In this paper we comment on the opinions of great philosophers from various epochs on the relationship between computers and the human mind. We ponder over whether we might be able to gain an understanding of the human mind and a perception of the world from the scientific point of view. We focus on the relationship between these two issues.

The phrase ‘synthetic biology’ is used to describe a set of different scientific and technological disciplines, which share the objective to design and produce new life forms. This essay addresses the following questions: What conception of life stands behind this ambitious objective? In what relation does this conception of life stand to that of traditional biology and biotechnology? And, could such a conception of life raise ethical concerns? Three different observations that provide useful indications for the conception of life in (...) synthetic biology will be discussed in detail: 1. Synthetic biologists focus on different features of living organisms in order to design new life forms, 2. Synthetic biologists want to contribute to the understanding of life, and 3. Synthetic biologists want to modify life through a rational design, which implies the notions of utilising, minimising/optimising, varying and overcoming life. These observations indicate a tight connection between science and technology, a focus on selected aspects of life, a production-oriented approach to life, and a design-oriented understanding of life. It will be argued that through this conception of life synthetic biologists present life in a different light. This conception of life will be illustrated by the metaphor of a toolbox. According to the notion of life as a toolbox, the different features of living organisms are perceived as various rationally designed instruments that can be used for the production of the living organism itself or secondary products made by the organism. According to certain ethical positions this conception of life might raise ethical concerns related to the status of the organism, the motives of the scientists and the role of technology in our society. (shrink)

Duncan Pritchard has recently defended a view he calls ‘epistemological disjunctivism’, largely inspired by John McDowell. I argue that Pritchard is right to associate the view with McDowell, and that McDowell’s ‘inference-blocking’ argument against the sceptic succeeds only if epistemological disjunctivism is accepted. However, Pritchard also recognises that epistemological disjunctivism appears to conflict with our belief that genuine and illusory experiences are indistinguishable (the ‘distinguishability problem’). Since the indistinguishability of experiences is the antecedent in the inference McDowell intends to block, (...) I suggest that his argument rests on an inconsistent set of premises. In support of this, I show that Pritchard’s response to the distinguishability problem is incompatible with the conclusion of the ‘inference-blocking’ argument, and that the response available in McDowell’s work relies on a mistaken conception of fallibility. Either McDowell must deny the sceptic’s premise that perceptual experiences are indistinguishable, or he must give up his conclusion that perceptual warrant can be indefeasible. (shrink)

In this paper I consider a cluster of positions which depart from the immortalist and dualist anthropologies of Rene Descartes and Henry More. In particular, I argue that John Locke and Isaac Newton are attracted to a monistic mind-body metaphysics, which while resisting neat characterization, occupies a conceptual space distinct from the dualism of the immortalists, on the one hand, and thoroughgoing materialism of Thomas Hobbes, on the other. They propound a sort of property monism: mind and body are distinct, (...) with distinct characteristics and functions, but are, nevertheless, ontologically interdependent. Consciousness ? the locus of personhood, and thus, a necessary condition for personal immortality ? is an embodied phenomenon; its preservation requires the life and proper functioning of the body. Dying with the dissolution of his body, then, man is a compound wholly mortal. Nevertheless, both Locke and Newton accepted the possibility of personal immortality; with Hobbes, both looked to the Biblical promise of bodily resurrection. For with the re-vitalization of the body ? and a subsequent restoration of consciousness and memory ? personal identity is preserved, even beyond the grave. (shrink)

Trends in the history of social science dedicated to the study of crime and punishment are presented as a case study supporting F.A. Hayek's theory of social change. Designing effective social institutions and public policies first requires an accurate vision of how society operates. An accurate model of society further requires scientific methods uniquely suited for the study of human beings as purposeful agents and the study of human institutions as complex social phenomena. If guided by faulty methods, theories are (...) inaccurate and policy outcomes veer from their intentions. Hayek termed such outcomes "abuses of reason". Aiming to replicate the objectivity of physical sciences via formal modeling and statistical measurement, economists throughout the 20th century imposed an excessively technical vision of human decision-making. Policy failures and social problems resulted. This paper argues that the historical trends of applied social science dedicated to crime and punishment can be understood similarly. Formal modeling and statistical measurement continuously displaced methods more attuned to human intentionality and social complexity. In result, amidst a long-run history of intellectual and political change, US law enforcement and criminal punishment policies became technocratic, and outcomes became disjointed from their stated intentions to promote social order and welfare. (shrink)

In this essay we reflect critically on how animal ethics, and in particular thinking about moral standing, is currently configured. Starting from the work of two influential “analytic” thinkers in this field, Peter Singer and Tom Regan, we examine some basic assumptions shared by these positions and demonstrate their conceptual failings—ones that have, despite efforts to the contrary, the general effect of marginalizing and excluding others. Inspired by the so-called “continental” philosophical tradition , we then argue that what is needed (...) is a change in the rules of the game, a change of the question. We alter the normative question from “What properties does the animal have?” to “What are the conditions under which an entity becomes a moral subject?” This leads us to consider the role of language, personal relations, and material-technological contexts. What is needed then in response to the moral standing problem, is not more of the same—yet another, more refined criterion and argumentation concerning moral standing, or a “final” rational argumentation that would be able to settle the animal question once and for all—but a turning or transformation in both our thinking about and our relations to animals, through language, through technology, and through the various place-ordering practices in which we participate. (shrink)

In the Club of Rome report Come on! Capitalism, Short-Termism, Population and the Destruction of the Planet (2018) Kant, along with other “old” Enlighteners, is presented as the father of a world-view which led to the destabilisation of the environment in which humanity exists. The authors of the report argue that the “old Enlightenment” with its individualism, faith in the market and a consumerist attitude to nature should be scrapped. I maintain that this assessment of Kant’s philosophy is groundless and (...) that his ideas allow us both to conduct a more profound diagnosis of the crisis and to propose a more solidly founded strategy of overcoming it. First, I sum up the position of the authors concerning the loss of sustainability of development which they attribute to the philosophy of Enlightenment. Next, I outline the history and content of the notion of “sustainable development” and offer an analysis of the sources of progressivist commitment to the conquest of nature which lie outside Modern Times in the idea of the “cultural mandate”. Then I present the Kantian diagnosis of the causes of the crisis which attributes it to humankind’s failure to “mature”. I compare the idea of “the full world” formulated by the authors of the report with the idea of the “the world come of age” and their diagnosis of “capitalism — short-termism — depletion of resources” with the Kantian assessment of the attempts to escape from the predicaments of the present into the past or the future. I draw attention to Kant’s solutions to some of the specific problems indicated in the report. Instead of the strategy of “return of the cultural mandate”, proposed at this time by the authors of the report, the Kant­ian answer to the crisis is a “Copernican turn” and re-direction of the cultivating effort to the inner moral development of the human being. (shrink)

In a series of classic papers, Donald Davidson put forward an ingenious argument to challenge the ascription of minds to nonlinguistic animals. Davidson's conclusions have been mercilessly demolished in the literature by cognitive ethologists, but none of them have directly addressed Davidson's argument. First, this paper is an attempt to elucidate and evaluate Davidson's central argument for denying minds to nonlinguistic animals. Davidson's central argument puts forth a challenge to those of us who want to attribute minds to nonlinguistic animals. (...) Second, this paper uses counterexamples offered in the cognitive ethology literature to meet Davidson's challenge directly. (shrink)

This article closely compares the opposing foundations of theoretical philosophy in René Descartes and Ayn Rand. The developmental course of Rand's foundations, with their continual opposition to Descartes, is tracked. Arguments particularly against Descartes are assembled in this article, and the bountiful contemporary scholarship on Descartes is engaged.

War captivity is an extreme traumatic experience typically involving exposure to repeated stressors, including torture, isolation, and humiliation. Captives are flung from their previous known world into an unfamiliar reality in which their state of consciousness may undergo significant change. In the present study extensive interviews were conducted with fifteen Israeli former prisoners of war who fell captive during the 1973 Yom Kippur war with the goal of examining the architecture of human thought in subjects lacking a sense of body (...) (disembodiment) as a result of confinement and isolation. Analysis of the interviews revealed that threats to a normal sense of body often lead to a loss of the sense of time as an objective dimension. Evidence suggests that the loss of the sense of body and the loss of the sense of time are in fact connected; that is, they collapse together. This breakdown in turn results in a collapse of the sense of self. (shrink)

Failing -- Ontology and desire in Dionysius the Areopagite -- Apophatic theology and its vicissitudes -- The death drive: from Freud to Žižek -- The gift and violence -- Divine violence as trauma -- Mystical theology and the four discourses -- Theology as failure.

How all philosophical explanations of human consciousness and the fundamental structure of the cosmos are bizarre—and why that’s a good thing Do we live inside a simulated reality or a pocket universe embedded in a larger structure about which we know virtually nothing? Is consciousness a purely physical matter, or might it require something extra, something nonphysical? According to the philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel, it’s hard to say. In The Weirdness of the World, Schwitzgebel argues that the answers to these fundamental (...) questions lie beyond our powers of comprehension. We can be certain only that the truth—whatever it is—is weird. Philosophy, he proposes, can aim to open—to reveal possibilities we had not previously appreciated—or to close, to narrow down to the one correct theory of the phenomenon in question. Schwitzgebel argues for a philosophy that opens. According to Schwitzgebel’s “Universal Bizarreness” thesis, every possible theory of the relation of mind and cosmos defies common sense. According to his complementary “Universal Dubiety” thesis, no general theory of the relationship between mind and cosmos compels rational belief. Might the United States be a conscious organism—a conscious group mind with approximately the intelligence of a rabbit? Might virtually every action we perform cause virtually every possible type of future event, echoing down through the infinite future of an infinite universe? What, if anything, is it like to be a garden snail? Schwitzgebel makes a persuasive case for the thrill of considering the most bizarre philosophical possibilities. (shrink)

The ability to interact in a natural language profoundly changes devices’ interfaces and potential applications of speaking technologies. Concurrently, this phenomenon challenges our mainstream theories of knowledge, such as how to analyze linguistic outputs of devices under existing anthropocentric theoretical assumptions. In section 1, I present the topic of machines that speak, connecting between Descartes and Generative AI. In section 2, I argue that accepted testimonial theories of knowledge and justification commonly reject the possibility that a speaking technological artifact can (...) give testimony. In section 3, I identify three assumptions underlying the view that rejects conversational AIs – AI-based technologies that converse, as testifiers: conversational AIs (1) lack intentions, (2) cannot be normatively assessed, and (3) cannot constitute an object in trust relations, while humans can. In section 4, I propose the concept ‘AI-testimony’ for analyzing outputs of conversational AIs, suggesting three conditions for technologies to deliver AI-testimony: (1) content is propositional, (2) generated and delivered with no other human directly involved, (3) the output is perceived as phenomenologically similar to that of a human. I conclude that this concept overcomes the limitations of the anthropocentric concept of testimony, opening future directions of research without associating conversational AIs with human-like agency. (shrink)

Elisabeth was the first of Descartes' interlocutors to press concerns about mind-body union and interaction, and the only one to receive a detailed reply, unsatisfactory though she found it. Descartes took her tentative proposal `to concede matter and extension to the soul' for a confused version of his own view: `that is nothing but to conceive it united to the body. Contemporary commentators take Elisabeth for a materialist or at least a critic of dualism. I read her instead as a (...) dualist of a different variety from Descartes: a forerunner of twenty-first century naturalistic dualism which calls for empirical investigation of the psychological and its posits to be taken just as seriously as physics and its posits. -/- I argue that Elisabeth, a keen scholar of mechanistic physics, objected not to substance dualism per se but to the residual Scholasticism of Descartes' account of mind-body causality and his dogmatism about principal attributes. She queried Descartes' categorisation of the `action' of thought as mind's principal attribute, and his identification of it with the merely negative property of immateriality, holding instead that further philosophical and empirical investigation into the nature of the mind is necessary. I problematise the materialist interpretation of Elisabeth with reference to later letters where she dismissed the materialist Objections of Hobbes and Gassendi and continued to urge further clarifications to Cartesian dualism. I explore Elisabeth's contrasting of statements of mechanistic physics with statements about thought, and her call for further investigation into the properties of the mind, and argue they mark her out as a forerunner of contemporary naturalistic dualism which proposes substance dualism as a best interpretation of recent psychology and of the difference in logical form between current physics and current psychology. (shrink)

Argues that a coherent theory of ethics requires an account of selfhood.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Ecological Ethics: An IntroductionDavid Keller (bio)Patrick Curry, Ecological Ethics: An Introduction. Malden, Massachusetts: Polity Press, 2007, 173pages.Were I in Bath having drinks with Patrick Curry, we would have much to agree about. Explaining his choice of title of his book, Ecological Ethics, he rightly points out that the more common descriptor "environmental ethics" presupposes a dualism between human beings and the nonhuman environment—an assumption which is itself anthropocentric (...) (p. 4). For philosophers interested in studying the human/ nonhuman dynamic, the legitimacy of anthropocentrism is itself an open question. Because the word 'ecology' treats humans, as biota, as integral parts of ecological systems, the phrase "ecological ethics" is less presumptuous and hence more accurate. The word 'ecological' also has the benefit of conveying the message that the subject is notgoing to involve extending moral considerability from humans out into the "environment." Instead, ecological systems as the locus of value provide the starting point for the elaboration of ethics (p. 2). For Curry, as for Leopold (1960) and Callicott (1989), "ecological community" is coextensive with the ethical community.To correlate the ethical community with the biotic community within the rubric of "ecological ethics" is nothing novel. Curry's claim that "there is something ancient about an ecological ethic" (p. 7) got me thinking: [End Page 153]prior to Abrahamic monotheism and Greek rationalism, ancient peoples, particularly nomadic hunter-gatherers, probably considered themselves as integral parts of what encompassed them, moving with herds, in concert with meteorological and seasonal changes, seeing themselves as one amongst other living beings. They probably did not see themselves apart from the "environment" as we have learned to do. Then with the advent of agriculture, linear furrows and controlled inundations must have fostered an addictive sense of security from flood and famine. Later, the innovations of industrial civilization further distanced us from the caprice of nature's wild vicissitudes. Yet that comfort comes at the expense of lost awareness of our responsibilities as bioticcitizens. Therefore, Curry says, following Sylvan (1973), we need a new ecological ethic since traditional Western morality "is no longer up to the job" (ibid.).Curry remarks that ethics, cast in this light, is not something "optional," something to be addressed after one's belly is full, debts settled, and lodging secured. Rather, ethics cuts directly to the core of human action, of all human activity (p. 5)—a claim reminiscent of Socrates' exhortation to Thrasymachus that it is no small matter that they are discussing, nothing of less importance than the right way to live one's life (Plato 2005, p. 603).Over the first sips of ale, I would praise him for giving his book a simple and straightforward structure that makes a challenging subject accessible, especially to students. After laying down the groundwork of basic concepts in moral philosophy (chapter 3)—objectivism versus relativism, the problem of the is/ought gap, religious morality and environmental philosophy (domination, stewardship, and managerialism), and virtue and rule-based ethics (chapter 4)—Curry addresses axiology (chapter 5). Are humans the sole locus of value (anthropocentrism), or are there other entities worthy of some sort of moral consideration who themselves do not carry the burden of moral responsibility (zoocentrism, biocentrism, ecocentrism)? Curry answers the latter in the affirmative, arguing that ontological interconnectedness of humans with other living beings within ecological systems discloses that something greater than humanity is the locus of value (p. 46).The most useful part of the book for my students out in Utah would be the middle chapters (6–8) in which Curry casts degrees of nonanthropocentrism [End Page 154]in shades of green. These shades range from light green or "shallow" anthropocentric ethics such Bookchin's Social Ecology (p. 50), Hardin's Lifeboat Ethics (pp. 52–54), and mainstream environmentalism (p. 51), through medium green ethics based on the extension of traditional human-oriented moral philosophy to nonhumans such as Singer's Animal Liberation (pp. 56–59), Regan's Animal Rights (pp. 59–60), and Taylor's Biocentrism (pp. 60–62). Curry proceeds to the dark green ethics of ecocentrism, such as Land Ethics (pp. 65–68), the Gaia Hypothesis (pp. 68–71... (shrink)

A comprehensive introduction to the Language of Though Hypothesis (LOTH) accessible to general audiences. LOTH is an empirical thesis about thought and thinking. For their explication, it postulates a physically realized system of representations that have a combinatorial syntax (and semantics) such that operations on representations are causally sensitive only to the syntactic properties of representations. According to LOTH, thought is, roughly, the tokening of a representation that has a syntactic (constituent) structure with an appropriate semantics. Thinking thus consists in (...) syntactic operations defined over representations. Most of the arguments for LOTH derive their strength from their ability to explain certain empirical phenomena like productivity, systematicity of thought and thinking. (shrink)

It is widely assumed that it is rational to suspend one’s belief regarding a certain proposition only if one’s evidence is neutral regarding that proposition. In this paper I broaden this condition, and defend, on the basis of an improved ancient argument, that it is rational to suspend one’s belief even if the available evidence is not neutral – or even close to neutral.

ABSTRACTThis essay provides a sketch of Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of love in relation to human experience and to the conceptualization of φιλία and σοφία outlined in his later works. In response to what he calls a “cruel thought … that is more fear of error than it is a love of truth”, Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on love and jealousy in Proust offer a concept of “fugitive love”. Opposed to the Cartesian desire for apodicticity that seeks to seize and arrest, fugitive love means (...) withholding one’s touch and letting the beloved die. In its offer of dispossession rather than possession, love requires faith. This faith, the opposite of faith in an absolute λόγος, invites and accepts being’s occultation as the very means of its openness. Merleau-Ponty’s thought offers a mode of philosophizing that no longer aims to make being its captive but a philosophy of weakness that allows for its withdraw. (shrink)

In this paper I want to point out the multifaceted impact of utilitarianism as well as pragmatism, applied as the unified philosophy of environmental protection. Special attention is paid to the utilitarian aspect of Marxism, and a continuous, comprehensive case study from Poland – in the context of European economic realities – serves as an example of social receptionof the utilitarian paradigm in contemporary environmental protection policy.

Among social epistemologists, having a certain proportion of reliably formed beliefs in a subject matter is widely regarded as a necessary condition for cognitive expertise. This condition is motivated by the idea that expert testimony puts subjects in a better position than non-expert testimony to obtain knowledge about a subject matter. I offer three arguments showing that veritism is an inadequate account of expert authority because the reliable access condition renders expertise incapable of performing its social role. I then develop (...) an alternative explanation of expert authority that I call the epistemic facility account, arguing that having a certain type of competence in a subject matter or domain of subject matters is sufficient for explaining expert authority while avoiding the problems with veritistic accounts. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophy of religion almost allergically reacts to metaphysics. They do so because of the various critiques of the potential reach of reason, which each in their own way argue that God cannot be appropriately approached via autonomous reason. In this article, I argue, on the one hand, that these critiques are furtively inspired by a certain outlook on transcendence, which I call the ‘Protestant view’ and, on the other hand, that numerous contemporary philosophers of religion are slowly starting to (...) appreciate a more ‘Catholic view’ on transcendence, which allows for a more metaphysically ambitious philosophy of religion. (shrink)

Few automated legal reasoning systems have been developed in domains of law in which a judicial decision maker has extensive discretion in the exercise of his or her powers. Discretionary domains challenge existing artificial intelligence paradigms because models of judicial reasoning are difficult, if not impossible to specify. We argue that judicial discretion adds to the characterisation of law as open textured in a way which has not been addressed by artificial intelligence and law researchers in depth. We demonstrate that (...) systems for reasoning with this form of open texture can be built by integrating rule sets with neural networks trained with data collected from standard past cases. The obstacles to this approach include difficulties in generating explanations once conclusions have been inferred, difficulties associated with the collection of sufficient data from past cases and difficulties associated with integrating two vastly different paradigms. A knowledge representation scheme based on the structure of arguments proposed by Toulmin has been used to overcome these obstacles. The system, known as Split Up, predicts judicial decisions in property proceedings within family law in Australia. Predictions from the system have been compared to those from a group of lawyers with favourable results. (shrink)

This paper addresses the meta-epistemological dispute over the basis of epistemic evaluation from the standpoint of meliorative epistemology. Meliorative epistemology aims at guiding our epistemic practice to better results, and it comprises two levels of epistemic evaluation. At the social level (meliorative social epistemology) appropriate experts conduct evaluation for the community, so that epistemic evaluation is externalist since each epistemic subject in the community need not have access to the basis of the experts' evaluation. While at the personal level (meliorative (...) personal epistemology) epistemic evaluation is internalist since each member of the community must evaluate the reliability of the (apparent) experts from the first-person perspective. I argue that evaluation at the social level should be the primary focus of meliorative epistemology since meliorative personal epistemology does not provide informative epistemic norms. It is then pointed out that epistemic evaluation at the social level can be considered internalist in the extended sense (social internalism) in that every component of the evaluation needs to be recognized by some members of the community at some points. As a result, some familiar problems of internalist epistemology, such as regress and circularity of epistemic support, carry over to meliorative social epistemology. (shrink)

There have been several important breakthroughs in the fields of philosophy of mind, philosophy of religion, and neuroscience in recent centuries. Despite their complexities and varying opinions in each field, the majority of these breakthroughs tend to view human consciousness as a concrete reality influenced by physiological, social, and environmental factors. This raises the question of why such a dominant perspective did not prevail throughout the history of philosophy and why there were inclinations to deny it. Additionally, why did great (...) philosophers throughout history reject the notion of embodied knowledge, which is a revolutionary approach in both philosophy and neuroscience and holds significant implications across diverse fields, from educational sciences to artificial intelligence? In this paper, we explore the reasons behind these questions. Firstly, we trace the origins of this perspective back to ancient Greek philosophers, including figures like Anaxagoras, Plato, and Aristotle. Next, we examine the reasons for the continuation of this line of thought among modern philosophers, including prominent figures like Descartes and Kant. Lastly, we delve into the approaches and attitudes of pioneering philosophers such as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, who diverged from the mainstream and emphasized the significance of the body in knowledge and consciousness. Understanding the historical neglect of embodiment in philosophy is essential to fully grasp the complexities of human consciousness. By incorporating insights from both historical and contemporary perspectives, we can gain a deeper understanding of the embodied nature of knowledge and its far-reaching impact on various philosophical, scientific, and practical domains. (shrink)

In this paper we examine the use of companion animals (pets) in studies of drugs and devices aimed at human and animal health and situate it within the context of philosophy of technology. We argue that companion animals serve a unique role in illuminating just what it means to use biological technologies and examine the implications for human-animal relationships. Though philosophers have often treated animals as technologies, we argue that the biomedical use of companion animals presents a new configuration of (...) ethical and technological concerns that deserves more attention. Though it seems that companion animals solve many of the ethical dilemmas caused by the use of laboratory animals, the use of companion animals presents its own set of ethical concerns. This paper contextualizes the use of companion animals in research. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The emerging consensus in the secondary literature on Duhem is that his notion of ‘good sense’ is a virtue of individual scientists that guides them choosie between empirically equal rival theories : 149–159; Ivanova 2010. “Pierre Duhem’s Good Sense as a Guide to Theory Choice.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 41 : 58–64; Fairweather 2011. “The Epistemic Value of Good Sense.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 43 : 139–146; Bhakthavatsalam. “Duhemian Good (...) Sense and Agent Reliabilism.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 64: 22–29). In this paper, I argue that good sense is irrelevant for theory choice within Duhem’s conception of scientific methodology. Theory choice, for Duhem, is either a pseudo-problem or addressed purely by empirical and formal desiderata depending on how it is understood. I go on to provide a positive interpretation of good sense as a feature of scientific communities that undergo particular forms of education that allow scientists to abandon theory pursuit. I conclude by suggesting that this interpretation entails that virtue epistemological readings of Duhem are insufficient for understanding good sense; we must employ a social epistemological perspective. (shrink)

I defend a how-possibly argument for Kantian (or Kant*-ian) transcendental idealism, drawing on concepts from David Chalmers, Nick Bostrom, and the cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction. If we are artificial intelligences living in a virtual reality instantiated on a giant computer, then the fundamental structure of reality might be very different than we suppose. Indeed, since computation does not require spatial properties, spatiality might not be a feature of things as they are in themselves but instead only the way that (...) things necessarily appear to us. It might seem unlikely that we are living in a virtual reality instantiated on a non-spatial computer. However, understanding this possibility can help us appreciate the merits of transcendental idealism in general, as well as transcendental idealism’s underappreciated skeptical consequences. (shrink)

To say health is 'special' is to say that it has a moral significance that differentiates it from other goods (cars, say or radios) and, as a matter of justice, warrants distributing it separately. In this essay, I critique a new justification for the specialness thesis about healthcare (STHC) recently put forth by Engster. I argue that, regrettably, Engster's justification of STHC ultimately fails and fails on much the same grounds as have previous justifications of STHC. However, I also argue (...) that Engster's argument still adds something valuable to the debate around STHC insofar as it reminds us that the moral significance of healthcare may be wider than simply its effect on the incidence of disability and disease: one further reason we may think healthcare is morally significant is because it concerns the treatment and care of those who are already unwell. (shrink)

Why does Walter Benjamin claim “indirection” to be the proper method for philosophical contemplation and writing? Why is this method—embodied, according to Benjamin, in the convoluted form of scholastic treatises and in their use of citations—fundamental for understanding his Origin of German Trauerspiel as suggesting an alternative to most strands of modern philosophy? The explicit and well-studied function of this method is for the presentation of what cannot be represented in language, of what cannot be intended or approached in thinking. (...) Namely, of what Benjamin understands as “truth.” Indeed, as Adorno implied, providing a method for presenting an intentionless reality, rather than for re-presenting the world as corresponding to the mind, is revolutionary. However, I claim that beyond its presentational function, the method of indirection has a further, pedagogical function. Benjamin’s concept of truth requires thinking in a manner that does not impose any exterior form, any conceptual or intuitive intention on truth and the materials in which it might be exhibited. The methodological adoption of digressive and intermittent writing is supposed to transform the way we think, or more accurately, the position from which thinking occurs. By examining Benjamin’s use of pedagogical terms against the backdrop of scholastic history and the Urfigure of modern method, that of Descartes, I show that writing and reading in the form of the tractatus serves as exercise in receding from the subject-position—a position of a subject intending an object—and thus conditions the presentation of intentionless truth. (shrink)

Thomas Hobbes based his natural philosophy on definitions and general principles of matter in motion, which he refrained from calling “laws of nature.” Across the channel, René Descartes had presented his own account of matter in motion in such a way that laws of nature play a central causal-explanatory role. Despite some notable differences in the two systems of natural philosophy, the content of the three Cartesian laws of nature is shared by Hobbesian principles of motion. Why is it the (...) case that Hobbes never ‘transferred’ the concept of law of nature from the sphere of civil society to the realm of nature? What is the status of the Hobbesian principles of motion if they are not laws? Answering these questions is the main aim of this article. It is shown that Hobbes made available an importantly different and genuinely original way to do natural philosophy, which renders it free of metaphysics and eschews the need to ground it in anything other than ‘natural reason’. Briefly put, Hobbes took the category of ‘laws of nature’ to involve commitments that cannot be met in the natural world, unless natural philosophy loses its autonomy from theology and metaphysics. (shrink)

Recent developments in the psychological and social sciences have seen a surge of attention to concepts of embodiment. The burgeoning field of embodied cognition, as well as the long-standing tradition of phenomenological philosophy, offer valuable insights for theorising how people come to understand the world around them. However, the implications of human embodiment have been largely neglected by one of the key frameworks for conceptualising the development of social knowledge: Social Representations Theory. This article seeks to spark a dialogue between (...) Social Representations Theory and embodiment research. It outlines the position the body occupies in the existing theoretical and empirical social representations literature, and argues that incorporating concepts gleaned from embodiment research may facilitate a more comprehensive account of the aetiology of social representations. The value of analytic attention to embodiment is illustrated with reference to a recent study of social representations of neuroscience, which suggested that embodied experience can shape the extent to which people engage with certain topics, the conditions under which they do so, and the conceptual and affective content of the ensuing representations. The article argues that expanding Social Representations Theory's methodological and conceptual toolkit, in order to illuminate the interplay between embodied experience and social communication in the development of common-sense knowledge, promises productive directions for empirical and theoretical advancement. (shrink)

Some of the systems used in natural language generation (NLG), a branch of applied computational linguistics, have the capacity to create or assemble somewhat original messages adapted to new contexts. In this paper, taking Bernard Williams’ account of assertion by machines as a starting point, I argue that NLG systems meet the criteria for being speech actants to a substantial degree. They are capable of authoring original messages, and can even simulate illocutionary force and speaker meaning. Background intelligence embedded in (...) their datasets enhances these speech capacities. Although there is an open question about who is ultimately responsible for their speech, if anybody, we can settle this question by using the notion of proxy speech, in which responsibility for artificial speech acts is assigned legally or conventionally to an entity separate from the speech actant. (shrink)

The modern sciences are divided into two groups: law-formulating and natural historical sciences. Sciences of both groups aim at describing the world, but they do so differently. Whereas the natural historical sciences produce “transcriptions” intended to be literally true of actual occurrences, laws of nature are expressive symbols of aspects of the world. The relationship between laws and the world thus resembles that between the symbols of classical iconography and the objects for which they stand. The natural historical approach was (...) founded by Aristotle and is retained in such present-day sciences as botany. Modern physics differentiated itself from the natural historical sciences and developed a symbolizing approach at the hands of Galileo and Descartes. Our knowledge of the physical domain is provided by two disciplines: the law-formulating science of physics and a natural historical science on which we depend in the everyday manipulation of our surroundings. (shrink)

I argue that the intellectualist account of knowledge-how, according to which agents have the knowledge-how to \ in virtue of standing in an appropriate relation to a proposition, is only half right. On the composition view defended here, knowledge-how at least typically requires both propositional knowledge and motor representations. Motor representations are not mere dispositions to behavior because they have representational content, and they play a central role in realizing the intelligence in knowledge-how. But since motor representations are not propositional, (...) propositional knowledge is not sufficient for knowledge-how. (shrink)

It is sometimes remarked that while the preoccupation with the history of technology is a mature and well-established discipline, the preoccupation with the philosophy of technology is at best recent, and at worst considered as marginal in academic terms. In contrast, its relative, the philosophy of science is eminently respectable and unquestioningly accepted by the philosophical community.This paper, first, briefly sets out the historical relationship between science and technology in the West. Against such a context, it then looks at the (...) epistemological values and goals embedded respectively in the philosophy of science and the philosophy of technology, to consider their overlap as well as their differences. It uses the study of genetics, its two revolutions in the twentieth century – classical Mendelian genetics and DNA molecular genetics – as an example to demonstrate these points of similarities and differences, thereby also establishing that the philosophy of technology is indeed a serious preoccupation. (shrink)

The alleged proof of the non-mechanical, or non-computational, character of the human mind based on Gödel’s incompleteness theorem is revisited. Its history is reviewed. The proof, also known as the Lucas argument and the Penrose argument, is refuted. It is claimed, following Gödel himself and other leading logicians, that antimechanism is not implied by Gödel’s theorems alone. The present paper sets out this refutation in its strongest form, demonstrating general theorems implying the inconsistency of Lucas’s arithmetic and the semantic inadequacy (...) of Penrose’s arithmetic. On the other hand, the limitations to our capacity for mechanizing or programming the mind are also indicated, together with two other corollaries of Gödel’s theorems: that we cannot prove that we are consistent, and that we cannot fully describe our notion of a natural number. (shrink)

The term "human dignity" is the source of considerable confusion in contemporary bioethics. It has been used by Kantians to refer to autonomy, by others to refer to the sanctity of life, and by still others to refer—albeit obliquely—to an important but infrequently discussed set of human goods. In the first part of this article, I seek to disambiguate the notion of human dignity. The second part is a defense of the philosophical utility of such a notion; I argue that (...) there is nothing implausible about appealing to a deontological "principle of dignity" to solve bioethical problems, especially those concerning the development of new biotechnologies. There may, however, be problems associated with any attempt to use dignity as a basis for public policy. This sort of worry is explained and briefly addressed in the final section. (shrink)

In this paper I will attempt to explain why the controversy surrounding the alleged refutation of Mechanism by Gödel’s theorem is continuing even after its unanimous refutation by logicians. I will argue that the philosophical point its proponents want to establish is a necessary gap between the intended meaning and its formulation. Such a gap is the main tenet of philosophical hermeneutics. While Gödel’s theorem does not disprove Mechanism, it is nevertheless an important illustration of the hermeneutic principle. The ongoing (...) misunderstanding is therefore based in a distinction between a metalogical illustration of a crucial feature of human understanding, and a logically precise, but wrong claim. The main reason for the confusion is the fact that in order to make the claim logically precise, it must be transformed in a way which destroys its informal value. Part of this transformation is a clear distinction between the Turing Machine as a mathematical object and a machine as a physical device. (shrink)

This paper argues for the reality of qualia as aspects of phenomenal experience. The argument focuses on color vision and develops a dispositionalist, subjectivist account of what it is for an object to be colored. I consider objections to dispositionalism on epistemological, metaphysical, and 'ordinary' grounds. I distinguish my representative realism from sense-data theories and from recent 'representational' or 'intentional' theories, and I argue that there is no good reason to adopt a physicalist stance that denies the reality of qualia (...) as phenomenally available intentional contents in Brentano's original sense of 'intentionality'. (shrink)

It is traditionally held that our knowledge of necessity is a priori; but the familiar theories of a priori knowledge – platonism and conventionalism – have now been discredited, and replaced by either modal skepticism or a posteriori essentialism. The main thesis of this paper is that Kant's theory of a priori knowledge, when detached from his transcendental idealism, offers a genuine alternative to these unpalatable options. According to Kant's doctrine, all epistemic necessity is grounded directly or indirectly on our (...) capacity for clear and distinct rational intuition. Insight, in turn, depends upon functions of the imagination for creating “mental models” of necessary truths. This doctrine is well exemplified by Kant's account of our knowledge of simple analytic truths. (shrink)

This paper examines an insoluble Cartesian problem for classical AI, namely, how linguistic understanding involves knowledge and awareness of u’s meaning, a cognitive process that is irreducible to algorithms. As analyzed, Descartes’ view about reason and intelligence has paradoxically encouraged certain classical AI researchers to suppose that linguistic understanding suffices for machine intelligence. Several advocates of the Turing Test, for example, assume that linguistic understanding only comprises computational processes which can be recursively decomposed into algorithmic mechanisms. Against this background, in (...) the first section, I explain Descartes’ view about language and mind. To show that Turing bites the bullet with his imitation game, in the second section I analyze this method to assess intelligence. Then, in the third section, I elaborate on Schank and Abelsons’ Script Applier Mechanism (SAM, hereby), which supposedly casts doubt on Descartes’ denial that machines can think. Finally, in the fourth section, I explore a challenge that any algorithmic decomposition of linguistic understanding faces. This challenge, I argue, is the core of the Cartesian problem: knowledge and awareness of meaning require a first-person viewpoint which is irreducible to the decomposition of algorithmic mechanisms. (shrink)

It is often taken to be intuitively obvious that if one is in a given conscious state, then one knows that one is in that state. This alleged obvious truth lies at the heart of two very different philosophical doctrines fithe Cartesian doctrine that one has incorrigible knowledge about one?s own conscious states, and the view that one can explain all conscious states in terms of higher-order awareness of mental states. The present paper begins with a description of the real-life (...) case of Simon Browne, a man who believed he had no conscious states whatsoever, although all external evidence overwhelmingly suggests that he had. This case as well as other cases of what can be called?being in denial? figives reason to reject both the alleged intuitively obvious truth and the two philosophical doctrines which attempt to exploit it. Having abandoned these doctrines, it remains to give an account of Browne?s condition, which picks out both why it is possible and why it is so unusual. This is done by arguing that Browne?s belief is contrary to evidence which he absolutely ought to accept, and that this is necessarily, not just contingently, unusual. In addition, it is shown how Browne?s philosophical beliefs about the mind?body relation contributed to his odd belief. (shrink)

This paper situates Hume's views on animals in the context of the Scottish Enlightenment by contrasting them with the views of Adam Smith. While Smith is more central to the philosophical establishment of the Scottish Enlightenment, their views on morals resemble each other greatly and both think that the analogies between humans and non-human animals are useful for thinking about morals. Their estimation of the nature and extent of those analogies, however, differ widely from one another. This has been historically (...) obscured by the fact that in no single work does Smith precisely detail what he thinks non-human animals are capable of. I argue that Smith thinks non-human animal minds are different in kind from human minds. This is evident from Smith's view of how language facilitates and co-creates certain aspects of human cognition. Hume, by contrast, seems to hold that non-human animal minds differ merely by degree from human minds. After reconstructing Smith's view, I contrast it with Hume's, providing historical context to show how Hume falls outside the mainstream on this issue and Smith within it. Their views on animals reflect, broadly, their standing with respect to the wider Scottish philosophical community. (shrink)

Normative research has nearly vanished from the academic ‘mainstream’ in accounting. Due to its prescriptive and value-driven approach, normative accounting research has been stigmatized as being unscientific and largely replaced by positive studies. We put this stigma into perspective. We first conceptualize the ‘positive-normative’ distinction and identify this dichotomy in accounting research history. We then challenge the dogmatic confinement of science to descriptive (positive) approaches. Moreover, we debate the basic conditions for normative accounting research and conclude that methodological and epistemological (...) pluralism in accounting research may help address a wide range of potential research questions. We point out that normative research approaches are essential in an applied science such as accounting, lest practical implications and prescriptions are to be the exclusive domain of accounting practice. (shrink)

This paper has arisen from my interest in questions ofsubjectivity of primary concern to contemporaryfeminist jurisprudence. Rather than side with anyparticular view represented in the debates surroundingthese questions, I have used Foucault's concept ofepisteme to explore the tradition of feministlegal thought. By focusing upon seventeenth-centurywomen's writings in which the earliest statementslinking law to women's oppression are to be found, thepaper argues that knowledge claims about law'sassociation with women's oppression are predicated notupon the positing of a sovereign feministconsciousness, but upon the (...) specific positivities ofknowledge which existed at the time. Theunderstanding of the birth of the feminist legaldiscourse in terms of the specific conditions of itspossibility, although historically contextualised,raises questions about the hitherto seeminglyunassailable adherence to subjectivist epistemologywhich the current feminist engagement with lawmaintains. (shrink)