Böcker i SpringerBriefs in Philosophy-serien

This book presents a new, powerful, and practical way of making final decisions on the hard, complex, uncertain problems of life and work. What if you have looked at the data, talked with trusted colleagues, and applied all the relevant managerial and ethical frameworks, but you still don't know what is right. How should you make your final decision?This crucial question is rarely asked or answered. And some standard answers ¿ follow your moral compass, your conscience, or your values ¿ offer more inspiration than practical guidance. This book argues that, when we make final, hard decisions, we learn what is right by defining ¿ personally ¿ what is right. We find moral clarity by creating it. The book presents a fresh, challenging, and practical perspective on our hardest decisions. It offers a new conceptual approach for teachers and scholars and practical guidance for leaders and managers.

This book provides a novel framework for understanding and revising labor markets and education policies in an era of machine learning. It posits that while learning and knowing both require thinking, learning is fundamentally different than knowing because it results in cognitive processes that change over time. Learning, in contrast to knowing, requires time and agency. Therefore, ¿learning algorithms¿¿that enable machines to modify their actions based on real-world experiences¿are a fundamentally new form of artificial intelligence that have potential to be even more disruptive to labor markets than prior introductions of digital technology. To explore the difference between knowing and learning, Turing¿s ¿Imitation Game,¿¿that he proposed as a test for machine thinking¿is expanded to include time dependence. The arguments presented in the book introduce three novel concepts: (1) Comparative learning advantage: This is a concept analogous to comparative labor advantagebut arises from the disparate times required to learn new knowledge bases/skillsets. It is argued that in the future, comparative learning advantages between humans and machines will determine their division of labor. (2) Two dimensions of job performance¿expertise and interpersonal: Job tasks can be sorted into two broad categories. Tasks that require expertise have stable endpoints, which makes these tasks inherently repetitive and subject to automation. Tasks that are interpersonal are highly context-dependent and lack stable endpoints, which makes these tasks inherently non-routine. Humans compared to machines have a comparative learning advantage along the interpersonal dimension, which is increasing in value economically. (3) The Learning Game is a time-dependent version of Turing¿s ¿Imitation Game.¿ It is more than a thought experiment. The ¿Learning Game¿ provides a mathematical framework with quantitative criteria for training and assessing comparative learningadvantages. The book is highly interdisciplinary¿presenting philosophical arguments in economics, artificial intelligence, and education. It also provides data, mathematical analysis, and testable criteria that researchers in these fields will find of practical use. The book calls for a rethinking of how labor markets operate and how the education system should prepare students for future jobs. It concludes with a list of counterintuitive recommendations for future education and labor policies that all stakeholders¿employers, employees, educators, students, and political leaders¿should heed.

The book considers the relationship between governance and participation, and the ways participation has been understood, framed and applied in the context of synthetic biology (SB) governance approaches. Based on fundamental questions about the scope, purpose, and responsibilities assigned to public participation activities, the authors conducted an literature review of policy reports and articles on SB governance. The authors identify key characteristics of synthetic biology, such as the complex interplay of research, engineering and IT expertise in the field, as well as the challenges these characteristics pose in designing governance frameworks. Drawing on insights from a literature review, the authors contest calls for ¿earlier¿ and ¿more¿ participation on the basis that such calls fail to consider the necessary structural adjustments and resources needed for such endeavors. The brief addresses ethical questions arising in synthetic biology that could be used for developing frameworks of governance in the ongoing COVID-19 crisis and the consequent innovations in vaccine research.

The first book-length study to address issues in modal logic at the eve of the Renaissance, this monograph provides important new insights into the way the debates on modal logic during the post-medieval period tied in with the so-called Wegestreit, the divide between the via antiqua and via moderna that dominated the discourse on logic during the 15th and early 16th centuries. The focus of the book is on the logic and philosophy of language of John Fabri of Valenciennes (fl. c. 1500), one of the last exponents of the terminist approach to logic that was bitterly criticized by the humanist movement. By means of a careful reconstruction of Fabri¿s text, the book argues that Fabri's modal logic ultimately goes back to the work of John Buridan, and represents the same approach to the topic as the modal logics that were developed by adherents of the via moderna in Paris. This has significant implications for the historiography of post-medieval philosophy. Fabri was active in Louvain, which until the late 16th century was the most important intellectual center in the Low Countries. According to a long-standing tradition in the scholarship, Louvain was one of the few bulwarks of via antiqua logic on the map of post-medieval Europe. The book argues that this thesis is at least in part a scholarly fiction, and thus in need of revision. By shedding light on an author whose thought has thus far remained entirely unstudied, it also constitutes a valuable step towards a history of philosophy without any gaps. The book is aimed at graduate students and researchers in the history of logic and philosophy, but will also be of interest to intellectual historians, historians of ideas, and to any contemporary modal logician who is interested in the historical roots of their discipline.

This book considers the important twentieth century Austrian philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and his conception of certainty. In his work entitled On Certainty, Wittgenstein provides not only a brilliant solution to a previously intractable philosophical problem, but also the elements of an entirely new way of approaching this and similar longstanding, apparently unresolvable, problems. In On Certainty, he re-conceives the problem of radical skepticismΓÇôthe claim that we can never really be certain of anything except the contents of our own mindsΓÇôas a kind of philosophical ΓÇ£diseaseΓÇ¥ of thought. His approach to the problem, which is emphasized in the book, is similar to the treatment of disease, has two main goals: (1) bring about an awareness in the philosopher that this kind of extreme skepticism is not a methodological approach to be taken seriously, and, with this awareness, (2) an attempt to replace this radical skepticism with a practical, Common Sense framework. Implicit in WittgensteinΓÇÖs approach are a number of strategies found in a contemporary approach to psychotherapy known as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). These strategies, along with philosophical methods and scientific practices rooted in the Scottish School of Common Sense, seek to diagnose and treat irrational thoughts and beliefs that often emerge (and re-emerge) in the discipline of philosophy. The aim of this book, then, is to provide students of philosophy with the tools necessary to adjust and reshape these irrational, self-defeating thoughts and beliefs into something new, something healthy. 

This book consists of a dialogue between two interlocutors, Pablo and a student, who discuss a great range of issues in social philosophy and political theory, and in particular, the emergence, working properties and economic effects of institutions.

For Johns, the world is in a constant state of being utilised, not merely through humans but through objects and their relations, and not only on a macro scale but on a micro scale (described by the theories of quantum physics).The object then becomes a locus of use, yet, importantly, one that can never be reduced to relations alone.

Some of the limits discussed concern our senses (our different perceptual modalities), some concern vagueness and fuzzy boundaries between different types of works of art, some concern the amount of human intention and intervention in the process of creation of an artwork, and some concern the border between art and science.

This book argues that Kant develops a theory of perception in the Critique of Judgment from which one can redefine his entire project, viewing and using aesthetics as its backbone, from the transcendental aesthetic of the First Critique to the Critique of Taste in the Third.

This book examines phenomenal conservatism, one of the most influential and promising internalist conceptions of non-inferential justification debated in current epistemology and philosophy of mind.

Inside, three scholars offer approaches to the problems of identity, consciousness, and the mind. The next chapter explores the problem of consciousness.

This book analyses an inconsistency within epistemic contextualism known as the factivity problem.

This book argues that two great problems of learning confront humanity: learning about the nature of the universe and about ourselves and other living things as a part of it;

This book offers the first systematic reading of Plato's Laches in English after three decades of scholarly silence. It rekindles interest in this much-neglected dialogue by providing a fresh discussion of the major issues that arise from the text. Among these issues, pride of place is taken by the virtue of courage, for the definition of which Socrates is depicted as engaging in some long-winded dialectical exchange with his interlocutors. Yet, although there is no room for doubt that the Laches is Plato's most explicit treatment of courage, this dialogue ends in perplexity and is thus traditionally thought of as an unsuccessful attempt to define what courage is. The present study challenges this suggestion. This book proposes a new paradigm for the interpretation of Plato's Laches. In fact, it constitutes the first systematic attempt to study the dialogue in light of the idea that its composition could well have formed part of Plato's overall plan to establish a well-defined and rigorous justification of the life of philosophical inquiryThe book will be of key interest to classicists, philosophers, and intellectual historians, but will also appeal to students or anyone interested in ancient Greek philosophy.

This book provides a systematic analysis of the ethical implications of traditional and complementary medicine (T&CM), focusing on pragmatic solutions.

Panpsychism claims that mentality is ubiquitous to reality, and in combination with dual-aspect monism it claims that anything, from fundamental particles to rocks, trees, and human animals, has two aspects: a physical aspect and a mental aspect.

This book presents a philosophical interpretation to numerical cognition based on dual process theories and heuristics.

In addition, it develops procedures for seeking evidence of mechanisms, for evaluating evidence of mechanisms, and for combining this evaluation with evidence of association in order to yield an overall assessment of effectiveness.

This book deals with philosophical aspects regarding the perception of spatial relationships in two and three-dimensional art.

The personal essays collected in this volume examine such issues as assimilation, the philosophy of neurosis, aneurysmal philosophy, and the connection between Hegel and Neurosis, among others.

In philosophy, ongoing debates about the nature of biological information, intentionality, health and disease, mechanism, and even biological trait classification, are closely related to debates about biological functions.

They argue that instead of reading Apeiron as a noun, it should be considered an adjective, with reference to the term phusis (nature), and that the phrase phusis apeiros may express the boundless power of nature, responsible for all creation and growth.

The book provides the different forms of materialism, particularly distinguished into claims about the material nature of the world and about the material nature of the mind, and then focus on materialist approaches to body and embodiment, selfhood, ethics, laws of nature, reductionism and determinism, and overall, its relationship to science.

This work explains how different theories of causation confront causal overdetermination. Chapters clarify the problem of overdetermination and explore its fundamental aspects. It is argued that a theory of causation can account for our intuitions in overdetermination cases only by accepting that the adequacy of our claims about causation depends on the context in which they are evaluated.The author proposes arguments for causal contextualism and provides insight which is valuable for resolution of the problem. These chapters enable readers to quickly absorb different perspectives on overdetermination and important theories of causation, therefore it is a work that will have a broad appeal.    

This book presents an overview of postmodernism and its social indicators, and of the postmodern condition in consciousness as an indicator of its modification and development. The book also discusses various forms of multiculturalism, including multiculturalism as multiple modernities and plural modernities, and non-Western contemporaneity.

It relates how Hume wrote his philosophy in a time of tumult, as the millennia-old metaphysical tradition that placed humans and their cognitive abilities in an ontological framework collapsed and gave way to one that placed the autonomy of the individual in its center.

This book offers a new way to justify privacy based on a theory derived from Buddhist insights. It also argues that the new way of conceptualizing privacy, as presented in this book, would go a long way in helping unravel the difficult concept of group privacy.