This is a commentary on Andrea Lavazza and Murilo Vilaça's article "Human Extinction and AI: What We Can Learn from the Ultimate Threat" (Lavazza & Vilaça, 2024). I discuss the potential concern that their proposal to create artificial successors to "insure" against the tragedy of human extinction might mean being too quick to accept that catastrophic prospect as inevitable, rather than single-mindedly focusing on avoiding it. I also consider the question of the value that we might reasonably assign to such (...) a future of artificial successors under the assumption that they do not enjoy phenomenal consciousness. (shrink)

“Creating the future” is a notion introduced by Alfred North Whitehead to define the task of universities and the function of philosophy. Implicitly, it is a rejection of the idea that the future is already determined, and in some sense, already exists, with the appearance of temporal becoming an illusion. “Creation” originally meant “the action of causing to exist”, or “a coming into being”. The “future” is not normally considered to be what can be created. Originally, it meant “yet (...) to be”. It now tends to be defined in relation to time, as “the time to come”, where “time” is assumed to be an independent existent along with space as the “containers” of material beings, with the future in some sense pre-existing its becoming present. The quantity of “matter” or “mass-energy” is assumed to be constant and to change its position and configurations in predictable ways over time. To refer to the future as being created is to reject this view of the universe and the basic concepts that define it, replacing these with concepts that can make intelligible the freedom of and creativity of people, the future as in process of being created, and humans as partially responsible for what future is created. It is to recognize that there are real possibilities that can be envisioned, understood, chosen, and brought into existence, with some process philosophers claiming that new possibilities can also be created. (shrink)

In his book Better Never to Have Been, David Benatar argues that it is generally all things considered wrong to procreate, such that if everyone acted in a morally ideal way, humanity would elect to extinguish the species. I aim to carefully question the premises and inferences that lead Benatar to draw this anti-natalist conclusion, indicating several places where one could sensibly elect to disembark from the train of argument heading toward such a radical view.

Beach's Gaelic Symphony is plausibly an abstract object that Beach created. The view that people create some abstract objects is called abstract creationism. There are abstract creationists about many kinds of objects, including musical works, fictional characters, arguments, words, internet memes, installation artworks, bitcoins, and restaurants. Alternative theories include materialism and Platonism. This paper discusses some of the most serious objections against abstract creationism. Arguably, these objections have ramifications for questions in metaphysics pertaining to the abstract/concrete distinction, time, causation, vague (...) existence, vague identity, and inadvertent creation. (shrink)

This paper offers a theory of filial piety on which piety is the ethical virtue that responds to the action of person-creating. Piety is the virtue of a creature qua creature. I begin by identifying the action of person-creating as the action of a parent. I then offer some points from the philosophy of action to delineate the action of person-creating. Next, I explain the metaphysical states that this action gives rise to and their value. Parent and (...) child fall in the category of relatives, discussed by Aristotle in his Categories. More specifically, Aristotle says that parent and child are relatives as creator and created. Agreeing with but going beyond Aristotle, I show how parent and child are creator and created as paradigm and image. A pious child is one who images their paradigm well. A child does this by participating in and perfecting the person-creating action of their parent, that is, by being a good person. I argue for the theory’s acceptance on the grounds that it better explains common intuitive judgments about filial piety than do the gratitude theory and the special goods theory (the two most influential and plausible competing theories of filial piety in the philosophical literature). (shrink)

The focus of this chapter is on efforts to create a new mathematics, with my prime interest being the role of mathematics in comprehending a world consisting first and foremost of processes, and examining what developments in mathematics are required for this. I am particularly interested in developments in mathematics able to do justice to the reality of life. Such mathematics could provide the basis for advancing ecology, human ecology and ecological economics and thereby assist in the transformation of society (...) and civilization so that we augment life rather than undermining the conditions for our existence. It was in the process of grappling with these problems that I was drawn to investigate the tradition of intuitionism in mathematics and the role of intuition in mathematics, science and philosophy, and then to consider Whitehead’s work on mathematics and its philosophy in relation to these. (shrink)

Traditional theism says that the goodness of everything comes from God. Moreover, the goodness of something intrinsically valuable can only come from what has it. Many conclude from these two claims that no creatures have intrinsic value if traditional theism is true. I argue that the exemplarist theory of the divine ideas gives the theist a way out. According to exemplarism, God creates everything according to ideas that are about himself, and so everything resembles God. Since God is wholly good (...) in every way, and since ethical supervenience is true, it follows that creatures have intrinsic value. (shrink)

Theistic activism and theistic conceptual realism attempt to relieve the tension between transcendent realism about universals and a strong aseity-sovereignty doctrine. Paradoxically, both theories seem to imply that God is metaphysically prior and metaphysically posterior to his own nature. In this paper I critique one attempt to respond to this worry and offer a neo-Augustinian solution in its place. I demonstrate that Augustine’s argument for forms as ideas in the mind of God strongly suggests that only created beings need universals (...) to ground their character. For them, divine concepts can do all of the work that universals are typically invoked to do in the contemporary literature. An uncreated being’s character needs no such grounding and can be accounted for in terms of his own concepts. If this is correct, theists may be realists about universals while maintaining the traditional read of God’s aseity and sovereignty. (shrink)

This paper offers a new defense of the externalist interpretation of the kataleptic impression. My strategy is to situate the kataleptic impression within the larger context of the Stoic account of expertise. I argue that, given mastery in recognizing the limitations of her own state of mind, the subject can restrict her assent to kataleptic impressions, even if they are phenomenologically indistinguishable from those which are not kataleptic.

Universities need to change dramatically in order to help humanity make progress towards as good a world as possible.

The process of cooperative problem solving can be divided into four stages. First, finding potential team members, then forming a team followed by constructing a plan for that team. Finally, the plan is executed by the team. Traditionally, very simple protocols like the Contract Net protocol are used for performing the first two stages of the process. In an open environment however, there can be discussion among the agents in order to form a team that can achieve the collective intention (...) of solving the problem. For these cases fixed protocols like contract net do not suffice. In this paper we present an alternative solution, using structured dialogues, with an emphasis on persuasion, that can be shown to lead to the required team formation. The dialogues are described formally using modal logics and speech acts. (shrink)

Editorial to a special edition of 'Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy': Creating the Future, December, 2018.

Speaking from our experience as department chairs in fields in which women are traditionally underrepresented, we offer reflections and advice on how one might move beyond the chilly climate and create a warmer environment for women students and faculty members.

Introduction: -/- Walking, illegally, down main Montreal thoroughfares with students in nightly demonstrations, with neighbors whom I barely knew before, banging pots and pans, and with tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people on every 22nd of the month since March—this was unimaginable a year ago.1 Unimaginable that the collective and heterogeneous body, which is the “manif [demonstration]”, could feel so much like home, despite its internal differences. Unimaginable that this mutual dependence on one another could enable not only (...) collective protection from traffic and police but the affective strength and audacity to take back the street—a mutual dependence that includes the masked demonstrators ready to help when gassed by police. Unimaginable too that we would be breaking the law daily,2 that blocking traffic and seeing the city from the center of the street would become habit, and that as the “printemps érable” becomes summer, we would be investing our time in neighborhood assemblies, in weaving social bonds, and in sustaining and deepening the mobilization. -/- I say these actions were unimaginable not merely because the context that motivated the enlargement of the student movement into a popular struggle combines a number of unique features. Nor were they simply unimaginable because the Quebec I previously knew was marred by the Islamophobia and cultural racism made visible during the reasonable accommodation debates, a society whose mapping excluded me and for whose sake it would have been difficult to protest.3 Rather, I say these actions were unimaginable because the possibility of this popular and inclusive mobilization had not yet been created. It is this possibility that the Quebec student movement has created, I argue, not only in quantitative terms by engaging so many, but at the level of lived subjectivities and intercorporeal solidarity. The evolution of the movement should be understood, then, both as a swelling of its popular base and as an intensification and qualitative transformation of ways of life. (shrink)

We argue that individual and institutional caregivers have a defeasible moral duty to provide dependent children with plant-based diets and related education. Notably, our three arguments for this claim do not presuppose any general duty of veganism. Instead, they are grounded in widely shared intuitions about children’s interests and caregivers’ responsibilities, as well as recent empirical research relevant to children’s moral development, autonomy development, and physical health. Together, these arguments constitute a strong cumulative case against inculcating in children the dietary (...) practice of regularly eating meat (and other animal products)—a practice we call “carnism.”. (shrink)

The goal of the 2010 Ontology Summit was to address the current shortage of persons with ontology expertise by developing a strategy for the education of ontologists. To achieve this goal we studied how ontologists are currently trained, the requirements identified by organizations that hire ontologists, and developments that might impact the training of ontologists in the future. We developed recommendations for the body of knowledge that should be taught and the skills that should be developed by future ontologists; these (...) recommendations are intended as guidelines for institutions and organizations that may consider establishing a program for training ontologists. Further, we recommend a number of specific actions for the community to pursue. (shrink)

I sketch here an intuitive picture of repeatable artworks as created types, which are individuated in part by historical paths (re)production. Although attractive, this view has been rejected by a number of authors on the basis of general claims about abstract objects. On consideration, however, these general claims are overgeneralizations, which whilst true of some abstracta, are not true of all abstract objects, and in particular, are not true of created types. The intuitive picture of repeatable artworks as created types (...) is, then, left in place. (shrink)

An increasing number of scholars at the intersection of feminist philosophy and critical disability studies have turned to Merleau-Ponty to develop phenomenologies of disability or of what, following Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, I call "non-normate" embodiment. These studies buck the historical trend of philosophers employing disability as an example of deficiency or harm, a mere litmus test for normative theories, or an umbrella term for aphenotypical bodily variation. While a Merleau-Pontian-inspired phenomenology is a promising starting point for thinking about embodied experiences of (...) all sorts, I here draw a cautionary tale about how ableist assumptions can easily undermine accounts of non-normate experience. I first argue that the omission or misguided treatment of disability within the history of philosophy in general and the phenomenological tradition in particular is due to the inheritance of what I call “the ableist conflation” of disability with pain, suffering, and disadvantage. I then show that Merleau-Ponty’s famous reading of the blind man’s cane is problematic insofar as it omits the social dimensions of disabled experiences, misconstrues the radicality of blindness as a world-creating disability, and operates via an able-bodied simulation that confuses object annexation or extension with incorporation. In closing, I contend that if phenomenology is to overcome the errors of traditional philosophy, as Merleau-Ponty once hoped, it must heed the insights of “crip” or non-normate phenomenology, which takes the lived experience of disability as its point of departure. [French translation forthcoming in Pour une phénoménologie critique, ed. Donald A. Landes, Quebec City, Les Presses de l'Université Laval/Paris, J.Vrin]. (shrink)

Erik Wielenberg [2014] and Mark Murphy [2017], [2018] have defended a series of arguments for the conclusion that creatures are not good intrinsically. In response, I take two steps. First, I introduce a conception of intrinsic value that makes created intrinsic value unproblematic. Second, I respond to their arguments in turn. The first argument is from the sovereignty-aseity intuition and an analysis of intrinsicality that makes derivative good extrinsic. I challenge the analysis. The second comes from a conception of perfection (...) where God exhausts all possibilities for goodness. I challenge this conception. The third comes from the contingency of creation and the internal logic of intrinsic value. I challenge the assumption that connects the two. I then present an argument from reference magnetism that the only conception of God, God's perfections, and religious language that makes it plausible that the sentence "God is intrinsically good and creatures are not" is true involves a strongly univocalist position. A view that is either unstatable or places strong demands on our conception of God, God's perfections and religious language thereby loses plausibility. (shrink)

Ontologies describe reality in specific domains in ways that can bridge various disciplines and languages. They allow easier access and integration of information that is collected by different groups. Ontologies are currently used in the biomedical sciences, geography, and law. A Biomedical Ethics Ontology would benefit members of ethics committees who deal with protocols and consent forms spanning numerous fields of inquiry. There already exists the Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI); the proposed BMEO would interoperate with OBI, creating a (...) powerful information tool. We define a domain ontology and begin to construct a BMEO, focused on the process of evaluating human research protocols. Finally, we show how our BMEO can have practical applications for ethics committees. This paper describes ongoing research and a strategy for its broader continuation and cooperation. (shrink)

By its alternative depiction of God's non-violent creative power at the start of the biblical canon, Gen 1 signals the Creator's original intent for shalom and blessing at the outset of human history, prior to the rise of human (or divine) violence. Gen 1 constitutes a normative framework by which we may judge all the violence that pervades the rest of the Bible.

Democratizing the syllabus has been discussed in the fields of sociology and political science but rarely in philosophy. In this paper I will draw upon my experience of teaching Philosophy of Love in an online modality to examine the impact on motivation when students fill in the gaps presented in a democratic syllabus.

Meet Tega. Blue, fluffy, and AI-enabled, Tega is a relational robot: a robot designed to form relationships with humans. Created to aid in early childhood education, Tega talks with children, plays educational games with them, solves puzzles, and helps in creative activities like making up stories and drawing. Children are drawn to Tega, describing him as a friend, and attributing thoughts and feelings to him ("he's kind," "if you just left him here and nobody came to play with him, he (...) might be sad"). Scholars and members of the public alike have raised the alarm about relational robots, worrying that the relationships that people, and especially children, form with such robots are objectionably inauthentic. We, members of an interdisciplinary team that developed and studies Tega, make this inauthenticity worry precise and offer practical recommendations for addressing it. We distinguish two kinds of (in)authenticity -- inauthenticity as unreality, and inauthenticity as deception -- arguing that neither is just what others have thought it is. With our distinction in hand, we argue that the authenticity concern can be met only through co-design methods -- methods that give stakeholders of all kinds (e.g. parents, educators, and children themselves) a genuine say in how relational robots are built. (shrink)

This article discusses Ibn Sīnā’s reasons for upholding the eternity of the world in his major philosophical writings and the ensuing heated debate between his detractors (al-Ghazālī, al-Shahrastānī and al-Rāzī) and supporters (al-Ṭūsī and al-Āmidī). I argue that notwithstanding the responses and surrejoinders it had elicited, Ibn Sīnā’s position on the issue is indeed coherent and irrefutable, since he distinguishes three modes of eternity, corresponding to the hierarchy of beings which he introduced, namely, (i) absolutely eternal (by virtue of itself); (...) (ii) relatively eternal (by virtue of something else); and (iii) not eternal both considered per se as well per aliud. With this distinction he evades both horns of the dilemma: either the universe is eternal or it is not eternal. On Ibn Sīnā’s account, therefore, the universe is both eternal and not eternal. It is eternal because the efficient cause that necessitates and sustains its existence is eternal, but also not eternal in view of its essential contingency. (shrink)

This note is part of a discussion of Mark Solm's 'The Conscious Id'. -/- It seconds Solms' claim that recent work in neuroscience indicates that the subcortical mechanisms that generate motives also generate consciousness, and that his enables us to integrate neuroscience with the Freudian Ego and Id. -/- Still this is not reason to regard the Id as conscious. If we take full account of the role of conflict, as described in terms of the Freudian superego, we can see (...) that the complex role of aggression in human life ensures that much of our emotional life is unconscious. (shrink)

The crisis of our times is that we have science without wisdom. Modern science and technology lead to modern industry and agriculture which in turn lead to all the great benefits of the modern world and to the global crises we face, from population growth to climate change. The fault lies, not with science, but with science dissociated from a more fundamental concern with problems of living. We urgently need to bring about a revolution in academia so that the fundamental (...) task becomes to help humanity learn how to tackle problems of living in increasingly cooperatively rational ways, so that we may gradually discover how to make progress towards a better, wiser world. (shrink)

Canada, as one of the three Allied nations collaborating on atomic energy development during the Second World War, had an early start in applying its new knowledge and defining a new profession. Owing to postwar secrecy and distinct national aims for the field, nuclear engineering was shaped uniquely by the Canadian context. Alone among the postwar powers, Canadian exploration of atomic energy eschewed military applications; the occupation emerged within a governmental monopoly; the intellectual content of the discipline was influenced by (...) its early practitioners, administrators, scarce resources, and university niches; and a self-recognized profession coalesced later than did its American and British counterparts. This paper argues that the history of the emergence of Canadian nuclear engineers exemplifies unusually strong shaping of technical expertise by political and cultural context. (shrink)

Adoption may be defined as ‘the legal process through which the state establishes a parental relationship, with all its attendant rights and duties, between a child and a (set of) parent(s) where there exists no previous procreative relationship’ . In adoptions from care, state intervention effectively converts an established, or nascent, adult– child relationship into ‘family’ in the legal sense. From the state’s perspective, adoption thus entails the transfer of parental responsibilities for a child in public care to a private (...) family unit, enabling the state to permanently delegate its duties towards a child to this new unit. This seemingly straightforward legal act raises deeper philosophical questions relating to such state ‘family creation’, particularly when the child’s perspective is taken. Such a child- centric approach normatively regards children as equal moral beings, who ought to be included in actions concerning them, regardless of their capacity to form and express an opinion. Accordingly, adoption from care can be described as a moral decision, aimed at doing what is in the child’s best interests. The purpose of this chapter is to explore a suspicion of a lack of child- centrism in adoption from care practice, and to illustrate how adopted children’s rights are inferior to those of their non- adopted peers. This will shed light on a practice currently lacking transparency and accountability and will increase our understanding of how we fail to treat children as equal moral individuals in decision- making that severely impacts children’s lives. (shrink)

In order to create a better world we need to bring about a revolution in universities so that they become devoted to helping humanity learn how to make progress towards as good a world as possible.

The prospect of cognitive enhancement well beyond current human capacities raises worries that the fundamental equality in moral status of human beings could be undermined. Cognitive enhancement might create beings with moral status higher than persons. Yet, there is an expressibility problem of spelling out what the higher threshold in cognitive capacity would be like. Nicholas Agar has put forward the bold claim that we can show by means of inductive reasoning that indefinite cognitive enhancement will probably mark a difference (...) in moral status. The hope is that induction can determine the plausibility of post‐personhood existence in the absence of an account of what the higher status would be like. In this article, we argue that Agar's argument fails and, more generally, that inductive reasoning has little bearing on assessing the likelihood of post‐personhood in the absence of an account of higher status. We conclude that induction cannot bypass the expressibility problem about post‐persons. (shrink)

Op-ed in local paper about being warned I could be ticketed for a bumper sticker while going through a suburban police check point.

Can we learn to create a better world? Yes, if we first create traditions and institutions of learning rationally devoted to that end. At present universities all over the world are dominated by the idea that the basic aim of academic inquiry is to acquire knowledge. Such a conception of inquiry, judged from the standpoint of helping us learn wisdom and civilization, is grotesquely and damagingly irrational. We need to change our approach to academic enterprise if we are to create (...) a kind of inquiry rationally devoted to helping us become more civilized. (shrink)

Did God create man, or did man create God? Did God or the Gods create us, or is it the other way around, and we created the Gods? -/- As primitive homo-sapiens, we wanted to understand where we came from, giving birth to many superstitious views and unscientific assumptions that created various versions of Gods, and the Gods were not always as we know them today .

The human subject in as much as he knows transforms the sensitive and concrete (the thing perceived) into abstract (an image of the thing perceived), the abstract into an idea (imaginative representation of the thing abstracted), and ideas into contents of conscience (meanings). The last step in the creation of meanings, something being executed in the speech act, consists in fixing the construct mentally created thus making it objectified meanings in the conscience of speakers. The interchange amongst the different steps (...) in the creation of meaning manifests lógos, the state lived by speakers in their interior when speaking, created and developed in words and because of words. (shrink)

Our commonsense notion of reality is supported by two critical assumptions for which we have little understanding: The conscious experience which underpins the observations integral to the scientific method and language, which is the method by which all theories, scientific or otherwise, are communicated. This book examines both of these matters in detail and arrives at a new theoretical foundation for understanding how nature undertakes the task of building the universe. -/- Creating Reality is a synthesis of Darwin’s The (...) Origin of Species and Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach (GEB). It is an intellectual journey that addresses the most profound questions facing science and philosophy today and delivers the greatest transformation in the way we view the world since Darwin’s masterpiece. The book is targeted at anyone up for the cerebral challenge of thinking deeply about how we make sense of the world and our existence. The book is thoroughly researched and referenced, drawing from the most highly credential sources. -/- When we take stock of where we are in our understanding of nature, it seems that three important questions stand out for which we have few answers. More than just questions, they represent gaps in our comprehension of what makes the universe tick. These are the thematic focal points of this book: -/- • What is the nature of belief? (An examination of truth as a function of language). • What is consciousness? • What is the relationship between mathematics and the physical world? -/- The exploration of these three questions unravels the mystery behind the principal means by which we come to have knowledge of the world. So our journey begins by asking the more generic question: How do we come to know the world? The book makes no assumptions about this thing called ‘reality’ and takes a fresh look at the presuppositions underlying commonsense notions of reality. (shrink)

In order to make progress towards a better world we need to learn how to do it. And for that we need institutions of learning rationally designed and devoted to helping us solve our global problems, make progress towards a better world. It is just this that we lack at present. Our universities pursue knowledge. They are neither designed nor devoted to helping humanity learn how to tackle global problems — problems of living — in more intelligent, humane and effective (...) ways. That, this book argues, is the key disaster of our times, the crisis behind all the others: our failure to have developed our institutions of learning so that they are rationally organized to help us solve our problems of living — above all, our global problems. Having universities devoted almost exclusively to the pursuit of knowledge is a recipe for disaster. Scientific knowledge and technological know-how have unquestionably brought great benefits to humanity. But they have also made possible — even caused — our current global crises, above all the impending crisis of global warming. In this lucid and provocative book, Nicholas Maxwell argues convincingly that we need urgently to bring about a revolution in universities round the world so that their basic aim becomes wisdom, and not just knowledge. (shrink)

Human ecology, it is argued, even when embracing recent developments in the natural sciences and granting a place to culture, tends to justify excessively pessimistic conclusions about the prospects for creating a sustainable world order. This is illustrated through a study of the work and assumptions of Richard Newbold Adams and Stephen Bunker. It is argued that embracing hierarchy theory as this has been proposed and elaborated by Herbert Simon, Howard Pattee, T.F.H. Allen and others enables human ecology to (...) conceive humans both as part of nature and as cultural beings in a way that gives due regard to the ethical development of humanity. That is, ethical constraints need no longer be conceived of as 'unnatural'. Characterizing the nature of such constraints, conceived of as emerging from the Hegelian 'struggle for recognition', this argument is shown to justify some optimism about the future, and to give some idea of how society should be organized if ethical constraints, able to constrain humanity’s relationship to the rest of nature, are to prevail. (shrink)

A review with commentary on Mark A. Bedau and Emily C. Parke (eds): The Ethics of Protocells: Moral and Social Implications of Creating Life in the Laboratory (Basic Bioethics series) MIT Press, Cambridge,MA, 2009, 365 pp, ISBN 978-0-262-01262-1, ISBN 978-0-262-51269-5.

The availability of large digital archives of historical newspaper content has transformed the historical sciences. However, the scale of these archives can limit the direct application of advanced text processing methods. Even if it is computationally feasible to apply sophisticated language processing to an entire digital archive, if the material of interest is a small fraction of the archive, the results are unlikely to be useful. Methods for generating smaller specialized corpora from large archives are required to solve this problem. (...) This article presents such a method for historical newspaper archives digitized using the METS/ALTO XML standard (Veridian Software, n.d.). The method is an ‘iterative bootstrapping’ approach in which candidate corpora are evaluated using text mining techniques, items are manually labelled, and Naïve Bayes text classifiers are trained and applied in order to produce new candidate corpora. The method is illustrated by a case study that investigates philosophical content, broadly construed, in pre-1900 English-language New Zealand newspapers. Extensive code is provided in Supplementary Materials. (shrink)

J. L. Mackie distinguished himself in twentieth-century philosophy by presenting an important objection to the traditional free will explanation for why God would allow evil: If evil is due to the free choice of creatures, why wouldn’t an omnipotent God simply create free creatures who would choose better? Alvin Plantinga, in turn, distinguished himself with his critique of Mackie. Plantinga’s main point is that Mackie made a mistake in assuming that it is within the power of omnipotence fully to create (...) just any possible world. However, Mackie made a second questionable assumption which Plantinga does not critique, and which I aim to clarify in this article. Mackie assumes that a God, as construed by classical theistic belief, who could create either of two people—one of whom would freely choose right and the other of whom would freely choose wrong—must create the one who would freely choose right. This assumption motivates Plantinga’s own account of trans-world depravity, which suggests that every free creature God might have created would have sinned had God created them. I consider Plantinga’s suggestion highly improbable. More importantly, under Mackie’s assumption, if there is at least one possible creature who would choose rightly, then there is no possibility of God ever allowing any other creature to sin, which would seem to be incompatible with their having any free will. -/- This version of the paper does have the same pagination as the published version. Permission has been granted from the Editor of Philosophia Christi to upload this contribution according to Philosophy Documentation Center terms of use. Learn more about the Journal by going to wwwepsociety. org/philchristi. (shrink)

This article argues that the creation of artificial offspring could make our lives more meaningful. By ‘artificial offspring’ I mean beings that we construct, with a mix of human and non-human-like qualities. Robotic artificial intelligences are paradigmatic examples of the form. There are two reasons for thinking that the creation of such beings could make our lives more meaningful and valuable. The first is that the existence of a collective afterlife—i.e. a set of human-like lives that continue after we die—is (...) likely to be an important source and sustainer of meaning in our present lives. The second is that the creation of artificial offspring provides a plausible and potentially better pathway to a collective afterlife than the traditional biological pathway. Both of these arguments are defended from a variety of objections and misunderstandings. (shrink)

Humanities and social science majors are frequently misunderstood, in Singapore as in many other parts of the world. The value of their education is regularly questioned, and many employers are unaware of the value such majors can bring to the table. They prefer to hire graduates with more explicitly “practical” degrees for jobs that humanities and social sciences students could excel in. As a result, humanities and social sciences students are not typically considered for many organisations and roles, despite offering (...) relevant and useful skills. In this article, I describe how I engaged with local employers to open internship opportunities to humanities and social sciences students who would not previously have been considered. (shrink)

he paper analyses migration flows from the Philippines in two gendered occupations: domestic helpers and computer programmers. The international division of labour theory claims that foreign investment determines migration from developing countries, especially of women, towards low-skilled gendered occupations in developed countries. This paper shows that the division of labour is neither gendered nor international in the predicted sense. For instance, data from Philippines Overseas Employment Agency shows that the theory is Eurocentric as Northern America and Europe are destinations for (...) only 3 per cent of domestic workers’ flows. The paper argues that neo-Marxism creates bias in gender and migration research and hinders understanding of important gendered effects concerning migrants. Two examples of such gendered effects are highlighted here: the higher vulnerability to legislative change of migrant men employed as domestic workers in Italy and the higher penetration of women into computer programming in the migrant flows to the U.S. (shrink)

Mounting empirical evidence underscores the health benefits of the arts, as recently reported in a scoping review by the World Health Organization. The creative arts in particular are acknowledged to be a public health resource that can be beneficial for well-being and health. Within this broad context, and as a subfield of participatory arts, the term social arts (SA) specifically refers to an art made by socially engaged professionals (e.g., artists, creative arts therapists, social workers, etc.) with non-professionals who determine (...) together the content and the final art product (in theater, visual arts, music, literature, etc.) with the aim to produce meaningful social changes. SA can enhance individual, community, and public health in times of sociopolitical instability and is an active field in Israel. However, SA is still an under-investigated field of study worldwide that is hard to characterize, typify, or evaluate. This paper presents a research protocol designed to examine a tripartite empirically-based model of SA that will cover a wide range of SA training programs, implementations, and impacts. The findings will help refine the definition of SA and inform practitioners, trainers, and researchers, as well as funding bodies and policymakers, on the content and impact of SA projects in Israel and beyond. (shrink)

During the 11,000 years patriarchy ruled it embedded male-bias in over 20,000 names thus making language suit their ideology of eternal males rule. Every male-biased name stops our species from seeing reality-as-it-is. Every bias hides a truth creating ignorance of what actually exists to be seen and known.

In this chapter, I systematically distinguish a variety of ways to rela- tionalize economics and focus on a certain approach to relationalizing normative economics in the light of communal values salient in the African philosophical tradi- tion. I start by distinguishing four major ways to relationalize empirical economics, viz., in terms of its ontologies, methods, explanations, and predictions and also three major ways to relationalize normative economics, with regard to means taken towards ends, decision-procedures used to specify ends, and ends (...) themselves. Then, in the remainder of the chapter, I address what would be involved in relationalizing the ends of economic choices, given ideals of communal relationship characteristically prized by sub-Saharan philosophers, particularly southern African adherents to ubuntu. I advance communal answers to the two large questions of what an economy should distribute and how to engage with stakeholders, and I suggest that the implications will be found plausible by many open-minded enquirers around the world. Although this chapter is a work of ethical philosophy, it is meant to be of broad interest to scholars in economics. (shrink)