A self-fulfilling prophecy in neuroprognostication occurs when a patient in coma is predicted to have a poor outcome, and life-sustaining treatment is withdrawn on the basis of that prediction, thus directly bringing about a poor outcome for that patient. In contrast to the predominant emphasis in the bioethics literature, we look beyond the moral issues raised by the possibility that an erroneous prediction might lead to the death of a patient who otherwise would have lived. Instead, we focus on the (...) problematic epistemic consequences of neuroprognostic SFPs in settings where research and practice intersect. When this sort of SFP occurs, the problem is that physicians and researchers are never in a position to notice whether their original prognosis was correct or incorrect, since the patient dies anyway. Thus, SFPs keep us from discerning false positives from true positives, inhibiting proper assessment of novel prognostic tests. This epistemic problem of SFPs thus impedes learning, but ethical obligations of patient care make it difficult to avoid SFPs. We then show how the impediment to catching false positive indicators of poor outcome distorts research on novel techniques for neuroprognostication, allowing biases to persist in prognostic tests. We finally highlight a particular risk that a precautionary bias towards early withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment may be amplified. We conclude with guidelines about how researchers can mitigate the epistemic problems of SFPs, to achieve more responsible innovation of neuroprognostication for patients in coma. (shrink)

In this article, I examine the moral dimensions of gender affirmation. I argue that the moral value of gender affirmation is rooted in what Iris Murdoch called loving attention. Loving attention is central to the moral value of gender affirmation because such affirmation is otherwise too fragile or insincere to have such value. Moral reasons to engage in acts that gender affirm derive from the commitment to give and express loving attention to trans people as a way of challenging their (...) marginalization. In the latter part of the paper, I will discuss how my arguments bear on recent arguments by Robin Dembroff and Daniel Wodak (2018) on the use of gender-neutral language. They argue that we have a duty not to use gender-specific pronouns for anyone. Their conclusion turns, in part, on a rejection of gender affirmation as a moral duty. The value of gender affirmation, rooted in our moral perception of trans people, should make us skeptical of this conclusion, in favor of a more nuanced and pluralistic approach to the ethics of gendering. (shrink)

Recently, bioethicists and the UNCRPD have advocated for supported medical decision-making on behalf of patients with intellectual disabilities. But what does supported decision-making really entail? One compelling framework is Anita Silvers and Leslie Francis’ mental prosthesis account, which envisions supported decision-making as a process in which trustees act as mere appendages for the patient’s will; the trustee provides the cognitive tools the patient requires to realize her conception of her own good. We argue that supported decision-making would be better understood (...) as a collaborative process, giving patients with intellectual disabilities the opportunity to make decisions in a respectful relationship with trusted others. We offer an alternative account of supported decision-making where the primary constraint is to protect the patient from domination by the trustee. This is advantageous in its preservation of the prospects for genuine collaboration, for the mental prosthesis approach ultimately reinforces a problematic ideal of isolated patient self-determination. (shrink)

The genetic modification of pigs as a source of transplantable organs is one of several possible solutions to the chronic organ shortage. This paper describes existing ethical tensions in xenotransplantation (XTx) that argue against pursuing it. Recommendations for lifelong infectious disease surveillance and notification of close contacts of recipients are in tension with the rights of human research subjects. Parental/guardian consent for pediatric xenograft recipients is in tension with a child’s right to an open future. Individual consent to transplant is (...) in tension with public health threats that include zoonotic diseases. XTx amplifies concerns about justice in organ transplantation and could exacerbate existing inequities. The prevention of infectious disease in source animals is in tension with the best practices of animal care and animal welfare, requiring isolation, ethologically inappropriate housing, and invasive reproductive procedures that would severely impact the well-being of intelligent social creatures like pigs. (shrink)

This paper aims to measure Knowledge Management Maturity (KMM) in the universities to determine the impact of knowledge management on high performance. This study was applied on Al-Quds Open University in Gaza strip, Palestine. Asian productivity organization model was applied to measure KMM. Second dimension which assess high performance was developed by the authors. The controlled sample was (306). Several statistical tools were used for data analysis and hypotheses testing, including reliability Correlation using Cronbach’s alpha, “ANOVA”, Simple Linear Regression and (...) Step Wise Regression.The overall findings of the current study suggest that KMM is suitable for measuring high performance. KMM assessment shows that maturity level is in level three. Findings also support the main hypothesis and it is sub- hypotheses. The most important factors effecting high performance are: Processes, KM leadership, People, KM Outcomes and Learning and Innovation. Furthermore the current study is unique by the virtue of its nature, scope and way of implied investigation, as it is the first comparative study in the universities of Palestine explores the status of KMM using the Asian productivity Model. (shrink)

Many real-world agents recognise that they impose harms by choosing to emit carbon, e.g., by flying. Yet many do so anyway, and then attempt to make things right by offsetting those harms. Such offsetters typically believe that, by offsetting, they change the deontic status of their behaviour, making an otherwise impermissible action permissible. Do they succeed in practice? Some philosophers have argued that they do, since their offsets appear to reverse the adverse effects of their emissions. But we show that (...) they do not. In practice, standard carbon offsetting does not reverse the harms of the original action, nor does it even benefit the same group as was harmed. Standard moral theories hence deny that such offsetting succeeds. Indeed, we show that any moral theory that allows offsetting in this setting faces a dilemma between allowing any wrong to be offset, no matter how grievous, and recognising an implausibly sharp discontinuity between offsettable actions and non-offsettable actions. The most plausible response is to accept that carbon offsetting fails to right our climate wrongs. (shrink)

In the present article, I offer a new reading of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, specifically her argument that ideologies such as racism engender totalitarianism when the lonely and disenfranchised laborers of modern society develop a pathological fixation on formal logic, which I term “logomania.” That is, such logical deductions, from horrifically false premises, are the closest thing to thinking that individuals can engage in after their psyches, relationships, and communities have broken down. And it is only thus that (...) totalitarianism can achieve power, since it offers at least some form of connectedness and meaning, regardless how terrifying and violent. The danger persists, clearly, with the resurgence of the far Right, including in the extraordinary regime of Trump in the United States. From this I conclude that, along with the admirable calls to fight loneliness and rebuild our communities, we should also supplement all formal logical instruction and community education with instruction in creative thinking (including aesthetics), thereby discouraging the monomaniac reliance on formal logic as inadvertent weapon of totalitarianism. (shrink)

This article investigates the hitherto under-examined relations between affirmative action, paternalism and respect. We provide three main arguments. First, we argue that affirmative action initiatives are typically paternalistic and thus disrespectful towards those intended beneficiaries who oppose the initiatives in question. Second, we argue that not introducing affirmative action can also be disrespectful towards these potential beneficiaries because such inaction involves a failure to adequately recognize their moral worth. Third, we argue that the paternalistic disrespect involved in affirmative action is (...) alleviated when the potential beneficiaries’ preferences against such initiatives are adaptive. We conclude that although there is a relevant sense in which paternalistic affirmative action is disrespectful, it may well be more disrespectful not to pursue such policies. (shrink)

As inductive decision-making procedures, the inferences made by machine learning programs are subject to underdetermination by evidence and bear inductive risk. One strategy for overcoming these challenges is guided by a presumption in philosophy of science that inductive inferences can and should be value-free. Applied to machine learning programs, the strategy assumes that the influence of values is restricted to data and decision outcomes, thereby omitting internal value-laden design choice points. In this paper, I apply arguments from feminist philosophy of (...) science to machine learning programs to make the case that the resources required to respond to these inductive challenges render critical aspects of their design constitutively value-laden. I demonstrate these points specifically in the case of recidivism algorithms, arguing that contemporary debates concerning fairness in criminal justice risk-assessment programs are best understood as iterations of traditional arguments from inductive risk and demarcation, and thereby establish the value-laden nature of automated decision-making programs. Finally, in light of these points, I address opportunities for relocating the value-free ideal in machine learning and the limitations that accompany them. (shrink)

With increased visibility of trans people comes increased philosophical interest in gendered language. This chapter aims to look at the research on gendered language in analytic philosophy of language so far, which has focused on two concerns: (1) determining how to define gender terms like ‘man’ and ‘woman’ such that they are trans inclusive and (2) if, or to what extent, we should use gendered language at all. We argue that the literature has focused too heavily on how gendered language (...) can harm trans people, and has not considered how trans people use gendered language to create meaning and joy for ourselves. Pulling from the literature in sociolinguistics, we look at examples of how trans people use language to make their lives better by gaining recognition, playing with gendered language, finding joy in gendered language, and taking control of definitional power, concluding that debates about gendered language need to consider not only how such language harms trans people but also how trans people use it for our own liberation. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that there are reasons to believe that an implicit bias for normalcy influences what are considered medically necessary treatments in psychiatry. First, we outline two prima facie reasons to suspect that this is the case. A bias for ‘the normal’ is already documented in disability studies; it is reasonable to suspect that it affects psychiatry too, since psychiatric patients, like disabled people, are often perceived as ‘weird’ by others. Secondly, psychiatry's explicitly endorsed values of well-being (...) and function are hard to measure directly, which is why we see simpler box-ticking conceptions of recovery used in large research studies. This need not be problematic, but might lead to researchers and clinicians focusing too much on treatments that promote easy-to-measure proxies for recovery, instead of what actually matters to psychiatric patients themselves. Next, we provide examples of treatments and treatment decisions within two areas – self-injury and psychosis – which are hard to explain unless we assume that an implicit and harmful normalcy bias is at work. We conclude with some suggestions for clinicians and future research. (shrink)

Consonant with the ongoing “aesthetic turn” in legal scholarship, this article pursues a new conception of law as poetry. Gestures in this law-as-poetry direction appear in all three main schools in the philosophy of law’s history, as follows. First, natural law sees law as divinely-inspired prophetic poetry. Second, positive law sees the law as a creative human positing (from poetry’s poesis). And third, critical legal theory sees these posited laws as calcified prose prisons, vulnerable to poetic liberation. My first two (...) sections interpret two texts at the intersections among these three theories, namely Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “A Defense of Poetry” and Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Shelley identifies a poetic rebirth in the ruins of natural law, suggesting a philosophy of law as “natural poesis.” And Tocqueville names several figurative aristocracies capable of redeploying aristocratic law against democratic despotism, suggesting a philosophy of law as “aristo-poetic counterforce.” Finally, I propose a new theory of law as poetry bridging these two theories, “natural aristo-poetic counterforce.”. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that there would be no obligatory maxims if the only standards for assessing maxims were Kant’s universalizability tests. The paper is divided into five sections. In the first, I clarify my thesis: I define my terms and disambiguate my thesis from other related theses for which one might argue. In the second, I confront the view that says that if a maxim passes the universalizability tests, then there is a positive duty to adopt that maxim; (...) I also confront a close relative of this view. In the third, I confront the view that says that if a maxim does not pass the universalizability tests, then there is a positive duty to adopt the contradictory of that maxim. In the fourth, I confront two variations of the view that says that if a maxim does not pass the universalizability tests and an agent is deliberating about the action in the maxim, then the agent has a positive duty to adopt the contrary of that maxim. In the fifth, I confront the view that says that if an agent has adopted a maxim of ends, then the agent has a positive duty to universalize that end. I then wrap up the paper with some concluding remarks. (shrink)

Psychiatric patients sometimes ask where to draw the line between who they are – their selves – and their mental illness. This problem is referred to as the self-illness ambiguity in the literature; it has been argued that solving said ambiguity is a crucial part of psychiatric treatment. I distinguish a Realist Solution from a Constructivist one. The former requires finding a supposedly pre-existing border, in the psychiatric patient’s mental life, between that which belongs to the self and that which (...) belongs to the mental illness. I argue that no such border exists, and that attempts to find it might even render the felt ambiguity worse. Instead, any solution must be constructivist; the patient (and others) should deliberate and discuss what to identify with or not. I further argue that psychiatric patients need not see their mental illness as wholly distinct from themselves to avoid ‘identifying with their diagnoses' in a problematic way. Finally, we can excuse problematic behaviour by mentally ill people – in fact, we can do so in a more nuanced and constructive way – while rejecting the view that the mental illness is wholly distinct from the patient’s self. (shrink)

The van Wijngaarden grammars are two-level grammars that present many interesting properties. In the present article I elaborate on six of these properties, to wit, (i) their being constituted by two grammars, (ii) their ability to generate (possibly infinitely many) strict languages and their own metalanguage, (iii) their context-sensitivity, (iv) their high descriptive power, (v) their productivity, or the ability to generate an infinite number of production rules, and (vi) their equivalence with the unrestricted, or Type-0, Chomsky grammars.

According to the “Embodied Cognition” entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the three landmark texts in the 4E cognitive science tradition are Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By, Varela, Thompson, and Rosch’s The Embodied Mind, and Andy Clark’s Being There. In my first section, I offer a phenomenological interpretation of these three texts, identifying recuring affirmations of the figure of dance alongside explicit marginalization of the practice of dance, perhaps in part due to cognitive science’s overemphasis on cognition (...) to the exclusion of affect. In my second section, drawing on my previous interpretations of proto-affect theorists (including Spinoza, Deleuze, and Fanon), I channel this tension in 4E cognitive science into a dancing partnership with human science psychology, suggesting three “choreographic provocations” for therapeutic practice and psychological research, namely (1) treating clients/subjects as dancers, (2) reimagining research and therapy as improvised duets between practitioners and clients/subjects, and (3) pursuing an ideal of freer movement and an emergent flourishing singularity for clients/subjects. Finally, I reformulate these three choreographic provocations in terms of my new theoretical method of “dancing-with,” as well as the four psychological prerequisites for flourishing posited by my figuration philosophy of dance. (shrink)

Stephen Law developed a challenge to theism, known as the evil-god challenge (Law (2010) ). The evil-god challenge to theism is to explain why the theist’s responses to the problem of evil are any better than the diabolist’s – who believes in a supremely evil god – rejoinders to the problem of good, when all the theist’s ploys (theodicy, sceptical theism, etc.) can be parodied by the diabolist. In the first part of this article, I extend the evil-god challenge by (...) showing that additional theist replies to the problem of evil (more theodicies, the privation view of evil, and others) also may be appropriated, with just as much plausibility, in support of the diabolist position. In the second part of the article, I defend the evil-god challenge against several objections. (shrink)

In August 2021, Froese et al. published survey data collected from 2,543 respondents on their subjective experiences living under imposed social distancing measures during COVID-19 (1). The questionnaire was issued to respondents in the UK, Japan, and Mexico. By combining the authors’ expertise in phenomenological philosophy, phenomenological psychopathology, and enactive cognitive science, the questions were carefully phrased to prompt reports that would be useful to phenomenological investigation and theorizing (2–4). These questions reflected the various author’s research interests (e.g., technology, grief, (...) time). Between April 7th and July 31st, 2021, a second questionnaire with the same question set was issued to respondents of the original who had agreed to do a follow-up. This was intended to capture subjective reports of life under social distancing measures a year after the initial survey. By this time–depending on their country of residence and health status–respondents had potentially lived with repeated and prolonged lockdowns and a variety of other restrictions on their social lives. When taken together, Survey I and Survey II provide a cross-cultural and longitudinal dataset that allows for analysis of longer-term impacts of imposed social distancing measures on people’s experiences. For researchers working in diverse disciplines, this dataset offers a rich resource that reflects people’s reactions to the imposition of different social restrictions in different countries and over different time periods. (shrink)

This project was provoked by the almost nonexistent pushback from the Democratic liberal establishment to the (2020) exoneration of Kyle Rittenhouse, despite his acknowledged killing of two Black Lives Matters protesters against the police murder of George Floyd. It builds on three prior articles arguing for the revival of ancient Dionysian practice, Haitian Vodou, and Indigenous South American shamanism to empower leftist revolution. In essence, I propose an assemblage of spiritual practices that are accessible today for the neo-colonized 99% of (...) the global population, by synthesizing and reconstructing three democratic, lower-SES, Indigenous religions, all of which share a militant defiance of their respective tyrannical plutocracies. To avoid cultural appropriation, I center these reconstructed spiritual practices on the figure of the “mage,” a psychosocial healer loosely analogous to a shaman. And the mage’s signature activity, “magic,” I redefine naturalistically as free interpersonal performative action, practiced using two theoretical disciplines (philosophy and psychology) and two practical disciplines chosen by each mage. More precisely, Spirit/Dance channels the “spirits” of dead ancestors, historical figures, legendary heroes, mythical beings, and fictional characters, into the three ultimate objectives of “mindfulness” for psyches/souls, “liberation” for mindful bodies, and “social justice” for liberated communities, indirectly empowering long-term revolution. (shrink)

This paper considers three possible ways of understanding the claim that the American criminal justice system is racist: individualist, “patterns”-based, and ideology-based theories of institutional racism. It rejects an individualist explanation of institutional racism because such an explanation fails to explain the widespread prevalence of anti-black racism in this system or indeed in the United States. It considers a “patterns” account of institutional racism, where consistent patterns of disparate racial effect mimic the structure of intentional projects of racial subjugation like (...) slavery or Jim Crow. While a “patterns” account helpfully directs attention to the effects of policies and practices that make up an institution, it does not fully explain the deep roots of anti-blackness in the criminal justice system in the United States. The paper concludes by defending an ideology-based theory of institutional racism for understanding the criminal justice system because the stereotype of the black criminal has a mutually reinforcing relationship with the patterns of disparate outcome for black people in the criminal justice system. This relationship creates a looping effect where the stereotype of the black criminal fuels the disproportionate involvement of black people in the criminal justice system, and the disproportionate representation of black people with felony records, in prisons, brutalized in police encounters, and so on reinforces the idea that black people are especially prone to criminality. Ideological approaches to racism that integrate attention to the patterns of disparate effect best explain what it means to say that the criminal justice system is racist. (shrink)

Criminal law practices in the US, including policing and incarceration, have drawn heavy criticism for their disproportionate impact on black people, particularly black men. At the same time, some feminist scholars and activists advocate for increases in criminal law responses to sexual assault, including expanding criminal statutes to cover more instances of sexual assault and increasing sentencing guidelines. These reforms are often justified by claims that criminal law should express more feminist values and reject sexist social schemas. This paper makes (...) the case that criminal legal interventions aimed at changing sexist social schemas, such as ‘rape culture,’ are unlikely to be successful because criminal law is effective at maintaining existing social norms, but bad at introducing novel ones. Similarly, in the US, criminality has been ideologically linked to blackness, so attempts to use the stigma of criminality to combat sexual violence are likely to reinforce anti-black racism. The very meaning of a criminal law depends on related social schemas, and the racist social schemas associated with criminality undermine the ability of criminal legal responses to present anti-sexist values. At best, criminal legal reforms aimed at expressing the equal dignity of women will be ambiguous because their meaning is negotiated by existing sexist and racist social schemas. Thus, penal expressivism cannot offer a justification for using criminal law to combat sexual assault. (shrink)

This paper considers the prospect of moral transhumanism from the perspective of theological virtue ethics. I argue that the pursuit of goodness inherent to moral transhumanism means that there is a compelling prima facie case for moral enhancement. However, I also show that the proposed enhancements would not by themselves allow us to achieve a life of virtue, as they appear unable to create or enhance prudence, the situational judgement essential for acting in accordance with virtue. I therefore argue that (...) moral enhancement technologies should take a limited or supporting role in moral development, which I call ‘moral supplementation’. (shrink)

Are living organisms--as Descartes argued--just machines? Or is the nature of life such that it can never be fully explained by mechanistic models? In this thought-provoking and controversial book, eminent geophysicist Walter M. Elsasser argues that the behavior of living organisms cannot be reduced to physico-chemical causality. Suggesting that molecular biology today is at the same point as Newtonian physics on the eve of the quantum revolution, Elsasser lays the foundation for a theoretical biology that points the way toward a (...) natural philosophy of organic life. Explicitly repudiating "vitalism" (the notion that the laws of nature need to be modified when applied to living organisms), Elsasser argues instead that the structural complexity of even a single living cell is "transcomputational"--that is, beyond the power of any imaginable system to compute. Beginning from this insight, Elsasser leads the reader through a step-by-step process that ultimately arrives at the conclusion that living and non-living matter are separated by "a no-man's land of irrationality." Trained in Germany as a physicist, Elsasser first pondered the implications of quantum mechanics for biology as early as 1951. The more closely he studied the inherent complexity of life, the more skeptical he became of the reductionist view of organisms as tiny machines. "An organism," he concluded, "is a source of causal chains which cannot be traced beyond a terminal point because they are lost in the unfathomable complexity of the organism." Like the physicist who works within the bounds of an unfathomable universe, Elsasser argues, the biologist must seek answers within a system that is no less unfathomable. (shrink)

As I have explored elsewhere, the Birmingham Philosophy Guild, which my former students and I re-founded in 2012, is a team of community members who engage in theoretical discussion, support group self-cultivation, and community activism. To further promote the guild as a catalyst for progressive social change, the present article connects it to both the popular cultural phenomenon of the “X-Men”—to make the guild more appealing to students and laypeople—and to the cutting-edge contemporary French philosophy of Étienne Balibar—to make the (...) guild more appealing to professors and culture workers. Moreover, the article connects these low- and high-brow phenomena to each other as well, thereby illustrating the political relevance of the lower, as well as a weakness in the higher, pursuant to social justice activism today. (shrink)

Does martial arts practice contribute to psychological well-being in professional martial artists? If so, what are the specific ways that martial arts practice accomplishes this? It has been a long-standing and widely held belief that martial arts practice can contribute to psychological well-being, however, there has been a lack of empirical research in the psychological literature focused on investigating the details of this hypothesis. The purpose of this research is therefore to investigate the impact of a paradigmatic martial arts practice—shadowboxing—on (...) the psychological well-being of professional martial artists. In this article I present the results from an original empirical study on professional Muay Thai practitioners (n = 14) that reveals how a martial arts practice (shadowboxing) contributes to their overall psychological well-being by contributing to their positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment. I present general results for how shadowboxing contributes to the psychological well-being of these professional martial artists overall, as well as more specific results for how shadowboxing contributes to the psychological well-being of these professional martial artists based on factors such as their gender, fight experience, and training location. This article also provides qualitative first-person reports from professional Muay Thai practitioners (n = 14) about their use of visualization and mental imagery and their experience of flow while shadowboxing, offering unique insight into the minds of professional martial artists as they are actively engaged in their craft. Finally, this article discusses the value and limitations of the present study and outlines suggestions for future research. (shrink)

Some theories of goodness are descriptively rich: they have much to say about what makes things good. Neo-Aristotelian accounts, for instance, detail the various features that make a human being, a dog, a bee good relative to facts about those forms of life. Famously, such theories of relative goodness tend to be comparatively poor: they have little or nothing to say about what makes one kind of being better than another kind. Other theories of goodness—those that take there to be (...) absolute goodness—are comparatively rich: they offer grounds for judging some types of things better than others because they have more absolute goodness. Moorean accounts, for example, can tell us that humans and human experiences are superior to bees and blades of grass. But such theories tend to be descriptively poor: they struggle to tell us in virtue of what this is so. In this essay we motivate and flesh out a view that splits the difference between accounts of goodness as relative and accounts of goodness as absolute. Such a view holds promise only if the mechanics of this kind of metaphysics of goodness can be worked out. Here we present a view on which the paradigm for absolute goodness is God and the paradigm for each kind of relative goodness is a divine idea. (shrink)

Numerous societal issues, from climate change to pandemics, require public engagement with scientific research. Such engagement reveals challenges that can arise when experts communicate with laypeople. One of the most common frameworks for framing these communicative interactions is the deficit model of science communication, which holds that laypeople lack scientific knowledge and/or positive attitudes towards science, and that imparting knowledge will fill knowledge gaps, lead to desirable attitude/behavior changes, and increase trust in science. §1 introduces the deficit model in more (...) detail and shows that adhering to this model often fails to achieve its aims, which motivates the main question of this chapter: how can Ludwik Fleck’s theory of thinking collectives address the persistent problem of deficit approaches in science communication? I suggest that it can do so by exposing the deficit model’s implicit assumption of an expert-lay divide. Accordingly, §2 lays out Fleck’s theory and §3 contrasts it with contemporary debates about science communication. Following this descriptive work, §4 draws on Fleck’s ideas to make four concrete suggestions for further questioning the expert-lay divide. (shrink)

In this article, I explore Seth Farber’s critique in _The Spiritual Gift of Madness_ that the leaders of the Mad Pride movement are failing to realize his vision of the mad as spiritual vanguard of sociopolitical transformation. First, I show how, contra Farber’s polemic, several postmodern theorists are well suited for this leadership (especially the Argentinian post-Marxist philosopher Ernesto Laclau). Second, I reinterpret the first book by the Icarus Project, _Navigating the Space between Brilliance and Madness_, by reimagining its central (...) metaphor of Icarus in the context of late capitalism as a prison world. Finally, I conclude with four strategies derived therefrom for higher functioning mad leaders to transform our penitentiary world. (shrink)

Upshot: In our target article we claimed that, at least since Weber and Varela, enactivism has incorporated a theoretical commitment to one important aspect of Jonas’s philosophical biology, namely its anthropomorphism, which is at odds with the methodological commitments of modern science. In this general reply we want to clarify what we mean by anthropomorphism, and explain why we think it is incompatible with science. We do this by spelling out what we call the “Jonasian inference,” i.e., the idea that (...) we are entitled, based on our first-person experience of teleology, to take the appearance of teleology in other living beings at face value. (shrink)

Though Mathias Risse and Gabriel Wollner’s On Trade Justice admirably incorporates the history of European philosophy and U.S. government, their otherwise reasonable proposals rest on dubious grounds. The book derives both much of its appeal, and its primary vulnerability, from a cluster of central terms that are situated precariously at the intersection of metaphors and concepts, or what Lakoff and Johnson call “metaphorical concepts.” In this article, I explore the three most important such terms, as featured in the following paraphrase (...) of theirs: “Trade is an embedded ground of justice.” For each italicized term, I conclude, Risse and Wollner vacillate between its most conceptual and metaphorical meanings, thereby attempting to (a) stretch “trade” to identify prehistoric exchange with global capitalism, so as to (b) rebrand the contextual “ground” of this universal activity as a foundation, even though (c) foundations “embedded” in other foundations simply reduce to their lowest common denominator. The latter, in this case, is global capitalism, the most immoral practices of which they are thereby pressured to defend, including temporary forms of the very exploitation that they so persuasively reconceive and otherwise condemn. (shrink)

This article derives from a project attempting to show that Western formal logic, from Aristotle onward, has both been partially constituted by, and partially constitutive of, what has become known as racism. In the present article, I will first discuss, in light of Frege’s honorary role as founder of the philosophy of mathematics, Reuben Hersh’s What is Mathematics, Really? Second, I will explore how the infamous section of Frege’s 1924 diary (specifically the entries from March 10 to April 9) supports (...) Hersh's claim regarding the link between political conservatism and the (historically and currently) dominant school of the philosophy of mathematics (to which Frege undeniably belongs). Third, I will examine Frege’s attempt at a more reader-friendly introduction to his philosophy of mathematics, The Foundations of Arithmetic. And finally, I will briefly analyze Frege’s Begriffsschrift to see how questions of race arise even at the heights of his logical abstraction. (shrink)

In The Philosophy of Logical Atomism Russell held the view that facts in the world are formally structured complexes, the structure of which matches the logical structure of correspondent propositions. Russell also seems to have denied that there are facts of identity and of diversity. This paper argues that Identity and Diversity can be understood as purely formal structures in Russellian facts. It considers Russell’s possible reasons for denying the existence of facts of identity and diversity and shows how problematic (...) these reasons are. In particular, I argue that identity statements are not tautologies, and their denial does not result into a contradiction. An important consequence of this thesis is that Metaphysics and Logic are not as tied up as Russell took them to be, but nevertheless these are good news for the old formal program for Metaphysics that lies at the very heart of what he called philosophical logic. (shrink)

In this article, I explore an important difference between circumstantial luck on the one side and resultant and constitutive luck on the other. In section 1, I argue that, in circumstantial luck, the object of luck and the object of moral judgment are different even though, in resultant and constitutive luck, they are the same. In section 2, I explain that this difference (1) has the potential to undermine the regress argument for moral luck; (2) makes viable the “selective moral (...) luck” argument strategy (affirming some species of moral luck but denying others); and (3) has implications for the heritability of luck. (shrink)

The Afro-Latin dance known as ‘salsa’ is a fusion of multiple dances from West Africa, Muslim Spain, enslaved communities in the Caribbean, and the United States. In part due to its global origins, salsa was pivotal in the development of the Figuration philosophy of dance, and for ‘dancing with,’ the theoretical method for social justice derived therefrom. In the present article, I apply the completed theory Figuration exclusively to salsa for the first time, after situating the latter in the dance (...) studies literature. My first section explores Juliet McMains’ recent history, Spinning Mambo into Salsa, with an emphasis on the dynamics of class, race and sex therein. My second section explores a resonant Afro-Latin dance history, Marta E. Savigliano’s Tango and the Political Economy of Passion, where she deploys salsa’s sister-dance (tango) as a ‘counter-choreography’ to the choreography of postmodern neocolonialism. And my third section applies Figuration’s four central aspects of dance (or ‘Moves’) to salsa qua member of its ‘societal’ family of dance. In conclusion, through partnering with salsa, Figuration emerges as a member of its own ‘discursive’ family of dance, while salsa emerges as a gestural discourse capable of helping reconstruct a more socially-just world from the postmodern ruins of today. (shrink)

In this article, I offer a new philosophical interpretation of Virgil’s Aeneid, dually centered on the queens of Olympus and Carthage. More specifically, I show how the philosopher-poet Virgil deploys Dido’s Junonian furor as the Aristotelian matter of the unjust Roman imperium, the feminist counterforce to the patriarchal force disguised as peaceful order. The first section explores Virgil’s political and biographical background for the raw materials for a feminist, anti-imperial political philosophy. The second section, following Marilynn Desmond, situates the continuing (...) misogynist condemnation of Virgil’s two goddess-queens in the context of their honored centrality in Roman and Carthaginian culture. The third section reinterprets Virgil’s goddess-queens as agents of furor as (apparently mad) feminist counterforce to the (actually mad) unjust force of the Roman empire and its agents Jupiter and Aeneas. The fourth section translates these poetic philosophical interpretations into prose, arguing that Dido’s Junonian furor is the Aristotelian matter constituting the unjust forms of Roman imperium. And the conclusion applies the latter analysis to Hardt and Negri’s Empire, suggesting Dido as a model for the “multitude” in the fight against the imperial injustice of today’s globalized empire. (shrink)

In his influential history of the post-1967 history of the Palestinian Occupation, radical Israeli architect Eyal Weizman show how even well-meaning decolonial efforts from privileged allies can be coopted by the colonizers, in what I call “de-decolonizing.” Here I focus on one of his examples, namely IDF (Israeli Defense Force) military professors repurposing the anarcho-communist philosophy of French postmodernist Gilles Deleuze into a weapon against Palestinian guerrilla resistance. My conclusion is that attempted decolonizing via (inevitably complicit) privileged allies must include (...) what Weizman calls “co-resistance,” and I call “reconstruction.” In other words, when a Deleuzian “line of flight” to “escape” is impossible, as arguably for Palestinians today, then one should follow the heroic example of the Bedouins, who (as Weizman acknowledges) are the only Arabs who have never stopped rebuilding their Palestine. (shrink)

In public reason liberalism, equal respect requires that conceptions of justice be publicly justifiable to relevant people in a manner that allocates to each an equal say. But all liberal public justification also excludes: e.g., it accords no say, or a lesser say, to people it deems unreasonable. Can liberal public justification be aligned with the equal respect that allegedly grounds it, if the latter calls for discursive equality? The chapter explores this challenge with a focus on Rawls-type political liberalism. (...) I suggest that political liberalism’s commitment to equal respect can cohere with the standing of the unreasonable in public justification if that standing is not impermissibly unequal in discursive purchase. I then consider one candidate view of the permissibility of purchase inequality. On this broadly sufficientarian view, purchase inequality is permissible provided relevant people have standing of enough purchase to be able to avoid relevant bads. A plausible variant of this view suggests that political liberalism’s commitment to equal respect does not cohere with the discursive standing of the unreasonable. It emerges that where liberal public justification accords actual people discursive respect but relevantly idealizes at least around its fringes, the permissibility of purchase inequality must be a central concern. (shrink)

There are simple mechanical systems that elude causal representation. We describe one that cannot be represented in a single directed acyclic graph. Our case suggests limitations on the use of causal graphs for causal inference and makes salient the point that causal relations among variables depend upon details of causal setups, including values of variables.

In Rawls’s political liberalism, legitimate exercises of political power must be publicly justifiable to reasonable citizens on grounds each can coherently accept, where citizens count as “reasonable” only if they can accept certain values of public culture. Other citizens have no say in public justification, or no equal say. For Rawls, then, legitimate political power must accord with a subset of cultural values, and can be legitimate even if it is not (equally) justifiable to people who cannot accept them. Does (...) this mean that Rawls permits that such people be dominated? What kind of domination, if any, would this involve, and would it involve “cultural” domination? This chapter takes its lead from these questions. It offers a reading of the role of public justification in political liberalism that foregrounds differences in the discursive standing of reasonable and unreasonable people, and interpret these differences in domination-theoretic terms. I suggest that there is reason to believe that Rawls’s view would subject the unreasonable–a mixed group that also includes respectable people–to forms of discursive and political domination, and this in a manner that attracts the worry that cultural domination is involved. (shrink)

Though currently marginalised in Western philosophy, tenth-century Arabic philosopher Abu Nasr Alfarabi is one of the most important thinkers of the medieval era. In fact, he was known as the ‘second teacher’ (after Aristotle) to philosophers such as Avicenna and Averroes. As this epithet suggests, Alfarabi and his successors engaged in a critical and creative dialogue with thinkers from other historical traditions, including that of the Ancient Greeks, although the creativity of his part is often marginalised as well. In this (...) article, I offer a new interpretation of Alfarabi’s sweeping volume, The Principles of the Opinions of the Virtuous Community. My focus is the materialism that overflows Alfarabi’s account of soul in general and the imaginative power in particular. The political conclusion of this account is that Virtuous Community does not directly present Alfarabi’s ideal ruler or community. Instead, it offers a materialist critique that prefigures critical theory and post-structuralism and thereby provides guidelines for how to more effectively engage monotheistic communities in the pursuit of social justice – including along the axes of race, gender and sexual orientation. (shrink)

In Morality & Mathematics, Justin Clarke-Doane argues that it is hard to imagine being "a realist about, for example, the standard model of particle physics, but not about mathematics." I try to explain how that seems very possible from the perspective of a physicist. What is real is the physical world; mathematics starts from descriptions of the natural world and extrapolates from there, but that extrapolation does not imply any independent reality. -/- Submitted to an Analysis Reviews symposium on Clarke-Doane's (...) Morality & Mathematics. (shrink)

In this chapter, I will offer a strategic new interpretation of Hannah Arendt's conception of forgiveness. In brief, I propose understanding Arendt as suggesting—not that evil is objectively banal, or a mere failure of imagination—but instead that it is maximally forgiveness-facilitating to understand the seemingly unforgivable as merely a failure of imagination. In other words, we must so expand our imaginative powers (what Arendt terms “enlarged mentality”) by creatively imagining others as merely insufficiently unimaginative, all in order to reimagine them (...) as beings whom we are willing and able to forgive. It is in this sense that I understand forgiveness for Arendt as a kind of “magic.” That is, forgiveness involves the imaginatively-funded creation of a new reality by merely naming it, like the phenomenon of “magic thinking,” wherein one believes one’s thoughts or speech are immediately realized in the world. The magic of forgiveness, in other words, is an incantation or performative speech act, based on the forgiver’s choice to “make believe,” or pretend-into-being, that the forgiven person is forgivable qua thoughtless. (shrink)

According to the literature review, there is much room for improvement of college student retention. The aim of this research is to evaluate the possibility of using deep and machine learning algorithms to predict whether students continue to attend college or will stop attending college. In this research a feature assessment is done on the dataset available from Kaggle depository. The performance of 20 learning supervised machine learning algorithms and one deep learning algorithm is evaluated. The algorithms are trained using (...) 11 features from 1000 records of previous student registrations that have been enrolled in college. The best performing classifier after tuning the parameters was NuSVC. It achieved Accuracy (91.00%), Precision (91.00%), Recall (91.00%), F1-score (91.00%), and time required for training and testing (0.04 second). Additionally, the proposed DL algorithm scored: Accuracy (93.00%), Precision (93.00%), Recall (93.00%), F1-score (93.00%), time required for training and testing (0.66 second) for predicting whether student will continue to attend college or not. (shrink)

This contribution aims to explore the historical predecessors of the Five Percenter model of self-realization, as popularized by Hip Hop artists such as Supreme Team, Rakim Allah, Brand Nubian, Wu-Tang Clan, or Sunz of Man. As compared to frequent considerations of the phenomenon as a creative mythological background for a socio-political struggle, Five Percenter teachings shall be discussed as contemporary interpretations of historical models of self-realization in various philosophical, religious, and esoteric systems. By putting the coded system of the tenfold (...) Supreme Mathematics as one of its core teachings in context with the Pythagorean Tetractys, an arrangement of ten points in four lines, the commonalities between the sequence and concepts attributed to the respective numbers will be demonstrated. (shrink)

Alberto Casullo ("Necessity, Certainty, and the A Priori", Canadian Journal of Philosophy 18, 1988) argues that arithmetical propositions could be disconfirmed by appeal to an invented scenario, wherein our standard counting procedures indicate that 2 + 2 != 4. Our best response to such a scenario would be, Casullo suggests, to accept the results of the counting procedures, and give up standard arithmetic. While Casullo's scenario avoids arguments against previous "disconfirming" scenarios, it founders on the assumption, common to scenario and (...) response, that arithmetic might be independent of standard counting procedures. Here I show, by attention to tallying as the simplest form of counting, that this assumption is incoherent: given standard counting procedures, then (on pain of irrationality) arithmetical theory follows. (shrink)

Abortion bans have been characterized as cruel especially in not allowing exceptions for rape or incest. The article first examines one approach to morally justifying bans based on the Doctrine of Double Effect (DDE) which distinguishes morally between killing or letting die intending death versus doing so only foreseeing death. It then presents some criticisms of the implications of the DDE but also argues that what the doctrine permits helps provide a ground for the permissibility of abortions even if the (...) fetus is a person. Whether there are limits on applying this argument is also considered. In conclusion, the article considers whether and why not permitting exceptions to bans for rape and incest is cruel and whether cruelty is a ground for opposition to bans. (shrink)

Despite the ubiquity of bees in Dickinson’s work, most interpreters denigrate her nature poems. But following several recent scholars, I identify Nietzschean/Dionysian overtones in the bee poems and suggest the figure of bees/hive/queen illuminates as feminist key to her corpus. First, (a) the bee’s sting represents martyred death; (b) its gold, immortality; (c) its tongue, the “lesbian phallus”; (d) its wings, poetic power; (e) its buzz, poetic melody, and (f) its organism, a joyful Dionysian Susan (her sister-in-law and love interest) (...) to Emily’s flower. Second, the hive represents her individual poems (with slants/dashes as stingers, wings as hymn meter, honey as rhymes, variant words as exiled bees, and accompanying flowers their Darwinian coevolution with bees), constituting her writing persona as a multi-voiced self-swarm, as organized in the apiary of her letters and fascicles. And third, the queen represents her Western cultural and religious inheritance wherein bees are symbols of the soul, reincarnation, poetic-philosophical vocation, and a Nietzschean, trans-Dionysian naturalist ontology—symbolized by apiarian Artemis. (shrink)

Is shadowboxing an effective form of functional exercise? What physiological and morphological changes result from an exercise program based exclusively on shadowboxing for 3 weeks? To date, no empirical research has focused specifically on addressing these questions. Since mixed martial arts (MMA) is the fastest growing sport in the world, and since boxing and kickboxing fitness classes are among the most popular in gyms and fitness clubs worldwide, the lack of research on shadowboxing and martial arts-based fitness programs in the (...) extant literature is a shortcoming that the present article aims to address. This case study involved a previously sedentary individual engaging in an exercise program based exclusively on shadowboxing for 3 weeks. Body composition and heart rate data were collected before, throughout, and upon completion of the 3-week exercise program to determine the effectiveness of shadowboxing for functional fitness purposes. An original shadowboxing program prepared by an Everlast Master Instructor and NASM Certified Personal Trainer (NASM-CPT) and Performance Enhancement Specialist (NASM-PES) was used for this 3-week period. The original shadowboxing program with goals, techniques, and combinations to work on throughout the 3-week program is included in this article. This case study demonstrates that a 3-week exercise program based exclusively on shadowboxing can increase aerobic capacity, muscle mass, bone mass, basal metabolic rate, and daily calorie intake, and decrease resting heart rate, fat mass, body fat percentage, and visceral fat rating in a previously sedentary individual. The results of this research demonstrate that shadowboxing can be a safe and effective form of exercise leading to morphological and physiological improvements including fat loss and increased aerobic capacity. The results of this research also demonstrate that the Tanita BC-1500 is a reliable tool for individuals to evaluate their own fitness progress over time. (shrink)

In a series of well known publications, Christine Korsgaard argues for the claim that an agent acts morally just in case s/he acts autonomously. Two of Korsgaard's signature arguments for the connection between morality and autonomy are the "argument from spontaneity" and the "regress argument." In this paper, I argue that neither the argument from spontaneity nor the regress argument is able to show that an agent would be acting wrongly even if s/he acts in a paradigmatically heteronomous fashion.