This paper seeks to answer the question: Can contemporary forms of artificial intelligence be creative? To answer this question, I consider three conditions that are commonly taken to be necessary for creativity. These are novelty, value, and agency. I argue that while contemporary AI models may have a claim to novelty and value, they cannot satisfy the kind of agency condition required for creativity. From this discussion, a new condition for creativity emerges. Creativity requires curiosity, a motivation to pursue epistemic (...) goods. I argue that contemporary AI models do not satisfy this new condition. Because they lack both agency and curiosity, it is a mistake to attribute the same sort of creativity to AI that we prize in humans. Finally, I consider the question of whether these AI models stand to make human creativity in the arts and sciences obsolete, despite not being creative themselves. I argue, optimistically, that this is unlikely. (shrink)

I argue for an account of creativity that unifies creative achievements in the arts, sciences, and other domains and identifies its characteristic value. This account draws upon case studies of creative work in both the arts and sciences to identify creativity as a kind of successful exploration. I argue that if creativity is properly understood in this way, then it is fundamentally a property of processes, something only agents can achieve, something that comes in degrees, subjectively novel, and non-formulaic. As (...) I develop the account, I show how it avoids challenges faced by other accounts of creativity, especially concerning creativity’s value. Hills and Bird (2018, 2019) have together argued that creativity is not necessarily valuable. My account challenges this view. If I am right that creativity is a kind of successful exploration, then creativity does have a characteristic value, specifically epistemic value. (shrink)

In this paper I articulate a view of doxastic control that helps defend the legitimacy of our practice of blaming people for their beliefs. I distinguish between three types of doxastic control: intention-based, reason-based, and influence-based. First I argue that, although we lack direct intention-based control over our beliefs, such control is not necessary for legitimate doxastic blame. Second, I suggest that we distinguish two types of reason-responsiveness: sensitivity to reasons and appreciation of reasons. I argue that while both capacities (...) are necessary for satisfying the control condition, neither is sufficient. Finally, I defend an influence-based view of doxastic control according to which we have the capacity to execute intentions to engage in reflection that causally influences our beliefs in positive epistemic ways. This capacity is both necessary and sufficient for satisfying the control condition for legitimate doxastic blame. I end by defending the view from two objections: that reflection is not necessary for meeting the control condition, and that it is not sufficient. (shrink)

In this chapter, we explore whether agents have an epistemic duty to eradicate implicit bias. Recent research shows that implicit biases are widespread and they have a wide variety of epistemic effects on our doxastic attitudes. First, we offer some examples and features of implicit biases. Second, we clarify what it means to have an epistemic duty, and discuss the kind of epistemic duties we might have regarding implicit bias. Third, we argue that we have an epistemic duty to eradicate (...) implicit biases that have negative epistemic impact. Finally, we defend this view against the objection that we lack the relevant control over implicit bias that’s required for such a duty. We argue that we have a kind of reflective control over the implicit biases that we are duty-bound to eradicate. And since, as we show, we have this control over a wide variety of implicit biases, there are a lot of implicit biases that we have epistemic duties to eradicate. (shrink)

In this paper, I solve a puzzle generated by three conflicting claims about the relationship between faith, belief, and control: according to the Identity Thesis, faith is a type of belief, and according to Fideistic Voluntarism, we sometimes have control over whether or not we have faith, but according to Doxastic Involuntarism, we never have control over what we believe. To solve the puzzle, I argue that the Identity Thesis is true, but that either Fideistic Voluntarism or Doxastic Voluntarism is (...) false, depending on how we understand "control." I distinguish two notions of control: direct intention-based control and indirect reflective control. I argue that though we have direct intention-based control over neither belief nor faith, we have indirect reflective control over each of them. Moreover, indirect reflective control helps explain how we can be held accountable for each. (shrink)

Technological developments have resulted in tremendous increases in the volume and diversity of the data and information that must be processed in the course of biomedical and clinical research and practice. Researchers are at the same time under ever greater pressure to share data and to take steps to ensure that data resources are interoperable. The use of ontologies to annotate data has proven successful in supporting these goals and in providing new possibilities for the automated processing of data and (...) information. In this chapter, we describe different types of vocabulary resources and emphasize those features of formal ontologies that make them most useful for computational applications. We describe current uses of ontologies and discuss future goals for ontology-based computing, focusing on its use in the field of infectious diseases. We review the largest and most widely used vocabulary resources relevant to the study of infectious diseases and conclude with a description of the Infectious Disease Ontology (IDO) suite of interoperable ontology modules that together cover the entire infectious disease domain. (shrink)

The available resources for global health assistance are far outstripped by need. In the face of such scarcity, many people endorse a principle according to which highest priority should be given to the worst off. However, in order for this prioritarian principle to be useful for allocation decisions, policy-makers need to know what it means to be badly off. In this article, we outline a conception of disadvantage suitable for identifying the worst off for the purpose of making health resource (...) allocation decisions. According to our total advantage view: the worst off are those who have the greatest total lifetime disadvantage; advantage foregone due to premature death should be treated in the same way as other ways of being disadvantaged at a time; how badly off someone is depends on the actual outcomes that will befall her without intervention, not her prospects at a time; and all significant forms of disadvantage count for determining who is worst off, not just disadvantage relating to health. We conclude by noting two important implications of the total advantage view: first, that those who die young are among the globally worst off, and second, that the epidemiological shift in the global burden of disease from communicable to non-communicable diseases should not lead to a corresponding shift in global health spending priorities. (shrink)

Eleonore Stump insightfully develops Aquinas’s theodicy to account for a significant source of human suffering, namely the undermining of desires of the heart. Stump argues that what justifies God in allowing such suffering are benefits made available to the sufferer through her suffering that can defeat the suffering by contributing to the fulfillment of her heart’s desires. We summarize Stump’s arguments for why such suffering requires defeat and how it is defeated. We identify three problems with Stump’s account of how (...) such suffering is defeated and offer solutions to each. We defend and strengthen Stump’s response to the hardest cases for her view, and explain what her view demands of God. (shrink)

Earth scientists have declared that we are living in “the Anthropocene,” but radical critics object to the implicit attribution of responsibility for climate disruption to all of humanity. They are right to object. Yet, in effort to implicate their preferred villains, their revised narratives often paint an overly narrow picture. Sharing the impulse of radical critics to tell a more precise and political story about how we arrived where we are today, this paper wagers that collective action is more effectively (...) mobilized when we identify multiple agencies and diverse historical processes as sites in need of urgent intervention. (shrink)

Spinoza is widely understood to criticize the role that fear plays in political life. Yet, in the Political Treatise, he maintains that everyone desires civil order due to a basic and universal fear of solitude. This chapter argues that Spinoza represents the fear of solitude as both a civilizing passion and as an affect that needs to be amplified and encouraged. The turbulence of social and political life makes solitude attractive, but isolation undermines the conditions of human power. Although it (...) may seem uncontroversial to understand isolation as something to avoid in political life, this chapter argues that Spinoza deflates the appeal of la vita solitaria even for philosophers and those seeking ethical perfection. (shrink)

In this essay, we aim to ground an alliance between Cynthia Willett’s theory of an ethics of eros and Hasana Sharp’s argument for a politics of renaturalization. Both approaches seek a vocabulary and practices for ethical life, which is not circumscribed by the requirement of rationality and is deeply attentive to relationships. The relations to which an ethics of eros and renaturalization must attend include social relations – the tender ministrations of mothers, lovers, and friends that sustain and nourish (...) (and sometimes threaten) each of us. Our lives, bodies, and minds, however, are also deeply involved with the nonhuman environment. Our existence depends on air, water, bacteria, shelter, and infinite other nonhuman beings. Our desires and needs include a habitable environment and even "biophilia." The increasing fragility of our ecosystems suggests that there is more need than ever for an ethics that goes not just beyond man – although that is certainly an ongoing project – but beyond the human. This essay is an attempt to ally our approaches in the feminist effort to produce a broad basis for ethics, allowing for a robust consideration of nonhuman nature. (shrink)

In ‘Are Citizenship Tests Necessarily Illiberal?’, Michael Blake argues that difficult citizenship tests are not necessarily illiberal, so long as they test for the right things. In this paper, I argue that Blake’s attempt to square citizenship tests with liberalism fails. Blake underestimates the burdens citizenship tests impose on immigrants, ignoring in particular the egalitarian claims immigrants have on equal social membership. Moreover, Blake’s positive justification of citizenship tests – that they help justify immigrants’ coercive voting power – both neglects (...) the fact that such tests are coercively imposed on immigrants and that the citizenship test Blake envisions does little to help ensure immigrants’ votes are legitimate. Citizenship tests thus aren’t, even in principle, a way of protecting citizens from unjustified coercive power. They are, even under favourable circumstances, an illiberal way of obstructing immigrants’ quest for social equality. (shrink)

The Infectious Disease Ontology (IDO) is a suite of interoperable ontology modules that aims to provide coverage of all aspects of the infectious disease domain, including biomedical research, clinical care, and public health. IDO Core is designed to be a disease and pathogen neutral ontology, covering just those types of entities and relations that are relevant to infectious diseases generally. IDO Core is then extended by a collection of ontology modules focusing on specific diseases and pathogens. In this paper we (...) present applications of IDO Core within various areas of infectious disease research, together with an overview of all IDO extension ontologies and the methodology on the basis of which they are built. We also survey recent developments involving IDO, including the creation of IDO Virus; the Coronaviruses Infectious Disease Ontology (CIDO); and an extension of CIDO focused on COVID-19 (IDO-CovID-19).We also discuss how these ontologies might assist in information-driven efforts to deal with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, to accelerate data discovery in the early stages of future pandemics, and to promote reproducibility of infectious disease research. (shrink)

This essay examines how two seventeenth-century feminists use the language of slavery and servitude to describe and protest the domination of women and girls. From their experiences of being forcibly confined to convents at a young age, Arcangela Tarabotti and Gabrielle Suchon demonstrate how the deprivation of knowledge, the restriction and destruction of social and kinship relations, and the impediments to the exercise their free wills impose upon them forms of slavery. The language of “slavery” and “servitude” plays a distinctive (...) role in their writing, the examination of which locates them in wider traditions of moral and political thought, helps us to understand their complaints, and allows us to appreciate their innovative, feminist adaptations of these discourses. The essay concludes with some reflections on how to think about the use of the idiom of slavery applied to the oppression of white Europeans, which is so common in the early modern period, contemporaneous with the rise of the transatlantic slave trade. (shrink)

Generosity is not best understood as an alliance of forces, necessary for mortal beings with limited time and skills. Sociability as generosity exceeds the realm of need and follows directly from our strength of character [fortitudo] because it expresses a positive power to overcome anti-social passions, such as hatred, envy, and the desire for revenge. Spinoza asserts that generous souls resist and overwhelm hostile forces and debilitating affects with wisdom, foresight, and love. The sociability yielded by generosity, then, is not (...) just a form of cooperation we need to survive and produce leisure for study and contemplation. Generosity is not a mere means but a positive expression of freedom, because it is the activity through which a strong soul (and body) transforms enemies into friends. It is not an expression of lack, but of an acquired power that infuses one’s social milieu with empowering love and joy, creating agreements in nature and power where they did not previously exist. Attention to generosity reveals not only that there are social virtues proper to Spinoza’s understanding of freedom but that freedom itself is, by necessity, social. (shrink)

This paper offers an interpretation of Spinoza's theory of ideas as a theory of power. The consideration of ideas in terms of force and vitality figures ideology critique as a struggle within the power of thought to give life support to some ideas, while starving others. Because ideas, considered absolutely on Spinoza's terms, are indifferent to human flourishing, they survive, thrive, or atrophy on the basis of their relationship to ambient ideas. Thus, the effort to think and live well requires (...) attention to the collective dimensions of thinking life, where "collective" refers to a transpersonal accumulation of ideal power that includes human as well as nonhuman beings. Because it is a matter of force and power rather than truth and falsity, the project of thinking otherwise entails an effort to displace and to reorganize ideas that is best undertaken by coordinating and galvanizing many thinking powers. (shrink)

How could a philosopher who insists on the exclusion of women from citizenship and state office by virtue of their insuperable weakness be an inspiration for feminism? The puzzles over Spinoza’s egalitarian credentials pose a problem particularly if one understands feminism primarily or exclusively as a demand for equality with men. When feminism is seen as a subcategory of Enlightenment commitments, one may choose to see Spinoza’s misogyny as superficial and as a betrayal of the radical potential of the egalitarianism (...) yielded by his metaphysics. But if feminism is not understood exclusively as one strand of late modern orthodoxy, we might better understand the surprising companionship of Spinoza and feminism. Indeed, Moira Gatens finds the heterodoxy of Spinoza’s thinking with respect to the ruling ideas today to be what is most valuable for feminism. Feminist Spinozism does not add to the chorus of praise for egalitarianism, secular politics, or the authority of reason in contrast to power. The Spinozist feminism pioneered by Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd finds resources precisely in Spinoza’s challenges to late modern common sense, including perhaps especially an ethics and politics grounded in the givenness of human equality. (shrink)

Numerous studies of the beliefs of people with anorexia nervosa (AN) suggest that a subset of such individuals may experience delusions. We first describe what makes a belief delusional and conclude that such characteristics can be appropriately applied to some beliefs of people with AN. Next, we outline how delusional beliefs may relate to the broader psychopathological process in AN, including: (1) they may be epiphenomenal; (2) they may be an initial partial cause of AN; (3) they may be caused (...) by aspects of AN; or (4) they may be sustaining causes, possibly involved in reciprocal causal relations with aspects of AN. We argue that there is good reason to believe that delusional beliefs of people with AN are not merely epiphenomenal, but rather that they’re causally connected to AN. Because of this, empirical studies can be designed to test for the presence of causal relations. We describe how these studies should be designed. The results of such studies have important implications for understanding the experience of individuals with AN and for the treatment of AN. We outline these implications. (shrink)

Buddhist philosophy asserts that human suffering is caused by ignorance regarding the true nature of reality. According to this, perceptions and thoughts are largely fabrications of our own minds, based on conditioned tendencies which often involve problematic fears, aversions, compulsions, etc. In Buddhist psychology, these tendencies reside in a portion of mind known as Store consciousness. Here, I suggest a correspondence between this Buddhist Store consciousness and the neuroscientific idea of stored synaptic weights. These weights are strong synaptic connections built (...) in through experience. Buddhist philosophy claims that humans can find relief from suffering through a process in which the Store consciousness is transformed. Here, I argue that this Buddhist 'transformation at the base' corresponds to a loosening of the learned synaptic connections. I will argue that Buddhist meditation practices create conditions in the brain which are optimal for diminishing the strength of our conditioned perceptual and behavioural tendencies. (shrink)

Like any broad narrative about the history of ideas, this one involves a number of simplifications. My hope is that by taking a closer look Spinoza's notorious remarks on animals, we can understand better why it becomes especially urgent in this period as well as our own for philosophers to emphasize a distinction between human and nonhuman animals. In diagnosing the concerns that give rise to the desire to dismiss the independent purposes of animals, we may come to focus on (...) a new aspect of what needs to change about contemporary thinking on species divisions. In what follows, I will bring out Spinoza's contradictory and ambivalent remarks pertaining to the specific differences between humans and animals. It is my suspicion that this ambivalence continues to plague us today. Like Spinoza, we want to say that humans are like and unlike animals. As a simply descriptive claim, it may be true and innocuous. Yet, the way we affirm our proximity and distance from nonhuman animals requires careful attention. Spinoza viewed this proximity as a source of danger. We might do well to emphasize, with thinkers such as Donna Haraway (2003),how our proximity and difference are also sources of pleasure and power, both to be able to enjoy the affectionate bond that can often develop between humans and our animal companions but also to quell the anxiety that might encourage us to exploit and abuse them. (shrink)

(Selection) In her provocative introduction to the interdisciplinary collection Extinction, Claire Colebrook diagnoses posthumanism as “delusional,” “symptomatic,” and “psychotic.” Now that we live in what geologists informally call the “anthropocene” – a new epoch in which a preponderance of the earth’s systems are irreversibly altered by human activity – she claims that it is dangerous, insane even, to imagine that the traditional, “Cartesian” idea of man as master of nature is invalid. The declaration of the death of man betrays a (...) willful denial of humanity’s destructive capacity. The dream that man is disappearing like a “face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea” is a symptom of a psychosis that protects us from the truth of man’s irretrievable imprint: eroding coral reefs, melting glaciers, gaping ozone, thousands of extinct species, and so much more. Colebrook’s is not only an indictment of French post-structuralism. She issues no less a challenge to feminist posthumanisms, which have launched influential assaults against the Cartesian figure of the self-possessed subject (who, we must admit, has few defenders in Continental philosophy generally). Does the heralding of the anthropocene demand a critical revival of Cartesian humanism? Must we affirm that humans are exceptional after all? (shrink)

This paper develops the implications of Spinoza’s invocation in chapter 6 of the traditional analogy between the oikos and the polis. Careful attention to this analogy reveals a number of interesting features of Spinoza’s political theory. Spinoza challenges the perception that absolute monarchy offers greater respite from the intolerable anxiety of the state of nature than does democracy. He acknowledges that people associate monarchical rule with peace and stability, but asserts that it can too easily deform its subjects. Unchallenged monarchy (...) may be credited with a certain order, “but if slavery, barbarism, and desolation are to be called peace, there can be nothing more wretched for mankind than peace.” This is all familiar to friends of Spinoza, but what kind of democracy is the alternative to those monarchies that tend toward despotism? It is a form of association that, he suggests, resembles a bitterly quarrelsome but nevertheless virtuous family. Thus, he admits that democratic, or popular, rule is typically turbulent and disorderly, but urges his reader to view contentions and disputes as a kind of salutary discord that preserves rather than threatens virtue. (shrink)

This essay contends that Spinoza provides a valuable analysis of the ‘‘affective’’damage to a social body caused by fear, anxiety, and ‘‘superstition.’’ Far from being primarily an external threat, this essay argues that terrorism and the promulgationof fear by the current administration in the United States pose a threat to internalsocial cohesion. The capacity to respond in constructive and ameliorative ways tocurrent global conflicts is radically undermined by amplifying corrosive relationshipsof anxiety, suspicion and hatred among citizens. Spinoza presents a portrait (...) of natural and political existence as deeply relational and ‘‘affective’’ such that human freedom and power depend upon the concern for the affective and passionatedispositions of human bodies and minds. In order for democracy, the power of themany, to exist effectively, the social body must be ruled by ‘‘joyful passions’’ rather than ‘‘sad passions,’’ which are destructive and debilitating by nature. (shrink)

Spinoza was generally silent on the topic of women. Despite Spinoza's sometimes noxious remarks on women, several feminist theorists have found resources and inspiration in his philosophy. The promising features feminist theorists have thus far identified in Spinoza's philosophy can be placed into three major categories: anti‐individualism; the conatus doctrine; anti‐dualism. Spinoza's philosophy might be understood as a unique and comprehensive form of structural analysis. Feminists are also keenly interested in how domination is interiorized, how it comes to form the (...) first‐person experience of individuals and/ or the psychology of groups. Egalitarian feminism draws on the liberal feminist tradition, according to which there are no morally relevant differences between men and women. Sexual difference feminism is often misunderstood to assert an essential difference between women and men, to assert the importance of recognizing one axis of difference, the sexual difference between male and female. (shrink)

In this commentary, I respond to the core question of Ruddick’s paper: How does the theoretical dethroning of humanity force us to reinvent ethics? In so doing, I expand on Spinoza’s profound contribution to the radical rethinking of the subject at the level of ontology. Although Ruddick invokes Spinoza, first and foremost, as a potential resource for ethics in light of climate disruption, I conclude that those resources offer only a glimmer of how to live differently. The work of re-imagination (...) at the level of metaphysics is flourishing, but we have yet to develop its implications for ethics and politics. (shrink)

This paper outlines Spinoza’s two diametrically opposed views on the question of sexual equality. In the Political Treatise, he contends that women are naturally inferior to men, and that they are unable to practice virtue. Yet, he presents an antithetical portrait of Eve in his retelling of the Fall in the Ethics. There, Eve’s nature accords perfectly with Adam’s, and their relationship might have promoted virtue in each of them. Attention to Spinoza’s version of the Fall reveals the profound importance (...) of the human bond for the enjoyment of freedom, and the possibility that women are not categorically excluded from Spinoza’s vision of virtue. (shrink)

After the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, most states enacted new measures to constrain international mobility. By May 8th, 2020, more than 93% of the world’s population lived in states with special entry bans and more than three billion lived in countries whose borders were almost completely closed to non-citizens. Can such measures be justified? If so, would this undermine the open borders view? This paper examines these questions. It argues, first, that, although short-term entry bans and other similar measures (...) designed to protect public health can be justified, these bans need to be designed with a number of exemptions, in particular, for asylum seekers and refugees. Even in times of pandemic, completely closed borders are indefensible. It argues, second, that although extreme versions of the open borders position may have difficulty accepting this conclusion, other versions of the position can consistently justify special entry restrictions. (shrink)

This paper examines the relationship between violence and the domination of speech in Spinoza’s political thought. Spinoza describes the cost of such violence to the State, to the collective epistemic resources, and to the members of the polity that domination aims to script and silence. Spinoza shows how obedience to a dominating power requires pretense and deception. The pressure to pretend is the linchpin of an account of how oppression severely degrades the conditions for meaningful communication, and thus the possibilities (...) for thinking and acting in common. Because it belongs to human nature to desire to share our thoughts with others, Spinoza believes that most people experience efforts to control our communication to be acutely intolerable. As a result, such unbearable violence threatens the political order that deploys it. I conclude with some speculative remarks about why, in the Theological-Political Treatise, Spinoza consistently deploys the superlative form of the adjective violentus in reference to the domination of thought and speech rather than to other modes of political violence. (shrink)

Non-communicable diseases now account for the majority of the global burden of disease and an international campaign has emerged to raise their priority on the post-2015 development agenda. We argue, to the contrary, that there remain strong reasons to prioritize maternal and child health. Policy-makers ought to assign highest priority to the health conditions that afflict the worst off. In virtue of how little healthy life they have had, children who die young are among the globally worst off. Moreover, many (...) interventions to deal with the conditions that cause mortality in the young are low-cost and provide great benefits to their recipients. Consistent with the original Millennium Development Goals, the international community should continue to prioritize reductions in communicable diseases, neonatal conditions, and maternal health despite the shifts in the global burden of disease. (shrink)

Balibar presents Spinoza as a profound critic of " the anthropomorphic illusion. " Spinoza famously derides the tendency of humans to project their own imagined traits and tendencies onto the rest of nature. The anthropomorphic illusion yields a gross overestimation our own agency. I argue in this essay that the flip side of this illusion is our refusal to extend certain properties we reserve exclusively to ourselves. The result is that we disregard the power of social and political institutions because (...) they do not resemble us. The anthropomorphic illusion therefore causes us both to overestimate our power as singular individuals and to underestimate the power of social and political institutions. If we understand ourselves and institutions as " transindividuals " rather than on the illusory model of substantial individuality, it is unproblematic to attribute individuality to collective powers, like the commonwealth, and makes better sense of how we are determined by external forces. (shrink)

In what follows, I will substantiate the argument that there are at least two senses in which Spinoza’s principles support revolutionary change. I will begin with a quick survey of his concerns with the problem of insurrection. I will proceed to show that if political programs can be called revolutionary, insofar as freedom is their motivation and justification, and insofar as freedom implies an expansion of the scope of the general interest to the whole political body, Spinoza ought to be (...) called a revolutionary. Finally, I will contend that even if he does not praise mass insurrection, he finds its guarantee in the laws of human nature itself, which cannot tolerate tyranny. And, thus, it is in a revolutionary vein that Spinoza cites Seneca repeatedly: violenta imperianemo continuit diu (TTP 5 8, 16 9). (shrink)

Although Spinoza’s words about intuition, also called “the third kind of knowledge,” remain among the most difficult to grasp, I argue that he succeeds in providing an account of its distinctive character. Moreover, the special place that intuition holds in Spinoza’s philosophy is grounded not in its epistemological distinctiveness, but in its ethical promise. I will not go as far as one commentator to claim that the epistemological distinction is negligible (Malinowski-Charles 2003),but I do argue that its privileged place in (...) Spinoza’s system belongs primarily to its ethical importance, by which I mean that intuition’s value is prized by virtue of the agency it confers upon those who enjoy it. Spinoza often notes that what distinguishes the “wise man” is that he is more powerful, able to do more. That is,the wise and free person with whose description the Ethics culminates is set apart not, first and foremost, by virtue of possessing a scientific account of the true cosmological order. The Ethics is perhaps called an ethics, rather than a treatise on metaphysics or knowledge, because it concludes with a demonstration of how one comes to be able to do what is best and to live a more joyful life. Intuitive science is essential to the characterization of the power to think and live well. (shrink)

The writings of Simone Weil support a feminist philosophy of education that locates freedom in self-determined creative work within contexts of necessity. In particular, Weil’s discussion of Force, the Good, Work, Method and Time provide criteria for a feminist philosophy of education, in terms of educational ends and means. Philosophy for Children is relevant to each of these themes, in various ways.

Rorty finds that my own appropriation of Spinoza toward a re-conception of ideology critique falls short, however, by (a) failing to “take Spinoza’s mind-body identity seriously” and by (b) advocating a “battle of ideas” rather than an enlargement of perspective. She presents an illuminating analysis of how, according to Spinoza, dichotomies serve as blunt provisional tools that become counterproductive once understanding is reached. She suggests that I preserve certain distinctions to the detriment of my own liberation project, such as the (...) distinction between the truth of an idea and its persuasive force. As part of criticism (a), she admonishes me for neglecting the importance of material conditions, and with criticism (b) she suggests that the imagery of battle misconstrues the project of becoming rational and the power of truth. Below I will try to show that we do not disagree about either the importance of material conditions for a project of political transformation or the identity of mind and body in substance. We do disagree, however, about the character of ideology critique. I will offer an example, in an attempt to demonstrate why it is neither a distortion of Spinoza nor strategically counterproductive to understand the project of thinking as an effort of what I call “resistant reconstruction” within the attribute of thought. (shrink)

Against the common understanding that the Ethics promotes a "radical anti-emotion program," I claim that Spinoza describes an immanent transformation of love from a form of madness to an expression of wisdom. Love as madness produces the affects that another tradition unites in the seven deadly sins, such as lust, gluttony, envy, greed, and pride. Spinoza, however, never condemns these affects as such. Within each affect one can find its "correct use" (E5p10schol), which enables us to love and to live (...) otherwise. As we come to understand our beloveds as determinate expressions both of nature's power and of our own ability to persevere in being, we find conditions for our liberation within these most burdensome of passions. More specifically, as we diminish our tendency to imagine what we love in terms of its finitude and susceptibility to loss, we are determined to love and to know both others and ourselves by the joyful passions. Ultimately, Spinoza's portrait of love suggests ways of life that generate the satisfaction of our possessive desire with the collective and inclusive love of, certainly, the eternal and immutable thing, but also the eternal and immutable in things, in each other, and above all, in ourselves. In other words, Spinoza's economics of love and possession point up the desire to appropriate our own power in and of community, and in of nature. (shrink)

In examining Judith Butler's treatment of Spinoza insofar as it reflects the tenacity of a commitment to the need to "honor the death drive," a need often justified by the ethical and political resources it provides, this essay asks about the basis of this need for feminist theory. From whence does it come? What ethical and political work does a primary vigilance toward our destructive and death-bent urges do? Thus, I begin with a review of Butler's treatment of Spinoza, and (...) proceed to make some suggestions about what motivates her creative appropriation of his principle of conatus. Finally, without demanding that Butler represent Spinoza's philosophy accurately, I propose that Spinoza's philosophy allows a very strong acknowledgment of destruction, including self-destruction, without conceding the necessity of an ethics or politics of anxiety. Like Butler, and perhaps even more radically, Spinoza insists upon our opacity to ourselves, our irreducible and original multiplicity and constitutive relationality, as well as the inability finally to demarcate the boundaries of the self. Yet his ethics culminates in what he calls a "remedy for the affects," in an endeavor to displace and minimize sad passions, like anxiety. In concluding, the question for feminist theory remains: Which are the best fictions, models of selfhood, and modes of speculation for the displacement of anxiety, aggression, and the passions that trigger violence agianst ourselves and others in a misogynist, homophobic, and racist culture? If I am not able to answer these questions in the course of this brief essay, I hope to underline the importance of asking them. (shrink)

I begin this paper with a survey of the textual evidence for a new Cartesian subject, a post-Cartesian Cartesian individual, for whom the life of the body, its passions, and its relationships are central. In the second section, I consider his remarks on hatred, which complicate his view embodied life. Even if Descartes’s study of the passions in his treatise as well as his correspondence calls for a more nuanced understanding of the Cartesian person, we will find in his attention (...) to embodiment a conflicted and wary human being for whom relationships can be nourishing and sweet just as easily as they can be noxious and bitter. (shrink)

This essay examines Elizabeth Grosz's provocative claim that feminist and anti-racist theorists should reject a politics of recognition in favor of "a politics of imperceptibility." She criticizes any humanist politics centered upon a dialectic between self and other. I turn to Spinoza to develop and explore her alternative proposal. I claim that Spinoza offers resources for her promising politics of corporeality, proximity, power, and connection that includes all of nature, which feminists should explore.

In asserting that the desire to possess what we cannot exclusively and permanently have lies at the root of human misery, Spinoza's Ethics discloses a problem that requires a political response. Although the final part of the Ethics appears to be the least practical of Spinoza's writings, it nonetheless foregrounds the tangible problem of our desire for possession, our desire to have what gives us joy. Moreover, it proposes a remedial practice by means of which this problematic desire might generate (...) satisfaction and strength rather than frustration and suffering. The "remedy for the affects" demands a reorientation of one's possessive desire corollary to the fundamentally affective and affirmative understanding of justice propounded in Spinoza's political writings. The cure for the possessive lovesickness portrayed in the Ethics, I aim to show, entails institutions of justice insofar as they operate upon our proprietary desires. (shrink)

A repository of clinically associated Staphylococcus aureus (Sa) isolates is used to semi‐automatically generate a set of application ontologies for specific subfamilies of Sa‐related disease. Each such application ontology is compatible with the Infectious Disease Ontology (IDO) and uses resources from the Open Biomedical Ontology (OBO) Foundry. The set of application ontologies forms a lattice structure beneath the IDO‐Core and IDO‐extension reference ontologies. We show how this lattice can be used to define a strategy for the construction of a new (...) taxonomy of infectious disease incorporating genetic, molecular, and clinical data. We also outline how faceted browsing and query of annotated data is supported using a lattice application ontology. (shrink)

Robert Grosseteste.--Thomas of York.--Roger Bacon.--John Pecham.--Richard of Middleton.--Duns Scotus.--Conclusion.--Bibliography (p. [409]-412).

An accurate classification of bacteria is essential for the proper identification of patient infections and subsequent treatment decisions. Multi-Locus Sequence Typing (MLST) is a genetic technique for bacterial classification. MLST classifications are used to cluster bacteria into clonal complexes. Importantly, clonal complexes can serve as a biological species concept for bacteria, facilitating an otherwise difficult taxonomic classification. In this paper, we argue for the inclusion of terms relating to clonal complexes in biomedical ontologies.

(Selection) Despite its contemplative, earnest, and, at times, disarmingly conversational tone, Spinoza's Religion is a rather provocative book. The epithets thrown at Spinoza throughout the early modern period—referring to the Theological-Political Treatise as that most "pestilential book," "forged in hell" by a godless rebel and atheist—are today badges of pride. Spinoza is celebrated among scholars and in popular culture for his uncompromising iconoclasm. He is admired for his refusal, following his ban from Judaism as a young man, to align with (...) any religious faith. Regarded as a staunch critic of religion, Spinoza is credited with paving the way for secular morality, guided by scientific and rational knowledge. With Spinoza's Religion, Carlisle urges us to understand the Ethics as a fundamentally religious text, which, at the same time, transforms our ideas of what religion is. (shrink)

Vaccine research, as well as the development, testing, clinical trials, and commercial uses of vaccines involve complex processes with various biological data that include gene and protein expression, analysis of molecular and cellular interactions, study of tissue and whole body responses, and extensive epidemiological modeling. Although many data resources are available to meet different aspects of vaccine needs, it remains a challenge how we are to standardize vaccine annotation, integrate data about varied vaccine types and resources, and support advanced vaccine (...) data analysis and inference. To address these problems, the community-based Vaccine Ontology (VO) has been developed through collaboration with vaccine researchers and many national and international centers and programs, including the National Center for Biomedical Ontology (NCBO), the Infectious Disease Ontology (IDO) Initiative, and the Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI). VO utilizes the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) as the top ontology and the Relation Ontology (RO) for definition of term relationships. VO is represented in the Web Ontology Language (OWL) and edited using the Protégé-OWL. Currently VO contains more than 2000 terms and relationships. VO emphasizes on classification of vaccines and vaccine components, vaccine quality and phenotypes, and host immune response to vaccines. These reflect different aspects of vaccine composition and biology and can thus be used to model individual vaccines. More than 200 licensed vaccines and many vaccine candidates in research or clinical trials have been modeled in VO. VO is being used for vaccine literature mining through collaboration with the National Center for Integrative Biomedical Informatics (NCIBI). Multiple VO applications will be presented. (shrink)

The nucleus accumbens orchestrates processes related to reward and pleasure, including the addictive consequences of repeated reward (e.g., drug addiction and compulsive gambling) and the accompanying feelings of craving and anhedonia. The neurotransmitters dopamine and endogenous opiates play interactive roles in these processes. They are released by natural rewards (i.e., food, water, sex, money, play, etc.) and are released or mimicked by drugs of abuse. Repeated drug use induces conditioned down-regulation of these neurotransmitters, thus causing painful suppression of everyday pleasure. (...) As with many spiritual traditions, Buddhism provides strong advice against the pursuit of worldly pleasures to attain the ‘‘good life.’’ In contrast, many forms of meditation give rise to an immense and abiding joy. Most of these practices involve ‘‘stilling the mind,’’ whereby all content-laden thought (e.g., fantasies, daydreams, plans) ceases, and the mind enters a state of openness, formlessness, clarity, and bliss. This can be explained by the Buddhist suggestion that almost all of our everyday thoughts are a form of addiction. It follows that if we turn off this internal ‘‘gossip of ego,’’ we will find relief from the biochemical dopamine/opiate down-regulation, which is, perhaps, the perpetual concomitant of our daily rumination. (shrink)

In a recent study, we found a negative association between psychopathy and violence against genetic relatives. We interpreted this result as a form of nepotism and argued that it failed to support the hypothesis that psychopathy is a mental disorder, suggesting instead that it supports the hypothesis that psychopathy is an evolved life history strategy. This interpretation and subsequent arguments have been challenged in a number of ways. Here, we identify several misunderstandings regarding the harmful dysfunction definition of mental disorder (...) as it applies to psychopathy and regarding the meaning of nepotism. Furthermore, we examine the evidence provided by our critics that psychopathy is associated with other disorders, and we offer a comment on their alternative model of psychopathy. We conclude that there remains little evidence that psychopathy is the product of dysfunctional mechanisms. (shrink)

Unlike natural-born citizens, many immigrants have agreed to undertake political obligations. Many have sworn oaths of allegiance. Many, when they entered their adopted country, promised to obey the law. This paper is about these agreements. First, it’s about their validity. Do they actually confer political obligations? Second, it’s about their justifiability. Is it permissible to get immigrants to undertake such political obligations? Our answers are ‘usually yes’ and ‘probably not’ respectively. We first argue that these agreements give immigrants political obligations. (...) We then argue that getting immigrants to undertake such obligations is morally wrong. This is because it makes immigrants’ political obligations more burdensome than those of natural-born citizens. We conclude that the practice of getting immigrants to undertake such obligations should be abolished. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic prompted immense work on the investigation of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Rapid, accurate, and consistent interpretation of generated data is thereby of fundamental concern. Ontologies––structured, controlled, vocabularies––are designed to support consistency of interpretation, and thereby to prevent the development of data silos. This paper describes how ontologies are serving this purpose in the COVID-19 research domain, by following principles of the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontology (OBO) Foundry and by reusing existing ontologies such as the Infectious Disease Ontology (...) (IDO) Core, which provides terminological content common to investigations of all infectious diseases. We report here on the development of an IDO extension, the Virus Infectious Disease Ontology (VIDO), a reference ontology covering viral infectious diseases. We motivate term and definition choices, showcase reuse of terms from existing OBO ontologies, illustrate how ontological decisions were motivated by relevant life science research, and connect VIDO to the Coronavirus Infectious Disease Ontology (CIDO). We next use terms from these ontologies to annotate selections from life science research on SARS-CoV-2, highlighting how ontologies employing a common upper-level vocabulary may be seamlessly interwoven. Finally, we outline future work, including bacteria and fungus infectious disease reference ontologies currently under development, then cite uses of VIDO and CIDO in host-pathogen data analytics, electronic health record annotation, and ontology conflict-resolution projects. (shrink)