Background Several jurisdictions, including Singapore, Australia, New Zealand and most recently Ireland, have a public interest or public good criterion for granting waivers of consent in biomedical research using secondary health data or tissue. However, the concept of the public interest is not well defined in this context, which creates difficulties for institutions, institutional review boards and regulators trying to implement the criterion. Main text This paper clarifies how the public interest criterion can be defensibly deployed. We first explain the (...) ethical basis for requiring waivers to only be granted to studies meeting the public interest criterion, then explore how further criteria may be set to determine the extent to which a given study can legitimately claim to be in the public interest. We propose an approach that does not attempt to measure magnitude of benefit directly, but rather takes into account metrics that are more straightforward to apply. To ensure consistent and justifiable interpretation, research institutions and IRBs should also incorporate procedural features such as transparency and public engagement in determining which studies satisfy the public interest requirement. Conclusion The requirement of public interest for consent waivers in secondary biomedical research should be guided by well-defined criteria for systematic evaluation. Such a criteria and its application need to be periodically subject to intra-committee and intra-institution review, reflection, deliberation and amendment. (shrink)

"We wish this volume to be a sure companion to the study of free will, broadly construed to include action theory, moral and legal responsibility, and cohort studies feathering off into adjacent fields in the liberal arts and sciences. In addition to general coverage of the discipline, this volume attempts a more challenging and complementary accompaniment to many familiar narratives about free will. In order to map out some directions such accompaniment will take, in this introduction we anchor the thirty (...) contributions to this volume in some common history from which they arise, and attempt to indicate where future work in free will and moral responsibility will–and has already begun to–depart from that history." -Excerpt from Introduction. ... ... To read full introduction, (1) download attached file or (2) follow wiley_dot_com link below, click "Read An Excerpt", then click :Excerpt 3:(pdf)". (shrink)

This review is republished to illustrate how important this book is to us today, with legislation and caselaw additions as follows: UK Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001; UK Contempt o Court Act 1981; UK Obscene Publications Act 1964; UK Perjury Act 1911; UK Police Misconduct Regulations 1999; UK Prevention o Corruption Act 1996; UK Fraud Act 2006; UK Bribery Act 2010; UK Prevention o Corruption Act 1926; UK Public Bodies Corrupt Practices Act 1889; and UK Terrorism Act 2000. Case (...) law includes: R v Bellum [1989]; R v Dryden [1995]; R v Kiin [1994]; R v Loosley [2002]; the Steven Lawrence murder case; and Tsang Ping-nam v R [1981]. (shrink)

Resumen: En este ensayo discuto la crítica de John Campbell a la tesis de la inescrutabilidad de la referencia de Quine. Primero defiendo que los argumentos de Campbell no dan en el blanco, pues él pasa por alto la conexión que Quine traza entre referencia, cuantificación, y ontología. Luego discuto otra línea de argumentación contra la inescrutabilidad que invoca la concepción relacional de la atención de Campbell. Finalmente, sugiero que esta línea –aunque insuficiente y necesitada de complemento– (...) pone de manifiesto que tras las posturas de ambos autores sobre la referencia hay importantes ideales filosóficos hacia los cuales debe dirigirse la discusión. (shrink)

Este discurso, encontrado entre os manuscritos de Berkeley, foi publicado pela primeira vez em 1871 por Alexander Campbell Fraser, em sua Collected Edition of the Works of Bishop Berkeley with Annotations.(LL pp. 598-604). No final do manuscrito, que atualmente se encontra no Museu Britânico, Berkeley registrou a data de 11 de janeiro de 1707/8. Berkeley tinha então 23 anos de idade. Isso indica que este discurso, próximo dos sermões que depois ele viria a escrever, foi escrito antes de ser (...) ordenado diácono da Igreja da Irlanda na capela do colégio do Trinity College de Dublin em 19 de fevereiro de 1709. A tradução aqui apresentada baseia-se na edição organizada por Luce e Jessop. The Works of George Berkeley Bishop of Cloyne. Luce, A. A. and Jessop, T. E. London and Edimburgh: Nelson, 1948, v. 7, 9-15. (shrink)

That i) there is a somehow determined chronology of Plato’s dialogues among all the chronologies of the last century and ii) this theory is subject to many objections, are points this article intends to discuss. Almost all the main suggested chronologies of the last century agree that Parmenides and Theaetetus should be located after dialogues like Meno, Phaedo and Republic and before Sophist, Politicus, Timaeus, Laws and Philebus. The eight objections we brought against this arrangement claim that to place the (...) dialogues like Meno, Phaedo and Republic both immediately after the early ones and before Parmenides and Theaetetus is epistemologically and ontologically problematic. -/- Key Words: Plato; chronology; knowledge; being; Parmenides -/- Introduction While the ancient philosophers, doxographers and commentators from Aristotle onward considered, more or less, the question of the date and arrangement of the dialogues (cf. Irwin 2008, 77 n. 69), they would not observe a firm necessity to consider the progress of Plato’s theories in dialogues, maybe because they did not think of any essential shift in there. We might be able to say, nevertheless, that the most prominent feature of the ancient attitude to Plato was its peculiar attention to the Republic and the Timaeus as the most mature works in his philosophy and also the consideration of Laws as a later work. This tendency can be discovered from the general viewpoint of the first chronologies of the early 19th century after starting to deal with the issue. That Schleiermacher observed Republic as the culmination of Plato’s philosophy and as one of the latest dialogues besides Laws and Timaeus could reflex the implicit chronology of the tradition in the first mirrors it found. Another tendency in Schleiermacher is taking the triology of Theaetetus, Sophist and Politicus as relatively early. From the last quarter of 19th century onward, stylometry helped scholars to establish a new framework to constructa new arrangement between the dialogues. Based on stylistic as well as literary findings, Campbell (1867, xxxff.) argued for the closeness of the style of Sophist and Politicus with Timaeus, Critias, Philebus and Lawsthat, especially because of the certain evidence about this last dialogue’s lateness, led to the consideration of all as late dialogues. Almost every other stylistic effort after Campbell approved the similarities between Sophist and Politicus with Timaeus, Critias, Philebus and Laws. The result of all such investigations led to a new chronology that, despite some differences, has a fixed structure in all its appearances. 1. The Standard Chronology of the Dialogues The chronologies that are now commonly accepted are mostly based on the arrangement of dialogues to three groups corresponding to three periods of Plato’s life, which became predominant after applying stylistic features in assessing the similarities between dialogues. The fact that all the stylometric considerations reached to the similar results about the date of dialogues while they were assessing different stylistic aspects helped the new chronology become prevailing not only among stylistic chronologies but also between those like Fine, Kahn and Vlastos who were inclined more to the content-based arrangements. Even this latter group could not neglect the apparently certain results of using the method of stylometry. This was the main reason, I think, that made what they called content-based chronology be under the domination of stylometry much more than they could expect. The division of the dialogues into three separate groups became something that most of the scholars took for granted so far as Kahn thinks this division 'can be regarded as a fixed point of departure in any speculation about the chronology of the dialogues' (1996, 44). Thereafter, all the chronologists are accustomed to divide the dialogues to three groups of early, middle and late corresponding to the three stages of Plato’s life. Nevertheless, some of them tried to make subdivisions among each group and introduce some of the dialogues as transitional between different periods and thus reached to a fourfold classification of the dialogues. Although theycould never achieve to a consensus about the place of some dialogues, about which we will discuss soon, the whole spirit of theirchronological arrangements is the same and thus compelling enough for us to unify all of them with the label of 'Standard Chronology of Dialogues' (SCD). We brought together some of the most famous chronologies in the table below to make a comparison easier and to show how all are approximately of the same opinion about the place of some dialogues. The following points must be noted about this table: 1. I divided the dialogues to eight groups of early, late early, transitional, early middle, late middle, post-middle, early late, and late. Although none of the chronologists applies this classification, it can be helpful to compare them. In this table, for example, if one of the chronologist’s beholds one of the dialogues as later than all the dialogues of middle group, it is considered here as late middle. Otherwise, if it is emphasized that it is after all of them, it is considered as post-middle. The same is true about the dialogues of the late group in which I regarded the first dialogues of that period as early late only in those who explicitly considered some dialogues as earlier than other ones in the late group. Though, therefore, some of the dialogues might have not been considered as forming a distinct class, they are distinguished here. A. SCD’s Early and Transitional Dialogues When we move from stylometric to content-based chronologies, the homogeneity between the dialogues of each group is more understandable. Guthrie (1975, v. 4, 50) distinguishes three groups, the first of them includes Apology, Crito, Laches, Lysis, Charmides, Euthyphro, Hippias Minor, Hippias Major, Protagoras, Gorgiasand Ion. In addition to Meno, Phaedo and Euthydems, his first group does not include Cratylus and Menexenus. Unlike Guthrie, almost all the other content-based chronologiesof our study desire to distinguish two categories inside the first group of which the latter must be considered as the transitional group leading to the dialogues of the middle period. Kahn distinguishes four groups of dialogues and arranges two of them before middle period dialogues. The first group including Apology, Crito, Ion, Hippias Minor, Gorgiasand Menexenus he calls 'early' or 'presystematic' dialogues (1998, 124). The second group he calls the 'threshold', 'pre-middle' or 'Socratic' dialogues including seven: Laches, Charmides, Lysis, Euthyphro, Protagoras, Euthydemus and Meno. Based on Vlastos’ arrangement we must distinguish Euthydemus, Hippias Major, Lysis, Menexenus and Meno as 'transitional' dialogues from the 'elenctic' dialogues that are the other dialogues of Kahn’smentioned first two groups plus the first book of theRepublic. Fine also distinguishes 'transitional' dialogues from early or 'Socratic' dialogues,but her transitional dialogues are Gorgias, Meno, Hippias Major, Euthydemus and Cratylus of which she thinks the last two dialogues are 'controversial' (2003, 1). Her Socratic dialogues are all the remaining dialogues of Kahn’s first two groups. In spite of all the differences between the mentioned chronologies, it can be seen that all of them are inclined to arrange the early dialogues in a way that: i) Besides the dialogues that are considered as late, it never includes Republic II-X, Theaetetus, Phaedrus and Parmenides. ii) It intends to consider the dialogues like Euthydemus and Hippias Majorthat look more critical as later among the earlier dialogues or as transitional group. iii) Those who do not consider Meno as a middle period dialogue place it in their second or transitional group. iv) None of the content-based chronologies considers Phaedo and Symposium as early. Stylometric chronologies also intend to put them either as last dialogues among their early ones or as middle. B. SCD’s Middle Period Dialogues Campbell listed Republic, Phaedrus, Parmenides and Theaetetus as his second group of dialogues, an idea thatwas accepted by Brandwood. Ledger’smiddle period dialogueshad Euthydemus, Symposium and Cratylus in addition to the dialogues that Campbell and Brandwood had mentioned as middle. Among content-based chronologies, Guthrie’s list of middle period dialogues did not include Parmenides but some dialogues which had been considered as early in stylometric ones: Meno, Phaedo, Republic, Symposium, Phaedrus, Euthydemus, Menexenus and Cratylus. In sofar as I know, Euthydemus and Menexenus have not been considered as middle by other content-based chronologists and Guthrie is an exception among them. That Phaedo, Phaedrus, Symposium and Republic were middle period dialogues almost all the philosophical chronologists like Kahn, Fine, Vlastos (except Rep.I), Irwin andKraut came along. The dialogues they do not string along about are Meno, Cratylus, Parmenides and Theaetetus. Those like Guthrie, Kraut and Irwin who did not consider Meno as early presumably posit it among middles. The same can be said about Cratylus in the suggested chronologies of Guthrie, Kahn, Vlastos and Kraut. Nonetheless, it is different in case of Parmenides and Theaetetus. Whereas all the mentioned stylometric chronologists like Campbell, Brandwood and Ledger set them among middle period dialogues,the philosophical chronologists, it might seem at first, did not arrive at a consensus about them. While Guthrie and Fine put them as the first dialogues of the late group, Vlastos and Kraut set them as the latest of the middle group, as well as Kahn who puts them as post-middle and amongst the late period dialogues. Regardless the way they classify their groups, their disagreement does not affect the arrangement of the dialogues: they all posit Parmenides and Theaetetus after the series of Meno, Phaedo, Phaedrus, Symposium and Republic and before Sophist, Politicus, Timaeus, Philebus and Laws. To sum up SCD’s arrangement of the middle period dialogues we can add: v) Republic and Phaedrus have been considered by all the mentioned chronologists as dialogues of the middle period. vi) All the philosophical chronologies have reached a consensus about setting Phaedo and Symposium alongside with Republic and Phaedrus as middle. vii) While Stylometric alongside some philosophic chronologists arrange Parmenides and Theaetetus among their middle period dialogues and mostly as the latest among them, other philosophical chronologists put them as the early among the late dialogues. We can conclude then that SCD intends to locate these two dialogues at the boundary between the middle and late period dialogues. -/- . (shrink)

Investigating Plato’s ontological as well as epistemological status in each of his dialogues, this book is going to challenge the current theories of Plato’s development and suggest a new one. Regarding the relation of Plato’s early and middle period dialogues, scholars have been divided to two opposing groups: unitarists and developmentalists. While developmentalists try to prove that there are some noticeable and even fundamental differences between Plato’s early and middle period dialogues, the unitarists assert that there is no essential difference (...) in there. The main goal of the first two chapters is to suggest that some of Plato’s ontological as well as epistemological principles change, both radically and fundamentally, between the early and middle period dialogues. Though this is a kind of strengthening the developmentalistic approach corresponding the relation of the early and middle period dialogues, based on the fact that what is to be proved here is a essential development in Plato’ ontology and his epistemology, by expanding the grounds of development to the ontological and epistemological principles, it hints to a more profound development. The fact that the bipolar and split knowledge and being of the early period dialogues give way to the tripartite and bound knowledge and benig of the middle period dialogues indicates the development of the notions of being and knowledge in Plato’s philosophy before the dialogues of the middle period. The first chapter entitled “Plato’s Onto-Epistemological Principles in the Early Dialogues” tries to draw out six principles out of Plato’s early dialogues specially Euthyphro, Laches, Charmides, Hippias Major and Euthydemus. We discuss that these principles present kind of a bipolar as well as split ontology and epistemology. The second chapter, “Revision of First Socrates’ Principles in the Middle Period Dialogues”, aims to argue that the onto-epistemological principles of the early dialogues are being radically changed in three dialogues of Meno, Phaedo and Republic in the middle period dialogues. Not only the bipolar ontology and epistemology of the early dialogues give place to a tripartite ontology and epistemology but also their split being and knowledge are inclined to be replaced by bound being and knowledge. Our next step in this book is to suggest a new approach to Plato’s theory of being in Republic V and Sophist based on the notion of difference and the being of a copy. To understand Plato’s ontology in these two dialogues we are going to suggest a theory we call Pollachos Esti; a name we took from Aristotle’s pollachos legetai both to remind the similarities of the two structures and to reach a consistent view of Plato’s ontology. Based on this theory, when Plato says that something both is and is not, he is applying difference on being which is interpreted here as saying, borrowing Aristotle’s terminology, 'is is (esti) in different senses'. I hope this paper can show how Pollachos Esti can bring forth not only a new approach to Plato’s ontology in Sophist and Republic but also a different approach to being in general. Thence, chapter three, “Pollachos Esti; Plato’s Ontology in Sophist and Republic”, intends to discuss that i) the theories of ‘being as difference’ and ‘being of a copy’, considered together in what we call the theory of pollachos esti, can well be compared to the structure of pollachos legetai in Aristotle when it is attached to the theories of pros hen and substance; and ii) the ontology of Republic V-VII is based on this theory and is, thus, almost the same as the ontology of Sophist. Investigating the most famous chronologies of the last 150 years from Campbell on, the fourth chapter, “The Standard Chronology of the Dialogues”, is to argue that all of them have a somewhat fix and dogmatic arrangement of Plato’s dialogues in which Meno, Phaedo and Republic are located after some early dialogues and before Theaetetus and Parmenides, on the one hand, and all the so-called late period dialogues after Theaetetus and Parmenides on the other hand. It is also reminded that all that the stylometric evidences can show is the lateness and homogeneity of the late period dialogues and, thence, nothing about the relation between dialogues like Theaetetus, Parmenides and Republic. The standard chronology is the subject of many criticisms some of which are discussed in our fifth chapter, “Objections against the Standard Chronology”, in three groups. While the first group of objections criticizes the place of the middle period dialogues immediately after the early ones, the second group attacks the place of late dialogues after the middle ones. The third group includes objections against the place of Parmenides in the standard chronology and tries to show that it cannot be considered after the middle period dialogues. The efforts of the first five chapters lead to a new theory of Plato’s ontological as well as epistemological development in an onto-epistemological chronology of his dialogues in our sixth chapter, “An Onto-Epistemological Chronology of Plato’s dialogues”. Instead of three periods, this chronology includes four waves of dialogues, Socratic wave, ontological wave, epistemological wave and political wave, in which all the so-called middle and late period dialogues are to be interpreted based on the problems presented in Parmenides I. The main changes we suggest in the standard chronology include firstly that Theaetetus and Parmenides I must be posited before Meno and Phaedo and, secondly, Republic must be posited after Sophist. Based on this arrangement, we can find Philosophos, Plato’s promised but unwritten dialogue, inside Republic. (shrink)

Distinctions in fundamentality between different levels of description are central to the viability of contemporary decoherence-based Everettian quantum mechanics (EQM). This approach to quantum theory characteristically combines a determinate fundamental reality (one universal wave function) with an indeterminate emergent reality (multiple decoherent worlds). In this chapter I explore how the Everettian appeal to fundamentality and emergence can be understood within existing metaphysical frameworks, identify grounding and concept fundamentality as promising theoretical tools, and use them to characterize a system of explanatory (...) levels (with associated laws of nature) for EQM. This Everettian level structure encompasses and extends the ‘classical’ levels structure. The ‘classical’ levels of physics, chemistry, biology, etc. are recovered, but they are emergent in character and potentially variable across Everett worlds. EQM invokes an additional fundamental level, not present in the classical levels picture, and a novel potential role for self-location in interlevel metaphysics. When given a modal realist interpretation, EQM also makes trouble for supervenience-based approaches to levels. (shrink)

In On the Plurality of Worlds (Lewis 1986), David Lewis imposes a condition on realist theories of modality which he calls ‘plenitude’. Lewis apparently assigns this condition considerable importance, and uses it to motivate his Humean principle of recombination, but he never says exactly what plenitude amounts to. This chapter first sets aside some obvious ways of reconstructing the plenitude criterion which do not fit with the textual evidence. An objection to modal realism due to John Divers and Joseph Melia (...) (Divers and Melia 2002) is diagnosed as equivocating between an overly-demanding plenitude constraint and a weaker constraint which fails to establish their conclusion. An alternative deflationary interpretation of the plenitude condition has it following from an application of standard theoretical virtues to a modal realist’s total theory; Lewis’ correspondence provides new evidence in support of this interpretation. The deflationary plenitude criterion also has broader application, beyond Lewisian modal realism. (shrink)

With an eye on the future of global ethics, I argue that social-media technologies are not morally neutral tools but are, for all intents and purposes, a kind of agent. They nudge us to do things that are bad for us. Moreover, I argue that we have a duty to quit using social-media platforms, not just on account of possible duties to preserve our own well-being but because users are akin to test subjects on whom developers are testing new nudges, (...) and we ought to deprive them of their test subjects. (shrink)

My topic in this paper is the relationships of metaphysical priority which might hold between the different alethic modal statuses—necessity, contingency, possibility and impossibility. In particular, I am interested in exploring the view that the necessity of necessities is ungrounded while the contingency of contingencies is grounded—a scenario I call ‘necessity first’. I will explicate and scrutinize the contrast between necessity first and its ‘contingency first’ contrary, and then compare both views with ‘multimodal’ and ‘amodal’ alternatives, drawing on David Lewis’s (...) modal realism and Barbara Vetter’s potentialism as example cases. I will then defend the necessity-first point of view from a reversed version of Blackburn’s classic dilemma against theories of the source of necessity. (shrink)

Sensory substitution devices (SSDs) aim to compensate for the loss of a sensory modality, typically vision, by converting information from the lost modality into stimuli in a remaining modality. “The vOICe” is a visual-to-auditory SSD which encodes images taken by a camera worn by the user into “soundscapes” such that experienced users can extract information about their surroundings. Here we investigated how much detail was resolvable during the early induction stages by testing the acuity of blindfolded sighted, naïve vOICe users. (...) Initial performance was well above chance. Participants who took the test twice as a form of minimal training showed a marked improvement on the second test. Acuity was slightly but not significantly impaired when participants wore a camera and judged letter orientations “live”. A positive correlation was found between participants' musical training and their acuity. The relationship between auditory expertise via musical training and the lack of a relationship with visual imagery, suggests that early use of a SSD draws primarily on the mechanisms of the sensory modality being used rather than the one being substituted. If vision is lost, audition represents the sensory channel of highest bandwidth of those remaining. The level of acuity found here, and the fact it was achieved with very little experience in sensory substitution by naïve users is promising. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that online echo chambers are in some cases and in some respects good. I do not attempt to refute arguments that they are harmful, but I argue that they are sometimes beneficial. In the first section, I argue that it is sometimes good to be insulated from views with which one disagrees. In the second section, I argue that the software-design principles that give rise to online echo chambers have a lot to recommend them. Further, (...) the opposing principle, serendipity, could give rise to serious harm, in light of the conclusion of the first section that sometimes we are better off being insulated from some content online. In the third section, I argue that polarization can be a useful tool for inculcating the appropriate attitudes in a person. (shrink)

Where does agency lie in musical performance? How is it expressed? Recent music scholarship has highlighted an increasingly prominent tendency to conceive of agency as not confined to any one individual or type of individual, instead being distributed across diverse individuals that can be found occupying performance situations. . This article uses two ‘percussion’ works from the 1970s by the composer John Cage, Child of Tree (1975) and its multi-performer elaboration Branches (1976), as a foil for engaging with these practical (...) and theoretical musical concerns, and for suggesting some heretofore underappreciated distinctions within the ongoing work on multi-agential performance. (shrink)

I argue that Plato believes that the soul must be both the principle of motion and the subject of cognition because it moves things specifically by means of its thoughts. I begin by arguing that the soul moves things by means of such acts as examination and deliberation, and that this view is developed in response to Anaxagoras. I then argue that every kind of soul enjoys a kind of cognition, with even plant souls having a form of Aristotelian discrimination (...) (krisis), and that there is therefore no completely unintelligent, evil soul in the cosmos that can explain disorderly motions; as a result, the soul is not the principle of all motion but only motion in the cosmos after it has been ordered by the Demiurge. (shrink)

I argue that, according to Plato, the body is the sole cause of psychic disorders. This view is expressed at Timaeus 86b in an ambiguous sentence that has been widely misunderstood by translators and commentators. The goal of this article is to offer a new understanding of Plato’s text and view. In the first section, I argue that although the body is the result of the gods’ best efforts, their sub-optimal materials meant that the soul is constantly vulnerable to the (...) body’s influences. In the second section, I argue that every psychic disorder is a disruption of the motions of the inner psychic circles by the body; moreover, I defend my translation of 86b. In the final section, I argue that the goal of education is to restore the circles to their original orbits, and I disarm a possible objection that bad education is also a cause of psychic disorder. (shrink)

This article is featured in a special issue dedicated to theme, "the human being in the digital era: awareness, critical thinking and political space in the age of the internet and artificial intelligence." In this article, I consider the way that social-media companies nudge us to spend more time on their platforms, and I argue that, in principle, these nudges are morally permissible: they are not manipulative and do not violate any obvious moral rules. The moral problem, I argue, is (...) not with nudging in principle but is instead with the fact that users are being nudged towards something bad for them. In practice, this often involves being nudged to spend an unhealthy amount of time using a social-media app or being nudged towards content that is bad for us, such as by promoting eating-disorder content to young girls. Since nudging is morally permissible, it is open to these companies to use the same technologies to nudge us towards the good. (shrink)

This article concerns the place of Plato’s eschatology in his philosophy. I argue that the theory of reincarnation appeals to Plato due to its power to explain how non-human animals came to be. Further, the outlines of this theory are entailed by other commitments, such as that embodiment disrupts psychic functioning, that virtue is always rewarded and vice punished, and that the soul is immortal. I conclude by arguing that Plato develops a view of reincarnation as the chief tool that (...) the gods have to ensure that virtue is victorious over vice throughout the whole cosmos. (shrink)

In this article, I approach some phenomena seen predominantly on social-media sites that are grouped together as cancel culture with guidance from two major themes in Plato’s thought. In the first section, I argue that shame can play a constructive and valuable role in a person’s improvement, just as we see Socrates throughout Plato’s dialogues use shame to help his interlocutors improve. This insight can help us understand the value of shaming people online for, among other things, their morally reprehensible (...) views. In the second section, I argue that it is required for the proper functioning of democratic institutions that some views be excluded from the public sphere, which follows some Platonic ideas from the Laws. In neither case do I argue that this approach is good in an unqualified sense or even ultima facie good. However, I maintain that these important insights from Plato’s dialogues illuminate crucial aspects of how we should think about cancel culture. (shrink)

In this article, I make the case for the continued relevance of Plato’s Timaeus. I begin by sketching Allan Bloom’s picture of the natural sciences today in The Closing of the American Mind, according to which the natural sciences are, objectionably, increasingly specialized and have ejected humans qua humans from their purview. I argue that Plato’s Timaeus, despite the falsity of virtually all of its scientific claims, provides a model for how we can pursue scientific questions in a comprehensive way (...) that stresses their connections to other disciplines, including the humanities, and that puts humanity qua humanity back in the picture. I then argue that being led by Plato’s philosophy to return humanity conceptually to the natural world can improve our thinking regarding climate change and other important environmental crises. (shrink)

To 'consequentialise' is to take a putatively non-consequentialist moral theory and show that it is actually just another form of consequentialism. Some have speculated that every moral theory can be consequentialised. If this were so, then consequentialism would be empty; it would have no substantive content. As I argue here, however, this is not so. Beginning with the core consequentialist commitment to 'maximising the good', I formulate a precise definition of consequentialism and demonstrate that, given this definition, several sorts of (...) moral theory resist consequentialisation. My strategy is to decompose consequentialism into three conditions, which I call 'agent neutrality', 'no moral dilemmas', and 'dominance', and then to exhibit some moral theories which violate each of these. (shrink)

This paper concerns Plato’s characterization of the body as the soul’s tool. I take perception as an example of the body’s usefulness. I explore the Timaeus’ view that perception provides us with models of orderliness. Then, I argue that perception of confusing sensible objects is necessary for our cognitive development too. Lastly, I consider the instrumentality relationship more generally and its place in Plato’s teleological worldview.

Katz denies that organisms created in a lab as part of a de-extinction attempt will be authentic members of the extinct species, on the basis that they will lack the original species’ defining biological and evolutionary history. Against Katz, I note that an evolutionary lineage is conferred on an organism through its inheriting genes from forebears already possessed of such a lineage, and that de-extinction amounts to a delayed, human-assisted reproductive process, in which genes are inherited from forebears long dead. (...) My conclusion is that de-extinct organisms can perfectly well have an ancient evolutionary history, contrary to what Katz claims. (shrink)

What explains the outcomes of chance processes? We claim that their setups do. Chances, we think, mediate these explanations of outcome by setup but do not feature in them. Facts about chances do feature in explanations of a different kind: higher-order explanations, which explain how and why setups explain their outcomes. In this paper, we elucidate this 'mediator view' of chancy explanation and defend it from a series of objections. We then show how it changes the playing field in four (...) metaphysical disputes concerning chance. First, it makes it more plausible that even low chances can have explanatory power. Second, it undercuts a circularity objection against reductionist theories of chance. Third, it redirects the debate about a prominent argument against epistemic theories of chance. Finally, it sheds light on potential chancy explanations of the Universe's origin. (shrink)

I argue that Plato thinks that the soul has location, surface, depth, and extension, and that the Timaeus’ composition of the soul out of eight circles is intended literally. A novel contribution is the development of an account of corporeality that denies the entailment that the soul is corporeal. I conclude by examining Aristotle’s objection to the Timaeus’ psychology and then the intellectual history of this reading of Plato.

Making Things Up, by Karen Bennett. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. xi + 260.

What kind of technology is the piano? It was once a distinctly everyday technology. In the bourgeois home of the nineteenth century it became an emblematic figure of gendered social life, its role shifting between visually pleasing piece of furniture, source of light entertainment, and expression of cultured upbringing. It performed this role unobtrusively, acting as a transparent mediator of social relations. To the composer of concert music it was, and sometimes still is, says Samuel Wilson, like the philosopher’s table: (...) “an assumed background on which one writes.” Like other instruments standard to Western art music, the piano was designed to facilitate the production of a consistent and refined timbre. More than most other such instruments, the piano also facilitated a kind of sonic neutrality. With its wide pitch range and smoothing of the percussive attack of its predecessor instruments, the piano presented composers with a technological means of approaching composition from a seemingly objective vantage point. It exemplified, in Heideggerian terms, the instrumentality of the instrument, serving as a mediator between idea and expression that apparently adds no character of its own. -/- This notion of the invisibility, or transparency, of the mediations that musical technologies such as the piano enact is one of my areas of concern here. So too is its inverse: when these mediations become visible or opaque. Transparency has been a topic of significant recent theoretical attention. Stefanos Geroulanos, for example, has detailed how the supposed transparency of intersubjective, epistemological, and social relations was a major point of critique in postwar French thought, where the supposition of transparency was taken to suppress how the world was “complex, layered, structured, filled with heterogeneity” – and, as I will stress here, contingency. The thinkers Geroulanos considers, from Jean-Paul Sartre through to Jean-François Lyotard, can be said to be united in their refusal to invisibilise mediatedness. From a starting point of conceiving of the piano as a technological artifact, and in particular from John Cage’s ‘prepared piano,’ I will explore how a similar concern has appeared in musical contexts, albeit not without the risk of reversion back into a logic of transparency. (shrink)

I argue that Plato thinks that a sunaition is a mere tool used by a soul (or by the cosmic nous) to promote an intended outcome. In the first section, I develop the connection between sunaitia and Plato’s teleology. In the second section, I argue that sunaitia belong to Plato’s theory of the soul as a self-mover: specifically, they are those things that are set in motion by the soul in the service of some goal. I also argue against several (...) popular and long-standing interpretations, namely, that sunaitia correspond to Aristotle’s idea of hypothetical necessity, that sunaitia are the ‘how’ in an explanation (whereas the true cause is the ‘why’), and that Plato’s causal views should be read through Aristotle’s fourfold schema. I conclude the article by surveying the history of sunaitia after Plato’s usage. (shrink)

This article reconstructs Gilles Deleuze’s engagement with phenomenology, and with the phenomenological problematic of sensation, in his Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Considering Deleuze’s adoption, from the phenomenology of art, of notions of sensation and rhythm, it examines how Deleuze complexifies these phenomenological notions by aligning them with his profoundly non-phenomenological notion of the body without organs, as well as with the concepts of modulation and the diagram. In mapping Deleuze’s complexification of rhythm and his development of a logic (...) of rhythmic modulation, this article shows how Deleuze immanently refines an approach to working beyond phenomenology, through phenomenology. (shrink)

Recenzio Kiraly V. Istvan Death and History c. konyverol.

Can the theory that reality is a simulation be tested? We investigate this question based on the assumption that if the system performing the simulation is nite (i.e. has limited resources), then to achieve low computational complexity, such a system would, as in a video game, render content (reality) only at the moment that information becomes available for observation by a player and not at the moment of detection by a machine (that would be part of the simulation and whose (...) detection would also be part of the internal computation performed by the Virtual Reality server before rendering content to the player). Guided by this principle we describe conceptual wave/particle duality experiments aimed at testing the simulation theory. (shrink)

In 1947 Donald Cary Williams claimed in The Ground of Induction to have solved the Humean problem of induction, by means of an adaptation of reasoning first advanced by Bernoulli in 1713. Later on David Stove defended and improved upon Williams’ argument in The Rational- ity of Induction (1986). We call this proposed solution of induction the ‘Williams-Stove sampling thesis’. There has been no lack of objections raised to the sampling thesis, and it has not been widely accepted. In our (...) opinion, though, none of these objections has the slightest force, and, moreover, the sampling thesis is undoubtedly true. What we will argue in this paper is that one particular objection that has been raised on numerous occasions is misguided. This concerns the randomness of the sample on which the inductive extrapolation is based. (shrink)

This is an impressive and important book about perception in Plato’s Timaeus, but most of its readers will probably be researchers who are interested in much broader questions about the dialogue. There is nothing deficient or lacking about this treatment of perception, but this book should be put alongside Thomas Johansen’s Plato’s Natural Philosophy and Sarah Broadie’s Nature and Divinity in the sense that this is, for all intents and purposes, a monograph about the whole Timaeus, even though it is (...) pitched as being focused on perception. There are only a few topics missing, such as the nature of the cosmic receptacle and psychic diseases. Virtually everything else, including the status of Timaeus’ so-called likely story, the generation of the lower gods, and the nature of bone, is discussed at length. (shrink)

Here I will put forward a claim about rhythm – that rhythm is relation. To develop this I will explore the entanglement of and antagonism between two notions of the musical avant-garde and its theorization. The first of these is derived from the European classical tradition, the second concerns Afrodiasporic musical practices. This essay comes in two parts. The first will consider some music-theoretical and philosophical ideas about rhythm in the post-classical avant-garde. Here I will explore how these ideas have (...) been used to, on one hand, stage a critique of Afrodiasporic musics, and specifically jazz, and, on the other hand, diminish and obscure the relation between the post-classical and Afrodiasporic avant-gardes. In the second part I will develop another lineage of rhythm, orthogonal to that of the post-classical avant-garde. Drawing from philosophy and Afrocentric, Afromodernist and, finally, Afrofuturist theory, I will map a theoretical move from rhythm understood, in its post-classical guise, as an exclusive and strictly musical category, to rhythm understood as an inclusive and plural category. This likewise charts a passage from an aesthetically autonomous understanding of objects of art to social and collective forms of artistic practice. (shrink)

This thesis focuses on expressively rich languages that can formalise talk about probability. These languages have sentences that say something about probabilities of probabilities, but also sentences that say something about the probability of themselves. For example: (π): “The probability of the sentence labelled π is not greater than 1/2.” Such sentences lead to philosophical and technical challenges; but can be useful. For example they bear a close connection to situations where ones confidence in something can affect whether it is (...) the case or not. The motivating interpretation of probability as an agent's degrees of belief will be focused on throughout the thesis. -/- This thesis aims to answer two questions relevant to such frameworks, which correspond to the two parts of the thesis: “How can one develop a formal semantics for this framework?” and “What rational constraints are there on an agent once such expressive frameworks are considered?”. (shrink)

In this essay we will take the American experimental composer John Cage’s understanding of sound as the starting point for an evaluation of that term in the field of sound studies. Drawing together two of the most influential figures in the field, Cage’s thought and work will serve as a lens through which to engage with recent debate concerning the uptake in sound studies of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. In so doing we will attempt to develop a path between (...) conflicting sides of sound studies, putting forward an understanding of sound that presents it not as an uninterrogated ontological essence, nor as only a term in a discursive web, but as a problem which must be repeatedly posed anew. We will consider points where this may yet be pushed towards a reified, essentialized understanding of the nature of sound, but move to offset this by emphasizing the production of a practical process of learning and experimentation. (shrink)

How do reasons combine? How is it that several reasons taken together can have a combined weight which exceeds the weight of any one alone? I propose an answer in mereological terms: reasons combine by composing a further, complex reason of which they are parts. Their combined weight is the weight of their combination. I develop a mereological framework, and use this to investigate some structural views about reasons, the main two being "Atomism" and "Holism". Atomism is the view that (...) atomic reasons are fundamental: all reasons reduce to atomic reasons. Holism is the view that whole reasons are fundamental. I argue for Holism, and against Atomism. I also consider whether reasons might be "context-sensitive". (shrink)

Rhythm is generally taken to refer to a temporal pattern of events. Yet in recent years, across diverse fields in the arts, humanities, and social sciences, it has come to serve as the conceptual marker for a wide range of new approaches to understanding relations and relationality, following most explicitly from the late work of Henri Lefebvre. This article explores the temporal aspect of such relational thinking, in particular asking how time is implicated in relations, and how it can be (...) meaningful in those relations. The sense of time is surveyed from the perspectives of both cognition and metaphysics as well as with reference to music scholarship and social theory, and key threads are drawn, from the writings of Gaston Bachelard and Charles Sanders Peirce in particular, in order to suggest that time can be a sign, and that the signifying properties of rhythm have critical social consequences. (shrink)

When beginning to think about the relation between experimental music and the thought of Gilles Deleuze, this quotation seems to be a natural starting point. In Deleuze and Guattari’s affirmation of this phrase from John Cage they suggest a resonance between music and philosophy: in both fields the experimental approach entails a dismantling of predetermining codes and hierarchies, and with this arises the opportunity for an open-endedness that accommodates singular events and encounters. This understanding of experimentation, however, is not as (...) transparent as it seems. In the context of the uptake and critique of Deleuzian ideas in the theorisation of music and sound, as well as recent re-evaluations of the milieu of “experimental music,” critics have argued that a range of normative demands, ideological assumptions, and metaphysical reductions undermine the purported freedoms of both Cagean and Deleuzian experimentalism. -/- Here I can only deal with a small aspect of the wide historical and theoretical problem this involves; but in short my aim is to begin to construct a means through which Deleuze and Guattari’s thought can be used to help us examine some strategies that composers and performers in post-Cagean musical experimentalism developed to navigate around the demands, assumptions, and reductions of Cage’s thought. (shrink)

The editors have put together an interesting and important collection of twelve essays that trace the development of explanations of the human body that appeal to machines and other technological artefacts. Although the focus of the book is ancient authors, with the oldest being Homer and Pindar, the last essay reaches into the eighteenth century, at which point there are no longer mere analogies between human bodies and machines but a conception of the human body as something mechanized. The essays (...) are put together in such a way that emphasizes the early-modern conception as the terminus of the ancient mode of inquiry. (shrink)

Are the methods of synthetic biology capable of recreating authentic living members of an extinct species? An analogy with the restoration of destroyed natural landscapes suggests not. The restored version of a natural landscape will typically lack much of the aesthetic value of the original landscape because of the different historical processes that created it—processes that involved human intentions and actions, rather than natural forces acting over millennia. By the same token, it would appear that synthetically recreated versions of extinct (...) natural organisms will also be less aesthetically valuable than the originals; that they will be, in some strong sense, ‘inauthentic’, because of their peculiar history and mode of origin. I call this the ‘genesis argument’ against de-extinction. In this article I critically evaluate the genesis argument. I highlight an important disanalogy between living organisms and natural landscapes: viz., it is of the essence of the former, but not of the latter, to regularly reproduce and die. The process of iterated natural reproduction that sustains the continued existence of a species through time obviously does not undermine the authenticity of the species. I argue that the authenticity of a species will likewise be left intact by the kind of artificial copying of genes and traits that a de-extinction project entails. I conclude on this basis that the genesis argument is unsound. (shrink)

The most familiar philosophical conception of objective chance renders determinism incompatible with non-trivial chances. This conception – associated in particular with the work of David Lewis – is not a good fit with our use of the word ‘chance’ and its cognates in ordinary discourse. In this paper we show how a generalized framework for chance can reconcile determinism with non-trivial chances, and provide for a more charitable interpretation of ordinary chance-talk. According to our proposal, variation in an admissible ‘evidence (...) base’ generates a spectrum of different chance functions. Successive coarse-grainings of the evidence base generates a partial ordering of chance functions, with finer trumping coarser if known. We suggest that chance-attributions in ordinary discourse express different chance functions in different contexts, and we sketch a potential contextual mechanism for making particular chance functions salient. The mechanism involves the idea that admissible evidence is available evidence: propositions that could be known. A consequence is that attributions of objective chances inherit the relatively familiar context-sensitivity associated with the modal ‘could’. We show how this context-dependency undermines certain arguments for the incompatibility of chance with determinism. (shrink)

Moss (2018) argues that rational agents are best thought of not as having degrees of belief in various propositions but as having beliefs in probabilistic contents, or probabilistic beliefs. Probabilistic contents are sets of probability functions. Probabilistic belief states, in turn, are modeled by sets of probabilistic contents, or sets of sets of probability functions. We argue that this Mossean framework is of considerable interest quite independently of its role in Moss’ account of probabilistic knowledge or her semantics for epistemic (...) modals and probability operators. It is an extremely general model of uncertainty. Indeed, it is at least as general and expressively powerful as every other current imprecise probability framework, including lower probabilities, lower previsions, sets of probabilities, sets of desirable gambles, and choice functions. In addition, we partially answer an important question that Moss leaves open, viz., why should rational agents have consistent probabilistic beliefs? We show that an important subclass of Mossean believers avoid Dutch bookability iff they have consistent probabilistic beliefs. (shrink)

Fourteen philosophers share their experience teaching Peirce to undergraduates in a variety of settings and a variety of courses. The latter include introductory philosophy courses as well as upper-level courses in American philosophy, philosophy of religion, logic, philosophy of science, medieval philosophy, semiotics, metaphysics, etc., and even an upper-level course devoted entirely to Peirce. The project originates in a session devoted to teaching Peirce held at the 2007 annual meeting of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy. The session, (...) organized by James Campbell and Richard Hart, was co-sponsored by the American Association of Philosophy Teachers. (shrink)

This article evaluates the theoretical and practical grounds of recent debates around Christoph Cox’s realist project of a ‘sonic materialism’ by returning to Gilles Deleuze, a key theoretical resource for Cox. It argues that a close engagement with Deleuze’s work in fact challenges many of the precepts of Cox’s sonic materialism, and suggests a rethinking of materialism in the context of music. Turning to some aspects of Deleuze’s work neglected by Cox, the ‘realist’ ontological inquiry Cox affirms is challenged through (...) the ‘onto-ethology’ that Deleuze and Félix Guattari develop in their A Thousand Plateaus, with this diversely constructive theory of relations explicated through musical examples from John Cage and Pauline Oliveros. To conclude, this article suggests that Deleuze can indeed be understood as subscribing to a materialism, but a materialism that is practical rather than doctrinal. (shrink)

The counterfactual account of physical computation is simple and, for the most part, very attractive. However, it is usually thought to trivialize the notion of physical computation insofar as it implies ‘limited pancomputationalism’, this being the doctrine that every deterministic physical system computes some function. Should we bite the bullet and accept limited pancomputationalism, or reject the counterfactual account as untenable? Jack Copeland would have us do neither of the above. He attempts to thread a path between the two horns (...) of the dilemma by buttressing the counterfactual account with extra conditions intended to block certain classes of deterministic physical systems from qualifying as physical computers. His theory is called the ‘algorithm execution account’. Here we show that the algorithm execution account entails limited pancomputationalism, despite Copeland’s argument to the contrary. We suggest, partly on this basis, that the counterfactual account should be accepted as it stands, pancomputationalist warts and all. (shrink)

Review the Istvan Kiraly V.'s book: Death and History.

In a recent article, Matej Cíbik claims that some tattoos are immoral because they are imprudent. (Cíbik 2020) In response, I argue that a tattoo can only be immoral if it causes harm to a third party, so that no tattoo is immoral simply because it is reckless. Conflating prudential and moral requirements in the way that Cíbik does would strike at the heart of liberalism, and has deeply counter-intuitive consequences, as we can see when we consider Cíbik's own discussions (...) of suicidal individuals and smokers. After discussing the role of the self/other distinction in liberal moral philosophy, I affirm both the moral neutrality of tattoos and the importance of adopting non-judgemental attitudes towards the choices which a person makes concerning her own body. (shrink)

This paper considers the role of myth and phenomenology in Pierre Schaeffer’s research into music and sound, and argues that engagement with these themes allows us to rethink the legacy and contemporary value of Schaeffer’s thought in sound studies. In light of critique of Schaeffer’s project, in particular that developed by Brian Kane and Schaeffer’s own apparent self-disavowal, this paper returns to Schaeffer’s early remarks on the “myth of the seashell” in order to examine the conditions of this critique. While (...) Kane argues that Schaeffer’s recourse to myth, coupled with his adoption of Husserlian phenomenology, leads to a closure of his inquiry and a failure to accommodate the contingency of his position, this paper argues that Schaeffer’s myth of the seashell brings into focus an open-ended, motivating phenomenological problem concerning subjectivity and objectivity that runs through his thought. Drawing on the philosophical work of Gaston Bachelard and Gilles Deleuze, this paper considers the epistemological significance of this moment in Schaeffer’s thought, suggesting a “problematic” account of the myth of the seashell that puts Schaeffer into conversation with contemporary work in epistemology. (shrink)

Famous examples of conceivability arguments include (i) Descartes’ argument for mind-body dualism, (ii) Kripke's ‘modal argument’ against psychophysical identity theory, (iii) Chalmers’ ‘zombie argument’ against materialism, and (iv) modal versions of the ontological argument for theism. In this paper, we show that for any such conceivability argument, C, there is a corresponding ‘mirror argument’, M. M is deductively valid and has a conclusion that contradicts C's conclusion. Hence, a proponent of C—henceforth, a ‘conceivabilist’—can be warranted in holding that C's premises (...) are conjointly true only if she can find fault with one of M's premises. But M's premises are modelled on a pair of C's premises. The same reasoning that supports the latter supports the former. For this reason, a conceivabilist can repudiate M's premises only on pain of severely undermining C's premises. We conclude on this basis that all conceivability arguments, including each of (i)–(iv), are fallacious. (shrink)