The article discusses the future of US democracy after the end of Donald J. Trump’s scandal-ridden presidency, which culminated in a violent attempted self-coup. In contrast to many observers outside the United States who appear to assume that Joe Biden’s inauguration marks the failure of the coup attempt, I argue that this view is overly optimistic. First, Trump by no means acted alone but was supported by leading figures in the Republican Party (GOP). Second, the attack on democratic norms and (...) institutions to restore and permanently cement Republican minority rule continues to move forward. The 2022 midterm elections and the 2024 presidential election set the course on whether the United States will return to liberal democracy or degrade into Hungary-style competitive authoritarianism. (shrink)

This article analyzes the gendered representation of military service in the German YouTube series Die Rekruten (DR) (The Recruits), a popular web series produced on behalf of the German armed forces (Bundeswehr) for recruitment purposes, which accompanies 12 navy recruits during their basic training. The article is situated within research on masculinity and the military, in particular military recruitment. It supplements current scholarship by studying a previously neglected case that is of particular interest given Germany’s antimilitarist culture, which should make (...) military recruitment and military public relations more difficult. The article asks how military service is represented in DR, what its discursive effects are, and what role (if any) masculinity plays in this process. We find support for recent feminist research on military masculinities (including in military recruitment) that emphasizes ambiguity and contradiction. What distinguishes the construction of military masculinity in DR from, for example, recruitment advertisements in the United States or the United Kingdom is its markedly civil character. This not only broadens the military’s appeal for a more diverse audience but also increases the legitimacy of the military and its activities. It does so by concealing the violence that has for the past two decades also been a very real part of what the Bundeswehr does. (shrink)

This article analyzes how populism is conceptualized and studied in International Relations (IR) and argues that it should be seen as a political logic instead of a political ideology. It does so by demonstrating that ‘populist foreign policy’ looks radically different when analyzing the populist left, refuting the possibility of any distinctly ‘populist’ foreign policy positions. We argue that large parts of IR scholarship practice a form of concept-stretching that undermines the quality of analysis as well as the ability to (...) make meaningful policy recommendations. Using the empirical case studies of Bernie Sanders in the United States and Podemos in Spain, the article demonstrates that populism does not translate into any shared ideological positions but is a way of formulating and performing – in these cases – leftist politics through which political actors can interpellate and mobilize different societal groups and demands behind their political projects. In particular, the analysis debunks common assumptions about populism’s alleged effects on foreign policy and dangers to pluralist democracy and shows that “populism” neither necessarily opposes multilateralism, migration and global public good provision nor formulates an authoritarian claim to power. (shrink)

These essays draw on work in the history and philosophy of science, the philosophy of mind and language, the development of concepts in children, conceptual..

We introduce two notions–the shadows and the shallows of explanation–in opening up explanation to broader, interdisciplinary investigation. The shadows of explanation refer to past philosophical efforts to provide either a conceptual analysis of explanation or in some other way to pinpoint the essence of explanation. The shallows of explanation refer to the phenomenon of having surprisingly limited everyday, individual cognitive abilities when it comes to explanation. Explanations are ubiquitous, but they typically are not accompanied by the depth that we might, (...) prima facie, expect. We explain the existence of the shadows and shallows of explanation in terms of there being a theoretical abyss between explanation and richer, theoretical structures that are often attributed to people. We offer an account of the shallows, in particular, both in terms of shorn-down, internal, mental machinery, and in terms of an enriched, public symbolic environment, relative to the currently dominant ways of thinking about cognition and the world. (shrink)

What is the relationship between knowledge and ethics? Does what we know and the reason that secures knowledge determine ethical responsibility, or might ethical responsibility itself awaken and animate the enterprise of knowing? The dissertation affirms the priority of ethics by juxtaposing two accounts of the relationship between truth and goodness. It critiques Hegel's systematic conception of absolute knowing by showing that this knowing elides the anarchical ethical demand arising from the other person. Hegel's dialectic reconciles the problem of the (...) relation with the other by transposing it to the plane of cognition where it becomes spirit's self-knowing. However, Emmanuel Levinas's phenomenological reduction of the structures of knowing exposes an ethical level of experience that both inspires and interrupts this adventure of knowing. ;After the introduction of this problematic, Chapter 1 examines the challenge that Levinas poses to Hegel, discovering in experience and subjectivity a ground where real dialogue can take place. Chapter 2 traces the reconception of subjectivity by which Hegel brings all exteriority within the experience of self-consciousness and compares this with Levinas's notion of "lived experience." In Chapter 3, I show how Levinas's account of sensibility and enjoyment resists incorporation into Hegel's notion of self-consciousness. Chapter 4 examines the encounter with the other person and explicates why Hegel's and Levinas's accounts cannot be reconciled or made to complement one another, for the non-allergic responsibility incurred in the face to face relation is inassimilable to the antagonism of the same and the other experienced as self-consciousness. Then, in Chapter 5, I trace Hegel's pursuit of a more authentic recognition of otherness through the development of the concept of spirit, paying special attention to the role of language. The ultimate accomplishment of spiritual recognition in Hegel's account is again challenged by Levinas's notion of responsibility, which signifies as an ethical "saying" apart from the "said." Finally, I contest the absoluteness of knowing without denying the dialectic that animates it by suggesting that philosophy can be maintained as a human enterprise, a pursuit of knowing that is ever subject to and interrupted by the face of the other. (shrink)

It is not a particularly hard thing to want or seek explanations. In fact, explanations seem to be a large and natural part of our cognitive lives. Children ask why and how questions very early in development and seem genuinely to want some sort of answer, despite our often being poorly equipped to provide them at the appropriate level of sophistication and detail. We seek and receive explanations in every sphere of our adult lives, whether it be to understand why (...) a friendship has foundered, why a car will not start, or why ice expands when it freezes. Moreover, correctly or incorrectly, most of the time we think we know when we have or have not received a good explanation. There is a sense both that a given, successful explanation satisfies a cognitive need, and that a questionable or dubious explanation does not. There are also compelling intuitions about what make good explanations in terms of their form, that is, a sense of when they are structured correctly. (shrink)

Critical discussion of Jerry Fodor's Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong (1998).

In this paper, I consider the relationship between Inference to the Best Explanation and Bayesianism, both of which are well-known accounts of the nature of scientific inference. In Sect. 2, I give a brief overview of Bayesianism and IBE. In Sect. 3, I argue that IBE in its most prominently defended forms is difficult to reconcile with Bayesianism because not all of the items that feature on popular lists of “explanatory virtues”—by means of which IBE ranks competing explanations—have confirmational import. (...) Rather, some of the items that feature on these lists are “informational virtues”—properties that do not make a hypothesis \ more probable than some competitor \ given evidence E, but that, roughly-speaking, give that hypothesis greater informative content. In Sect. 4, I consider as a response to my argument a recent version of compatibilism which argues that IBE can provide further normative constraints on the objectively correct probability function. I argue that this response does not succeed, owing to the difficulty of defending with any generality such further normative constraints. Lastly, in Sect. 5, I propose that IBE should be regarded, not as a theory of scientific inference, but rather as a theory of when we ought to “accept” H, where the acceptability of H is fixed by the goals of science and concerns whether H is worthy of commitment as research program. In this way, IBE and Bayesianism, as I will show, can be made compatible, and thus the Bayesian and the proponent of IBE can be friends. (shrink)

Recent years have witnessed intensive efforts to specify which requirements ethical artificial intelligence (AI) must meet. General guidelines for ethical AI consider a varying number of principles important. A frequent novel element in these guidelines, that we have bundled together under the term explicability, aims to reduce the black-box character of machine learning algorithms. The centrality of this element invites reflection on the conceptual relation between explicability and the four bioethical principles. This is important because the application of general ethical (...) frameworks to clinical decision-making entails conceptual questions: Is explicability a free-standing principle? Is it already covered by the well-established four bioethical principles? Or is it an independent value that needs to be recognized as such in medical practice? We discuss these questions in a conceptual-ethical analysis, which builds upon the findings of an empirical document analysis. On the example of the medical specialty of radiology, we analyze the position of radiological associations on the ethical use of medical AI. We address three questions: Are there references to explicability or a similar concept? What are the reasons for such inclusion? Which ethical concepts are referred to? (shrink)

Some properties are causally relevant for a certain effect, others are not. In this paper we describe a problem for our understanding of this notion and then offer a solution in terms of the notion of a program explanation.

In the last two decades, a robust consensus has emerged among philosophers of science, whereby political, ethical, or social values must play some role in scientific inquiry, and that the ‘value-free ideal’ is thus a misguided conception of science. However, the question of how to distinguish, in a principled way, which values may legitimately influence science remains. This question, which has been dubbed the ‘new demarcation problem,’ has until recently received comparatively less attention from philosophers of science. In this paper, (...) I appeal to Rawls’s theory of justice (1971) on the basis of which I defend a Rawlsian solution to the new demarcation problem. As I argue, the Rawlsian solution places plausible constraints on which values ought to influence scientific inquiry, and, moreover, can be fruitfully applied to concrete cases to determine how the conflicting interests of stakeholders should be balanced. After considering and responding to the objection that Rawls’s theory of justice applies only to the “basic structure” of society, I compare the Rawlsian solution to some other approaches to the new demarcation problem, especially those that emphasize democratic criteria. (shrink)

In this article, I consider an important challenge to the popular theory of scientific inference commonly known as ‘inference to the best explanation’, one that has received scant attention.1 1 The problem is that there exists a wide array of rival models of explanation, thus leaving IBE objectionably indeterminate. First, I briefly introduce IBE. Then, I motivate the problem and offer three potential solutions, the most plausible of which is to adopt a kind of pluralism about the rival models of (...) explanation. However, I argue that how ranking explanations on this pluralistic account of IBE remains obscure and pluralism leads to contradictory results. In light of these objections, I attempt to dissolve the problem by showing why IBE does not require a ‘model’ of explanation and by giving an account of what explanation consists in within the context of IBE. (shrink)

The study of culture and cultural selection from a biological perspective has been hampered by the lack of any firm theoretical basis for how the information for cultural traits is stored and transmitted. In addition, the study of any living system with a decentralized or multi-level information structure has been somewhat restricted due to the focus in genetics on the gene and the particular hereditary structure of multicellular organisms. Here a different perspective is used, one which regards living systems as (...) self-constructing energy users that utilize their genome as a library of information, making the genetic system just another component that adds fitness to the overall integrated unit. In this framework, basic fitness is measured as the ability to gather energy for growth and reproduction, and the fitness of the genetic system is broken down into two aspects: first, the effectiveness in searching for new somatic functional information, and second, the effectiveness in searching for better structures to store and process information. With this more generalized perspective, major evolutionary transitions to higher levels of organization become competitions between different information structures; furthermore the functioning and fitness of cultural systems can be more easily described and compared with other modes of information storage within biological systems. Modern technological societies are self-constructing systems that rely on written (symbolic) information storage and very complex algorithms that effectively search for variation with a high probability of successful selection. These systems are currently competing with traditional organic systems, and this competition constitutes the latest major evolutionary transition. Upon comparison of the energy-gathering potential of symbolic-based systems with DNA-based life, it appears that symbolic systems have a tremendous fitness potential and the current shift to a higher level of selection may be as significant and far-reaching as any of the previous major evolutionary transitions. (shrink)

I begin with a distinction between narrow and broad defenses to the logical problem of evil. The former is simply an attempt to show that God and evil are not logically incompat-ible whereas the latter attempts the same, but only by appealing to beliefs one takes to be true in the actual world. I then argue that while recent accounts of original sin may be consistent with a broad defense, they are also logically incoherent. After considering potential replies, I conclude (...) by proposing an account of original sin that is both logically coherent and consistent with a broad defense. (shrink)

This chapter describes the potential far‐reaching consequences of contemplative higher education for the fields of science and medicine.

In this paper, I examine Cicero’s oft-neglected De Divinatione, a dialogue investigating the legitimacy of the practice of divination. First, I offer a novel analysis of the main arguments for divination given by Quintus, highlighting the fact that he employs two logically distinct argument forms. Next, I turn to the first of the main arguments against divination given by Marcus. Here I show, with the help of modern probabilistic tools, that Marcus’ skeptical response is far from the decisive, proto-naturalistic assault (...) on superstition that it is sometimes portrayed to be. Then, I offer an extended analysis of the second of the main arguments against divination given by Marcus. Inspired by Marcus’ second main argument, I formulate, explicate, and defend a substantive principle of scientific methodology that I call the “Ciceronian Causal-Nomological Requirement” (CCR). Roughly, this principle states that causal knowledge is essential for relying on correlations in predictive inference. Although I go on to argue that Marcus’ application of the CCR in his debate with Quintus is dialectically inadequate, I conclude that De Divinatione deserves its place in Cicero’s philosophical corpus, and that ultimately, its significance for the history and philosophy of science ought to be recognized. (shrink)

Definition of the problem The umbrella term “explicability” refers to the reduction of opacity of artificial intelligence (AI) systems. These efforts are challenging for medical AI applications because higher accuracy often comes at the cost of increased opacity. This entails ethical tensions because physicians and patients desire to trace how results are produced without compromising the performance of AI systems. The centrality of explicability within the informed consent process for medical AI systems compels an ethical reflection on the trade-offs. Which (...) levels of explicability are needed to obtain informed consent when utilizing medical AI? Arguments We proceed in five steps: First, we map the terms commonly associated with explicability as described in the ethics and computer science literature, i.e., disclosure, intelligibility, interpretability, and explainability. Second, we conduct a conceptual analysis of the ethical requirements for explicability when it comes to informed consent. Third, we distinguish hurdles for explicability in terms of epistemic and explanatory opacity. Fourth, this then allows to conclude the level of explicability physicians must reach and what patients can expect. In a final step, we show how the identified levels of explicability can technically be met from the perspective of computer science. Throughout our work, we take diagnostic AI systems in radiology as an example. Conclusion We determined four levels of explicability that need to be distinguished for ethically defensible informed consent processes and showed how developers of medical AI can technically meet these requirements. (shrink)

In a previous issue of this journal Michael Veber argued that God could not answer certain prayers because doing so would be immoral. In this article I attempt to demonstrate that Veber’s argument is simply the logical problem of evil applied to a possible world. Because of this, his argument is susceptible to a Plantinga-style defense.

In this paper, I offer an analysis of the radical disagreement over the adequacy of string theory. The prominence of string theory despite its notorious lack of empirical support is sometimes explained as a troubling case of science gone awry, driven largely by sociological mechanisms such as groupthink (e.g. Smolin 2006). Others, such as Dawid (2013), explain the controversy by positing a methodological revolution of sorts, according to which string theorists have quietly turned to nonempirical methods of theory assessment given (...) the technological inability to directly test the theory. The appropriate response, according to Dawid, is to acknowledge this development and widen the canons of acceptable scientific methods. As I’ll argue, however, the current situation in fundamental physics does not require either of these responses. Rather, as I’ll suggest, much of the controversy stems from a failure to properly distinguish the “context of justification” from the “context of pursuit”. Both those who accuse string theorists of betraying the scientific method and those who advocate an enlarged conception of scientific methodology objectionably conflate epistemic justification with judgements of pursuit-worthiness. Once we get clear about this distinction and about the different norms governing the two contexts, the current situation in fundamental physics becomes much less puzzling. After defending this diagnosis of the controversy, I’ll show how the argument patterns that have been posited by Dawid as constituting an emergent methodological revolution in science are better off if reworked as arguments belonging to the context of pursuit. (shrink)

Purpose: The method of diagnosing diabetic retinopathy (DR) through artificial intelligence (AI)-based systems has been commercially available since 2018. This introduces new ethical challenges with regard to obtaining informed consent from patients. The purpose of this work is to develop a checklist of items to be disclosed when diagnosing DR with AI systems in a primary care setting. -/- Methods: Two systematic literature searches were conducted in PubMed and Web of Science databases: a narrow search focusing on DR and a (...) broad search on general issues of AI-based diagnosis. An ethics content analysis was conducted inductively to extract two features of included publications: (1) novel information content for AI-aided diagnosis and (2) the ethical justification for its disclosure. -/- Results: The narrow search yielded n = 537 records of which n = 4 met the inclusion criteria. The information process was scarcely addressed for primary care setting. The broad search yielded n = 60 records of which n = 11 were included. In total, eight novel elements were identified to be included in the information process for ethical reasons, all of which stem from the technical specifics of medical AI. -/- Conclusions: Implications for the general practitioner are two-fold: First, doctors need to be better informed about the ethical implications of novel technologies and must understand them to properly inform patients. Second, patient's overconfidence or fears can be countered by communicating the risks, limitations, and potential benefits of diagnostic AI systems. If patients accept and are aware of the limitations of AI-aided diagnosis, they increase their chances of being diagnosed and treated in time. (shrink)

In this article, I will provide a critical overview of the form of non-deductive reasoning commonly known as “Inference to the Best Explanation” (IBE). Roughly speaking, according to IBE, we ought to infer the hypothesis that provides the best explanation of our evidence. In section 2, I survey some contemporary formulations of IBE and highlight some of its putative applications. In section 3, I distinguish IBE from C.S. Peirce’s notion of abduction. After underlining some of the essential elements of IBE, (...) the rest of the entry is organized around an examination of various problems that IBE confronts, along with some extant attempts to address these problems. In section 4, I consider the question of when a fact requires an explanation, since presumably IBE applies only in cases where some explanation is called for. In section 5, I consider the difficult question of how we ought to understand IBE in light of the fact that among philosophers, there is significant disagreement about what constitutes an explanation. In section 6, I consider different strategies for justifying the truth-conduciveness of the explanatory virtues, e.g., simplicity, unification, scope, etc., criteria which play an indispensable role in any given application of IBE. In section 7, I survey some of the most recent literature on IBE, much of which consists of investigations of the status of IBE from the standpoint of the Bayesian philosophy of science. (shrink)

The Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI) is an ontology that provides terms with precisely defined meanings to describe all aspects of how investigations in the biological and medical domains are conducted. OBI re-uses ontologies that provide a representation of biomedical knowledge from the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) project and adds the ability to describe how this knowledge was derived. We here describe the state of OBI and several applications that are using it, such as adding semantic expressivity to (...) existing databases, building data entry forms, and enabling interoperability between knowledge resources. OBI covers all phases of the investigation process, such as planning, execution and reporting. It represents information and material entities that participate in these processes, as well as roles and functions. Prior to OBI, it was not possible to use a single internally consistent resource that could be applied to multiple types of experiments for these applications. OBI has made this possible by creating terms for entities involved in biological and medical investigations and by importing parts of other biomedical ontologies such as GO, Chemical Entities of Biological Interest (ChEBI) and Phenotype Attribute and Trait Ontology (PATO) without altering their meaning. OBI is being used in a wide range of projects covering genomics, multi-omics, immunology, and catalogs of services. OBI has also spawned other ontologies (Information Artifact Ontology) and methods for importing parts of ontologies (Minimum information to reference an external ontology term (MIREOT)). The OBI project is an open cross-disciplinary collaborative effort, encompassing multiple research communities from around the globe. To date, OBI has created 2366 classes and 40 relations along with textual and formal definitions. The OBI Consortium maintains a web resource providing details on the people, policies, and issues being addressed in association with OBI. (shrink)

Intuitions about intentional action have turned out to be sensitive to normative factors: most people say that an indifferent agent brings about an effect of her action intentionally when it is harmful, but unintentionally when it is beneficial. Joshua Knobe explains this asymmetry, which is known as ‘the Knobe effect’, in terms of the moral valence of the effect, arguing that this explanation generalizes to other asymmetries concerning notions as diverse as deciding and being free. I present an alternative explanation (...) of the Knobe effect in terms of normative reasons. This explanation generalizes to other folk psychological notions such as deciding, but not to such notions as being free. I go on to argue, against Knobe, that offering a unified explanation of all the asymmetries he discusses is in fact undesirable. (shrink)

In this paper, I critically evaluate several related, provocative claims made by proponents of data-intensive science and “Big Data” which bear on scientific methodology, especially the claim that scientists will soon no longer have any use for familiar concepts like causation and explanation. After introducing the issue, in Section 2, I elaborate on the alleged changes to scientific method that feature prominently in discussions of Big Data. In Section 3, I argue that these methodological claims are in tension with a (...) prominent account of scientific method, often called “Inference to the Best Explanation”. Later on, in Section 3, I consider an argument against IBE that will be congenial to proponents of Big Data, namely, the argument due to Roche and Sober Analysis, 73:659–668, that “explanatoriness is evidentially irrelevant.” This argument is based on Bayesianism, one of the most prominent general accounts of theory-confirmation. In Section 4, I consider some extant responses to this argument, especially that of Climenhaga Philosophy of Science, 84:359–368,. In Section 5, I argue that Roche and Sober’s argument does not show that explanatory reasoning is dispensable. In Section 6, I argue that there is good reason to think explanatory reasoning will continue to prove indispensable in scientific practice. Drawing on Cicero’s oft-neglected De Divinatione, I formulate what I call the “Ciceronian Causal-nomological Requirement”, which states, roughly, that causal-nomological knowledge is essential for relying on correlations in predictive inference. I defend a version of the CCR by appealing to the challenge of “spurious correlations,” chance correlations which we should not rely upon for predictive inference. In Section 7, I offer some concluding remarks. (shrink)

This paper offers a probabilistic treatment of the conditions for argument cogency as endorsed in informal logic: acceptability, relevance, and sufficiency. Treating a natural language argument as a reason-claim-complex, our analysis identifies content features of defeasible argument on which the RSA conditions depend, namely: change in the commitment to the reason, the reason’s sensitivity and selectivity to the claim, one’s prior commitment to the claim, and the contextually determined thresholds of acceptability for reasons and for claims. Results contrast with, and (...) may indeed serve to correct, the informal understanding and applications of the RSA criteria concerning their conceptual dependence, their function as update-thresholds, and their status as obligatory rather than permissive norms, but also show how these formal and informal normative approachs can in fact align. (shrink)

The Preface Paradox is often discussed for its implications for rational belief. Much less discussed is a variant of the Preface Paradox for knowledge. In this paper, I argue that the most plausible closure-friendly resolution to the Preface Paradox for Knowledge is to say that in any given context, we do not know much. I call this view “Socraticism”. I argue that Socraticism is the most plausible view on two accounts—(1) this view is compatible with the claim that most of (...) our knowledge ascriptions are true, and (2) provided that (1) is true, the costs of accepting Socraticism are much less than the costs of accepting any other resolution to the Paradox. I argue for (1) in Section 2 by developing a question-sensitive contextualist model for knowledge that shows how Socraticism is compatible with the claim that most of our knowledge ascriptions are true. I also argue how this contextualist model can achieve this result where other contextualist models fail. I then consider other closure-friendly solutions to the paradox in Section 3 and show how accepting those solutions forces us to give up a number of plausible epistemic principles. (shrink)

Anarchism is by far the least broadly understood ideology and the least studied academically. Though highly influential, both historically and in terms of recent social movements, anarchism is regularly dismissed. Anarchism: A Conceptual Approach is a welcome addition to this growing field, which is widely debated but poorly understood. Occupying a distinctive position in the study of anarchist ideology, this volume, authored by a handpicked group of established and rising scholars, investigates how anarchists often seek to sharpen their message and (...) struggle to determine what ideas and actions are central to their identity. Moving beyond defining anarchism as simply an ideology or political theory, this book examines the meanings of its key concepts, which have been divided into three categories: Core, Adjacent, and Peripheral concepts. Each chapter focuses on one important concept, shows how anarchists have understood the concept, and highlights its relationships to other concepts. Although anarchism is often thought of as a political topic, the interdisciplinary nature of Anarchism: A Conceptual Approach makes it of interest to students and scholars across the social sciences, liberal arts, and the humanities. (shrink)

Institutions can be strong or weak. But what does this mean? Equilibrium theories equate institutions with behavioural regularities. In contrast, rule theories explicate them in terms of a standard that people are supposed to meet. I propose that, when an institution is weak, a discrepancy exists between the regularity and the standard or rule. To capture this discrepancy, I present a hybrid theory, the Rules-and-Equilibria Theory. According to this theory, institutions are rule-governed behavioural regularities. The Rules-and-Equilibria Theory provides the basis (...) for two measures of institutional strength. First, institutions that pertain to coordination games solve problems of information. Their strength is primarily a matter of the expected degree of compliance. Second, institutions that concern mixed-motive games solve problems of motivation. Their strength can be measured in terms of the weight people attribute to its rule. (shrink)

Are there deep differences between these cultures in their ways of thinking? How can they be described? There is no neutral language for doing so. One can doubt all claims to deep essence as being metaphysical illusions and figments. However, the differences are certainly experienced. They can be characterized negatively. This is where Chinese and Western viewpoints meet. Whereas Jullien finds the cultural Other enabling him to think otherwise and effectively to keep the recursive self-negating aspect of discourse active and (...) alive in his own discourse, I attempt to do this by reference to the apophatic current underlying Western philosophical reflection in all its most radically critical and especially self-critical manifestations. Especially from consideration of Eastern approaches to universality, the apophatic wisdom that can be gathered here can serve to put us on guard against any universality that can be thought. Universality is not what it is thought to be by the universals that we can think. The naïve faith in thought and education as per se emancipatory is belied by history. The universal remains an ideal rather than a manifest fact in the course of history. It cannot be approached except always by way of the negative. (shrink)

In this paper, I describe some strategies for teaching an introductory philosophy of science course to Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) students, with reference to my own experience teaching a philosophy of science course in the Fall of 2020. The most important strategy that I advocate is what I call the “Second Philosophy” approach, according to which instructors ought to emphasize that the problems that concern philosophers of science are not manufactured and imposed by philosophers from the outside, but (...) rather are ones that arise internally, during the practice of science itself. To justify this approach, I appeal to considerations from both educational research and the epistemology of testimony. In addition, I defend some distinctive learning goals that philosophy of science instructors ought to adopt when teaching STEM students, which include rectifying empirically well-documented shortcomings in students’ conceptions of the “scientific method” and the “nature of science.” Although my primary focus will be on teaching philosophy of science to STEM students, much of what I propose can be applied to non-philosophy majors generally. Ultimately, as I argue, a successful philosophy of science course for non-philosophy majors must be one that advances a student’s science education. The strategies that I describe and defend here are aimed at precisely that end. (shrink)

If a future AI system can enjoy far more well-being than a human per resource, what would be the best way to allocate resources between these future AI and our future descendants? It is obvious that on total utilitarianism, one should give everything to the AI. However, it turns out that every Welfarist axiology on the market also gives this same recommendation, at least if we assume consequentialism. Without resorting to non-consequentialist normative theories that suggest that we ought not always (...) create the world with the most value, or non-welfarist theories that tell us that the best world may not be the world with the most welfare, I propose a new theory that justifies giving some resources to humanity in the face of overwhelming AI well-being. I call this new theory, “Group Prioritarianism". (shrink)

This paper discusses the finite version of the two envelope paradox. (That is, we treat the paradox against the background assumption that there is only a finite amount of money in the world.).

Throughout the biological and biomedical sciences there is a growing need for, prescriptive ‘minimum information’ (MI) checklists specifying the key information to include when reporting experimental results are beginning to find favor with experimentalists, analysts, publishers and funders alike. Such checklists aim to ensure that methods, data, analyses and results are described to a level sufficient to support the unambiguous interpretation, sophisticated search, reanalysis and experimental corroboration and reuse of data sets, facilitating the extraction of maximum value from data sets (...) them. However, such ‘minimum information’ MI checklists are usually developed independently by groups working within representatives of particular biologically- or technologically-delineated domains. Consequently, an overview of the full range of checklists can be difficult to establish without intensive searching, and even tracking thetheir individual evolution of single checklists may be a non-trivial exercise. Checklists are also inevitably partially redundant when measured one against another, and where they overlap is far from straightforward. Furthermore, conflicts in scope and arbitrary decisions on wording and sub-structuring make integration difficult. This presents inhibit their use in combination. Overall, these issues present significant difficulties for the users of checklists, especially those in areas such as systems biology, who routinely combine information from multiple biological domains and technology platforms. To address all of the above, we present MIBBI (Minimum Information for Biological and Biomedical Investigations); a web-based communal resource for such checklists, designed to act as a ‘one-stop shop’ for those exploring the range of extant checklist projects, and to foster collaborative, integrative development and ultimately promote gradual integration of checklists. (shrink)

We develop a Bayesian framework for thinking about the way evidence about the here and now can bear on hypotheses about the qualitative character of the world as a whole, including hypotheses according to which the total population of the world is infinite. We show how this framework makes sense of the practice cosmologists have recently adopted in their reasoning about such hypotheses.

In this paper, I discuss the ways in which epistemic anxiety promotes well-being, specifically by examining the positive contributions that feelings of epistemic anxiety make toward intellectually virtuous inquiry. While the prospects for connecting the concept of epistemic anxiety to the two most prominent accounts of intellectual virtue, i.e., “virtue-reliabilism” and “virtue-responsibilism”, are promising, I primarily focus on whether the capacity for epistemic anxiety counts as an intellectual virtue in the reliabilist sense. As I argue, there is a close yet (...) unexplored connection between feelings of epistemic anxiety and the form of inference commonly known as “Inference to the Best Explanation” (IBE). Specifically, I argue that both the recognition that some fact requires an explanation—a necessary first step in applying IBE—and the subsequent motivation to employ IBE are typically facilitated by feelings of epistemic anxiety. So, provided IBE is truth-conducive the capacity for epistemic anxiety should count as an intellectual virtue in the reliabilist sense. After outlining my main argument, I address the challenge that the capacity for epistemic anxiety has the potential to be misleading. To respond to this challenge, I discuss how our recognition that a fact requires an explanation must in part be a species of practical knowledge, rather than theoretical knowledge. For the agent to skillfully distinguish between facts that require an explanation and facts that do not, she must develop the virtuous disposition to feel the appropriate amount of epistemic anxiety. Despite the many negative aspects associated with anxiety, as I conclude, being disposed to feel the appropriate amount of epistemic anxiety is ultimately good for us. (shrink)

Biomarker-based predictive tests for subjectively asymptomatic Alzheimer’s disease (AD) are utilized in research today. Novel applications of artificial intelligence (AI) promise to predict the onset of AD several years in advance without determining biomarker thresholds. Until now, little attention has been paid to the new ethical challenges that AI brings to the early diagnosis in asymptomatic individuals, beyond contributing to research purposes, when we still lack adequate treatment. The aim of this paper is to explore the ethical arguments put forward (...) for AI aided AD prediction in subjectively asymptomatic individuals and their ethical implications. The ethical assessment is based on a systematic literature search. Thematic analysis was conducted inductively of 18 included publications. The ethical framework includes the principles of autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice. Reasons for offering predictive tests to asymptomatic individuals are the right to know, a positive balance of the risk-benefit assessment, and the opportunity for future planning. Reasons against are the lack of disease modifying treatment, the accuracy and explicability of AI aided prediction, the right not to know, and threats to social rights. We conclude that there are serious ethical concerns in offering early diagnosis to asymptomatic individuals and the issues raised by the application of AI add to the already known issues. Nevertheless, pre-symptomatic testing should only be offered on request to avoid inflicted harm. We recommend developing training for physicians in communicating AI aided prediction. (shrink)

This paper considers a problem that arises for free will defenses when considering the nature of God's own will. If God is perfectly good and performs praiseworthy actions, but is unable to do evil, then why must humans have the ability to do evil in order to perform such actions? This problem has been addressed by Theodore Guleserian, but at the expense of denying God's essential goodness. I examine and critique his argument and provide a solution to the initial problem (...) that does not require abandoning God's essential goodness. (shrink)

This article presents a critique of the current naturalist readings of Nietzsche by drawing a distinction between a sense of naturalism based on nature taken as "what there is" and one based on the scientific concept of nature. The paper suggests that Nietzsche is a naturalist in the first sense, but not in the latter, and that due to the confusion between the two sense, many arguments in favor of the first have been unwarrantedly transferred into the latter. The article (...) begins with a close critical reading of Brian Leiter's "Nietzsche's Naturalism Revisited" before confronting the naturalist readings with one case of Nietzsche's writings, found in Daybreak's Book V. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Nietzsche-Studien Jahrgang: 44 Heft: 1 Seiten: 267-290 In this paper, I examine the possibility of constructing an ontological phenomenology of love by tracing Nietzsche’s questioning about science. I examine how the evolution of Nietzsche’s thinking about science and his increasing suspicion towards it coincide with his interest for the question of love. Although the texts from the early and middle period praise science as an antidote to asceticism, the later texts associate the scientifi c spirit with asceticism. (...) I argue that this shift is motivated by Nietzsche’s realization that asceticism and science share the same fetish of facts. It is now for Nietzsche no longer a matter of proving the so-called facts of the backworlds to be wrong (something science is very capable of doing), but a matter of rejecting the very structure of thought that reduces a shapeless reality into a series of facts, subjects and objects. It is this second attitude that Nietzsche regards as the common core of science and asceticism. From this critique of science and its correlative critique of facts, Nietzsche begins searching for a counter-attitude able to perform the reduction of the factual attitude. This is the attitude he calls love. Although Nietzsche’s concept of love has oft en been elucidated in terms of its object or its subject, I argue that such interpretations precisely defeat Nietzsche’s point, which is to recover a ground that precedes the division of the world into subjects and objects. Love becomes the name of this intra-relationship of being, opening up to new perspectives on Nietzsche’s ontology of the will to power. (shrink)

The topic of fake news has received increased attention from philosophers since the term became a favorite of politicians (Habgood-Coote 2016; Dentith 2016). Notably missing from the conversation, however, is a discussion of fake news and conspiracy theory media as a market. This paper will take as its starting point the account of noxious markets put forward by Debra Satz (2010), and will argue that there is a pro tanto moral reason to restrict the market for fake news. Specifically, we (...) begin with Satz’s argument that restricting a market may be required when i) that market inhibits citizens from being able to stand in an equal relationship with one another, and ii) this problem cannot be solved without such direct restrictions. Our own argument then proceeds in three parts: first, we argue that the market for fake news fits Satz’s description of a noxious market; second, we argue against explanations of the proliferation of fake news that are couched in terms of “epistemic vice”, and likewise argue against prescribing critical thinking education as a solution to the problem; finally, we conclude that, in the absence of other solutions to mitigate the noxious effects of the fake news market, we have a pro tanto moral reason to impose restrictions on this market. At the end of the paper, we consider one proposal to regulate the fake news market, which involves making social media outlets potentially liable in civil court for damages caused by the fake news hosted on their websites. (shrink)

Environmental health research produces scientific knowledge about environmental hazards crucial for public health and environmental justice movements that seek to prevent or reduce exposure to these hazards. The environment in environmental health research is conceptualized as the range of possible social, biological, chemical, and/or physical hazards or risks to human health, some of which merit study due to factors such as their probability and severity, the feasibility of their remediation, and injustice in their distribution. This paper explores the ethics of (...) identifying the relevant environment for environmental health research, as judgments involved in defining an environmental hazard or risk, judgments of that hazard or risk's probability, severity, and/ or injustice, as well as the feasibility of its remediation, all ought to appeal to non-epistemic as well as epistemic values. I illustrate by discussing the case of environmental lead, a housing-related hazard that remains unjustly distributed by race and class and is particularly dangerous to children. Examining a controversy in environmental health research ethics where researchers tested multiple levels of lead abatement in lead-contaminated households, I argue that the broader perspective on the ethics of environmental health research provided in the first part of this paper may have helped prevent this controversy. (shrink)

This paper provides an analysis of the way in which two foundational principles of medical ethics–the trusted doctor and patient autonomy–can be undermined by the use of machine learning (ML) algorithms and addresses its legal significance. This paper can be a guide to both health care providers and other stakeholders about how to anticipate and in some cases mitigate ethical conflicts caused by the use of ML in healthcare. It can also be read as a road map as to what (...) needs to be done to achieve an acceptable level of explainability in an ML algorithm when it is used in a healthcare context. (shrink)

This chapter proposed a novel design methodology called Value-Sensitive Design and its potential application to the field of artificial intelligence research and design. It discusses the imperatives in adopting a design philosophy that embeds values into the design of artificial agents at the early stages of AI development. Because of the high risk stakes in the unmitigated design of artificial agents, this chapter proposes that even though VSD may turn out to be a less-than-optimal design methodology, it currently provides a (...) framework that has the potential to embed stakeholder values and incorporate current design methods. The reader should begin to take away the importance of a proactive design approach to intelligent agents. (shrink)

La pensée de Heidegger sur le dieu cherche à trouver, retrouver ou découvrir pour celui-ci et dans son histoire une dimension originaire et inaugurale et en même temps non-métaphysique, une voix qui parle dans un autre langage à venir et qui soit celle du monde et des mortels. Cette considération du dieu se rencontre aussi dans les tentaives mystiques d'Orient, en particulier dans le soufisme de la voie (tarika, طريقة) d'Ibn 'Arabi, qui retrouve son dieu autrement que dans sa dimension (...) de créateur. Ce dieu se révèle comme intrinsèque au monde - il n'est jamais sans monde, et surtout il s'avère avoir l'homme pour gardien, pour berger de sa parole et de ce même monde. Le points de convergence des deux pensées sont multiples. Nous offrons ici l'ébauche d'un dialogue qui s'avérera certainement très fructueux pour la pensée du dieu, surtout compte tenu des recherches actuelles concernant le sens du spirituel et du religieux. Le recueillement, l'intériorité qui dépasse la volonté et le défi qu'ils posent à la subjectivité sont au cœur des articlations que nous établissons das ce texte. (shrink)

This paper discusses ethical issues surrounding Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) of the economic effects of climate change, and how climate economists acting as policy advisors ought to represent the uncertain possibility of catastrophe. Some climate economists, especially Martin Weitzman, have argued for a precautionary approach where avoiding catastrophe should structure climate economists’ welfare analysis. This paper details ethical arguments that justify this approach, showing how Weitzman’s “fat tail” probabilities of climate catastrophe pose ethical problems for widely used IAMs. The main (...) claim is that economists who ignore or downplay catastrophic risks in their representations of uncertainty likely fall afoul of ethical constraints on scientists acting as policy advisors. Such scientists have duties to honestly articulate uncertainties and manage (some) inductive risks, or the risks of being wrong in different ways. (shrink)

In this essay I analyze a passage from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s On Certainty. This excerpt contains the expression “O, rubbish!” (Ach Unsinn), which I consider to be closely related to the notions of “bullshit” developed by Harry Frankfurt and Gerald A. Cohen. The relevance of this essay is illustrated with lively examples, both related to contemporary society and identified by Wittgenstein about 70 years ago. The paper is organized in six sections containing 1) an introduction to the topic, 2) an explanation (...) of “bullshit” as found in the works of Frankfurt and Cohen, 3) an explanation of Wittgenstein’s work on certainty and propositions beyond doubt, 4) an identification of reasonable and unreasonable doubt and their connection to “bullshit”, 5) an explanation of the different kinds of “bullshit” with the intention of mapping them in relation to each other, and 6) a summarizing conclusion. The main purpose of this paper is to expound on Wittgenstein’s views on “bullshit” and relate them to contemporary philosophy of nonsense. (shrink)

Juhani Yli-Vakkuri and John Hawthorne have recently presented a thought experiment—Mirror Man—designed to refute internalist theories of belief and content. We distinguish five ways in which the case can be interpreted and argue that on none does it refute internalism.