137 research outputs found
Some Mysteries of Love
This is the text of The Lindley Lecture for 2001, given by Harry Frankfurt, an American philosopher
Inadvertencia y responsabilidad moral
En contra de la posiciĂłn de ciertos filĂłsofos, como Thomas Nagel, defiendo la creencia del sentido comĂșn segĂșn la cual las personas no son moralmente responsables de aquello que hacen o producen inadvertidamente. Considero quĂ©Â respuesta podrĂamos esperar razonablemente de una persona que inadvertidamente hace o produce un evento o condiciĂłn que es manifiestamente indeseable o malo; y sugiero que podrĂamos esperar razonablemente que dicha persona no se sienta culpable, sino mĂĄs bien apenada por su inhabilidad para prevenir o evitar esa condiciĂłn o evento
Trivial Tasks that Consume a Lifetime: Kierkegaard on Immortality and Becoming Subjective
S. Kierkegaard argued that our highest task as humans is to realize an âintensifiedâ or âdevelopedâ form of subjectivityâhis name for self-responsible agency. A self-responsible agent is not only responsible for her actions. She also bears responsibility for the individual that she is. In this paper, I review Kierkegaardâs account of the role that our capacity for reflective self-evaluation plays in making us responsible for ourselves. It is in the exercise of this capacity that we can go from being subjective in a degraded senseâmerely being an idiosyncratic jumble of accidental and arbitrary attitudes and affectsâto being a subject in the ideal or eminent sense. The latter requires the exercise of my capacity for reflective self-evaluation, since it involves recognizing, identifying with, and reinforcing those aspects of my overall make-up that allow me to express successfully a coherent way of being in the world. Kierkegaard argues that taking immortality seriously is one way to achieve the right kind of reflective stance on oneâs own character or personality. Thus, Kierkegaard argues that immortality as a theoretical posit can contribute to oneâs effort to own or assume responsibility for being the person one is
The BCN Challenge to Compatibilist Free Will and Personal Responsibility
Many philosophers ignore developments in the behavioral, cognitive, and neurosciences that purport to challenge our ideas of free will and responsibility. The reason for this is that the challenge is often framed as a denial of the idea that we are able to act differently than we do. However, most philosophers think that the ability to do otherwise is irrelevant to responsibility and free will. Rather it is our ability to act for reasons that is crucial. We argue that the scientific findings indicate that it is not so obvious that our views of free will and responsibility can be grounded in the ability to act for reasons without introducing metaphysical obscurities. This poses a challenge to philosophers. We draw the conclusion that philosophers are wrong not to address the recent scientific developments and that scientists are mistaken in formulating their challenge in terms of the freedom to do otherwise
Measuring Parton Densities in the Pomeron
We present a program to measure the parton densities in the pomeron using
diffractive deep inelastic scattering and diffractive photoproduction, and to
test the resulting parton densities by applying them to other processes such as
the diffractive production of jets in hadron-hadron collisions. Since QCD
factorization has been predicted NOT to apply to hard diffractive scattering,
this program of fitting and using parton densities might be expected to fail.
Its success or failure will provide useful information on the space-time
structure of the pomeron.Comment: Contains revisions based on Phys. Rev. D referee comments. RevTeX
version 3, epsf, 31 pages. Uuencoded compressed postscript figures appended.
Uncompressed postscript files available at
ftp://ftp.phys.psu.edu/pub/preprint/psuth136
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