This paper traces how media representations encouraged enthusiasts, youth and skilled volunteers to participate actively in science and technology during the twentieth century. It assesses how distinctive discourses about scientific amateurs positioned them with respect to professionals in shifting political and cultural environments. In particular, the account assesses the seminal role of a periodical, Scientific American magazine, in shaping and championing an enduring vision of autonomous scientific enthusiasms. Between the 1920s and 1970s, editors Albert G. Ingalls and Clair L. Stong (...) shepherded generations of adult ‘amateur scientists’. Their columns and books popularized a vision of independent non-professional research that celebrated the frugal ingenuity and skills of inveterate tinkerers. Some of these attributes have found more recent expression in present-day ‘maker culture’. The topic consequently is relevant to the historiography of scientific practice, science popularization and science education. Its focus on independent non-professionals highlights political dimensions of agency and autonomy that have often been implicit for such historical actors.The paper argues that the Scientific American template of adult scientific amateurism contrasted with other representations: those promoted by earlier periodicals and by a science education organization, Science Service, and by the national demands for recruiting scientific labour during and after the Second World War. The evidence indicates that advocates of the alternative models had distinctive goals and adapted their narrative tactics to reach their intended audiences, which typically were conceived as young persons requiring instruction or mentoring. By contrast, the monthly Scientific American columns established a long-lived and stable image of the independent lay scientist. (shrink)

The Report presents insights which illuminates the intertwinements of European regulatory policies and global governance arrangements. By pinning down the exact nature of the interaction between these two levels, the EU’s dilemma becomes obvious: On the one hand, stronger global governance can be a chance, through which the EU can clarify its own raison d’être of increased integration to the wider world. On the other hand, the design of the European project is being challenged by more assertive global structures. This (...) is especially the case in relation to the WTO regime, which is constraining the decisional autonomy of the EU, regarding the appropriateness of its content and its external effects. Thus, the regulation of services in the EU and the WTO are discussed in the first section of this report. Section two focuses on labour standards, which are analysed from different angles in order to clarify the functions of the WTO and the ILO, multinational companies as well as other private actors within this specific field. The final section deals with the legitimacy problematic of transnational governance. Table of contents: Introduction Christian Joerges and Poul F. Kjaer Section One: Freedom of Services Chapter 1 The Multiple Understandings of Conflict between Trade in Services and Labour Protection Alexia Herwig Chapter 2 Competing in Markets, not Rules: The Conflict over the Single Services Market Susanne K. Schmidt Chapter 3 Competitiveness and Labour Protection: A Comment Markus Krajewski Section Two: Labour Standards Chapter 4 WTO and ILO: Can Social Responsibility be maintained in International Trade? Josef Falke Chapter 5 Reframing RECON: Perspectives on Transnationalisation and Post-national Democracy from Labour Law Claire Methven O’Brien Chapter 6 Transnational Governance and Human Rights: The Obligations of Private Actors in the Global Context Regina Kreide Section Three: The Legitimacy of Transnational Governance Chapter 7 Legitimacy through Precaution in European Regulation of GMOs? From the Standpoint of Governance as Analytical Perspective Maria Weimer Chapter 8 The Justice Deficit of the EU and other International Organisations Jürgen Neyer Chapter 9 Towards Normative Legitimacy of the World Trade Order Alexia Herwig and Thorsten Hüller Chapter 10 From Utopia to Apology – The Return to Inter-state Justice in Normative IR Scholarship: Comments on Neyer and Herwig & Hüller Jens Steffek. (shrink)

According to Stanley Kubrick, “[i]f it can be written, or thought, it can be filmed”. This is true for award-winning Irish short story writer Claire Keegan (1968) whose sparse and effective prose has hit the core of audiences struggling to process the lingering impact of national trauma. Keegan confronts it all head-on, highlighting social issues that loom large in evocative narratives where thoughts, situations and scenarios spill over into the space between the words. What is left unsaid says it (...) all. The silence that reigns in a space of ‘NON-sayability’ in Keegan’s stories is anything but opaque. In Small Things Like These she navigates treacherous territories in a dark Christmas tale about the widespread and notorious Magdalene Laundry apparatus that keeps weighing heavily on our collective conscience. How can we remain passive in the face of wrongdoings and how does Keegan unlock the past and urge us to scrutinise history? (shrink)

Étant donné la définition de l'eugénisme, il est très difficile d'établir une distinction claire entre la science (médecine, ingénierie génétique) et l'eugénisme en tant que domaine inclus. Et pour définir une ligne sur laquelle l'ingénierie génétique ne devrait pas aller plus loin, conformément aux normes morales, juridiques et religieuses. Si nous acceptons l'aide de la génétique pour trouver des moyens de lutter contre le cancer, le diabète ou le VIH, nous acceptons également l'eugénisme positif tel qu'il est défini à (...) présent. Et si nous acceptons le dépistage génétique et les interventions sur le fœtus, ou l’avortement, nous acceptons implicitement l’eugénisme négatif. En outre, au niveau gouvernemental, bien que l'eugénisme soit officiellement refusé, il a été légalisé dans de nombreux pays jusqu'à récemment et est toujours accepté et légalisé, même sous des formes subtiles, même de nos jours. -/- TABLE: -/- Abstract Introduction 1. Histoire de l'eugénisme - 1.1 Antiquité - 1.2 Le darwinisme social - 1.3 Francis Galton - 1.4 Charles Davenport - 1.5 L'eugenisme en tant que politique d'État - - 1.5.1 L'eugenisme en États-Unis - - 1.5.2 L'eugenisme en Allemagne - 1.6 La période d'après-guerre 2. L'eugénisme actuel - 2.1 L'eugénisme libéral - 2.2 L'eugénisme en tant que politique d'État 3. L'éthique de l'eugénisme 4. L'avenir de l'eugénisme Conclusions Bibliographie -/- DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.12520.83203 . (shrink)

Dans la définition de l'eugénisme, il est très difficile d'établir une distinction claire entre la science (médecine, génie génétique) et l'eugénisme. Et de définir une ligne de conduite sur laquelle l'ingénierie génétique ne devrait pas aller, conformément aux normes morales, juridiques et religieuses. Tant que nous acceptons l'aide de la génétique pour trouver des moyens de lutter contre le cancer, le diabète ou le VIH, nous acceptons également l'eugénisme positif tel qu'il est actuellement. Et tant que nous acceptons le (...) dépistage génétique et les interventions sur le fœtus, ou l'avortement, nous acceptons implicitement l'eugénisme négatif. En outre, au niveau gouvernemental, bien que l'eugénisme soit officiellement démenti, il a été légalisé dans de nombreux pays jusqu'à récemment et est toujours accepté et légalisé, même sous des formes subtiles, y compris aujourd'hui. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.31335.50088. (shrink)

The Value-free ideal of science (VFI) is a view that claims that scientists should not use non-epistemic values when they are justifying their hypotheses, and is widely considered to be obsolete in the philosophy of science. I will defend the ideal by demonstrating that acceptance of non-epistemic values, prohibited by VFI, necessitates legitimizing certain problematic scientific practices. Such practices, including biased methodological decisions or Questionable Research Practices (QRP), significantly contribute to the Replication Crisis. I will argue that the realizability of (...) VFI is not a necessary condition for its validity. Then, I will show how some of the prominent proposals of value-laden science legitimize problematic scientific practices, provide real-world examples, and generalize the argument. Finally, I will show how value-laden methodological decisions contribute to the Replicability Crisis and discuss two strategies for realizing VFI. (shrink)

Automated Influence is the use of Artificial Intelligence to collect, integrate, and analyse people’s data in order to deliver targeted interventions that shape their behaviour. We consider three central objections against Automated Influence, focusing on privacy, exploitation, and manipulation, showing in each case how a structural version of that objection has more purchase than its interactional counterpart. By rejecting the interactional focus of “AI Ethics” in favour of a more structural, political philosophy of AI, we show that the real problem (...) with Automated Influence is the crisis of legitimacy that it precipitates. (shrink)

How do we ensure agents formulating legal statements are not systematically in error? In this paper I assume that the success of legal statements follows from the fact that propositions expressed by legal statements adequately represent legal reality. I argue that the content of legal statements hinges implicetly on the sources of law and methods in which we attribute meaning to these sources. In this regard, I identify the primary obstacle to the success of actions that consist of asserting legal (...) statements as a systematic failure to refer to the proper method of interpretation by the agents formulating these statements. The paper explores several solutions to this challenge, focusing on the solution explaining the success in referring to the proper method of interpretation in virtue of meta-interpretive considerations. Subsequently, the paper discusses a challenge to this solution following from the claim that there are many different theories of meta-interpretation, and there is no fact (neither natural, nor conventional or intentional, anchored in the collective consciousness of society), determining that one of them is more accurate than the other ones. Given all the intricacies, this study focuses on exploring a coherent framework for understanding how different interpretive methods and meta-interpretative theories can be evaluated and applied in legal practice. It seeks to articulate a model that accommodates the diversity of interpretations while striving for a reasoned consensus on how legal texts should be understood and applied. (shrink)

The overreliance on verbal models and theories in psychology has been criticized for hindering the development of reliable research programs (Harris, 1976; Yarkoni, 2020). We demonstrate how the conceptual space framework can be used to formalize verbal theories and improve their precision and testability. In the framework, scientific concepts are represented by means of geometric objects. As a case study, we present a formalization of an existing three-dimensional theory of emotion which was developed with a spatial metaphor in mind. Wundt (...) posits that the range of human emotion can be represented along three axes of basic emotions (pleasure/displeasure, excitement/inhibition, tension/relaxation), just as color vision can be represented using three basic colors. We use dimensions to represent basic emotions, points to represent emotional states, and regions to represent broader emotional concepts. We then compare our formalization to an existing structuralist formalization of Wundt’s theory. Further, we discuss the empirical predictions that our formalization generates, such as comparisons of similarity and intensity. We conclude by demonstrating how the tools developed in the conceptual space framework can be used to formulate a theory of emotion based on empirical observation. (shrink)

This paper critically assesses the possibility of moral enhancement with ambient intelligence technologies and artificial intelligence presented in Savulescu and Maslen (2015). The main problem with their proposal is that it is not robust enough to play a normative role in users’ behavior. A more promising approach, and the one presented in the paper, relies on an artifi-cial moral reasoning engine, which is designed to present its users with moral arguments grounded in first-order normative theories, such as Kantianism or utilitarianism, (...) that reason-responsive people can be persuaded by. This proposal can play a normative role and it is also a more promising avenue towards moral enhancement. It is more promising because such a system can be designed to take advantage of the sometimes undue trust that people put in automated technologies. We could therefore expect a well-designed moral reasoner system to be able to persuade people that may not be persuaded by similar arguments from other people. So, all things considered, there is hope in artificial intelli-gence for moral enhancement, but not in artificial intelligence that relies solely on ambient intelligence technologies. (shrink)

The Enkratic Principle enjoys something of a protected status as a requirement of rationality. I argue that this status is undeserved, at least in the epistemic domain. Compliance with the principle should not be thought of as a requirement of epistemic rationality, but rather as defeasible indication of epistemic blamelessness. To show this, I present the Puzzle of Inconsistent Requirements, and argue that the best way to solve it is to distinguish two kinds of epistemic evaluation – requirement evaluations and (...) appraisal evaluations. This allows us to solve the puzzle while accommodating traditional motivations for thinking of the Enkratic Principle as a requirement of rationality. (shrink)

Indicative conditionals and tendency causal claims are closely related (e.g., Frosch and Byrne, 2012), but despite these connections, they are usually studied separately. A unifying framework could consist in their dependence on probabilistic factors such as high conditional probability and statistical relevance (e.g., Adams, 1975; Eells, 1991; Douven, 2008, 2015). This paper presents a comparative empirical study on differences between judgments on tendency causal claims and indicative conditionals, how these judgments are driven by probabilistic factors, and how these factors differ (...) in their predictive power for both causal and conditional claims. (shrink)

Political deepfakes have prompted outcry about the diminishing trustworthiness of visual depictions, and the epistemic and political threat this poses. Yet this new technique is being used overwhelmingly to create pornography, raising the question of what, if anything, is wrong with the creation of deepfake pornography. Traditional objections focusing on the sexual abuse of those depicted fail to apply to deepfakes. Other objections—that the use and consumption of pornography harms the viewer or other (non-depicted) individuals—fail to explain the objection that (...) a depicted person might have to the creation of deepfake pornography that utilises images of them. My argument offers such an explanation. It begins by noting that the creation of sexual images requires an act of consent, separate from any consent needed for the acts depicted. Once we have separated these out, we can see that a demand for consent can arise when a sexual image is of us, even when no sexual activity was actually engaged in, as in the case of deepfake pornography. I then demonstrate that there are two ways in which an image can be ‘of us’, both of which can exist in the case of deepfakes. Thus, I argue: if a person, their likeness, or their photograph is used to create pornography, their consent is required. Whenever the person depicted does not consent (or in the case of children, can’t consent), that person is wronged by the creation of deepfake pornography and has a claim against its production. (shrink)

A familiar part of debates about supererogatory actions concerns the role that cost should play. Two camps have emerged: one claiming that extreme cost is a necessary condition for when an action is supererogatory, while the other denies that it should be part of our definition of supererogation. In this paper, I propose an alternative position. I argue that it is comparative cost that is central to the supererogatory and that it is needed to explain a feature that all accounts (...) agree is central to the very notion of supererogation: optionality. Perhaps because of this agreement on its importance, few attempts have been made to clarify and explain the notion of optionality. I argue that giving an account of the optionality of supererogatory requires drawing a line between doing the bare minimum permissible and going beyond the bare minimum and that this line ought to be drawn based on comparative cost of alternative permissible acts. Having outlined my account and motivated it, I discuss and reject two concerns that might be raised: firstly, that it is extreme cost, not comparative cost, that matters and, secondly, that in fact no cost is needed for an act to be supererogatory. (shrink)

This paper advances a novel hybrid theory addressing a fundamental puzzle in legal philosophy: how legal statements can simultaneously have both cognitive and practical features. Drawing on contemporary developments in metaethics and philosophy of language, we argue that legal statements express both beliefs and desire-like attitudes. My analysis yields three key findings. First, I demonstrate that within any given legal system, the descriptive content of legal statements remains invariant across different contexts of use and assessment – a feature that explains (...) persistent patterns of legal disagreement, retraction and attribution of responsibility for content. Second, I show that the desire-like states expressed by legal statements are uniformly directed at the general property picked out by “It is the law that…” rather than at particular legal norms, regardless of the speaker – thereby preserving their inference-licensing property and evidential function. Third, I identify generalized conversational implicature as the mechanism through which legal statements convey desire-like states explaining their distinctive practical features. This theoretical framework offers a novel solution to the puzzle of legal motivation: rather than positing a necessary conceptual link between legal judgment and motivation, it explains their characteristic connection through the general action-guiding purpose of legal discourse and Gricean conversational principles. (shrink)

Can we make mistakes about what rationality requires? A natural answer is that we can, since it is a platitude that rational belief does not require truth; it is possible for a belief to be rational and mistaken, and this holds for any subject matter at all. However, the platitude causes trouble when applied to rationality itself. The possibility of rational mistakes about what rationality requires generates a puzzle. When combined with two further plausible claims – the enkratic principle, and (...) the claim that rational requirements apply universally – we get the result that rationality generates inconsistent requirements. One popular and attractive solution to the puzzle denies that it is possible to make rational mistakes about what rationality requires. I show why (contra Titelbaum (2015b), and Littlejohn (2015)) this solution is doomed to fail. (shrink)

In a recent series of papers, Jane Friedman argues that suspended judgment is a sui generis first-order attitude, with a question as its content. In this paper, I offer a critique of Friedman’s project. I begin by responding to her arguments against reductive higher-order propositional accounts of suspended judgment, and thus undercut the negative case for her own view. Further, I raise worries about the details of her positive account, and in particular about her claim that one suspends judgment about (...) some matter if and only if one inquires into this matter. Subsequently, I use conclusions drawn from the preceding discussion to offer a tentative account: S suspends judgment about p iff S believes that she neither believes nor disbelieves that p, S neither believes nor disbelieves that p, and S intends to judge that p or not-p. (shrink)

According to the orthodox view, the goodness of a life depends exclusively on the things that actually happened within it, such as its pleasures and pains, the satisfaction of its subject’s preferences, or the presence of various objective goods and bads. In this paper, I argue that the goodness of a life also depends on what could have happened, but didn’t. I then propose that this view helps us resolve ethical puzzles concerning the standards for a life worth living for (...) animals and the significance of a life’s shape. (shrink)

This essay characterizes the perception of the visual hybrid as nonconceptual, introducing the terminology of nonconceptual content theory to aesthetics. The visual hybrid possesses a radical but nonetheless exemplary aesthetic composition and is well established in culture, art, and even design. The essay supplies a philosophical analysis of the results of cross-cultural experiments, showing that while categorization or conceptual hierarchization kicks in when the visual hybrids are juxtaposed with linguistic descriptions, no conceptual scheme takes effect when participants are presented with (...) mere visual hybrids. In isolation, the hybrids do not lend themselves to classification. I draw four conclusions from these experimental outcomes: 1. The perception of visual hybrids follows the structure of a nonconceptual mental content, because the original categories or concepts of the hybrids’ components are not combined into one, and their properties are not applied to one another, therefore none of the components reconstructs the other such that it is introduced to a new category. 2. Language freezes the hybridity of the visual hybrid into conceptuality. 3. Given that language has a freezing effect in the case of an extreme visual phenomenon such as the hybrid, it is all the more restraining in moderate artistic compositions, such as visual metaphors, in which properties of one component (the source) are applied to the other (the target). In those, nonconceptuality emerges from relatively organized compositions, forms, and relations, and from the dependence of objects and their properties on perceptual context. 4. Thus, the nonconceptualist terminology is suitable for the analysis of aesthetic perception in general and aesthetic perception’s relation to language. Keywords aesthetics, perception, nonconceptual content, hybrids, visual metaphors. (shrink)

De Re Significance accounts of moral appraisal consider an agent’s responsiveness to a particular kind of reason, normative moral reasons de re, to be of central significance for moral appraisal. Here, I argue that such accounts find it difficult to accommodate some neuroatypical agents. I offer an alternative account of how an agent’s responsiveness to normative moral reasons affects moral appraisal – the Reasonable Expectations Account. According to this account, what is significant for appraisal is not the content of the (...) reasons an agent is responsive to, but rather whether she is responsive to the reasons it is reasonable to expect her to be responsive to, irrespective of their content. I argue that this account does a better job of dealing with neuroatypical agents, while agreeing with the De Re Significance accounts on more ordinary cases. (shrink)

There has been some debate as to whether or not it is possible to keep a promise, and thus fulfil a duty, to supererogate. In this paper, I argue, in agreement with Jason Kawall, that such promises cannot be kept. However, I disagree with Kawall’s diagnosis of the problem and provide an alternative account. In the first section, I examine the debate between Kawall and David Heyd, who rejects Kawall’s claim that promises to supererogate cannot be kept. I disagree with (...) Heyd’s argument, as it fails to get to the heart of the problem Kawall articulates. Kawall’s argument however fails to make clear the problem with promising to supererogate because his discussion relies on the plausibility of the following claim: that supererogatory actions cannot also fulfil obligations. I argue that this view is mistaken because there are clear examples of supererogatory actions that also fulfil obligations. In the final section, I give my alternative account of the problem, identifying exactly what is wrong with fulfilling a duty, and thus keeping a promise, to supererogate. My diagnosis emphasises the importance of identifying non-supererogatory actions when it comes to understanding the way in which supererogatory actions go above and beyond the call of duty. (shrink)

Epistemic consequentialism has been challenged on the grounds that it is overly demanding. According to the Epistemic Junk Problem, this view implies that we are often required to believe junk propositions such as ‘the Great Bear Lake is the largest lake entirely in Canada’ and long disjunctions of things we already believe. According to the Numerosity Problem, this view implies that we are frequently required to have an enormous number of beliefs. This paper puts forward a novel version of epistemic (...) consequentialism which avoids these twin demandingness problems. The key is to recognise, first, that the final epistemic value of a true belief depends at least in part on the duration for which it is retained by the agent and, second, that our cognitive makeup places important constraints on which beliefs are retained and for how long. (shrink)

Unlike human soldiers, autonomous weapons systems are unaffected by psychological factors that would cause them to act outside the chain of command. This is a compelling moral justification for their development and eventual deployment in war. To achieve this level of sophistication, the software that runs AWS will have to first solve two problems: the frame problem and the representation problem. Solutions to these problems will inevitably involve complex software. Complex software will create security risks and will make AWS critically (...) vulnerable to hacking. I claim that the political and tactical consequences of hacked AWS far outweigh the purported advantages of AWS not being affected by psychological factors and always following orders. Therefore, one of the moral justifications for the deployment of AWS is undermined. (shrink)

This is the editorial of the monothematic issue of the journal Filozofia dedicated to Martin Buber (1878 – 1965) on the occasion of the centenary of the first publication of his most famous and popular book, I and Thou, on his philosophy of dialogue.

I argue that there are some situations in which it is praiseworthy to be motivated only by moral rightness de dicto, even if this results in wrongdoing. I consider a set of cases that are challenging for views that dispute this, prioritising concern for what is morally important in moral evaluation. In these cases, the agent is not concerned about what is morally important, does the wrong thing, but nevertheless seems praiseworthy rather than blameworthy. I argue that the views under (...) discussion cannot accommodate this, and should be amended to recognise that it is often praiseworthy to be motivated to do what is right. (shrink)

Incoherence is usually regarded as a bad thing. Incoherence suggests irrationality, confusion, paradox. Incoherentism disagrees: incoherence is not always a bad thing, sometimes we ought to be incoherent. If correct, Incoherentism has important and controversial implications. It implies that rationality does not always require coherence. Dilemmism and Incoherentism both embrace conflict in epistemology. After identifying some important differences between these two ways of embracing conflict, I offer some reasons to prefer Incoherentism over Dilemmism. Namely, that Incoherentism allows us to deliberate (...) about what we ought to believe using ordinary epistemology, and it does a better job of accommodating the positive features of incoherence. (shrink)

Is logic normative for belief? A standard approach to answering this question has been to investigate bridge principles relating claims of logical consequence to norms for belief. Although the question is naturally an epistemic one, bridge principles have typically been investigated in isolation from epistemic debates over the correct norms for belief. In this paper we tackle the question of whether logic is normative for belief by proposing a Kripkean model theory accounting for the interaction between logical, doxastic, epistemic and (...) deontic notions and using this model theory to show which bridge principles are implied by epistemic norms that we have independent reason to accept, for example, the knowledge norm and the truth norm. We propose a preliminary theory of the interaction between logical, doxastic, epistemic and deontic notions that has among its commitments bridge principles expressing how logic is normative for belief. We also show how our framework suggests that logic is exceptionally normative. (shrink)

I argue for the unexceptionality of evidence about what rationality requires. Specifically, I argue that, as for other topics, one’s total evidence can sometimes support false beliefs about this. Despite being prima facie innocuous, a number of philosophers have recently denied this. Some have argued that the facts about what rationality requires are highly dependent on the agent’s situation and change depending on what that situation is like. (Bradley 2019). Others have argued that a particular subset of normative truths, those (...) concerning what epistemic rationality requires, have the special property of being ‘fixed points’—it is impossible to have total evidence that supports false belief about them. (Smithies 2012; Titelbaum 2015). Each of these kinds of exceptionality permits a solution to downstream theoretical problems that arise from the possibility of evidence supporting false belief about requirements of rationality. However, as I argue here, they incur heavy explanatory burdens that we should avoid. (shrink)

Is normative uncertainty like factual uncertainty? Should it have the same effects on our actions? Some have thought not. Those who defend an asymmetry between normative and factual uncertainty typically do so as part of the claim that our moral beliefs in general are irrelevant to both the moral value and the moral worth of our actions. Here I use the consideration of Jackson cases to challenge this view, arguing that we can explain away the apparent asymmetries between normative and (...) factual uncertainty by considering the particular features of the cases in greater detail. Such consideration shows that, in fact, normative and factual uncertainty are equally relevant to moral assessment. (shrink)

Standing in San Marco Cathedral in Venice, you immediately notice the exquisitely decorated spandrels: the triangular spaces bounded on either side by adjoining arches and by the dome above. You would be forgiven for seeing them as the starting point from which to understand the surrounding architecture. To do so would, however, be a mistake. It is a similar mistaken inference that evolutionary biologists have been accused of making in assuming a special adaptive purpose for such biological features as fingerprints (...) and chins. I argue that a mistake of just this sort is being made by ethicists who appeal to the intrinsic value of supererogatory acts in their efforts to make space for supererogation in ethical theory. Many cases of supererogatory action are simply spandrels: by-products of uncontroversial commitments elsewhere in our moral thought. This is not to downplay their value but rather to show that their value need not be the justification for making room for the supererogatory. I demonstrate this by examining two areas: rights and the distribution of burdens among a group. My argument has significance for those who take themselves to be defends of the possibility of supererogatory actions, as well as those who are committed to the contrary and those who believe themselves to be indifferent on the matter. (shrink)

This essay presents the Aestheticism of the 19th century as the foundational movement of modernist-formalist aesthetics of the 20th century. The main principle of this movement is what I denominate “productive opacity”. Aestheticism has not been recognized as a philosophical aesthetic theory. However, its definition of artwork as an exclusive kind of form—a deep, opaque form—is among the most precise ever given in the discipline. This essay offers an interpretation of aestheticism as a formalist theory, referred to here as “deep (...) formalism”, focusing on the thinking of leading aestheticists, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and James Whistler. These three thinkers defined artwork as a form saturated with an inextricable content, viz. opaque form. (shrink)

This book offers a new definition of metaphor-as an ontological and visual construction, whose roots are external visual forms, and its motivation is our attachment to forms. This definition, which Michalle Gal names “visualist,” challenges the ruling conceptualist theory of metaphors and places a new emphasis on how we experience rather than understand metaphors. In doing so, she responds to the visual turn that is taking place in literature and the media, demanding that the visual become a site of philosophical (...) analysis. This focus on the external visual world allows Gal to employ visual theories to capture the essence of metaphor. She looks beyond conceptual or semantic mechanism, and returns to theories of Arnheim and Gombrich and the current evolution of ideas about the visual or material and embodied cognition. Proposing to see visual metaphors in their basic form, she uses a new externalist terminology of ontology, visuality, composition, affordance, construction, and emergence. Setting out a new theory that takes into account that humans are visual no less than cognitive creatures, Visual Metaphors and Aesthetics lays the foundation for a new vocabulary to talk about metaphors. (shrink)

This paper offers a theoretical framework that can be used to derive viable engineering strategies for the design and development of robots that can nudge people towards moral improvement. The framework relies on research in developmental psychology and insights from Stoic ethics. Stoicism recommends contemplative practices that over time help one develop dispositions to behave in ways that improve the functioning of mechanisms that are constitutive of moral cognition. Robots can nudge individuals towards these practices and can therefore help develop (...) the dispositions to, for example, extend concern to others, avoid parochialism, etc. (shrink)

Amy saves a man from drowning despite the risk to herself, because she is moved by his plight. This is a quintessentially supererogatory act: an act that goes above and beyond the call of duty. Beth, on the other hand, saves a man from drowning because she wants to get her name in the paper. On this second example, opinions differ. One view of supererogation holds that, despite being optional and good, Beth’s act is not supererogatory because she is not (...) praiseworthy; the other agrees that Beth is not praiseworthy but holds that her act is nevertheless supererogatory because, while supererogatory actions are generally performed by praiseworthy agents, an individual need not be praiseworthy for their act to be supererogatory. In this paper, I raise a problem for this latter position, which I shall call the Anti-Motivation View of supererogation. While the Anti-Motivation View rejects the claim that the agent’s motivations are important, it accepts that the agent’s intentions are. Thus, this view assumes that a clear, coherent distinction can be drawn between intentions and motivations in the context of supererogation. This distinction is often attributed to Mill; however, his original discussion reveals an inconsistency. Consider Clara, who saves a man from drowning because she wants to torture him later. According to Mill, Clara’s act is not morally good; those who follow Mill will have to accept that it is therefore not supererogatory. Mill asserts that Clara’s act differs from Amy’s and Beth’s not just in motivation but also in intention. I question this explanation and demonstrate that the distinction between motivation and intention is not as clear as the Anti-Motivation View has supposed and that the gap between the Anti-Motivation View and the alternative Praise-Based View is either much greater or much smaller than previously thought. (shrink)

The article presents the basic error of Kuhn's philosophy of physics and an attempt to suggest how the philosophy of physics should be practiced.

Moral theories that demand that we do what is morally best leave no room for the supererogatory. One argument against such theories is that they fail to realize the value of autonomy: supererogatory acts allow for the exercise of autonomy because their omissions are not accompanied by any threats of sanctions, unlike obligatory ones. While this argument fails, I use the distinction it draws – between omissions of obligatory and supererogatory acts in terms of appropriate sanctions – to draw a (...) parallel with psychological perfectionism. Through this parallel, I demonstrate that requiring what is morally best is in fact counter-productive. Thus, by its own lights, a theory that wants us to do what is best ought at the very least to tell us to believe that some actions are supererogatory. As the old adage goes, the best is the enemy of the good; I argue here that the supererogatory is the solution. (shrink)

This article presents an argument for the view that we can perceive temporal features without awareness. Evidence for this claim comes from recent empirical work on selective visual attention. An interpretation of selective attention as a mechanism that processes high-level perceptual features is offered and defended against one particular objection. In conclusion, time perception likely has an unconscious dimension and temporal mental qualities can be instantiated without ever being conscious.

Quality Space Theory is a holistic model of qualitative states. On this view, individual mental qualities are defined by their locations in a space of relations, which reflects a similar space of relations among perceptible properties. This paper offers an extension of Quality Space Theory to temporal perception. Unconscious segmentation of events, the involvement of early sensory areas, and asymmetries of dominance in multi-modal perception of time are presented as evidence for the view.

The Minimal Theory of Causation, presented in Graßhoff and May, 2001, aspires to be a version of a regularity analysis of causation able to correctly predict our causal intuitions. In my article, I will argue that it is unsuccessful in this respect. The second aim of the paper will be to defend Hitchcock’s proposal concerning divisions of causal relations against criticism made, in Jakob, 2006 on the basis of the Minimal Theory of Causation.

Philosophers and scientists refer to the special character of phenomenal consciousness, something supposedly obvious to all conscious persons. However, we had no empirical evidence about the folk view of consciousness until the first studies were carried out in the experimental philosophy of consciousness. According to the leading interpretation of these results, laypersons—people without academic knowledge about consciousness—do not notice the phenomenal aspect of consciousness. The aim of the article is to answer the question of whether we can trust these results. (...) I show that there are serious doubts about the validity of the experimental philosophy of consciousness research. As a result, the leading interpretation should be rejected, and the question about the folk nature of the concept of consciousness must be regarded as open. (shrink)

The chapter is devoted to the probability and acceptability of indicative conditionals. Focusing on three influential theses, the Equation, Adams’ thesis, and the qualitative version of Adams’ thesis, Sikorski argues that none of them is well supported by the available empirical evidence. In the most controversial case of the Equation, the results of many studies which support it are, at least to some degree, undermined by some recent experimental findings. Sikorski discusses the Ramsey Test, and Lewis’s triviality proof, with special (...) attention dedicated to the popular ways of blocking it. Sikorski concludes that the role of the three theses in future studies of conditionals should be re-thought, and he presents alternative proposals. (shrink)

It is not clear to what the projects of creating an artificial intelligence (AI) that does ethics, is moral, or makes moral judgments amounts. In this paper we discuss some of the extant metaethical theories and debates in moral philosophy by which such projects should be informed, specifically focusing on the project of creating an AI that makes moral judgments. We argue that the scope and aims of that project depend a great deal on antecedent metaethical commitments. Metaethics, therefore, plays (...) the role of an Archimedean fulcrum in this context, very much like the Archimedean role that it is often taken to take in context of normative ethics (Dworkin 1996; Dreier 2002; Fantl 2006; Ehrenberg 2008). (shrink)

ABSTRACT Schopenhauer's argument against suicide has served as a punching bag for many modern-day commentators. Dale Jacquette, Sandra Shapshay, and David Hamlyn all argue that the premises of this argument or its conclusion are inconsistent with Schopenhauer's wider metaphysical and ethical project. This paper defends Schopenhauer from these charges. Along the way, it examines the relations between suicide, death by voluntary starvation, negation of the will, compassion, and Schopenhauer's critiques of cynicism and stoicism. The paper concludes that there may be (...) gaps in Schopenhauer's system, but not where the aforementioned commentators tried to locate them. (shrink)

Advocates of moral enhancement through pharmacological, genetic, or other direct interventions sometimes explicitly argue, or assume without argument, that traditional moral education and development is insufficient to bring about moral enhancement. Traditional moral education grounded in a Kohlbergian theory of moral development is indeed unsuitable for that task; however, the psychology of moral development and education has come a long way since then. Recent studies support the view that moral cognition is a higher-order process, unified at a functional level, and (...) that a specific moral faculty does not exist. It is more likely that moral cognition involves a number of different mechanisms, each connected to other cognitive and affective processes. Taking this evidence into account, we propose a novel, empirically informed approach to moral development and education, in children and adults, which is based on a cognitive-affective approach to moral dispositions. This is an interpretative approach that derives from the cognitive-affective personality system (Mischel and Shoda, 1995). This conception individuates moral dispositions by reference to the cognitive and affective processes that realise them. Conceived of in this way, moral dispositions influence an agent's behaviour when they interact with situational factors, such as mood or social context. Understanding moral dispositions in this way lays the groundwork for proposing a range of indirect methods of moral enhancement, techniques that promise similar results as direct interventions whilst posing fewer risks. (shrink)

Design is an omnipresent, aesthetic-functional phenomenon, one that is culturally loaded and broadly influential. Since ancient times, design has played a crucial role in shaping both our intimate daily experiences and broader societal structures. It influences behavior, preferences, cultural norms and movements, political or personal identities, and economic systems. Today, design is not only a thriving field of practice but also an evolving area of academic inquiry, one that is becoming a self-standing discipline. It is, of course, important to define (...) ‘design’ . But, in developing our understanding of it, we also need to analyze its relationships to associated fields, such as ontology, cognition and perception, ethics, politics, social conduct, fine or popular art, everyday aesthetics, and science and technology. The special issue Design and its Relations takes up this mission. We aim to reveal and study the interactions between design as an aesthetic-functional field and various auxiliary concepts, ideas, phenomena, and disciplines. The essays in the special issue thus address a range of design affiliations. These include both (a) relatively abstract affiliations—such as aesthetics, perception and appreciation, beauty, ethics, science, rationalism, and the idea of abstractness itself—and (b) more direct topics, including design’s relations to photographic systems and even cultural views of parenthood given through the evolution of crib shapes (which is a typical substantiation of design’s impact on humanity’s foundations). (shrink)

The paper deals with Martin Buber’s claim that responsibility “is the basic theme of my work in general.” As I show in the opening section of the article, his statement applies to the dialogical period of his work, but not the pre-dialogical. In the mystical phase of Buber’s thought there is no place for responsibility because the very nature of mysticism excludes that possibility. The incompatibility of mysticism and interpersonal responsibility is confirmed in the autobiographical fragment “conversion,” one of the (...) two biographical moments I discuss in relation to the shift in his thinking on responsibility. The second is his relationship with his wife Paula Winkler, which profoundly influenced his thinking about the importance of love and marriage for an understanding of responsibility. I then explore his view of responsibility as a doctrine, which developed along with his dialogical philosophy. Finally, I examine his critical views on four basic ways of avoiding responsibility, which highlight the close connection between freedom and responsibility: belief in fate, individualism, collectivism, and religious acosmism. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider how digital technologies have changed the conceptual landscape by forcing us to reconsider three core concepts at the heart of the category of child pornography: (i) what it means to be an image; (ii) what it means to be an image of a child; and (iii) what it means to be a sexual image of a child. I demonstrate that we might need to radically reconceive these concepts and I point to some policy implications of (...) doing so. (shrink)

In my dissertation I critically survey existing theories of time consciousness, and draw on recent work in neuroscience and philosophy to develop an original theory. My view depends on a novel account of temporal perception based on the notion of temporal qualities, which are mental properties that are instantiated whenever we detect change in the environment. When we become aware of these temporal qualities in an appropriate way, our conscious experience will feature the distinct temporal phenomenology that is associated with (...) the passing of time. The temporal qualities model of perception makes two predictions about the mechanisms of time perception; one that time perception is modality specific and the other that it can occur without awareness. My argument for this view partially depends on a number of psychophysical experiments that I designed and implemented myself and which investigate subjective time distortions caused by looming visual stimuli. These results show that the mechanisms of conscious experience of time are distinct from the mechanisms of time perception, as my theory of temporal qualities predicts. (shrink)

Replicability is widely regarded as one of the defining features of science and its pursuit is one of the main postulates of meta-research, a discipline emerging in response to the replicability crisis. At the same time, replicability is typically treated with caution by philosophers of science. In this paper, we reassess the value of replicability from an epistemic perspective. We defend the orthodox view, according to which replications are always epistemically useful, against the more prudent view that claims that it (...) is useful in very limited circumstances. Additionally, we argue that we can learn more about the original experiment and the limits of the discovered effect from replications at different levels. We hold that replicability is a crucial feature of experimental results and scientists should continue to strive to secure it. (shrink)