learning algorithms may radically improve our ability to diagnose and treat disease. For moral, legal, and scientific reasons, it is essential that doctors and patients be able to understand and explain the predictions of these models. Scalable, customisable, and ethical solutions can be achieved by working together with relevant stakeholders, including patients, data scientists, and policy makers.

When it comes to understanding the genesis and development of Heidegger’s thought, it would be rather difficult to overestimate the importance of the “Aristotle-Introduction” of 1922, Heidegger’s “Phenomenological Interpretations with Respect to Aristotle.” This text is both a manifesto which describes the young Heidegger’s philosophical commitments, as well as a promissory note which outlines his projected future work. This Aristotle-Introduction not only enunciates Heidegger’s broad project of a philosophy which is both systematic and historical; it also indicates, in particular, why (...) a principal (or fundamental) ontology can be actualized only through a destruction of the history of ontology. This text anticipates several central themes of Being and Time (e.g., facticity, death, falling), and also foreshadows some of the issues which were to occupy the later Heidegger (e.g., “truth” as a heterogenous process of unconcealment). There is no doubt that much can – and will – be written on the meaning and implications of this important text. But instead of making my own, early contribution to such a secondary literature, I have decided to limit myself in this “Preface” to a few brief remarks concerning the historical background to Heidegger’s “Phenomenological Interpretations with Respect to Aristotle.”. (shrink)

This book is an extended reflection on a basic but far-reaching claim: "There are no 'bare' particulars". Because "individuals are necessarily individuals of a kind," Lowe argues, "realism with regard to particulars or individuals... implies realism with regard to sorts or kinds". A "sortal" concept is "a concept of a distinct sort or kind of individuals". Lowe's purpose in this book is to examine the meaning and implications of sortal concepts, and to challenge relativist conceptions of identity and reductivist strategies (...) in metaphysics. (shrink)

According to a prevalent view among philosophers formal logic is the philosopher’s main tool to assess the validity of arguments, i.e. the philosopher’s ars iudicandi. By drawing on a famous dispute between Russell and Strawson over the validity of a certain kind of argument – of arguments whose premises feature definite descriptions – this paper casts doubt on the accuracy of the ars iudicandi conception. Rather than settling the question whether the contentious arguments are valid or not, Russell and Strawson, (...) upon discussing the proper logical analysis of definite descriptions, merely contrast converse informal validity assessments rendered explicit by nonequivalent logical for-malizations. (shrink)

Review of Hegel’s Introduction to the System: Encyclopaedia Phenomenology and Psychology by Robert E. Wood.

Sceptical theists--e.g., William Alston and Michael Bergmann--have claimed that considerations concerning human cognitive limitations are alone sufficient to undermine evidential arguments from evil. We argue that, if the considerations deployed by sceptical theists are sufficient to undermine evidential arguments from evil, then those considerations are also sufficient to undermine inferences that play a crucial role in ordinary moral reasoning. If cogent, our argument suffices to discredit sceptical theist responses to evidential arguments from evil.

Philosophers often claim that studying philosophy helps people to become better thinkers. Thanks to a grant from the American Philosophical Association, we were able to test this claim empirically, using a large sample of students (N = 122,352) graduating from 369 colleges and universities across the United States between 2010 and 2019. We investigated whether philosophy majors show more growth than non-philosophy majors in intellectual traits like open-mindedness and a tendency to think carefully and thoroughly, as well as more personal (...) forms of growth that might be fostered by philosophical study (e.g., self-understanding). Additionally, although this was not our primary question, we sought to better understand what students who major in philosophy are like. Specifically, we examined the demographics of philosophy majors, the other subjects that they tend to study when they double major, and the patterns of adding and dropping of philosophy majors between freshman and senior year. (shrink)

As I hope to show in this paper, Fichte’s rejection of traditional social contractarian accounts of human social relations is related to his rejection of the search for a criterion, or external standard, by which we might measure our knowledge in epistemology. More specifically, Fichte’s account of the impossibility of a normative social contract (as traditionally construed) is related to his account of the impossibility of our knowing things as they might be “in themselves,” separate from and independent of our (...) own activity in knowing them. Addressing the question of whether we finite human knowers can ever transcend the limits of our own consciousness, Fichte argues that Hume was not sufficiently critical: “…the Humean system holds open the possibility that we might someday be able to go beyond the boundary of the human mind, whereas the Critical system proves that such progress is absolutely impossible, and it shows that the thought of a thing possessing existence and specific properties in itself and apart from any faculty of representation is a piece of whimsy, a pipe dream, a nonthought.” In a very real sense, then, Fichte aims to “out-Hume” Hume on the question of whether we can ever know “things-in-themselves” or an external criterion for testing our knowledge. That is, Fichte goes beyond Hume and insists on the necessary – and not merely contingent – character of our ignorance of so-called things-in-themselves (i.e., things that supposedly exist antecedent to and independent of our consciousness of them). But unlike Hume, Fichte argues that radical skepticism regarding all possible knowledge of things-in-themselves does not undermine – but actually confirms and sustains – our belief in the emancipatory power of reason. (shrink)

One of the defining characteristics of Kant’s “critical philosophy” is what has been called the “critique of immediacy” or the rejection of the “myth of the given.” According to the Kantian position, no object can count as an object for a human knower apart from the knower’s own activity or spontaneity. That is, no object can count as an object for a human knower on the basis of the object’s givenness alone. But this gives rise to a problem: how is (...) it possible to accept the Kantian critique of immediacy while also giving an epistemologically adequate account of the constrained or finite character of human knowing (i.e., an account that does not rely on some appeal to what is simply “given”)? This paper examines how this crucial question is addressed (with more or less success) in the “critical philosophies” of Kant, Lonergan, and Fichte. (shrink)

One of the best-known members of the United Nations Commission which drafted the 1948 "Universal Declaration of Human Rights," Jacques Maritain, famously held that the "natural rights" or "human rights" possessed by every human being are grounded and justified by reference to the natural law.' In many quarters today, the notion of the natural law, and arguments for a set of natural rights grounded in the natural law, have come under fierce attack. One common line of attack is illustrated by (...) the arguments of some utilitarians, for whom "natural law thinking" is mistaken insofar as it implies that there is an absolute moral prohibition against violating any human being's "natural rights." Even if there is such a thing as "natural rights," these utilitarians argue, such rights - including even the natural "right to life" - are necessarily relational, and thus have meaning only within the context of a larger social whole. As a result, the argument goes, the supposed "natural rights" possessed by individual human beings are never inviolable or unconditional, but instead always negotiable and subject to being "traded away" for the sake of greater social utility. Consider just one alleged counter-example to the notion that there are inviolable or unconditional "natural rights": it is well-known that approximately 36,000 people in the United States die every year as a result of influenza infections or influenza-related complications.' There is little doubt that hundreds, and probably even thousands, of human lives would be saved every year if local governments were to pass laws requiring flu vaccinations for all members of at-risk populations (e.g., the very young and the very elderly). It would seem that there would be broad support for mandated flu vaccinations- no matter what the expense - if human lives would be saved and if the natural "right to life" is inviolable or unconditional.' And yet no such life-saving laws exist, apparently because citizens and legislators believe that the social costs and inconveniences would be too great. According to the utilitarian position, this demonstrates - contrary to what Ronald Dworkin and others say about rights' - that rights do not trump utility, but in fact are quite regularly and reasonably trumped by utility. In light of such contemporary understandings and policies, can natural law thinking about natural rights be made credible? In what follows, I shall argue that utilitarian thinkers are correct to hold that rights are intrinsically relational; but they are wrong to conclude that the relational character of rights entails that "natural rights" are not inviolable or not unconditional. (shrink)

Freud proposes that in unconscious processing, logical connections are also (heavily) based upon phonological similarities. Repressed concerns, for example, would also be expressed by way of phonologic ambiguity. In order to investigate a possible unconscious influence of phonological similarity, 31 participants were submitted to a tachistoscopic subliminal priming experiment, with prime and target presented at 1ms. In the experimental condition, the prime and one of the 2 targets were phonological reversed forms of each other, though graphemically dissimilar (e.g., “nice” and (...) “sign”); in the control condition the targets were pseudo-randomly attributed to primes to which they don’t belong. The experimental task was to “blindly” pick the choice most similar to the prime. ERPs were measured with a focus on the N320, which is known to react selectively to phonological mismatch in supraliminal visual word presentations. The N320 amplitude-effects at the electrodes on the midline and at the left of the brain significantly predicted the participants’ net behavioral choices more than half a second later, while their subjective experience is one of arbitrariness. Moreover, the social desirability score (SDS) significantly correlates with both the behavioral and the N320 brain responses of the participants. It is proposed that in participants with low SDS the phonological target induces an expected reduction of N320 and this increases their probability to pick this target. In contrast, high defensive participants have a perplexed brain reaction upon the phonological target, with a negatively peaking N320 as compared to control and this leads them to avoid this target more often. Social desirability, which is understood as reflecting defensiveness, might also manifest itself as a defense against the (energy-consuming) ambiguity of language. The specificity of this study is that all of this is happening totally out of awareness and at the level of very elementary linguistic distinctions. (shrink)

Kant’s “moral proof” for the existence of God has been the subject of much criticism, even among his most sympathetic commentators. According to the critics, the primary problem is that the notion of the “highest good,” on which the moral proof depends, introduces an element of contingency and heteronomy into Kant’s otherwise strict, autonomy-based moral thinking. In this paper, I shall argue that Kant’s moral proof is not only more defensible than commentators have typically acknowledged, but also has some very (...) interesting implications (e.g. the moral proof is “circular” and thus implicitly self-validating). My account shall proceed in five stages: 1. Preliminary Discussion of the Moral Proof 2. the Argument of the Moral Proof 3. Critics of the Moral Proof 4. Defense of the Moral Proof 5. Implications of the Moral Proof: Circularity and Self-referentiality.” . (shrink)

The National Center for Biomedical Ontology is a consortium that comprises leading informaticians, biologists, clinicians, and ontologists, funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Roadmap, to develop innovative technology and methods that allow scientists to record, manage, and disseminate biomedical information and knowledge in machine-processable form. The goals of the Center are (1) to help unify the divergent and isolated efforts in ontology development by promoting high quality open-source, standards-based tools to create, manage, and use ontologies, (2) to create (...) new software tools so that scientists can use ontologies to annotate and analyze biomedical data, (3) to provide a national resource for the ongoing evaluation, integration, and evolution of biomedical ontologies and associated tools and theories in the context of driving biomedical projects (DBPs), and (4) to disseminate the tools and resources of the Center and to identify, evaluate, and communicate best practices of ontology development to the biomedical community. Through the research activities within the Center, collaborations with the DBPs, and interactions with the biomedical community, our goal is to help scientists to work more effectively in the e-science paradigm, enhancing experiment design, experiment execution, data analysis, information synthesis, hypothesis generation and testing, and understand human disease. (shrink)

The so-called problem of arguing “from what is to what ought to be” was popularized by G.E. Moore in Principia Ethica (1903), and has received much attention from modern philosophers. I would like to argue that this apparent problem rests on a false dichotomy between our knowing and our doing.

Throughout the biological and biomedical sciences there is a growing need for, prescriptive ‘minimum information’ (MI) checklists specifying the key information to include when reporting experimental results are beginning to find favor with experimentalists, analysts, publishers and funders alike. Such checklists aim to ensure that methods, data, analyses and results are described to a level sufficient to support the unambiguous interpretation, sophisticated search, reanalysis and experimental corroboration and reuse of data sets, facilitating the extraction of maximum value from data sets (...) them. However, such ‘minimum information’ MI checklists are usually developed independently by groups working within representatives of particular biologically- or technologically-delineated domains. Consequently, an overview of the full range of checklists can be difficult to establish without intensive searching, and even tracking thetheir individual evolution of single checklists may be a non-trivial exercise. Checklists are also inevitably partially redundant when measured one against another, and where they overlap is far from straightforward. Furthermore, conflicts in scope and arbitrary decisions on wording and sub-structuring make integration difficult. This presents inhibit their use in combination. Overall, these issues present significant difficulties for the users of checklists, especially those in areas such as systems biology, who routinely combine information from multiple biological domains and technology platforms. To address all of the above, we present MIBBI (Minimum Information for Biological and Biomedical Investigations); a web-based communal resource for such checklists, designed to act as a ‘one-stop shop’ for those exploring the range of extant checklist projects, and to foster collaborative, integrative development and ultimately promote gradual integration of checklists. (shrink)

Some types of solar radiation management (SRM) research are ethically problematic because they expose persons, animals, and ecosystems to significant risks. In our earlier work, we argued for ethical norms for SRM research based on norms for biomedical research. Biomedical researchers may not conduct research on persons without their consent, but universal consent is impractical for SRM research. We argue that instead of requiring universal consent, ethical norms for SRM research require only political legitimacy in decision-making about global SRM trials. (...) Using Allen Buchanan & Robert Keohane's model of global political legitimacy, we examine several existing global institutions as possible analogues for a politically legitimate SRM decision-making body. (shrink)

Scholars, journalists, and activists working on climate change often distinguish between “individual” and “structural” approaches to decarbonization. The former concern choices individuals can make to reduce their “personal carbon footprint” (e.g., eating less meat). The latter concern changes to institutions, laws, and other social structures. These two approaches are often framed as oppositional, representing a mutually exclusive forced choice between alternative routes to decarbonization. After presenting representative samples of this oppositional framing of individual and structural approaches in environmental communication, we (...) identify four problems with oppositional thinking and propose five ways to conceive of individual and structural reform as symbiotic and interdependent. (shrink)

有名な蟻男E.O.ウィルソンは常に私のヒーローの1人でした-優れた生物学者だけでなく、少なくとも他の人が把握できない、または把握している限り、私たちの性質についての真実をほのめかすための勇敢なマイノリ ティの1人です、政治的便宜のために勤勉に避けます。悲しいことに、彼は、ハーバードの同僚たちの宗教的な熱意によって少なくとも部分的に動機付けられた、科学に対する無知で傲慢な攻撃へのパーティーとして、彼の 長いキャリアを最も率直なやり方で終えています。これは、大学が宗教団体からお金を受け取ったとき、科学雑誌が大きな評判に驚いて、適切な査読を避けられたとき、そして自我が制御不能になることを許可されたときの 卑劣な結果を示しています。それは、進化の本質、科学的方法論の基本、数学と科学の関係、理論の構成要素、そして産業文明の崩壊に容赦なく取り組む際に信仰と寛大さへの態度さえも適切に導く。 現代の2つのシス・エムスの見解から人間の行動のための包括的な最新の枠組みを望む人は、私の著書「ルートヴィヒ・ヴィトゲンシュタインとジョン・サールの第2回(2019)における哲学、心理学、ミンと言語の論 理的構造」を参照することができます。私の著作の多くにご興味がある人は、運命の惑星における「話す猿--哲学、心理学、科学、宗教、政治―記事とレビュー2006-2019 第3回(2019)」と21世紀4日(2019年)の自殺ユートピア妄想st Century 4th ed (2019)などを見ることができます。 .

Despite a large and multifaceted effort to understand the vast landscape of phenotypic data, their current form inhibits productive data analysis. The lack of a community-wide, consensus-based, human- and machine-interpretable language for describing phenotypes and their genomic and environmental contexts is perhaps the most pressing scientific bottleneck to integration across many key fields in biology, including genomics, systems biology, development, medicine, evolution, ecology, and systematics. Here we survey the current phenomics landscape, including data resources and handling, and the progress that (...) has been made to accurately capture relevant data descriptions for phenotypes. We present an example of the kind of integration across domains that computable phenotypes would enable, and we call upon the broader biology community, publishers, and relevant funding agencies to support efforts to surmount today's data barriers and facilitate analytical reproducibility. (shrink)

For Kant, philosophical investigations are inherently analytic. The proper method of philosophy is analysis, and the object of analysis are concepts. Hence, Kant’s short description of philosophy as “rational cognition […] from concepts” (KrV, A 837/B 865) can be substituted by “philosophy is conceptual analysis”. The article shows that Kant follows a representationalism about concepts and a combination of intensional and extensional feature semantics. Against the claim that Kant is a proponent of the concept-judgement-inversion, it is argued that concepts are (...) being articulated in form of singular terms, propositions, and sets of propositions alike. Kant interlinks different kinds of concepts with different kinds of definitions, as the reconstruction of his theory of definitions reveals. Philosophy foremost deals with what Kant calls “given” empirical and pure concepts. Such concepts are object of analysis, i.e., explication and exposition. The article ends with answers to five possible objections. Is philosophy all about analysis? (shrink)

While philosophers hold that it is patently absurd to blame robots or hold them morally responsible [1], a series of recent empirical studies suggest that people do ascribe blame to AI systems and robots in certain contexts [2]. This is disconcerting: Blame might be shifted from the owners, users or designers of AI systems to the systems themselves, leading to the diminished accountability of the responsible human agents [3]. In this paper, we explore one of the potential underlying reasons for (...) robot blame, namely the folk's willingness to ascribe inculpating mental states or "mens rea" to robots. In a vignette-based experiment (N=513), we presented participants with a situation in which an agent knowingly runs the risk of bringing about substantial harm. We manipulated agent type (human v. group agent v. AI-driven robot) and outcome (neutral v. bad), and measured both moral judgment (wrongness of the action and blameworthiness of the agent) and mental states attributed to the agent (recklessness and the desire to inflict harm). We found that (i) judgments of wrongness and blame were relatively similar across agent types, possibly because (ii) attributions of mental states were, as suspected, similar across agent types. This raised the question - also explored in the experiment - whether people attribute knowledge and desire to robots in a merely metaphorical way (e.g., the robot "knew" rather than really knew). However, (iii), according to our data people were unwilling to downgrade to mens rea in a merely metaphorical sense when given the chance. Finally, (iv), we report a surprising and novel finding, which we call the inverse outcome effect on robot blame: People were less willing to blame artificial agents for bad outcomes than for neutral outcomes. This suggests that they are implicitly aware of the dangers of overattributing blame to robots when harm comes to pass, such as inappropriately letting the responsible human agent off the moral hook. (shrink)

In Beyond Physicalism, an interdisciplinary group of physical scientists, behavioral and social scientists, and humanists from the Esalen Institute’s Center for Theory and Research argue that physicalism must be replaced by an expanded scientific naturalism that accommodates something spiritual at the heart of nature.

Ontology is one strategy for promoting interoperability of heterogeneous data through consistent tagging. An ontology is a controlled structured vocabulary consisting of general terms (such as “cell” or “image” or “tissue” or “microscope”) that form the basis for such tagging. These terms are designed to represent the types of entities in the domain of reality that the ontology has been devised to capture; the terms are provided with logical defi nitions thereby also supporting reasoning over the tagged data. Aim: This (...) paper provides a survey of the biomedical imaging ontologies that have been developed thus far. It outlines the challenges, particularly faced by ontologies in the fields of histopathological imaging and image analysis, and suggests a strategy for addressing these challenges in the example domain of quantitative histopathology imaging. The ultimate goal is to support the multiscale understanding of disease that comes from using interoperable ontologies to integrate imaging data with clinical and genomics data. (shrink)

Perceptualism is a prominent theory analyzing emotions as perceptual experiences of value. A longstanding challenge to perceptualism says that emotions cannot be perceptual because they are subject to normative assessments in terms of reasons and rationality while perceptual experiences are not. I defend perceptualism from this charge. My argument begins by distinguishing two forms of normative assessment: fundamental and non-fundamental. Perceptualism is compatible with the latter (i.e., non-fundamental reasons and rationality); even sensory experiences are so assessable. I next argue that (...) emotions are only non-fundamentally assessable. Following this argument, I outline a perceptualist-friendly theory of emotions as non-fundamentally normatively assessable. (shrink)

When you hallucinate an object, you are not in the normal sort of concurrent causal sensory interaction with that object. It's standardly further inferred that the hallucinated object does not actually exist. But the lack of normal concurrent causal sensory interaction does not imply that there does not exist an object that is hallucinated. It might be a past‐perceived object. In this paper, I argue that this claim holds for at least some interesting cases of hallucination. Hallucinations generated by misleading (...) cues (e.g. ‘seeing’ Kanizsa triangles), hallucinations of Charles Bonnet Syndrome patients, and dreams are experiences of past‐perceived objects. (shrink)

Uma crítica de "On Certainty",de Wittgenstein, que ele escreveu em 1950-51 e foi publicada pela primeira vez em 1969. A maior parte da revisão se dedica a apresentar uma estrutura moderna para a filosofia (a psicologia descritiva do pensamento de alta ordem) e posicionar o trabalho de Wittgenstein e John Searle neste quadro e em relação ao trabalho dos outros. Sugere-se que este livro pode ser considerado como a pedra angular da psicologia e da filosofia, pois foi o primeiro a (...) descrever os dois sistemas de pensamento e mostra como nossa compreensão inabalável do mundo deriva do nosso Sistema 1 axiomático inata, e como ele interage com o Sistema 2. Foi uma revolução na epistemologia, pois mostrou que nossas ações não repousam em julgamentos, mas em axiomas indubitáveis que levam diretamente à ação. Colocarei o trabalho de Wittgenstein e Searle no quadro dos dois sistemas de pensamento proeminentes na tomada de decisões e pesquisas, usando uma nova tabela de intencionalidade e nova nomenclatura de sistemas duplos. Aqueles que desejam um quadro até à data detalhado para o comportamento humano da opinião moderna dos dois sistemas consultar meu livros Falando Macacos 3ª Ed (2019), A Estrutura Lógica da Filosofia, Psicologia, Mente e Linguagem em Ludwig Wittgenstein e John Searle 2a Ed (2019), Suicídio Pela Democracia,4aEd(2019), Entendendo as Conexões entre Ciência, Filosofia, Psicologia, Religião, Política e Economia Artigos e Análises 2006-2019 (2020), Ilusões Utópicas Suicidas no 21St século 5a Ed (2019), A Estrutura Lógica do Comportamento Humano (2019), e A Estrutura Lógica da Consciência (2019) y outras. "Se eu quisesse duvidar se esta era a minha mão, como eu poderia evitar duvidando se a palavra "mão" tem algum significado? Então isso é algo que você parece saber, afinal. Na certeza p48 "Mas não consegui que minha imagem do mundo satisfizesse sua correção: nem a tenho porque estou satisfeito com sua correção. Não: é o fundo herdado contra o qual eu distinguio entre verdadeiro e falso." (OC p94). "Aqui encontramos um fenômeno notável e característico na pesquisa filosófica: a dificuldade---Eu poderia dizer ---não é encontrar a solução, mas sim reconhecer como a solução algo que parece que era apenas uma preliminar para ela. Já dissemos tudo. ---Não é nada que deriva disso, não esta é a solução! .... Isso está relacionado, eu acho, à nossa falha em esperar por uma explicação, enquanto a solução da dificuldade é uma descrição, se dermos o lugar certo em nossas considerações. Se pararmos nisso, e não tentarmos ir além disso. Zettel p312-314 . (shrink)

The debate about scientific realism is concerned with the relation between our scientific theories and the world. Scientific realists argue that our best theories or components of those theories correspond to the world. Anti-realists deny such a correspondence. Traditionally, this central issue in the philosophy of science has been approached by focusing on the theories themselves (e.g., by looking at theory change or the underlying experimental context). I propose a relatively unexplored way to approach this old debate. In addition to (...) focusing on the theory, we should focus on the theorizer. More precisely, in order to determine on which component of a theory we should hinge a realist commitment, we should analyze the cognitive processes underlying scientific theorizing. In this paper I do just that. Drawing from recent developments in the cognitive sciences and evolutionary epistemology, I formulate some tentative conclusions. The aim of this paper is not so much to defend a particular position in the debate on scientific realism but to showcase the value of taking a cognitive perspective in the debate. (shrink)

Desde Gintis é um economista sênior e eu li alguns de seus livros anteriores com interesse, eu estava esperando um pouco mais insights sobre o comportamento. Infelizmente, ele faz as mãos mortas de seleção de grupo e fenomenologia para as peças centrais de suas teorias de comportamento, e isso em grande parte invalida o trabalho. Pior, uma vez que ele mostra um julgamento tão ruim aqui, ele chama a questão de todo o seu trabalho anterior. A tentativa de ressuscitar a (...) seleção de grupos por seus amigos em Harvard, Nowak e Wilson, há alguns anos foi um dos maiores escândalos em biologia na última década, e eu tenho narrado a triste história no meu artigo ' altruísmo, Jesus e do fim do mundo-como o Templeton Foundation comprou uma cátedra de Harvard e atacou evolução, racionalidade e civilização-uma revisão de E.O. Wilson 'A Conquista social da Terra' (The Social Conquest of Earth) (2012) e Nowak e Highfield ' SuperCooperators ' (2012). Ao contrário de Nowak, Gintis não parece ser motivado pelo fanatismo religioso, mas pelo forte desejo de gerar uma alternativa para as realidades sombrias da natureza humana, facilitada pela (perto Universal) falta de compreensão da biologia humana e Blank Slateism (tábua rasa) de cientistas comportamentais, outros acadêmicos e o público em geral. Gintis justamente ataca (como ele tem muitas vezes antes) economistas, sociólogos e outros cientistas comportamentais por não ter um quadro coerente para descrever o comportamento. Naturalmente, a estrutura necessária para entender o comportamento é um evolucionário. Infelizmente, ele não consegue fornecer um próprio (de acordo com seus muitos críticos e eu concordo), e a tentativa de transplantar o cadáver podre de seleção de grupo para qualquer teorias econômicas e psicológicas que ele gerou em suas décadas de trabalho, meramente invalida todo o seu projeto. Embora Gintis faz um esforço valente para entender e explicar a genética, como Wilson e Nowak, ele está longe de ser um perito, e como eles, a matemática apenas o cega para as impossibilidades biológicas e, claro, esta é a norma na ciência. Como Wittgenstein famosa observou na primeira página de cultura e valor "não há nenhuma denominação religiosa em que o uso indevido de expressões metafísicas tem sido responsável por tanto pecado como tem em matemática." Sempre foi evidente que um gene que provoca comportamento que diminui a sua própria frequência não pode persistir, mas este é o cerne da noção de seleção de grupo. Além disso, tem sido bem conhecido e muitas vezes demonstrado que a seleção de grupo apenas reduz a aptidão inclusiva (seleção de parentes), que, como observou Dawkins, é apenas um outro nome para a evolução pela seleção natural. Como Wilson, Gintis tem trabalhado nesta arena por cerca de 50 anos e ainda não entendeu, mas depois que o escândalo quebrou, levei apenas 3 dias para encontrar, ler e entender o trabalho profissional mais relevante, como detalhado no meu artigo. É incompreensível para perceber que Gintis e Wilson foram incapazes de realizar isso em quase meio século. Discuto os erros de seleção de grupo e fenomenologia que são a norma na Academia como casos especiais da falha universal perto de entender a natureza humana que estão destruindo a América e o mundo. Aqueles que desejam um quadro até à data detalhado para o comportamento humano da opinião moderna dos dois sistemas consultar meu livros Falando Macacos 3ª Ed (2019), A Estrutura Lógica da Filosofia, Psicologia, Mente e Linguagem em Ludwig Wittgenstein e John Searle 2a Ed (2019), Suicídio Pela Democracia,4aEd(2019), Entendendo as Conexões entre Ciência, Filosofia, Psicologia, Religião, Política e Economia Artigos e Análises 2006-2019 (2019), Ilusões Utópicas Suicidas no 21St século 5a Ed (2019), A Estrutura Lógica do Comportamento Humano (2019), e A Estrutura Lógica da Consciência (2019) e outras. (shrink)

Significant associations have been found between specific human leukocyte antigen (HLA) alleles and organ transplant rejection, autoimmune disease development, and the response to infection. Traditional searches for disease associations have conventionally measured risk associated with the presence of individual HLA alleles. However, given the high level of HLA polymorphism, the pattern of amino acid variability, and the fact that most of the HLA variation occurs at functionally important sites, it may be that a combination of variable amino acid sites shared (...) by several alleles (shared epitopes) are better descriptors of the actual causative genetic variants. Here we describe a novel approach to genetic association analysis in which genes/proteins are broken down into smaller sequence features and then variant types defined for each feature, allowing for independent analysis of disease association with each sequence feature variant type. We have used this approach to analyze a cohort of systemic sclerosis patients and show that a sequence feature composed of specific amino acid residues in peptide binding pockets 4 and 7 of HLA-DRB1 explains much of the molecular determinant of risk for systemic sclerosis. (shrink)