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  1. Respiratory rhythms of the predictive mind.Micah Allen, Somogy Varga & Detlef H. Heck - 2022 - Psychological Review (4):1066-1080.
    Respiratory rhythms sustain biological life, governing the homeostatic exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide. Until recently, however, the influence of breathing on the brain has largely been overlooked. Yet new evidence demonstrates that the act of breathing exerts a substantive, rhythmic influence on perception, emotion, and cognition, largely through the direct modulation of neural oscillations. Here, we synthesize these findings to motivate a new predictive coding model of respiratory brain coupling, in which breathing rhythmically modulates both local and global neural (...)
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  2. Towards Post-Pandemic Sustainable and Ethical Food Systems.Matthias Kaiser, Stephen Goldson, Tatjana Buklijas, Peter Gluckman, Kristiann Allen, Anne Bardsley & Mimi E. Lam - 2021 - Food Ethics 6 (1).
    The current global COVID-19 pandemic has led to a deep and multidimensional crisis across all sectors of society. As countries contemplate their mobility and social-distancing policy restrictions, we have a unique opportunity to re-imagine the deliberative frameworks and value priorities in our food systems. Pre-pandemic food systems at global, national, regional and local scales already needed revision to chart a common vision for sustainable and ethical food futures. Re-orientation is also needed by the relevant sciences, traditionally siloed in their disciplines (...)
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  3. How Not to Find Over-Imitation in Animals.Kristin Andrews & Jedediah W. P. Allen - 2024 - Human Development.
    While more species are being identified as cultural on a regular basis, stark differences between human and animal cultures remain. Humans are more richly cultural, with group-specific practices and social norms guiding almost every element of our lives. Furthermore, human culture is seen as cumulative, cooperative, and normative, in contrast to animal cultures. One hypothesis to explain these differences is grounded in the observation that human children across cultures appear to spontaneously over-imitate silly or causally irrelevant behaviors that they observe. (...)
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  4. Exploration and exploitation of Victorian science in Darwin’s reading notebooks.Jaimie Murdock, Colin Allen & Simon DeDeo - 2017 - Cognition 159 (C):117-126.
    Search in an environment with an uncertain distribution of resources involves a trade-off between exploitation of past discoveries and further exploration. This extends to information foraging, where a knowledge-seeker shifts between reading in depth and studying new domains. To study this decision-making process, we examine the reading choices made by one of the most celebrated scientists of the modern era: Charles Darwin. From the full-text of books listed in his chronologically-organized reading journals, we generate topic models to quantify his local (...)
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  5. Reflective Intuitions about the Causal Theory of Perception across Sensory Modalities.Pendaran Roberts, Keith Allen & Kelly Schmidtke - 2020 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 12 (2):257-277.
    Many philosophers believe that there is a causal condition on perception, and that this condition is a conceptual truth about perception. A highly influential argument for this claim is based on intuitive responses to Gricean-style thought experiments. Do the folk share the intuitions of philosophers? Roberts et al. (2016) presented participants with two kinds of cases: Blocker cases (similar to Grice’s case involving a mirror and a pillar) and Non-Blocker cases (similar to Grice’s case involving a clock and brain stimulation). (...)
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  6. Conscious thoughts from reflex-like processes: A new experimental paradigm for consciousness research.Allison K. Allen, Kevin Wilkins, Adam Gazzaley & Ezequiel Morsella - 2013 - Consciousness and Cognition 22 (4):1318-1331.
    The contents of our conscious mind can seem unpredictable, whimsical, and free from external control. When instructed to attend to a stimulus in a work setting, for example, one might find oneself thinking about household chores. Conscious content thus appears different in nature from reflex action. Under the appropriate conditions, reflexes occur predictably, reliably, and via external control. Despite these intuitions, theorists have proposed that, under certain conditions, conscious content resembles reflexes and arises reliably via external control. We introduce the (...)
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  7. When Do Robots Have Free Will? Exploring the Relationships between (Attributions of) Consciousness and Free Will.Eddy Nahmias, Corey Allen & Bradley Loveall - 2019 - In Bernard Feltz, Marcus Missal & Andrew Sims (eds.), Free Will, Causality, and Neuroscience. Leiden: Brill.
    While philosophers and scientists sometimes suggest (or take for granted) that consciousness is an essential condition for free will and moral responsibility, there is surprisingly little discussion of why consciousness (and what sorts of conscious experience) is important. We discuss some of the proposals that have been offered. We then discuss our studies using descriptions of humanoid robots to explore people’s attributions of free will and responsibility, of various kinds of conscious sensations and emotions, and of reasoning capacities, and examine (...)
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  8. Folk intuitions about the causal theory of perception.Pendaran Roberts, Keith Allen & Kelly Ann Schmidtke - 2016 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy.
    It is widely held by philosophers not only that there is a causal condition on perception but also that the causal condition is a conceptual truth about perception. One influential line of argument for this claim is based on intuitive responses to a style of thought experiment popularized by Grice. Given the significance of these thought experiments to the literature, it is important to see whether the folk in fact respond to these cases in the way that philosophers assume they (...)
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  9. Principlism and Contemporary Ethical Considers in Transgender Health Care.Luke Allen, Noah Adams, Florence Ashley, Cody Dodd, Diane Ehrensaft, Lin Fraser, Maurice Garcia, Simona Giordano, Jamison Green, Thomas Johnson, Justin Penny, Rachlin Katherine & Jaimie Veale - forthcoming - International Journal of Transgender Health.
    Background: Transgender health care is a subject of much debate among clinicians, political commentators, and policy-makers. While the World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH) Standards of Care (SOC) establish clinical standards, these standards contain implied ethics but lack explicit focused discussion of ethical considerations in providing care. An ethics chapter in the SOC would enhance clinical guidelines. Aims: We aim to provide a valuable guide for healthcare professionals, and anyone interested in the ethical aspects of clinical support for gender (...)
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  10. Clarifying Our Stance on BMI and Accessibility in Gender-Affirming Surgery: A Commitment to Inclusive Care and Dialogue – A Reply to Castle & Klein (2024).Luke R. Allen, Noah Adams, Cody Dodd, Diane Ehrensaft, Lin Fraser, Maurice Garcia, Simona Giordano, Jamison Green, Thomas Johnson, Justin Penny, Katherine Rachlin & Jaimie Veale - forthcoming - International Journal of Transgender Health.
    We respond to a Letter to the Editor regarding "Principlism and contemporary ethical considerations for providers of transgender health care." We address criticisms by Castle & Klein (2024) of blatant fatphobia related to the ethical elements concerning BMI restrictions for gender-affirming surgery. Our response corrects several mischaracterizations of the article and clarifies our position. My co-authors and I remain focused on advocating for patient-centered, ethically sound, evidence-based, and equitable healthcare policies.
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  11. Engineered Wisdom for Learning Machines.Brett Karlan & Colin Allen - 2024 - Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence 36 (2):257-272.
    We argue that the concept of practical wisdom is particularly useful for organizing, understanding, and improving human-machine interactions. We consider the relationship between philosophical analysis of wisdom and psychological research into the development of wisdom. We adopt a practical orientation that suggests a conceptual engineering approach is needed, where philosophical work involves refinement of the concept in response to contributions by engineers and behavioral scientists. The former are tasked with encoding as much wise design as possible into machines themselves, as (...)
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  12. Reconciling the opposing effects of neurobiological evidence on criminal sentencing judgments.Corey Allen, Karina Vold, Gidon Felson, Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby & Eyal Aharoni - 2019 - PLoS ONE 1:1-17.
    Legal theorists have characterized physical evidence of brain dysfunction as a double-edged sword, wherein the very quality that reduces the defendant’s responsibility for his transgression could simultaneously increase motivations to punish him by virtue of his apparently increased dangerousness. However, empirical evidence of this pattern has been elusive, perhaps owing to a heavy reliance on singular measures that fail to distinguish between plural, often competing internal motivations for punishment. The present study employed a test of the theorized double-edge pattern using (...)
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  13. The Relativity of Volition: Aristotle’s Teleological Agent Causalism.Robert Allen - manuscript
    Nicomachean Ethics/NE, Book III, Chapters 1-5, provides Aristotle’s account of “Voluntary Movement.” It, thus, draws the Passion-Action distinction, only posited earlier in Categories, while also serving as the linchpin of NE’s discussion of Virtue, in explicitly connecting it to Right Reason. My explication of this text renders its terminology consistent with the Law of Excluded Middle and rebuts two criticisms of the Eudaimonistic Axiology on which it is based. These results are shown to be entailments of Aristotle’s doctrine that Voluntary (...)
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  14. Powers and the hard problem of consciousness: conceivability, possibility and powers.Sophie R. Allen - 2022 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 12 (2):1-33.
    Do conceivability arguments work against physicalism if properties are causal powers? By considering three different ways of understanding causal powers and the modality associated with them, I will argue that most, if not all, physicalist powers theorists should not be concerned about the conceivability argument because its conclusion that physicalism is false does not hold in their favoured ontology. I also defend specific powers theories against some recent objections to this strategy, arguing that the conception of properties as powerful blocks (...)
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  15. Samuel Butler's Contributions to Biological Philosophy.Barry Allen - 2023 - Common Knowledge 29 (2):251-279.
    Samuel Butler is usually remembered for Erewhon, widely considered among the best English satires. He also contributed to philosophical biology in works that collectively compose the nineteenth century's finest statement of the evolutionary argument associated with the name of Lamarck. In writing on evolution, Butler was not presenting science for a popular audience but deliberately intervening in the scientific argument about Darwinism. Surprised by the success of his first venture in philosophical biology, Life and Habit, Butler committed himself to the (...)
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  16. Ethics of Decentralized Social Technologies: Lessons from Web3, the Fediverse, and Beyond.Danielle Allen, Woojin Lim, Eli Frankel, Joshua Simons, Divya Siddarth & Glen Weyl - 2023 - Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics.
    This paper argues that the plethora of experiments with decentralized social technologies (DSTs)—clusters of which are sometimes called “the Web 3.0 ecosystem” or “the Fediverse”—have brought us to a constitutional moment. These technologies enable radical innovations in social, economic, and political institutions and practices, with the potential to support transformative approaches to political economy. They demand governance innovation. The paper develops a framework of prudent vigilance for making ethical choices in this space that help to both grasp positive opportunities for (...)
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  17.  61
    Singularities and Genetic Structure in Deleuze's Logic of Sense.M. Curtis Allen - 2024 - Journal of Speculative Philosophy 38 (3):226-236.
    This article presents formal correspondences between the ontological and logical structures of Deleuze’s theory of sense-events in the Logic of Sense as a “post-Cantorian orientation of thought” (Livingston 2012), grappling with an essential incompleteness or inconsistency at the heart of both Being and thought, one which Deleuze champions positively under the equation Ungrounding = Becoming. Through it, Deleuze’s sometimes slippery use of the concept of singularity (and its relation to the virtual) is elaborated, elucidating a post-Cantorian metaphysics of events, distinct (...)
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  18. Open Problems in DAOs: Political Science and Philosophy.Eliza R. Oak, Woojin Lim, Danielle Allen & Helene Landemore - 2023 - Arxiv.
    Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) are a new, rapidly-growing class of organizations governed by smart contracts. Here we describe how researchers can contribute to the emerging science of DAOs and other digitally-constituted organizations. From granular privacy primitives to mechanism designs to model laws, we identify high-impact problems in the DAO ecosystem where existing gaps might be tackled through a new data set or by applying tools and ideas from existing research fields such as political science, computer science, economics, law, and organizational (...)
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  19. 14. Real Traits, Real Functions?Colin Allen - 2002 - In André Ariew, Robert Cummins & Mark Perlman (eds.), Functions: New Essays in the Philosophy of Psychology and Biology. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 373.
    Discussions of the functions of biological traits generally take the notion of a trait for granted. Defining this notion is a non-trivial problem. Different approaches to function place different constraints on adequate accounts of the notion of a trait. Accounts of function based on engineering-style analyses allow trait boundaries to be a matter of human interest. Accounts of function based on natural selection have typically been taken to require trait boundaries that are objectively real. After canvassing problems raised by each (...)
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  20. Does Opacity Undermine Privileged Access?Timothy Allen & Joshua May - 2014 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 22 (4):617-629.
    Carruthers argues that knowledge of our own propositional attitudes is achieved by the same mechanism used to attain knowledge of other people's minds. This seems incompatible with "privileged access"---the idea that we have more reliable beliefs about our own mental states, regardless of the mechanism. At one point Carruthers seems to suggest he may be able to maintain privileged access, because we have additional sensory information in our own case. We raise a number of worries for this suggestion, concluding that (...)
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  21. On an Alleged Case of Propaganda: Reply to McKinnon.Sophie R. Allen, Elizabeth Finneron-Burns, Mary Leng, Holly Lawford-Smith, Jane Clare Jones, Rebecca Reilly-Cooper & R. J. Simpson - manuscript
    In her recent paper ‘The Epistemology of Propaganda’ Rachel McKinnon discusses what she refers to as ‘TERF propaganda’. We take issue with three points in her paper. The first is her rejection of the claim that ‘TERF’ is a misogynistic slur. The second is the examples she presents as commitments of so-called ‘TERFs’, in order to establish that radical (and gender critical) feminists rely on a flawed ideology. The third is her claim that standpoint epistemology can be used to establish (...)
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  22. Fragmented and conflicted: folk beliefs about vision.Paul E. Engelhardt, Keith Allen & Eugen Fischer - 2023 - Synthese 201 (3):1-33.
    Many philosophical debates take for granted that there is such a thing as ‘the’ common-sense conception of the phenomenon of interest. Debates about the nature of perception tend to take for granted that there is a single, coherent common-sense conception of vision, consistent with Direct Realism. This conception is often accorded an epistemic default status. We draw on philosophical and psychological literature on naïve theories and belief fragmentation to motivate the hypothesis that untutored common sense encompasses conflicting Direct Realist and (...)
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  23. The Mereology of Events.Robert Allen - 2005 - Sorites.
    I demonstrate here that it is possible for an event to be identical with one of its proper parts, refuting the key premise in Lawrence Lombard's argument for the essentiality of an event's time. I also propose and defend an alternative to his criterion of event identity.
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  24. The ImmPort Antibody Ontology.William Duncan, Travis Allen, Jonathan Bona, Olivia Helfer, Barry Smith, Alan Ruttenberg & Alexander D. Diehl - 2016 - Proceedings of the International Conference on Biological Ontology 1747.
    Monoclonal antibodies are essential biomedical research and clinical reagents that are produced by companies and research laboratories. The NIAID ImmPort (Immunology Database and Analysis Portal) resource provides a long-term, sustainable data warehouse for immunological data generated by NIAID, DAIT and DMID funded investigators for data archiving and re-use. A variety of immunological data is generated using techniques that rely upon monoclonal antibody reagents, including flow cytometry, immunofluorescence, and ELISA. In order to facilitate querying, integration, and reuse of data, standardized terminology (...)
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  25. Psychologists’ responsibility to society: Public policy and the ethics of political action.Luke R. Allen & Cody G. Dodd - 2018 - Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology 38 (1):42-53.
    In the United States, prohibitionist policies are used as the primary approach to combat the negative effect of substance use on society. An extensive academic literature spanning the disciplines of economics, political science, and multiculturalism documents the great social costs of the United States’ “War on Drugs” both nationally and internationally. These costs come with at best marginal effect on substance abuse and other crimes linked to the drug trade. In many cases, there is a reason to believe that these (...)
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  26. Mining Arguments From 19th Century Philosophical Texts Using Topic Based Modelling.John Lawrence, Chris Reed, Simon McAlister, Andrew Ravenscroft, Colin Allen & David Bourget - 2014 - In Nancy Green, Kevin Ashley, Diane Litman, Chris Reed & Vern Walker (eds.), Proceedings of the First Workshop on Argumentation Mining. Baltimore, USA: pp. 79-87.
    In this paper we look at the manual analysis of arguments and how this compares to the current state of automatic argument analysis. These considerations are used to develop a new approach combining a machine learning algorithm to extract propositions from text, with a topic model to determine argument structure. The results of this method are compared to a manual analysis.
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  27. Multi-level computational methods for interdisciplinary research in the HathiTrust Digital Library.Jaimie Murdock, Colin Allen, Katy Börner, Robert Light, Simon McAlister, Andrew Ravenscroft, Robert Rose, Doori Rose, Jun Otsuka, David Bourget, John Lawrence & Chris Reed - 2017 - PLoS ONE 12 (9).
    We show how faceted search using a combination of traditional classification systems and mixed-membership topic models can go beyond keyword search to inform resource discovery, hypothesis formulation, and argument extraction for interdisciplinary research. Our test domain is the history and philosophy of scientific work on animal mind and cognition. The methods can be generalized to other research areas and ultimately support a system for semi-automatic identification of argument structures. We provide a case study for the application of the methods to (...)
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  28. Failure and Expertise in the ancient conception of an art.James Allen - 1994 - In Horowitz Tami Tamar & Janis Allen (eds.), Scientific Failure. Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 81-108.
    The articles examines how failure, especially in so-called 'stochastic' arts or sciences like medicine and navigation stimulated reflections about the nature of the knowledge required of a genuine art (techne) or science.
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  29. (1 other version)The Contemporary Frankfurt School's Eurocentrism Unveiled: The Contribution of Amy Allen.Claudia Leeb, Robert Nichols, Yves Winter & Amy Allen - 2018 - Political Theory 46 (5):772-800.
    In her latest book, The End of Progress, Amy Allen embarks on an ambitious and much-needed project: to decolonize contemporary Frankfurt School Critical Theory. As with all of her books, this is an exceptionally well-written and well-argued book. Allen strives to avoid making assertions without backing them up via close and careful textual reading of the thinkers she engages in her book. In this article, I will state why this book makes a central contribution to contemporary critical theory (in the (...)
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  30. Skepticism about Reasoning.Sherrilyn Roush, Kelty Allen & Ian Herbert - 2009 - In P. D. Magnus & Jacob Busch (eds.), New waves in philosophy of science. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan. pp. 112-141.
    Less discussed than Hume’s skepticism about what grounds there could be for projecting empirical hypotheses is his concern with a skeptical regress that he thought threatened to extinguish any belief when we reflect that our reasoning is not perfect. The root of the problem is the fact that a reflection about our reasoning is itself a piece of reasoning. If each reflection is negative and undermining, does that not give us a diminution of our original belief to nothing? It requires (...)
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  31. Mirror, Mirror in the Brain, What's the Monkey Stand to Gain?Colin Allen - 2010 - Noûs 44 (2):372 - 391.
    Primatologists generally agree that monkeys lack higher-order intentional capacities related to theory of mind. Yet the discovery of the so-called "mirror neurons" in monkeys suggests to many neuroscientists that they have the rudiments of intentional understanding. Given a standard philosophical view about intentional understanding, which requires higher-order intentionahty, a paradox arises. Different ways of resolving the paradox are assessed, using evidence from neural, cognitive, and behavioral studies of humans and monkeys. A decisive resolution to the paradox requires substantial additional empirical (...)
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  32. Hannah Arendt: Existential phenomenology and political freedom.Wayne F. Allen - 1982 - Philosophy and Social Criticism 9 (2):170-190.
    This paper has three purposes: first, to explicate the ex istential basis of Arendt's theory of action. This will be done by first tracing the intellectual derivation of Arendt's existentialism and the modifications she made to fit it in to her public realm. Second, I will demonstrate the con nection between Arendt's existentialism and her formula tion of political freedom. Third, I will illustrate throughout that Arendt's political ideas, if they are to be properly understood, must be subsumed under her (...)
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  33. Genesis in Egypt: the philosophy of ancient Egyptian creation accounts.James P. Allen (ed.) - 1988 - New Haven, Conn.: Yale Egyptological Seminar, Dept. of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Graduate School, Yale University.
    Thousands of texts discuss Egytpain cosmology and cosmogony. James Allen has selected sixteen to translate and discuss in order to shed light on one of the questions that clearly preoccupied ancient intellectuals; the origins of the world.
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  34. Rhetorical Humanism vs. Object-Oriented Ontology: The Ethics of Archimedean Points and Levers.Ira Allen - 2014 - Substance 43 (3):67-87.
    Archimedes of Syracuse has long provided a touchstone for considering how we make and acquire knowledge. Since the early Roman chroniclers of Archimedes’ life, and especially intensively since Descartes, scholars have described, sought, or derided the Archimedean point, defining and redefining its epistemic role. “Knowledge,” at least within modernity, is rhetorically tied to the figure of the Archimedean point, a place somewhere outside a regular and constrained world of experience. If this figure still leads to useful ways of thinking about (...)
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  35. Freedom and Reason: An Anselmian Critique of Susan Wolf's Compatiblism.Robert Allen - 2013 - Saint Anselm Journal 9 (1):01-13.
    Susan Wolf’s compatibilism is unique for being ‘asymmetrical.' While holding that blameworthiness entails being able to avoid acting wrongly, she maintains that our freedom consists in single-mindedly pursuing Truth and Goodness. Comparing and contrasting her position to Saint Anselm’s seminal, libertarian approach to the same subject elicits serious questions, highlighting its drawbacks. How could freedom entail the inability to do certain things? In what sense are reasons causes? What sense can be made of a double standard for assignments of responsibility? (...)
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  36. Quantum of Wisdom.Colin Allen & Brett Karlan - 2022 - In Greg Viggiano (ed.), Quantum Computing and AI: Social, Ethical, and Geo-Political Implications. pp. 157-166.
    Practical quantum computing devices and their applications to AI in particular are presently mostly speculative. Nevertheless, questions about whether this future technology, if achieved, presents any special ethical issues are beginning to take shape. As with any novel technology, one can be reasonably confident that the challenges presented by "quantum AI" will be a mixture of something new and something old. Other commentators (Sevilla & Moreno 2019), have emphasized continuity, arguing that quantum computing does not substantially affect approaches to value (...)
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  37. Determinism and Frankfurt Cases.Robert Allen - manuscript
    The indirect argument (IA) for incompatibilism is based on the principle that an action to which there is no alternative is unfree, which we shall call ‘PA’. According to PA, to freely perform an action A, it must not be the case that one has ‘no choice’ but to perform A. The libertarian and hard determinist advocates of PA must deny that free will would exist in a deterministic world, since no agent in such a world would perform an action (...)
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  38. The Aristotelian Alternative to Humean Bundles and Lockean Bare Particulars: Lowe and Loux on Material Substance .Robert Allen - manuscript
    Must we choose between reducing material substances to collections of properties, a’ la Berkeley and Hume or positing bare particulars, in the manner of Locke? Having repudiated the notion that a substance could simply be a collection of properties existing on their own, is there a viable alternative to the Lockean notion of a substratum, a being essentially devoid of character? E.J. Lowe and Michael Loux would answer here in the affirmative. Both recommend hylomorphism as an upgrade on the metaphysics (...)
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  39. The Utah Lyceum: Cultivating "Reasonableness" in Southwest Utah.Kristopher G. Phillips & Gracia Allen - 2020 - In Claire Elise Katz (ed.), Growing Up with Philosophy Camp: How Learning to Think Develops Friendship, Community, and a Sense of Self. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. pp. 111-120.
    In this chapter we discuss the role of what we call "reasonableness" in a philosophy summer camp held at Southern Utah University. "Reasonableness," as we call it, is a more narrowly prescribed form of rationality - indeed one can be rational but unreasonable, but not the other way around. We discuss the importance and value of introducing philosophy to students before they get to college, and describe some of the challenges we face in introducing students in SW Utah to philosophy.
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  40. John Perry’s Neo-Humean Compatibilism: Initiative and Free Agency.Robert Allen - manuscript
    John Perry has recently developed a form of Compatibilism that respects the Principle of Alternatives (PA), according to which free agency requires having the ability to do more than one thing. Eschewing so-called Frankfurt counterexamples to this intuitively plausible principle, long the bête noire of those who would like to believe in free agency and Determinism, Perry argues that there is an important sense in which we can act differently than we do. It signifies the “natural” property of possessing a (...)
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  41. Analogical Reasoning in Saint Anselm's De Concordia: Grace, Free Will, and Cooperation.Robert Allen - manuscript
    St. Anselm is a master of philosophical prose. His writings on God, truth, and free will are models of clarity born of unflagging concern for argumentative precision. He is especially adept at using analogies to cinch his readers' understanding of these recondite matters. Who could forget the light shed upon the concept of existence by the Painter Analogy in the Ontological Argument or how his River Analogy illumines the unification of the Holy Trinity? Such intellectual insights could only be gifts (...)
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  42. Working Backwards with Copi's Inference Rules.Robert Allen - 1996 - American Philosophical Association Journal on Teaching Philosophy 95 (Spring):103-104.
    In their Introduction to Logic, Copi and Cohen suggest that students construct a formal proof by "working backwards from the conclusion by looking for some statement or statements from which it can be deduced and then trying to deduce those intermediate statements from the premises. What follows is an elaboration of this suggestion. I describe an almost mechanical procedure for determining from which statement(s) the conclusion can be deduced and the rules by which the required inferences can be made. This (...)
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  43. The Metaphysical Subject and Logical Space: Solipsism and Singularity in the Tractatus.M. Curtis Allen - 2018 - Open Philosophy 1 (1):277-289.
    This essay presents a heterodox reading of the issue of solipsism in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, out of which the whole of the TLP can be re-read. Inspired by, though not dependent on, the themes of virtuality and singularity found in Deleuze’s ‘transcendental empiricism’, Wittgenstein’s concept of ‘logical space’ is here complexly related to the paradoxes of the ‘metaphysical subject’ and ‘solipsism,’ within which the strictures of sense are defined, and through which the logico-pictorial scaffolding of the TLP precipitates its own (...)
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  44. (1 other version)The Subject is Qualia.Robert F. Allen - manuscript
    Things strike me in a variety ways. F and F# sound slightly different, ripe and unripe tomatoes neither look nor taste nor smell the same, and silk feels smoother than corduroy. In each case, I distinguish an experience of something on the basis of what it is like to be its subject. That is to say, in philosophical parlance, if not quite the vernacular, its “quale,” leads me to categorize it and, thus, respond appropriately to its stimulus. The function of (...)
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  45. Defeating the Whole Purpose: A Critique of Ned Markosian's Agent-Causal Compatibilism.Robert Allen - manuscript
    Positions taken in the current debate over free will can be seen as responses to the following conditional: -/- If every action is caused solely by another event and a cause necessitates its effect, then there is no action to which there is an alternative (C). -/- The Libertarian, who believes that alternatives are a requirement of free will, responds by denying the right conjunct of C’s antecedent, maintaining that some actions are caused, either mediately or immediately, by events whose (...)
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  46. Analogical Reasoning in St. Anselm's Concordia: Free Will, Grace, and Cooperation.Robert Allen - manuscript
    St. Anselm is a master of philosophical prose. His writings on God, truth, and free will are models of clarity born of unflagging concern for argumentative precision. He is especially adept at using analogies to cinch his readers' understanding of these recondite matters. Who could forget the light shed upon the concept of existence by the Painter Analogy in the Ontological Argument or how his River Analogy illumines the unification of the Holy Trinity? Such intellectual insights could only be gifts (...)
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  47. (3 other versions)Gradations of Volition: An Essay in Honor of Father Joseph Owens CSsR.Robert Allen - manuscript
    I demonstrate here that St. Anselm”s understanding of free will fits neatly into an Aristotelian conceptual framework. Aristotle”s four causes are first aligned with Anselm”s four senses of “will”. The volitional hierarchy Anselm”s definition of free will entails is then detailed, culminating in its reconciliation with Eudaimonism. The summum bonum turns out to be the apex of that series of actualizations or perfections. I conclude by explicating Anselm’s teleological understanding of sin by reference to his analog of Aristotle’s essence-accident distinction.
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  48. Dispositions, Rule-Following, and Infinity.Robert Allen - manuscript
    The going-on problem (GOP) is the central concern of Wittgenstein's later philosophy. It informs not only his epistemology and philosophy of mind, but also his views on mathematics, universals, and religion. In section I, I frame this issue as a matter of accounting for intentionality. Here I follow Saul Kripke's lead. My departure therefrom follows: first, a criticism of Wittgenstein's “straight” conventionalism and, secondly, a defense of a solution Kripke rejects. I proceed under the assumption, borne out in the end, (...)
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  49. Choose Your Illusion: Philosophy, Self-Deception, and Free Choice.Robert Allen - manuscript
    Illusionism treats the almost universally held belief in our ability to make free choices as an erroneous, though beneficent, idea. According to this view, it is sadly true, though virtually impossible to believe, that none of a person’s choices are avoidable and ‘up to him’: any claim to the effect that they are being naïveté or, in the case of those who know better, pretense. Indeed, the implications of this skepticism are so disturbing, pace Spinoza, that it must not be (...)
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  50. A Roadmap for Governing AI: Technology Governance and Power Sharing Liberalism.Danielle Allen, Sarah Hubbard, Woojin Lim, Allison Stanger, Shlomit Wagman & Kinney Zalesne - 2024 - Harvard Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation.
    This paper aims to provide a roadmap to AI governance. In contrast to the reigning paradigms, we argue that AI governance should not be merely a reactive, punitive, status-quo-defending enterprise, but rather the expression of an expansive, proactive vision for technology—to advance human flourishing. Advancing human flourishing in turn requires democratic/political stability and economic empowerment. Our overarching point is that answering questions of how we should govern this emerging technology is a chance not merely to categorize and manage narrow risk (...)
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