In recent years there has been growing interest in adapting virtue ethics to the ethics of technology. However, it has most typically been invoked to address some particular issue of moral importance, and there is only a limited range of works dealing with the methodological question of how virtue ethics may contribute to this field. My approach in this paper is threefold. I start with a brief discussion of Aristotelian virtue ethics, with a view to constructing a framework in which (...) to then address at least some of the aspects of the growing technicization of life that call for scrutiny. I subsequently proceed further by outlining three possible models of virtue-theoretical analysis within the ethics of technology, giving special attention to those changes in human agency where technicization can be seen to exert a significant influence. Finally, I focus on the third such possibility, the extended virtue model, as a basis for calling for a more inclusive account of moral agency. (shrink)

The growing significance of technology in both everyday life and professionalised practices has brought important volume of philosophical works. However, it is somehow surprising that this current is barely reflected in virtue ethics. This paper highlights two aspects of the issue as seen from the MacIntyrean perspective. Firstly, the rise of technologisation in most areas of human life demands reflection on its influence on the autonomy and unity of the agent’s quest for a good life. Here, the new perspectives for (...) phronesis need to be pointed out. Secondly, a methodological question shows up concerning the way in which virtue ethics may find an adequate response to the technical augmentation of the agency. For this, I argue, resources might be found in the Extended Mind thesis. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to analyze the basis for the moral obligation to remember. As the moral relation to the past is primarily a matter of shared identity, the kind of obligation in question splits into two related issues, namely, that of political, state-oriented and state-organized memory on which the political identity rests and that of memory labour grounded in social identities based in shared, time-extended projects. Drawing upon tensions between these two, I discuss time control and the (...) accumulation of identity as central to memory labour and, referring to John Zerzan’s critique of symbolical roots of power, pinpoint the moral basis of such an accumulation. On the basis of this, I argue for nesting the duty to remember in acknowledging the agent’s recognition of the relatedness and dependency of their agency and possibilities of flourishing which can be obtained thanks to adjusting the field of the virtue of practical wisdom so that it includes members of the time-extended community. (shrink)

Public opinion has it that ethics should be concerned with studying and providing precise and reliable rules of conduct. This view is based in a long philosophical tradition which begins with the Stoics and continues at least to Kant; it is, however, a false view. There are good reasons to turn our attention to these aspects of moral thinking which refer to and emphasize the element of risk and uncertainty. In the article I briefly discuss two of such reasons: the (...) problem of moral luck and the problem of action based on ignorance. Consideration of these two problems leads to the conclusion that the most tricky element in moral thinking is the firm belief of the subject in the truth of the premises on which they base their actions and in the irrelevance of external factors to the assessment of their deeds. In this light I argue that the basic requirement for a moral justification of a particular action is not its conformity to a certain set of rules but the subject’s critical reflection on their course of action. Indeed, what turns an attitude into a moral attitude is an amoral, epistemological factor: criticism and openness to uncertainty. (shrink)

The paper addresses some of the aspects of the neo-Aristotelian concept of good on the basis of Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities approach. The author’s general thesis is that the idea of good organizes its normativity along two vectors pointed towards nature and emancipation, which are interlinked, that is — the normativity of the good is always organized by both of them and it is inappropriate to refer to one of them only. This fault is made, the author believes, by Nussbaum who (...) does not offer enough resources to establish a sound naturalistic evaluative standard in her theory. To address this issue the author starts by discussing the capabilities approach as a form of the concept of good and proceeds by analysing Nussbaum’s view on family as an exemplar of the inadequacies of the approach. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to investigate the relations between the basic moral categories, namely those of norms, ideals and supererogation. The subject of discussion is, firstly, the ways that these categories are understood; secondly, the possible approaches towards moral acting that appear due to their use; and thirdly, their relationship within the moral system. However, what is of a special importance here is the relationship between the categories of norms and ideals (or in a wider aspect — laudable (...) acts) and a thesis about their complementary character. For it seems that the omission of one of the elements that are analysed within a moral system must result in an essential limitation of both the possibilities of finding an adequate approach to a given moral problem (on a descriptive level), as well as defining the full set of normative guidelines. Therefore, as I shall argue, resigning from a two-level method of moral analysis may lead to the atrophy of the very idea of ethics itself. (shrink)

Przedmiotem artykułu jest rozważenie znaczenia zmian, jakie dla form działania podmiotowego (duchowości) mają zmiany technologicznie. Przyjmując, że pewne punkty zaczepienia takiej refleksji dostępne są w popkulturowych formach oswajania postępu, jako osiowe wybieram pojęcie „dżihadu buteriańskiego” z powieści Diuna Franka Herberta, scalające kilka istotnych aspektów tak rozwoju technicznego, jak i refleksji nad nim. W części pierwszej, koncentrując się na drugim składniku tego wyrażenia, omawiam pogląd Samuela Butlera oraz wskazuję na znaczenie wystąpienie luddystów w początkach XIX w. W części drugiej rozwijam ten (...) wątek, omawiając krytykę społeczeństwa technologicznego formułowaną przez współczesnych anarchoprymitywistów. W części trzeciej zwracam uwagę na pierwszy element wyrażenia Herberta by wskazać na podmiotowe aspekty zmian technologicznych. W konsekwencji wskazuję kierunki analizy, dzięki którym etyka cnót może wypracować adekwatną odpowiedź na zagrożenia płynące ze strony technologii przy akceptacji korzyści zeń płynących. (shrink)

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

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

Praca poświęcona jest naturze dobrego życia. Zastosowanie odnowionej w połowie XX wieku myśli Arystotelesa pozwala tu uchwycić i przezwyciężyć zarówno miałkość propozycji „przemysłu szczęścia”, jak i akademickiej filozofii. Autor interpretuje koncepcję starożytnego filozofa przy użyciu współczesnych narzędzi filozoficznych wskazując jak ich zastosowanie pozwala uchwycić węzłowe problemy życia (jak pytanie o szczęście i sens) oraz wskazać te metody myślenia, które umożliwiają krytyczny namysł nad rzeczywistością społeczną. Pytanie o dobro jest zatem zarówno o to, jak kształtować własne życie, ale też jak myśleć (...) o relacjach z ludźmi, z innymi istotami oraz jak współdziałać w dążeniu do dóbr wspólnych. Te ostatnie okazują się przy tym nie tylko dobrami publicznymi, infrastrukturalnymi, ale przede wszystkim formami kooperacji i współżycia. (shrink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The paper analyzes the visual aspect of metaphors, offering a new theory of metaphor that characterizes its syntactic structure, material composition and visuality as its essence. It will accordingly present the metaphorical creating or transfiguring, as well as conceiving or understanding, of one thing as a different one, as a visual ability. It is a predication by means of producing non-conventional compositions – i.e., by compositional, or even aesthetic, means. This definition is aimed to apply to the various kinds of (...) metaphors: conceptual, linguistic, visual, and material. It will thus challenge the definition of metaphor as a conceptual or linguistic phenomenon in nature that is based on its semantic mechanism, broad concepts, and cognitive value. Those definitions have been prevalent since the second half of 20th century, under the influence of the philosophy of language, and later of cognitive studies. (shrink)

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

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

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

This paper provides an analysis of Martin Buber’s not very well-known essay “Distance and Relation”, which is his most relevant contribution to philosophical anthropology. In the essay, which was published almost thirty years after the publication of his most famous book, I and Thou, Buber elaborated on the anthropological foundations of his cosmic vision of dialogical life. The central question is “How is man possible?” Buber’s answer is very important to the further development of his principle of dialogue in psychology (...) (primarily his notion of confirmation) and philosophy of art, but it is not quite clear how compatible it is with some of his earlier theses from I and Thou. In particular, the relation between “distance” and the I-It relation is unclear. There are two seemingly contradictory statements: “In the beginning is the relation” and “The primal distance is a presupposition of the relation”. The aim of this paper is to examine these anthropological foundations and to elucidate this apparent contradiction. (shrink)

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

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

Martin Buber’s The Question to the Single One appeared in Nazi Germany at a time, when collectivism in its totalitarian forms was at the height of its development. On one hand this little book is an immediate reaction to the social-political situation in inter-war Europe. On the other hand it is a consideration of the anthropological question of the modern man from the point of view of dialogical personalism. The paper focuses on Buber’s critique of both the individualistic and collectivistic (...) doctrines of ethical relativism. It examines also his category of the “single one in responsibility” as a response to both doctrines. (shrink)

This paper proposes to define metaphor as a visual-material structure, the sphere of which is ontological rather than cognitive or conceptual. It argues that the essence of metaphor, as either an aesthetic or a communicative unit or both, resides in the qualitative dimension and appearance, or even materiality, of the metaphorical medium and its form. The paper thus offers a new theory of metaphor, focusing on the medium of metaphor, which composes and transfigures or reconstructs its target anew: a composition (...) that is prior to understanding or conceptualizing the target. In doing so, the paper presents a formalist ontology of metaphors, established via an externalist account of metaphors, as opposed to the prevailing cognitivist-conceptualist account which I characterize as internalist. The various kinds of metaphor – linguistic, poetic, visual or material – are based on their external structure, rather than an internal-conceptual mechanism of understanding, as assumed by a significant segment of the literature. Visual metaphor, therefore, is the paradigmatic kind of metaphor, the analysis of which can be generalized to other kinds of metaphor. Furthermore, the paper tries to overcome the current discrepancy between the formalist character of the metaphorical medium and the dominance of cognitivist and conceptualist theories of metaphor. Challenging these, I claim that if the identity of metaphor is indeed based on its composition, then it is actually based on its aesthetic qualities. That is to say, not only are there autonomous visual or material metaphors, that are not based on linguistic or conceptual ones, but linguistic and conceptual metaphors are based on visuality: they are enabled by the structural possibilities offered by visual media. (shrink)

While there is a prolific debate surrounding the issue of conscientious objection of individuals towards performing certain clinical acts, this debate ignores the fact that there are other reasons why clinicians might wish to object providing specific services. This paper briefly discusses the idea that healthcare workers might object to providing specific services because they are against their professional judgement, they want to maintain a specific reputation, or they have pragmatic reasons. Reputation here is not simply understood as being in (...) good standing with a professional body. Rather, reputation is treated in the sense that a craftsman might wish to be known for providing a specific type, quality, and style of service. Professionalism is understood as acting according to the philosophical and scientific principles that are the basis of healthcare (such as acting for the benefit of the patient’s health and following well- evidenced treatment pathways). (shrink)

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

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

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

Engineering an artificial intelligence to play an advisory role in morally charged decision making will inevitably introduce meta-ethical positions into the design. Some of these positions, by informing the design and operation of the AI, will introduce risks. This paper offers an analysis of these potential risks along the realism/anti-realism dimension in metaethics and reveals that realism poses greater risks, but, on the other hand, anti-realism undermines the motivation for engineering a moral AI in the first place.

The Ramsey Test is considered to be the default test for the acceptability of indicative conditionals. I will argue that it is incompatible with some of the recent developments in conceptualizing conditionals, namely the growing empirical evidence for the _Relevance Hypothesis_. According to the hypothesis, one of the necessary conditions of acceptability for an indicative conditional is its antecedent being positively probabilistically relevant for the consequent. The source of the idea is _Evidential Support Theory_ presented in Douven (2008). I will (...) defend the hypothesis against alleged counterexamples, and show that it is supported by growing empirical evidence. Finally, I will present a version of the Ramsey test which incorporates the relevance condition and therefore is consistent with growing empirical evidence for the relevance hypothesis. (shrink)

Predictions about autonomous weapon systems are typically thought to channel fears that drove all the myths about intelligence embodied in matter. One of these is the idea that the technology can get out of control and ultimately lead to horrifi c consequences, as is the case in Mary Shelley’s classic Frankenstein. Given this, predictions about AWS are sometimes dismissed as science-fiction fear-mongering. This paper considers several analogies between AWS and other weapon systems and ultimately offers an argument that nuclear weapons (...) and their effect on the development of modern asymmetrical warfare are the best analogy to the introduction of AWS. The fi nal section focuses on this analogy and offers speculations about the likely consequences of AWS being hacked. These speculations tacitly draw on myths and tropes about technology and AI from popular fi ction, such as Frankenstein, to project a convincing model of the risks and benefi ts of AWS deployment. (shrink)

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

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

In the posthumously published ‘Future People, the Non-Identity Problem, and Person-Affecting Principles’, Derek Parfit presents a novel axiological principle which he calls the Wide Dual Person-Affecting Principle and claims that it does not imply the Repugnant Conclusion. This paper shows that even the best version of Parfit's principle cannot avoid this conclusion. That said, accepting such a principle makes embracing the Repugnant Conclusion more justifiable. This paper further addresses important questions which Parfit left unanswered concerning: the relative importance of individual (...) and collective goodness, comparisons involving unequal outcomes, how to understand individual goodness, and whether incomparability at the level of individual goodness implies incomparability at the level of overall goodness. (shrink)

Tato studie je v první řadě studií z dějin filosofie. Jejím hlavním úkolem je popsat život a dílo autora, který byl v česko-slovenském intelektuálním prostředí dlouhou dobu opomíjen: anglo-amerického matematika, fyzika a filosofa Alfreda Northa Whiteheada. Jeho životní příběh bývá někdy popisován jako „příběh tří měst“: Cambridge v Anglii, Londýna a nakonec Cambridge v Massachusetts, kde sídlí Harvardova univerzita. Studie se soustředí na některé významné momenty ve filosofově životě a pokouší se je zdůraznit jako klíč k porozumění Whiteheadovu celoživotnímu projektu. (...) Na samotném závěru je dodáno několik poznámek o recepci Whiteheadových myšlenek v česko-slovenském myšlenkovém milieu. (shrink)

Stať se snaží analyzovat myšlenky málo známého rukopisu Sigmunda Freuda z roku 1895, v němž usiloval o nalezení biologických základů lidské psychiky. Tato práce je pozoruhodná ze dvou důvodů. Jednak představuje úvahy, které se výrazně od- lišují od toho, co je pro Freuda v oblasti psychologie tak typické. Freud se zde, až na výjimky, nezabývá psychoanalýzou či studiemi o hysterii, nýbrž popisuje, co by mohlo být základem těchto psychologických jevů na neurofyziologické úrovni. Druhým pozoruhodným faktem je, že tento manuskript byl (...) pozapome- nut až do poloviny 20. století, kdy byl vytištěn pod názvem Projekt vědecké psychologie. A jak je známo, neurofyziologická studia lidské mysli spojená s analýzou kognitivních funkcí se v ri- gorózní podobě objevují až na počátku 60. let. Stať se proto pokouší ukázat základní principy Projektu a naznačit, v čem byl Freud inspirativním průkopníkem moderních neurofyziologických přístupů k lidské mysli. (shrink)

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

Przyszłość Edukacji Zawodowej. Metody Modernizacji Szkół Zawodowych I Zwiȩkszenia Adaptacyjności Pracowników Oświaty Michał Skarzyński (ed.) Izba Rzemieślnicza I Przedsiȩbiorczości W Białymstoku (2015) .

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

Volume 19, Issue 7, July 2019, Page 39-40.

In this paper, I offer an account of the dependence relation between perception of change and the subjective flow of time that is consistent with some extant empirical evidence from priming by unconscious change. This view is inspired by the one offered by William James, but it is articulated in the framework of contemporary functionalist accounts of mental qualities and higher-order theories of consciousness. An additional advantage of this account of the relationship between perception of change and subjective time is (...) that is makes sense of instances where we are not consciously aware of changes but still experience the flow of time. (shrink)

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

This text is a kind of sketch and presents some simple ideas. The aim of this article is to carry out a critical and reflexive analysis of Roman Ingarden's philosophy of responsibility. Being a member of the phenomenological current, Ingarden mainly studied the ontological bases or conditions of responsibility by identifying different situations of responsibility. In this paper situations of responsibility have been analysed in the semantic contexts in which the word "responsibility" appears. Legally, the prescriptive contexts of using the (...) word "responsibility" are particularly important since they are usually either ignored or inadequately separated from descriptive contexts. Roman Ingarden's views were supplemented by Alf Ross's aspects of responsibility. As a result, the elementary ways of understanding responsibility have been reconstructed; they are the basis for reflections on moral responsibility as well as legal responsibility. (shrink)

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