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 (...) that such feminists are wrong to worry about a threat of male violence in relation to trans women. In Section 1 we argue that ‘TERF’ is not a merely descriptive term; that to the extent that McKinnon offers considerations in support of the claim that ‘TERF’ is not a slur, these considerations fail; and that ‘TERF’ is a slur according to several prominent accounts in the contemporary literature. In Section 2, we argue that McKinnon misrepresents the position of gender critical feminists, and in doing so fails to establish the claim that the ideology behind these positions is flawed. In Section 3 we argue that McKinnon’s criticism of Stanley fails, and one implication of this is that those she characterizes as ‘positively privileged’ cannot rely on the standpoint-relative knowledge of those she characterizes as ‘negatively privileged’. We also emphasize in this section McKinnon’s failure to understand and account for multiple axes of oppression, of which the cis/trans axis is only one. (shrink)

In this open peer commentary, we categorize the possible “neuroscience in national security” definitions of misuse of science and identify which, if any, are uniquely presented by advances in neuroscience. To define misuse, we first define what we would consider appropriate use: the application of reasonably safe and effective technology, based on valid and reliable scientific research, to serve a legitimate end. This definition presents distinct opportunities for assessing misuse: misuse is the application of invalid or unreliable science, or is (...) the use of reliable scientific methods to serve illegitimate ends. Ultimately, we conclude that while national security is often a politicized issue, assessing the state of scientific progress should not be. (shrink)

Background: Increasing resistance of Pseudomonas aeruginosa to ciprofloxacin in ICU/burn units has created a problem in the treatment of infections caused by this microorganism. -/- Methods: Fifty P. aeruginosa strains were isolated from burn patients hospitalized in the Kerman Hospital during May 1999-April 2000 and were tested for in-vitro sensitivity to different antibiotics by disc diffusion breakpoint assay. The isolates were subjected to minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) test by agar dilution method. Existence of the plasmids was also investigated in the (...) isolates. -/- Results: Thirty-four patients infected with ciprofloxacin strains showed MIC of 8 mg/ml [p<0.001]. Sixteen patients were infected with sensitive strains exhibiting MIC range of 0.0125-0.125 ± 0.033 mg/ml. The isolates were also also resistant to other antibiotics [p<0.001]. Plasmid isolation and agarose gel electrophoresis (0.7%) revealed three plasmid bands in strains 8 and 16, and one band in strain 35. -/- Conclusion: The emergence of ciprofloxacin resistance of P. aeruginosa in burn patients is alarming since this antibiotic has only recently been introduced onto the market in Iran. One important observation was that some isolates exhibited cross resistance to other antibiotics. Furthermore, some strains were carriers of plasmids which might have acted as the potential source of acquired resistance in the hospital setting. -/- . (shrink)

The vacuum energy density of free scalar quantum field Φ in a Rindler distributional space-time with distributional Levi-Cività connection is considered. It has been widely believed that, except in very extreme situations, the influence of acceleration on quantum fields should amount to just small, sub-dominant contributions. Here we argue that this belief is wrong by showing that in a Rindler distributional background space-time with distributional Levi-Cività connection the vacuum energy of free quantum fields is forced, by the very same background (...) distributional space-time such a Rindler distributional background space-time, to become dominant over any classical energy density component. This semiclassical gravity effect finds its roots in the singular behavior of quantum fields on a Rindler distributional space-times with distributional Levi-Cività connection. In particular we obtain that the vacuum fluctuations Φ2 have a singular behavior at a Rindler horizon R 0 : 2 ( ) 4 , 2 , δ = Φ δ δ − δ  c a a→∞ . Therefore sufficiently strongly accelerated observer burns up near the Rindler horizon. Thus Polchinski’s account doesn’t violate the Einstein equivalence principle. (shrink)

Hog farming is a significant industry in the Philippines, providing 60% of the country's animal meat consumption. However, the African Swine Fever (ASF) outbreak has caused its collapse. In effect, the hog raisers stopped their operation and sought alternatives to earn money for the family's needs. As a result, a phenomenological study investigated the hog raisers' lived experiences and how they cope with the existing phenomenon. Six key informants were selected based on inclusion criteria and purposive sampling for one-on-one interviews (...) conducted by researchers. Using Creswell's approach, (1) fear of the virus, (2) frustration from the border controls and lockdowns, (3) broken promises of financial assistance from the Department of Agriculture, and (4) incurred substantial financial loss were themes concerning the lived experiences of the key informants. Also, the key informants shared how they coped with the outbreak, including (1) shifting to a farming business, (2) working in a construction site, and (3) making hollow blocks. An effective approach to combat the ASF outbreak in Cebu necessitates a comprehensive strategy that draws on insights from key informants. It is imperative to establish systems of support that consider the financial, emotional, and psychological needs of those affected. Collaborative efforts with local communities, researchers, and government organizations are also crucial to devising sustainable plans for managing and preventing ASF in the long run. This study sheds light on the obstacles encountered by the hog industry in Cebu and underscores the significance of implementing coordinated measures to mitigate the effects of ASF. (shrink)

Sentience is the capacity to have feelings, such as feelings of pain, pleasure, hunger, thirst, warmth, joy, comfort and excitement. It is not simply the capacity to feel pain, but feelings of pain, distress or harm, broadly understood, have a special significance for animal welfare law. Drawing on over 300 scientific studies, we evaluate the evidence of sentience in two groups of invertebrate animals: the cephalopod molluscs or, for short, cephalopods (including octopods, squid and cuttlefish) and the decapod crustaceans or, (...) for short, decapods (including crabs, lobsters and crayfish). We also evaluate the potential welfare implications of current commercial practices involving these animals. (shrink)

The term action of consciousness is used to refer to an influence, such as psychokinesis or free will, that produces an effect on matter that is correlated to mental intention, but not completely determined by physical conditions. Such an action could not conserve energy. But in that case, one wonders why, when highly accurate measurements are done, occasions of non-conserved energy (generated perhaps by unconscious PK) are not detected. A possible explanation is that actions of consciousness take place within the (...) limits of the uncertainty principle. Two models are reviewed that, using the latter assumption, propose that consciousness can originate an action potential in the brain. One (that of Eccles) uses the latter assumption only, and the other (that of Burns) additionally assumes that consciousness acts, within those limits, by ordering quantum fluctuations. (shrink)

When discussing the extinction of humanity, there does not seem to be any clear agreement about what ‘humanity’ really means. One aim of this paper is to show that it is a more slippery concept than it might at first seem. A second aim is to show the relationship between what constitutes or defines humanity and what gives it value. Often, whether and how we ought to prevent human extinction depends on what we take humanity to mean, which in turn (...) depends on what we value about humans. Finally, I will offer a definition of humanity that I argue offers a plausible account of when we might say humanity has gone extinct, and reflects what we value about humans, and relatedly, what many actually care about in terms of why we should be preserved. (shrink)

In everyday language, we readily attribute experiences to groups. For example, 1 might say, “Spain celebrated winning the European Cup” or “The uncovering of corruption caused the union to think long and hard about its internal structure.” In each case, the attribution makes sense. However, it is quite difficult to give a nonreductive account of precisely what these statements mean because in each case a mental state is ascribed to a group, and it is not obvious that groups can have (...) mental states. In this article, I do not offer an explicit theory of collective experience. Instead, I draw on phenomenological analyses and empirical data in order to provide general conditions that a more specific theory of collective experience must meet in order to be coherent. (shrink)

This paper argues that there are good reasons to limit the scope of luck egalitarianism to co‐existing people. First, I outline reasons to be sceptical about how “luck” works intergenerationally and therefore the very grounding of luck egalitarianism between non‐overlapping generations. Second, I argue that what Kasper Lippert‐Rasmussen calls the “core luck egalitarian claim” allows significant intergenerational inequality which is a problem for those who object to such inequality. Third, luck egalitarianism cannot accommodate the intuition that it might be required (...) to leave future generations better off than we are, even if it would come at no cost to ourselves. Finally, I argue that following another, broader, version of luck egalitarianism would require us to level down future generations and possibly even ourselves, which is a problem for those persuaded by the levelling‐down objection. (shrink)

Walter S. Athearn's "An Introduction to the Study of the Mind" delves into the essence and functions of the human mind, exploring its immaterial, unitary, self-active, self-conscious, and abiding attributes. Athearn emphasizes the mind's immortality and constancy despite bodily changes, underscoring the importance of effective study habits and emotional management for cognitive efficiency. The work highlights the significant impact of early experiences on mental development and stresses the need for balanced growth in knowledge, appreciation, and conduct to prevent mental disorders. (...) Through insightful examples and practical guidance, Athearn provides a comprehensive framework for understanding the mind's role in shaping individual destiny and the importance of listening to the voice of conscience. (shrink)

Dombrowski and Murdoch offer versions of the ontological argument which aim to avoid two types of objection – those concerned with the nature of the divine, and those concerned with the move from an abstract concept to a mind-independent reality. For both, the nature of the concept of God/Good entails its instantiation, and both supply a supporting argument from experience. It is only Murdoch who successfully negotiates the transition from an abstract concept to the instantiation of that concept, however, and (...) this is achieved by means of an ontological argument from moral experience which, in a reversal of the Kantian doctrine, depends ultimately on a form of the cosmological argument. (shrink)

Despite the ubiquity of inner speech in our mental lives, methods for objectively assessing inner speech capacities remain underdeveloped. The most common means of assessing inner speech is to present participants with tasks requiring them to silently judge whether two words rhyme. We developed a version of this task to assess the inner speech of a population of patients with aphasia and corresponding language production deficits. As expected, patients’ performance on the silent rhyming task was severely impaired relative to controls. (...) More surprisingly, however, patients’ performance on this task did not correlate with their performance on a variety of other standard tests of overt language abilities. In particular, patients who were generally unimpaired in their abilities to overtly name objects during confrontation naming tasks, and who could reliably judge when two words spoken to them rhymed, were still severely impaired (relative to controls) at completing the silent rhyme task. This seems to suggest that inner speech was more severely impaired in these patients than outer speech. However, these results should also cause us to critically reflect on the relation between inner speech and silent rhyme judgments more generally. (shrink)

Some physicians, in their care of patients at risk of misusing opioids, use machine learning (ML)-based prediction drug monitoring programmes (PDMPs) to guide their decision making in the prescription of opioids. This can cause a conflict: a PDMP Score can indicate a patient is at a high risk of opioid abuse while a patient expressly reports oppositely. The prescriber is then left to balance the credibility and trust of the patient with the PDMP Score. Pozzi1 argues that a prescriber who (...) downgrades the credibility of a patient’s testimony based on a low PDMP Score is epistemically and morally unjustified and contributes to a form of testimonial injustice. This results in patients being silenced, excluded from decision-making processes and subjected to structural injustices. Additionally, the use of ML systems in medical practices raises concerns about perpetuating existing inequalities, overestimating their capabilities and displacing human authority. However, almost the very same critiques apply to human-based systems. Formalisation, ML systems included, should instead be viewed positively,2 and precisely as a powerful means to begin eroding these and other problems in ethically sensitive domains. In this case, the epistemic virtues of formalisation include promoting transparency, consistency and replicability in decision making. Rigorous ML systems can also help ensure that models …. (shrink)

In this article, we propose the Fair Priority Model for COVID-19 vaccine distribution, and emphasize three fundamental values we believe should be considered when distributing a COVID-19 vaccine among countries: Benefiting people and limiting harm, prioritizing the disadvantaged, and equal moral concern for all individuals. The Priority Model addresses these values by focusing on mitigating three types of harms caused by COVID-19: death and permanent organ damage, indirect health consequences, such as health care system strain and stress, as well as (...) economic destruction. It proposes proceeding in three phases: the first addresses premature death, the second long-term health issues and economic harms, and the third aims to contain viral transmission fully and restore pre-pandemic activity. -/- To those who may deem an ethical framework irrelevant because of the belief that many countries will pursue "vaccine nationalism," we argue such a framework still has broad relevance. Reasonable national partiality would permit countries to focus on vaccine distribution within their borders up until the rate of transmission is below 1, at which point there would not be sufficient vaccine-preventable harm to justify retaining a vaccine. When a government reaches the limit of national partiality, it should release vaccines for other countries. -/- We also argue against two other recent proposals. Distributing a vaccine proportional to a country's population mistakenly assumes that equality requires treating differently situated countries identically. Prioritizing countries according to the number of front-line health care workers, the proportion of the population over 65, and the number of people with comorbidities within each country may exacerbate disadvantage and end up giving the vaccine in large part to wealthy nations. (shrink)

According to proponents of the extended mind, bio-external resources, such as a notebook or a smartphone, are candidate parts of the cognitive and mental machinery that realises cognitive states and processes. The present chapter discusses three areas of ethical concern associated with the extended mind, namely mental privacy, mental manipulation, and agency. We also examine the ethics of the extended mind from the standpoint of three general normative frameworks, namely, consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics.

Edith Stein is considered a leading figure in the early phenomenological movement and the disciple who performed in the best way the phenomenological method proposed by Husserl, and yet her relationship to phenomenology remains unclear in the literature. This article seeks to add clarity to her relationship to phenomenology while considering three inescapably related questions. (1) What did Stein conceive phenomenology to be? (2) How should we understand Husserl’s influence on Stein? (3) Was Stein an original phenomenological thinker? I argue (...) that Stein conceives of phenomenology as an epistemological critique that aims to clarify the essential foundations of knowledge. It involves intentional analysis that proceeds by way of essential-seeing (Wesensschau), which can be brought about through the method of free imaginative variation, and its intentional analysis involves close attention to the relationship between meaning-intention and meaning-fulfillment. I argue that the primary influence Husserl exerts on Stein is in the development of phenomenology as conceived in his Logical Investigations. Finally, I offer an understanding of how Stein conceived of her differences with Husserl on the issue of idealism in order to argue that Stein’s phenomenological writings in On the Problem of Empathy and “Sentient Causality” offer us a novel phenomenological account of the human being that begins with the ego but escapes being a mere egology. (shrink)

Our culture is dominated by digital documents in ways that are easy to overlook. These documents have changed our worldviews about science and have raised our expectations of them as tools for knowledge justification. This article explores the complexities surrounding the digital document by revisiting Michael Polanyi’s theory of tacit knowledge—the idea that “we can know more than we can tell.” The theory presents to us a dilemma: if we can know more than we can tell, then this means that (...) the communication of science via the document as a primary form of telling will always be incomplete. This dilemma presents significant challenges to the open science movement. (shrink)

In this article, I explicate Husserl’s phenomenology of the person as found in Ideen II by examining the most important aspects of persons in this work. In the first section, I explicate the concept of the surrounding world (Umwelt) with special attention to the difference between the different attitudes (Einstellungen) that help determine the sense of constituted objects of experience. In the second section, I investigate Husserl’s description of the person as a founded, higher order, spiritual (geistig) objectivity. I consider (...) this description of the person by examining the symmetry between the organization of Ideen II as a whole and the order of the constitution of the person. In the final section, I look at the relationship between the constitution of the person and the spiritual (geistig) world. (shrink)

To claim that the divine is a person or personal is, according to Swinburne, ‘the most elementary claim of theism’. I argue that, whether the classical theist’s concept of the divine as a person or personal is construed as an analogy or a metaphor, or a combination of the two, analysis necessitates qualification of that concept such that any differences between the classical theist’s concept of the divine as a person or personal and revisionary interpretations of that concept are merely (...) superficial. Thus, either the classical theist has more in common with revisionary theism than he/she might care to admit, or classical theism is a multi-faceted position which encompasses interpretations which some might regard as revisionist. This article also explores and employs the use of a gender-neutral pronoun in talk about God. (shrink)

Even if all of the content of conscious experience is encoded in the brain, there is a considerable difference between the view that consciousness does independent processing and the view that it does not. If all processing is done by the brain, then conscious experience is unnecessary and irrelevant to behavior. If consciousness performs a function, then its association with particular aspects of brain processing reflect its functional use in determining behavior. However, if consciousness does perform a function, it cannot (...) be described entirely by known physical laws. Rather, even if the content of conscious experience follows physical encoding in the brain, consciousness must then be governed in part by a principle which is different from any known physical principle. (shrink)

Originally published in 1925, C. Delisle Burns’ _The Philosophy of Labour _attempts to lay down key aspects of labour and the working class of that time period, covering aspects such as economic obstacles, standards of living and patriotism. Burns does not draw on past philosophers or sociological thinkers of the working-class and instead chose to focus only on the attitude of the workers in factories, mines, roads, railways and other forms of manual labour. This title will be of (...) interest to students of philosophy. (shrink)

In this paper, we highlight some problems for accounts of disability and enhancement that have not been sufficiently addressed in the literature. The reason, we contend, is that contemporary debates that seek to define, characterise or explain the normative valence of disability and enhancement do not pay sufficient attention to a wide range of cases, and the transition between one state and another. In section one, we provide seven cases that might count as disability or enhancement. We explain why each (...) case might count, and on what basis, and why it is been neglected. Each case is explained as a transition in what we call capacity space. We then argue that no definition of disability or enhancement addresses all of these cases, except for strict welfarist accounts of disability that do not rely on a depiction of any particular capacity. We argue further, however, that this is a serious deficiency of welfarist conceptions of disability. We then address objections to our account. (shrink)

The embedding and promotion of social change is faced with aparadoxical challenge. In order to mainstream an approach to socialchange such as responsible research and innovation and makeit into a practical reality rather than an abstract ideal, we need tohave conceptual clarity and empirical evidence. But, in order to beable to gather empirical evidence, we have to presuppose that theapproach already exists in practice. This paper proposes a social labmethodology that is suited to deal with this circularity. Themethodology combines the (...) defining features of social labs emergingfrom the literature such as agility and real-world focus withestablished theories and approaches such as action research andexperiential learning. Thereby it enables the parallel investigationand propagation of RRI. The framework thus constructed provides atheoretical embedding of sociallabs and overcomes some of theknown limitations of the constitutive approaches. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that, although Alvin Plantinga’s Felix Culpa theodicy appears on only two pages of his recent book Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion and Naturalism (2011) (i.e. 58-59), it is of pivotal importance for the book as a whole. Plantinga argues that there is superficial conflict but deep concord between science and monotheism, and that there is superficial concord but deep conflict between science and naturalism. I contend that the weakness of the Felix Culpa theodicy (...) lends support to the view that there is more than superficial conflict between science and monotheism, and offer an alternative response to the challenge of evil which suggests that there might be, after all, concord between science and (religious) naturalism. (shrink)

‘Shallow’ and ‘deep’ versions of scientific realism may be distinguished as follows: the shallow realist is satisfied with belief in the existence of the posits of our best scientific theories; by contrast, deep realists claim that realism can be legitimate only if such entities are described in metaphysical terms. We argue that this methodological discussion can be fruitfully applied in Everettian quantum mechanics, specifically on the debate concerning the existence of worlds and the recent dispute between Everettian actualism and quantum (...) modal realism. After presenting what is involved in such dispute, we point to a dilemma for realists: either we don’t have the available metaphysical tools to answer the deep realist’s demands, and realism is not justified in this case, or such demands of metaphysical dressing are not mandatory for scientific realism, and deep versions of realism are not really required. (shrink)

The possibility of empirical test is discussed with respect to three issues: (1) What is the ontological relationship between consciousness and the brain/physical world? (2) What physical characteristics are associated with the mind/brain interface? (3) Can consciousness act on the brain independently of any brain process?

Art plays a significant role in Iris Murdoch’s moral philosophy, a major part of which may be interpreted as a proposal for the revision of religious belief. In this paper, I identify within Murdoch’s philosophical writings five distinct but related ways in which great art can assist moral/religious belief and practice: art can reveal to us “the world as we were never able so clearly to see it before”; this revelatory capacity provides us with evidence for the existence of the (...) Good, a metaphor for a transcendent reality of which God was also a symbol; art is a “hall of reflection” in which “everything under the sun can be examined and considered”; art provides us with an analogue for the way in which we should try to perceive our world; and art enables us to transcend our selfish concerns. I consider three possible objections: that Murdoch’s theory is not applicable to all forms of art; that the meaning of works of art is often ambiguous; and that there is disagreement about what constitutes a great work of art. I argue that none of these objections are decisive, and that all forms of art have at least the potential to furnish us with important tools for developing the insight required to live a moral/religious life. (shrink)

Two forms of independent action by consciousness have been proposed by various researchers – free will and holistic processing. (Holistic processing contributes to the formation of behavior through the holistic use of brain programs and encoding.) The well-known experiment of Libet et al. (1983) implies that if free will exists, its action must consist of making a selection among alternatives presented by the brain. As discussed herein, this result implies that any physical changes mind can produce in the brain are (...) very small, and this in turn implies that holistic processing would also act to select among brain programs. The latter process would contribute to flexibility of behavior, which would therefore be an indication of the possible presence of consciousness in an animal. Because locomotion requires response to varying and unpredictable conditions, the above conclusions support the idea that simple forms of consciousness appear very early in the evolutionary line of the animal kingdom. (shrink)

In recent years, some simulation theorists have claimed that the discovery of mirror neurons provides empirical support for the position that mind reading is, at some basic level, simulation. The purpose of this essay is to question that claim. I begin by providing brief context for the current mind reading debate and then developing an influential simulationist account of mind reading. I then draw on the works of Edmund Husserl and Edith Stein to develop an alternative, phenomenological account. In conclusion, (...) I offer multiple objections against simulation theory and argue that the empirical evidence mirror neurons offer us does not necessarily support the view that empathy is simulation. (shrink)

I examine Bernard Lonergan's approach to the problem of evil. I look to determine whether his solution, which is based on the conjugate forms of faith, hope, and charity, and culminates in a heuristic where forgiveness plays an essential role in moving beyond the problem of evil is adequate. I examine the distinction between basic sin, moral evil, and physical evil as well as his claim that from the viewpoint of the unrestricted act of understanding the non-systematic vanishes.

Traditionally, being a realist about something means believing in the independent existence of that something. In this line of thought, a scientific realist is someone who believes in the objective existence of the entities postulated by our best scientific theories. In metaphysical terms, what does that mean? In ontological terms, i.e., in terms of what exists, scientific realism can be understood as involving the adoption of a scientifically informed ontology. But according to some philosophers, a realistic attitude must go beyond (...) ontology. The way in which this requirement has been understood involves providing a metaphysics for the entities postulated by science, that is, answering questions about the nature of what ontology admits to exist. We discuss how two fashionable approaches face the challenge of providing a metaphysics for science: a form of naturalism and the Viking/Toolbox approach. Finally, we present a third way, which adopts the best of both approaches: the meta-Popperian method, which focuses on discarding the wrong alternatives, or better saying, the metaphysical profiles incompatible with certain theories. We present the meta-Popperian method, a metametaphysical method capable of objectively assessing which metaphysical profiles are incompatible with certain scientific theories. For this, we will use quantum mechanics as a case study, presenting some previously obtained results. As our focus is on methodological questions about the relationship between metaphysics and science; with this method, we can see how science can be used to avoid error in metaphysical issues. In our opinion, this would be a way to develop a productive relationship between science and metaphysics. (shrink)

This qualitative case study investigates the environmental implications of tourist arrivals in Matabungkay Beach, Lian, and their impact on the destination image. Through in-depth interviews with seven key stakeholders, including local residents, business owners, and environmental activists, the study explores perceptions, concerns, and potential solutions regarding the intersection of tourism and environmental sustainability. Findings reveal a complex relationship between tourism and environmental degradation, with participants expressing concerns about poor waste management, impacts on destination image, and health concerns. These challenges not (...) only threaten the natural beauty and biodiversity of the area but also tarnish the destination's image, affecting its appeal to tourists and potential investors. Despite these challenges, participants highlight existing initiatives and potential solutions, including community-based conservation efforts, sustainable tourism practices, and enhanced regulations. Collaboration among stakeholders is emphasized as crucial for achieving a balance between tourism development and environmental preservation. The study underscores the need for comprehensive strategies includes formulated an ordinance for comprehensive waste management and pollution control ordinance to optimize the destination image of Matabungkay Beach while addressing its environmental challenges. By integrating sustainable practices and fostering community engagement, the destination can enhance its appeal while safeguarding its natural resources for future generations. (shrink)

“What is appreciation?” is a basic question in the philosophy of art, and the analogy between appreciating a work of art and getting a joke can help us answer it. We first propose a subjective account of aesthetic appreciation (I). Then we consider jokes (II). The difference between getting a joke and not, or what it is to get it right, can often be objectively articulated. Such explanations cannot substitute for the joke itself, and indeed may undermine the very power (...) of the joke to evoke an appropriate response. Sometimes the discourse of art critics can have a similar effect. We therefore explore the analogy between getting jokes and appreciating works of art (III), and find it unexpectedly strong. Finally (IV), we consider Wittgensteinian grounds for thinking as we do, considering the language game of joke-telling, the relevance of seeing aspects, and giving reasons. (shrink)

Justice in production is concerned with ensuring the benefits and burdens of work are distributed in a way that is reflective of persons' status as moral equals. While a variety of accounts of productive justice have been offered, insufficient attention has been paid to the distribution of work's benefits and burdens in the future. In this article, after granting for the sake of argument forecasts of widespread future technological unemployment, we consider the implications this has for egalitarian requirements of productive (...) justice. We argue that in relation to all the benefits affiliated with work, other than undertaking social contribution, the technological replacement of work is unproblematic as these benefits could in principle be attained elsewhere. But because social contribution uniquely corresponds to work (when work is understood as more than a paid job), the normative assessment of technological unemployment will turn on the value that theories of justice give to contributive activity. We then argue that despite technological replacement being plainly beneficial insofar as it relieves persons from the burdens of work, such as dangerous work or drudgery, because the nature of care work makes it less susceptible to technological replacement, egalitarian concern will require the burdens of care work to be shared equally between individuals. (shrink)

The text translated, “Das Wissen von fremden Ichen,” bears particular importance for the early phenomenological movement for two reasons. The first is Lipps’ refutation of the theory that knowledge of other selves arises by way of an inference from analogy. Lipps first developed his account of empathy to explain that we tend to succumb to geometric optical illusions because we project living activity into inanimate objects. In sum, Lipps’ groundbreaking article on The Knowledge of Other Egos deserves as much interest (...) from the philosophical community today as it had in the past. The figure of Lipps the philosopher needs to be taken into consideration anew among other much-celebrated proponents of the phenomenological movement. The supporters of that theory, however, demand that we ought to be able to pick out a justification for the existence of objective reality from the fact of our sensations by way of thought alone. (shrink)

Individual attributes, such as educational background, may influence the degree of health consideration in food consumption. The local social norms may affect the same consideration in the collective level. Represented by education level and the custom rules adherence in food choosing behavior, this study aimed to examine how knowledge influences health consideration in food consumption and how the local social norms moderate this association in a multicultural enriched society. By utilizing the Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF) as a conceptual framework, this (...) study analyzed a dataset of 710 urban residents in Indonesia. There was a negative association between education level and health consideration in food consumption in which the custom rules adherence in food choosing behavior moderated against this negative association. For those with a low level of custom-based food consumption, their health consideration is lower as they have higher education level. However, the opposite trend which is a more intuitive positive association was found in those who consume more custom-based food. Socio-cultural factors have a complex impact on food choosing behavior among Indonesian urban residents. Therefore, governmental policies in the health promotion campaign of healthy-nutritious food should incorporate socio-cultural aspects with a deeper understanding of the human mind’s information processing. (shrink)

The principles which can justify significantly risky nontherapeutic research on children are a combination of: (1) direct or indirect benefits to the child participants now and/or in the future (and these benefits need not necessarily be medical, they can also be socioeconomic or otherwise non-medical); (2) a high standard of informed consent that fundamentally focuses on the child participant's understanding (and capacity for understanding) of relevant features of informed consent. Researchers, parents and guardians, as well as child participants themselves, have (...) different roles and obligations towards one another. This is not an issue of seeking to find excuses to expose children to risk, but rather an issue of seeking the least risky and most ethical way to do so if and when required by public health emergencies or to achieve directly beneficial scientific breakthroughs. (shrink)

Shortages of new therapeutics to treat coronavirus disease (COVID-19) have forced clinicians, public health officials, and health systems to grapple with difficult questions about how to fairly allocate potentially life-saving treatments when there are not enough for all patients in need (1). Shortages have occurred with remdesivir, tocilizumab, monoclonal antibodies, and the oral antiviral Paxlovid (2) -/- Ensuring equitable allocation is especially important in light of the disproportionate burden experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic by disadvantaged groups, including Black, Hispanic/Latino and (...) Indigenous communities, individuals with certain disabilities, and low-income persons. However, many health systems have resorted to first-come, first-served approaches to allocation, which tend to disadvantage individuals with barriers in access to care (3). There is mounting evidence of racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic disparities in access to medications for COVID-19 (4, 5). -/- One potential method to promote equitable allocation is to use a weighted lottery, which is an allocation strategy that gives all eligible patients a chance to receive the scarce treatment while also allowing the assignment of higher or lower chances according to other ethical considerations (6). We sought to assess the feasibility of implementing a weighted lottery to allocate scarce COVID-19 medications in a large U.S. health system and to determine whether the weighted lottery promotes equitable allocation. (shrink)

Eshel Ben-Jacob’s manuscript entitled ‘Bacterial wisdom, Gödel’s theorem and creative genomic webs’ summarizes decades of work demonstrating adaptive mutagenesis in bacterial genomes. Bacterial genomes, each an essential part of a Kantian whole that is a single bacterium, are thus not independent of the environment as sensed; and a single bacterium is therefore a semiotic entity. Ben-Jacob suggests this but errs in 1) assigning autonomy to the genome, and 2) analogizing through computation without making clear whether he is doing so for (...) illustrative purposes or making committed ontological propositions. We reinterpret adaptive mutagenesis and related phenomena in ways both metaphysically rigorous and revealing. We conclude that bacteria are much farther removed from the ‘self-organizing’ world of inanimate process than from the Peircian world of signs; and a critical reappraisal of existing knowledge can enhance our understanding of selfhood, semiosis, and the roots of subjective experience. (shrink)

In real-time, Twitter strongly imprints world events, popular culture, and the day-to-day; Twitter records an ever growing compendium of language use and change; and Twitter has been shown to enable certain kinds of prediction. Vitally, and absent from many standard corpora such as books and news archives, Twitter also encodes popularity and spreading through retweets. Here, we describe Storywrangler, an ongoing, day-scale curation of over 100 billion tweets containing around 1 trillion 1-grams from 2008 to 2020. For each day, we (...) break tweets into 1-, 2-, and 3-grams across 150+ languages, record usage frequencies, and generate Zipf distributions. We make the data set available through an interactive time series viewer, and as downloadable time series and daily distributions. We showcase a few examples of the many possible avenues of study we aim to enable including how social amplification can be visualized through ‘contagiograms’. (shrink)

GILBERT JEAN FACCARELLO (Paris, 1950) is professor of economics at Université Panthéon-Assas, Paris, and a member of the Triangle research centre (École Normale Supérieure de Lyon and CNRS). He is presently chair of the ESHET Council (European Society for the History of Economic Thought). He completed his doctoral research in economics at Université de Paris X Nanterre. He has previously taught at the Université de Paris-Dauphine, Université du Maine and École Normale Supérieure de Fontenay/Saint-Cloud (now École Normale Supérieure de Lyon). (...) He is a co-founder of The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, which he co-edited for 20 years with J. L. Cardoso, Heinz D. Kurz, and A. Murphy. With Alain Béraud, he edited the Nouvelle histoire de la pensée économique (La Découverte, 3 volumes, 1992-2000) and, together with Heinz D. Kurz, he is presently editing a Handbook of the History of Economic Analysis (3 volumes, forthcoming with Edward Elgar). -/- EJPE interviewed Gilbert Faccarello about his research career in the history of economic thought, where he has focused especially on old and new classical and Marxian political economy, and French political economy during the 18th and 19th centuries. G. Faccarello discusses his interest not only in the logical structure and context of the economic ideas of past thinkers but also the links between economic thought, philosophy, and religion. (shrink)

Children conceived in order to donate biological material to save the life of an already existing child are known as 'saviour siblings'. The primary reasons that have been offered against the practice are: (i) creating a saviour sibling has negative impacts on the created child and (ii) creating a saviour child represents a wrongful procreative motivation of the parents. In this paper we examine to what extent the creation of saviour siblings actually presents a special case in procreative ethics. Although (...) we do not deny that there is a unique feature present in the saviour sibling case—namely, that the child was created to save their sibling’s life, we argue that the distinctive feature of being a saviour sibling does not make the procreative act wrong. Our claim is that the features that would make the creation of a particular saviour sibling (im)permissible are the same features that would make the creation of any child (im)permissible. Our conclusion is that saviour siblings—in relation to the reasons for the (im)permissibility of their creation—are not a special case for procreative ethics. (shrink)

Data security is, protecting data from ill- conceived get to, utilize, introduction, intrusion, change, examination, recording or destruction. Cloud computing is a sort of Internet-based computing that grants conjoint PC handling resources and information to PCs what's more, different gadgets according to necessity. It is a model that empowers universal, on-request access to a mutual pool of configurable computing resources. At present, security has been viewed as one of the best issues in the improvement of Cloud Computing. The key issue (...) in effective execution of Cloud Computing is to adequately deal with the security in the cloud applications. This paper talks about the part of cryptography in cloud computing to improve the data security. The expectation here is to get bits of knowledge another security approach with the usage of cryptography to secure information at cloud data centers. (shrink)

A longish (12 page) discussion of Richard Sorabji's excellent book, with a further discussion of what it means for a theory of emotions to be a cognitive theory.

Interactions are important in establishing deep and meaningful learning experiences for learners in a distance education setup. Of all the activities in an online classroom, the discussion forum proved to be the one that had the most interactions. A discussion forum lets learners interact with the content, peers, and teachers. Participation in these learning activities is one important factor. The more the learners participate, the more they learn. This paper uses the researcher’s experience in determining what participation is in an (...) online learning experience. After reviewing the experience, participation in a discussion forum is defined as a self-induced connection to the learning community to receive and share knowledge to bring a deeper understanding of a certain theory or phenomenon.” There are conditions for a behavior or action that can be considered participation. The more conditions the behavior met, the higher the level of participation it led. The conditions are the learner analyzes an abstract theory or concept and relates it to practice or experience; the learner views other people’s perspectives regarding the subject and synthesizes a stronger and deeper understanding of the acquired knowledge; the learner communicates the acquired understanding of a certain subject that induces a validation or further inquiry; lastly, the learner constructed a train of premeditated discourse that leads to the understanding of a certain subject. (shrink)

The meaning of “information and communication technologies (ICT)”, “market of information and communication technologies” were clarified in the article. Components and priority areas for capital investment in the ICT market were determined. The relativity of relationship between the placement of supercomputers in the countries and their level of innovation was revealed. The tendencies of world ICT market development were defined. The place of Ukraine in the world ICT market was established.