One objection to conventional AI ethics is that it slows innovation. This presentation responds by reconfiguring ethics as an innovation accelerator. The critical elements develop from a contrast between Stability AI’s Diffusion and OpenAI’s Dall-E. By analyzing the divergent values underlying their opposed strategies for development and deployment, five conceptions are identified as common to acceleration ethics. Uncertainty is understood as positive and encouraging, rather than discouraging. Innovation is conceived as intrinsically valuable, instead of worthwhile only as mediated by social (...) effects. AI problems are solved by more AI, not less. Permissions and restrictions governing AI emerge from a decentralized process, instead of a unified authority. The work of ethics is embedded in AI development and application, instead of functioning from outside. Together, these attitudes and practices remake ethics as provoking rather than restraining artificial intelligence. (shrink)

Traversing the genres of philosophy and literature, this book elaborates Deleuze's notion of difference, conceives certain individuals as embodying difference, and applies these conceptions to their writings.

Compartmentalizing our distinct personal identities is increasingly difficult in big data reality. Pictures of the person we were on past vacations resurface in employers’ Google searches; LinkedIn which exhibits our income level is increasingly used as a dating web site. Whether on vacation, at work, or seeking romance, our digital selves stream together. One result is that a perennial ethical question about personal identity has spilled out of philosophy departments and into the real world. Ought we possess one, unified identity (...) that coherently integrates the various aspects of our lives, or, incarnate deeply distinct selves suited to different occasions and contexts? At bottom, are we one, or many? The question is not only palpable today, but also urgent because if a decision is not made by us, the forces of big data and surveillance capitalism will make it for us by compelling unity. Speaking in favor of the big data tendency, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg promotes the ethics of an integrated identity, a single version of selfhood maintained across diverse contexts and human relationships. This essay goes in the other direction by sketching two ethical frameworks arranged to defend our compartmentalized identities, which amounts to promoting the dis-integration of our selves. One framework connects with natural law, the other with language, and both aim to create a sense of selfhood that breaks away from its own past, and from the unifying powers of big data technology. (shrink)

Does AI conform to humans, or will we conform to AI? An ethical evaluation of AI-intensive companies will allow investors to knowledgeably participate in the decision. The evaluation is built from nine performance indicators that can be analyzed and scored to reflect a technology’s human-centering. When summed, the scores convert into objective investment guidance. The strategy of incorporating ethics into financial decisions will be recognizable to participants in environmental, social, and governance investing, however, this paper argues that conventional ESG frameworks (...) are inadequate for AI-intensive companies. To fully account for contemporary technology, the following categories of evaluation will be developed and featured as vital investing criteria: autonomy, dignity, privacy, performance. With these priorities established, the larger goal is a model for humanitarian investing in AI-intensive companies that is intellectually robust, manageable for analysts, useful for portfolio managers, and credible for investors. (shrink)

Decadence in philosophy is defined in the relation between thinking and truth, and explored as a conflict between Richard Rorty and Gilles Deleuze.

The relation between thinking and truth in philosophy is explored in terms of this question: which one serves the other? The essay argues that a conception of philosophy as truth serving thought can be perceived in the work of French Nietzschean philosophers.

An updated excerpt from the larger paper AI Human Impact. Excerpt explains why ESG investing requires Updating for the AI economy.

Big data and predictive analytics applied to economic life is forcing individuals to choose between authenticity and freedom. The fact of the choice cuts philosophy away from the traditional understanding of the two values as entwined. This essay describes why the split is happening, how new conceptions of authenticity and freedom are rising, and the human experience of the dilemma between them. Also, this essay participates in recent philosophical intersections with Shoshana Zuboff’s work on surveillance capitalism, but the investigation connects (...) on the individual, ethical level as opposed to the more prevalent social and political interaction. (shrink)

Principles of fairness and solidarity in AI ethics regularly overlap, creating obscurity in practice: acting in accordance with one can appear indistinguishable from deciding according to the rules of the other. However, there exist irregular cases where the two concepts split, and so reveal their disparate meanings and uses. This paper explores two cases in AI medical ethics – one that is irregular and the other more conventional – to fully distinguish fairness and solidarity. Then the distinction is applied to (...) the frequently cited COMPAS versus ProPublica dispute in judicial ethics. The application provides a broader model for settling contemporary and topical debates about fairness and solidarity. It also implies a deeper and disorienting truth about AI ethics principles and their justification. (shrink)

In 1990, Gilles Deleuze publishedPostscript on the Societies of Control, an introduction to the potentially suffocating reality of the nascent control society. This thirty-year update details how Deleuze’s conception has developed from a broad speculative vision into specific economic mechanisms clustering around personal information, big data, predictive analytics, and marketing. The central claim is that today’s advancing control society coerces without prohibitions, and through incentives that are not grim but enjoyable, even euphoric because they compel individuals to obey their own (...) personal information. The article concludes by delineating two strategies for living that are as unexplored as control society itself because they are revealed and then enabled by the particular method of oppression that is control. (shrink)

Decadence in philosophy means evaluating truth claims exclusively in terms of provocation, in terms of how vigorously they generate subsequent thought. The best truth/book/essay/video doesn’t settle questions, but produces still more thought, writing, production. -/- Decadence privileges the history of thinking over the history of truth. Thought’s history runs from base servility (the best thinking eliminates the need for itself by culminating in universal truth, Platonism), to dialectical servility (the ceaseless interplay of interpretation as a verb, and as a noun, (...) Nietzscheanism), to decadence, where thought overthrows truth’s independent value and incorporates assertions into its own expression and acceleration. -/- Decadence is defined as truth serving thought, and practiced when the only reason we have truths is to generate more thinking. While the definition structures well historically, the claim in Decadence of the French Nietzsche is not that there are serial epochs – Platonism followed by Nietzscheanism followed by Decadence – but that an esoteric vein of decadence runs through philosophy’s history. (shrink)

Digital nomadism is described geographically, technologically, and existentially.

Recent AI ethics has focused on applying abstract principles downward to practice. This paper moves in the other direction. Ethical insights are generated from the lived experiences of AI-designers working on tangible human problems, and then cycled upward to influence theoretical debates surrounding these questions: 1) Should AI as trustworthy be sought through explainability, or accurate performance? 2) Should AI be considered trustworthy at all, or is reliability a preferable aim? 3) Should AI ethics be oriented toward establishing protections for (...) users, or toward catalyzing innovation? Specific answers are less significant than the larger demonstration that AI ethics is currently unbalanced toward theoretical principles, and will benefit from increased exposure to grounded practices and dilemmas. (shrink)

An Introduction to data ethics, focusing on questions of privacy and personal identity in the economic world as it is defined by big data technologies, artificial intelligence, and algorithmic capitalism. -/- Originally published in The Business Ethics Workshop, 3rd Edition, by Boston Acacdemic Publishing / FlatWorld Knowledge.

According to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, big data reality means, “The days of having a different image for your co-workers and for others are coming to an end, which is good because having multiple identities represents a lack of integrity.” Two sets of questions follow. One centers on technology and asks how big data mechanisms collapse our various selves (work-self, family-self, romantic-self) into one personality. The second question set shifts from technology to ethics by asking whether we want the kind of (...) integrity that Zuckerberg lauds, and that big data technology enables. The negative response is explored by sketching three ethical conceptions of selfhood that recommend personal identity be understood as dis-integrating. The success of the strategies partially depends upon an undermining use of big data platforms. (shrink)

The difference between Derrida and Deleuze has been debated in terms of their understandings and uses of the historical distinction between Being and beings. Daniel W. Smith intersects with the question when discussing transcendence and immanence. Clair Colebrook intersects when discussing materialism. Paul Patton intersects when distinguishing the unconditioned and conditioned. This essay moves along with their ideas, and contributes to the discussion by re-inscribing the debate in terms of nouns and verbs. The conclusion suggests that the noun/verb prism yields (...) a view of the question about Being and beings that fits most easily into Smith’s conception of the relation between Derrida and Deleuze. Thematically, the essay is framed by a line from Derrida’s eulogy for Deleuze, and by a question. The line is Derrida recollecting Deleuze commenting that, "It’s painful for me to see you spending so much time on the College International de Philosophie. I would rather you wrote..." The question addressed to the prolific Derrida and Deleuze is: “How much writing is enough?” Why do individuals with limited time who have already written numerous and thick volumes of philosophy choose to go ahead and write more? (shrink)

Today’s ethics of privacy is largely dedicated to defending personal information from big data technologies. This essay goes in the other direction; it considers the struggle to be lost, and explores two strategies for living after privacy is gone. First, total exposure embraces privacy’s decline, and then contributes to the process with transparency. All personal information is shared without reservation. The resulting ethics is explored through a big data version of Robert Nozick’s Experience Machine thought experiment. Second, transient existence responds (...) to privacy’s loss by ceaselessly generating new personal identities, which translates into constantly producing temporarily unviolated private information. The ethics is explored through Gilles Deleuze’s metaphysics of difference applied in linguistic terms to the formation of the self. Comparing the exposure and transience alternatives leads to the conclusion that today’s big data reality splits the traditional ethical link between authenticity and freedom. Exposure provides authenticity, but negates human freedom. Transience provides freedom, but disdains authenticity. (shrink)

Decadence in philosophy is the reversal between thinking and truth: philosophical truths valued only insofar as they provoke more philosophical thought.

The reversal of the relationship between nouns and verbs.

We offer philosophical motivations for a method we call Virtual World Cognitive Science (VW CogSci), in which researchers use virtual embodied agents that are embedded in virtual worlds to explore questions in the field of Cognitive Science. We focus on questions about mental and linguistic representation and the ways that such computational modeling can add rigor to philosophical thought experiments, as well as the terminology used in the scientific study of such representations. We find that this method forces researchers to (...) take a god’s-eye view when describing dynamical relationships between entities in minds and entities in an environment in a way that eliminates the need for problematic talk of belief and concept types, such as the belief that cats are silly, and the concept CAT, while preserving belief and concept tokens in individual cognizers’ minds. We conclude with some further key advantages of VW CogSci for the scientific study of mental and linguistic representation and for Cognitive Science more broadly. (shrink)

This paper critically examines currently influential transparency accounts of our knowledge of our own beliefs that say that self-ascriptions of belief typically are arrived at by “looking outward” onto the world. For example, one version of the transparency account says that one self-ascribes beliefs via an inference from a premise to the conclusion that one believes that premise. This rule of inference reliably yields accurate self-ascriptions because you cannot infer a conclusion from a premise without believing the premise, and so (...) you cannot infer from a premise that you believe the premise unless you do believe it. I argue that this procedure cannot be a source of justification, however, because one can be justified in inferring from p that q only if p amounts to strong evidence that q is true. This is incompatible with the transparency account because p often is not very strong evidence that you believe that p. For example, unless you are a weather expert, the fact that it will rain is not very strong evidence that you believe it will rain. After showing how this intuitive problem can be made precise, I conclude with a broader lesson about the nature of inferential justification: that beliefs, when justified, must be underwritten by beliefs, when justified, must be underwritten by evidential relationships between the facts or propositions which those beliefs represent. (shrink)

It is our contention that an ontological commitment to propositions faces a number of problems; so many, in fact, that an attitude of realism towards propositions—understood the usual “platonistic” way, as a kind of mind- and language-independent abstract entity—is ultimately untenable. The particular worries about propositions that marshal parallel problems that Paul Benacerraf has raised for mathematical platonists. At the same time, the utility of “proposition-talk”—indeed, the apparent linguistic commitment evident in our use of 'that'-clauses (in offering explanations and making (...) predictions)—is also in need of explanation. We account for this with a fictionalist analysis of our use of 'that'-clauses. Our account avoids certain problems that arise for the usual error-theoretic versions of fictionalism because we apply the notion of semantic pretense to develop an alternative, pretense-involving, non-error-theoretic, fictionalist account of proposition-talk. (shrink)

A large chorus of voices has grown around the claim that theistic belief is epistemically suspect since, as some cognitive scientists have hypothesized, such beliefs are a byproduct of cognitive mechanisms which evolved for rather different adaptive purposes. This paper begins with an overview of the pertinent cognitive science followed by a short discussion of some relevant epistemic concepts. Working from within a largely Williamsonian framework, we then present two different ways in which this research can be formulated into an (...) argument against theistic belief. We argue that neither version works. (shrink)

Although critics often argue that the new atheists are arrogant, dogmatic, closed-minded and so on, there is currently no philosophical analysis of this complaint - which I will call 'the vice charge' - and no assessment of whether it is merely a rhetorical aside or a substantive objection in its own right. This Chapter therefore uses the resources of virtue epistemology to articulate this ' vice charge' and to argue that critics are right to imply that new atheism is intrinsically (...) epistemically vicious, and it ends with some remarks about the rationality of allowing such intrinsically vicious doctrines to feature within public debate about important matters concerning science, religion, and politics. (shrink)

According to a traditional Cartesian epistemology of perception, perception does not provide one with direct knowledge of the external world. Instead, your immediate perceptual evidence is limited to facts about your own visual experience, from which conclusions about the external world must be inferred. Cartesianism faces well-known skeptical challenges. But this chapter argues that any anti-Cartesian view strong enough to avoid these challenges must license a way of updating one’s beliefs in response to anticipated experiences that seems diachronically irrational. To (...) avoid this result, the anti-Cartesian must either license an unacceptable epistemic chauvinism, or else claim that merely reflecting on one’s experiences defeats perceptual justification. This leaves us with a puzzle: Although Cartesianism faces problems, avoiding them brings a new set of problems. (shrink)

According to Quine’s indispensability argument, we ought to believe in just those mathematical entities that we quantify over in our best scientific theories. Quine’s criterion of ontological commitment is part of the standard indispensability argument. However, we suggest that a new indispensability argument can be run using Armstrong’s criterion of ontological commitment rather than Quine’s. According to Armstrong’s criterion, ‘to be is to be a truthmaker (or part of one)’. We supplement this criterion with our own brand of metaphysics, 'Aristotelian (...) (...) realism', in order to identify the truthmakers of mathematics. We consider in particular as a case study the indispensability to physics of real analysis (the theory of the real numbers). We conclude that it is possible to run an indispensability argument without Quinean baggage. (shrink)

The cultivation of receptivity to the mystery of reality is a central feature of many religious and philosophical traditions, both Western and Asian. This paper considers two contemporary accounts of receptivity to mystery – those of David E. Cooper and John Cottingham – and considers them in light of the problem of loss of receptivity. I argue that a person may lose their receptivity to mystery by embracing what I call a scientistic stance, and the paper concludes by offering two (...) possible responses to combating that stance and restoring the receptivity to mystery that it occludes. (shrink)

At the core of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason was a decisive break with certain fundamental Cartesian assumptions or claims about consciousness and self-consciousness, claims that have nonetheless remained perennially tempting, from a phenomenological perspective, independently of any further questions concerning the metaphysics of mind and its place in nature. The core of this philosophical problem has recently been helpfully exposed and insightfully probed in Dan Zahavi’s book, Self and Other: Exploring Subjectivity, Empathy, and Shame. In these remarks I suggest (...) that Zahavi’s view of what he calls ‘The Experiential Self’ defends precisely the sorts of claims to which a Kantian account of consciousness is fundamentally opposed, and while assessing the overall merits of the two contrasting outlooks is no easy matter, I side with the Kantian view. (shrink)

Although Cottingham and Holland make a persuasive case for the claim that it is difficult to situate a meaningful life within a Darwinian naturalistic cosmology, this paper argues that their case should be modified in response to the apparent fact that certain persons seem genuinely not to experience the ‘bleakness’ that they describe. Although certain of these cases will reflect an incomplete appreciation of the existential implications of Darwinian naturalism, at least some of those cases may be genuine. The resulting (...) possibility that certain persons can embrace Darwinian naturalism and live meaningful lives in apparent immunity to the ‘bleakness charge’ therefore poses new puzzles for Cottingham and Holland, and for wider questions about the meaningfulness of human life. I consider that possibility in light of the work of David E. Cooper and Paul Feyerabend and offer a set of three suggestions for further developing these debates. (shrink)

In this review essay, I review in detail Abram de Swann's fine new book, The Killing Compartments. The book is a theoretical analysis of the varieties and causes of genocides and other mass asymmetrical killing campaigns. I then suggest several criticisms of his analysis.

Christopher Johnson has put forward in this journal the view that ad hominem reasoning may be more generally reasonable than is allowed by writers such as myself, basing his view on virtue epistemology. I review his account, as well as the standard account, of ad hominem reasoning, and show how the standard account would handle the cases he sketches in defense of his own view. I then give four criticisms of his view generally: the problems of virtue conflict, vagueness, conflation (...) of speech acts, and self-defeating counsel. I then discuss four reasons why the standard account is superior: it better fits legal reality, the account of other fallacies, psychological science, and political reality. (shrink)

This review aims to identify (1) sources of knowledge and (2) important themes of the ethical debate related to surgical alteration of facial features in East Asians. This article integrates narrative and systematic review methods. In March 2014, we searched databases including PubMed, Philosopher’s Index, Web of Science, Sociological Abstracts, and Communication Abstracts using key terms “cosmetic surgery,” “ethnic*,” “ethics,” “Asia*,” and “Western*.” The study included all types of papers written in English that discuss the debate on rhinoplasty and blepharoplasty (...) in East Asians. No limit was put on date of publication. Combining both narrative and systematic review methods, a total of 31 articles were critically appraised on their contribution to ethical reflection founded on the debates regarding the surgical alteration of Asian features. Sources of knowledge were drawn from four main disciplines, including the humanities, medicine or surgery, communications, and economics. Focusing on cosmetic surgery perceived as a westernising practice, the key debate themes included authenticity of identity, interpersonal relationships and socio-economic utility in the context of Asian culture. The study shows how cosmetic surgery of ethnic features plays an important role in understanding female identity in the Asian context. Based on the debate themes authenticity of identity, interpersonal relationships, and socio-economic utility, this article argues that identity should be understood as less individualistic and more as relational and transformational in the Asian context. In addition, this article also proposes to consider cosmetic surgery of Asian features as an interplay of cultural imperialism and cultural nationalism, which can both be a source of social pressure to modify one’s appearance. (shrink)

In a 2002 article Stewart Cohen advances the “bootstrapping problem” for what he calls “basic justification theories,” and in a 2010 followup he offers a solution to the problem, exploiting the idea that suppositional reasoning may be used with defeasible as well as with deductive inference rules. To curtail the form of bootstrapping permitted by basic justification theories, Cohen insists that subjects must know their perceptual faculties are reliable before perception can give them knowledge. But how is such knowledge of (...) reliability to be acquired if not through perception itself? Cohen proposes that such knowledge may be acquired a priori through suppositional reasoning. I argue that his strategy runs afoul of a plausible view about how epistemic principles function; in brief, I argue that one must actually satisfy the antecedent of an epistemic principle, not merely suppose that one does, to acquire any justification by its means – even justification for a merely conditional proposition. (shrink)

Psychopaths are the bugbears of moral philosophy. They are often used as examples of perfectly rational people who are nonetheless willing to do great moral wrong without regret; hence the disorder has received the epithet “moral insanity” (Pritchard 1835). But whereas philosophers have had a great deal to say about psychopaths’ glaring and often horrifying lack of moral conscience, their aesthetic capacities have received hardly any attention, and are generally assumed to be intact or even enhanced. Popular culture often portrays (...) psychopaths in ways that suggest a great gap between their amorality and their aesthetic sensitivity. In The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991), Hannibal Lecter appreciates fine art, fashion, and wine, while he eats his way through his enemies. His real-life counterparts, however, do not demonstrate the same sensitivities. There is no evidence that psychopaths are capable of real aesthetic appreciation, and some evidence that they are not. In this paper, we set out the limited evidence for the psychopath’s deficient aesthetic sensitivity. The best explanations of what the psychopath lacks turn out to implicate abilities that are also thought to be central to moral thought and action: an impaired capacity for empathizing with others and deficient ability to take a disinterested attitude towards things (socalled distance). We endorse the latter explanation. Thinking about what underlies the psychopath’s deficient aesthetic understanding turns out to throw light on a difficult problem: the connection between ethics and aesthetics. (shrink)

This is a review of the biopic of the great mathematician Ramanujan, 'The Man Who Knew Infinity'(2016).

In this essay, I briefly review ten of the best bio flicks of artists. After laying out my criteria for assessing biographical films about artists, I review my ten choices. These films are: The Agony and the Ecstasy; Frida; Local Color; The Moon and Sixpence; Girl with the Pearl Earring; Pollock; Rembrandt; Moulin Rouge; Modigliani; and Lust for Life. For each film, I try to explain the ways in which the directors were able to show the artist’s creative processes and (...) personal challenges. (shrink)

In this essay, I review the movie Good. Good tells the story of the moral corruption of its protagonist, a writer, who is seduced by blandishments and material rewards given to him by the Nazi regime. It is a nice illustration of corruption—the degradation of character wrought by the desire for wealth and fame—what Aristotle would call “pleonexia.”.

This essay is my review of Olaf Gersemann’s book, Cowboy Capitalism: European Myths, American Reality. Gersemann was a reporter for Germany’s largest business weekly magazine, and he came to America to write an expose of the weakness of the American economy. What he found instead—and argued in detail—is that the American economy was robust, for better off than commonly believed in Europe. I finish the review by pointing out some things he overlooked, such as the fact that the U.S. has (...) paid and continues to pay disproportionately more for joint American/European defense, and that no European nation has allowed in the vast number of poor immigrants that America has. (shrink)

This essay is my review of Randal Marlin’s fine book, Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion (2nd Ed.). Marlin’s book examines the concept of propaganda, rightly noting that the term has a neutral meaning of just promulgating a point of view and a pejorative meaning of using deceit to push a point of view. Marlin gives a concise history of propaganda techniques, and propaganda theory—from ancient Greece through WWII—and has a good discussion of the ethical issues involved in propaganda.

In this paper, I aim to discuss what puns, metaphysically, are. I argue that the type-token view of words leads to an indeterminacy problem when we consider puns. I then outline an alternative account of puns, based on recent nominalist views of words, that does not suffer from this indeterminacy.

Limited aggregationists argue that when deciding between competing claims to aid we are sometimes required and sometimes forbidden from aggregating weaker claims to outweigh stronger claims. Joe Horton presents a ‘fatal dilemma’ for these views. Views that land on the First Horn of his dilemma suggest that a previously losing group strengthened by fewer and weaker claims can be more choice-worthy than the previously winning group strengthened by more and stronger claims. Views that land on the Second Horn suggest that (...) combining two losing groups together and two winning groups together can turn the losing groups into the winning groups and the winning groups into the losing groups. This paper demonstrates that the ‘fatal dilemma’ is neither fatal nor a dilemma. The First Horn is devastating but avoidable and the Second Horn is unavoidable but not devastating. Nevertheless, Horton’s argument does help to narrow down the acceptable range of views. (shrink)

Jennifer Hawkins (2024) offers two cases that challenge traditional accounts of decision-making capacity, according to which respect for a medical decision turns on an individual’s cognitive capacities at the time the decision is made (Hawkins 2024; Appelbaum and Grisso 1988). In each of her described cases (involving anorexia nervosa and grief, respectively), a patient makes a decision that—although instrumentally rational at the time—does not reflect the patient’s longer-term values due to being in a particular psychological state. Importantly, this state does (...) not impair the patient’s cognition, but rather predisposes them to make a decision that conflicts with their own broader values, beliefs, or desires. (shrink)

A belief one has is safe if either (i) it could not easily be false or (ii) in any nearby world in which it is false, it is not formed using the method one uses to form one’s actual belief. It seems our mathematical beliefs are safe if mathematical pluralism is true: if, loosely put, almost any consistent mathematical theory is true. It seems, after all, that in any nearby world where one’s mathematical beliefs differ from one’s actual beliefs, one (...) would believe some other true, consistent theory. Focusing on Justin Clarke-Doane’s recent discussion, I argue the thesis that mathematical beliefs are safe given pluralism faces some obstacles. I argue (i) is true of mathematical belief given pluralism only if we deny plausible claims about the interpretation of non-pluralists who many of us could easily be. Unless strong metasemantic theses are true, it is plausible many of us could easily deny or refuse to believe a consistent and true mathematical theory we actually believe. Since philosophical arguments and controversies permeate the methodology of foundational mathematics, I argue we cannot confidently distinguish the methods we use in mathematics between worlds, thus raising doubts about (ii). (shrink)

This paper examines the integration and unification of the philosophy and psychology of well-being. For the most part, these disciplines investigate well-being without reference to each other. In recent years, however, with the maturing of each discipline, there have been a growing number of calls to integrate the two. While such calls are welcome, what it means to integrate well-being philosophy and psychology can vary greatly depending on one’s theoretical and practical ends. The aim of this paper is to provide (...) a novel conceptual framework for thinking about integrating well-being philosophy and psychology that systematically categorizes different kinds of integration projects. We divide existing attempts in the literature into three broad categories according to the perspective from which the integration takes place: (1) top-down meta-theoretical unification; (2) psychological integration within philosophy; and (3) philosophical integration within psychology. These categories are then broken down into various further subcategories. Our aim in providing this framework is both to facilitate the assessment and comparison of existing integration attempts and to provide a roadmap for future integration attempts. For each category, we discuss one or two representative examples of the approaches. By doing so, we hope to generate interest in the wide variety of existing integration projects, as well as to generate discussion concerning the benefits and pitfalls of different approaches. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: Central to both James’s earlier psychology and his later philosophical views was a recurring distinction between percepts and concepts. The distinction evolved and remained fundamental to his thinking throughout his career as he sought to come to grips with its fundamental nature and significance. In this chapter, I focus initially on James’s early attempt to articulate the distinction in his 1885 article “The Function of Cognition.” This will highlight a key problem to which James continued to (...) return throughout his later philosophical work on the nature of our cognition, including in his famous “radical empiricist” metaphysics of “pure experience” around the turn of the century. We shall find that James grappled insightfully but ambivalently with the perceptual and conceptual dimensions of the “knowledge relation” or the “cognitive relation,” as he called it—or what, following Franz Brentano, philosophers would later call our object-directed thought or intentionality more generally. Some philosophers have once again returned to James’s work for crucial insights on this pivotal topic, while others continue to find certain aspects of his account to be problematic. What is beyond dispute is that James’s inquiries in this domain were both innovative and of lasting significance. (shrink)

People have sought ways to improve their physical and mental capabilities for thousands of years. For those of us who believe that human enhancement technologies include clothes, tools and weapons, the politics of enhancement started in prehistory. The norms of pre-industrial societies that only certain castes or genders could touch specific tools or wear certain clothes were preliminary politics of enhancement. Prosthetic limbs are thousands of years old, and by the 15th century, there were multiple experiments with vaccination around the (...) world. Although it would be appropriate to write a history of the various forms of empowerment that have taken place since the dawn of civilisation, this volume – that now we can present to the lectors – will be on the debates about human enhancement that began in the early 20th century, once modern medicine had begun to suggest actual technologies for human augmentation. Before examining the relationship between human enhancement and biopolitics (the subject of our work), it is helpful to say a few words about the series in which this volume appears, a series that bears the same title as this first text and which opens with contributions from the best scientific experts on the subject. (shrink)