Bøger 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 argues that no ethically appropriate relation to other human beings is possible unless we treat them as genuinely other. The authors provide reasons to be critical of various attempts, many of them popular in our contemporary (Western) culture, to encourage deeper attachment to and immersion into others¿ lives and experiences. They defend the significance of the distance between human beings, criticizing exaggerated uses of, e.g., the concept of empathy and related concepts in academic as well as more popular ethical contexts, across a range of issues from the nature of ethical duty to the philosophy of love. The chapters offer non-technical philosophical and cultural criticism through selected perspectives on the continuum between closeness and distance, exploring various aspects of ethically significant relations between human beings. This book thus appeals to a wide audience, especially researchers and students in different fields of the humanities, including philosophy, literary studies, and cultural studies, by combining philosophical and literary methodologies in a humanistic examination of the value of distance. The book also argues that we have to be able to abstract from the concrete other in ethical relations, living in the normative and rational sphere of duty instead of emotional immersion.

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 monograph presents a synthesis and reconstruction of Rudolf Arnheim's theory of media.

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

This book introduces a panorama of the philosophical theory of explanation. This is certainly the case in real-world philosophical interaction, and as this book aptly demonstrates, it can also be the case in written philosophical exposition.

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.

The book deals with philosophical issues concerning the understanding of the literary text and its distinctive nature, meaning, and relevance to life. In short, the book makes an attempt to provide a critical overview of contemporary debates and discussions of literary aesthetics mainly from a Western analytical perspective.

This book approaches classic epistemological problems from a contextualist perspective.

This new study provides a refreshing look at the issue of exceptions and shows that much of the problem stems from a failure to recognize at least two kinds of exception-ridden law: ceteris paribus laws and ideal laws.

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 examines how legal causation inference and epidemiological causal inference can be harmonized within the realm of jurisprudence, exploring why legal causation and epidemiological causation differ from each other and defining related problems.

It then provides a critique of the Official Development Assistance (ODA) discourse and reviews the political economy of ODA, the discourse, and the conditionalities that are barriers to socio-economic development.

This book reflects on the phenomenon of biotechnology and how it affects the body and discusses a number of related issues, including visualization, mediation, and epistemology. The author offers a compelling thesis, arguing that the exploration of the human body has one ultimate aim: to gain knowledge of it and to conquer it.