The Philippine government has been relentless in its counterinsurgency campaigns. From the colonial wars that vilified as insurgents and bandits the honored heroes of today, up to the anti-communist and anti-secessionist civil and military efforts of the postcolonial regimes, these campaigns have not only rolled out large state resources but also cost lives of innocent civilians. Patterned after the United States (US) of America’s principle of low-intensity conflict aimed at countering Marxist and anti-imperialist movements (Reed 1986), counterinsurgency campaigns have (...) unleashed a warfare that indiscriminately target its supposed opponents, including unarmed activists. In 2007, the United Nations Special Rapporteur Philip Alston examined the horrible political situation of the Philippines – characterized by political killings, abductions, and tortures – and identified how state elements, under the blanket protection of waging a counterinsurgency campaign, were responsible for the political repressions then (Sales 2009). Today, under the murderous Duterte regime, the counterinsurgency campaign has reached an unprecedented level of ferocity as it is waged through a militarist whole-ofnation approach composed by multi-level government and multi-agency responses. -/- Being greatly influenced by the US, counterinsurgency campaigns in the Philippines follow the paranoiac and hysterical communist witch-hunt of McCarthyism (Hutchins-Viroux 2008). The hysteria’s contemporary and local expression is the phenomenon called red- or terror-tagging.1 Terror-tagging is the systematic process of maliciously naming or identifying an individual or group as a communist and/or terrorist by its association with a supposed communist and/or terrorist group. Being a systematic process, it is initiated and sustained by state elements with the view of maligning or defaming political activists. Terror-tagging is aimed against activists, dissenters, and even the political opposition. The social activist Rhoda Dalang (2014) has noted how terror-tagging has been deployed by the Philippine state in its counterinsurgency efforts, from the Marcos up to the then Aquino regime. And until the previous Duterte regime, yet with increased intensity and fatality, terror-tagging continued to defame and liquidate activists. As terror-tagging has not received enough academic attention, this chapter aims to fill this gap by providing a preliminary analysis of it. The chapter will be doing a critical discourse analysis. It will take off from a revealing study done by Don Kevin Hapal and Raisa Serafica of Rappler, a media outlet in the Philippines. Through a separate discourse analysis of Facebook posts of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTFELCAC),2 the chapter will also identify aspects of terror-tagging. The discussion will further be theorized using the Marxist analysis of the State and informed by interviews of Atty. Maria Sol Taule and Cristina Palabay. They are both human rights workers who have worked with terror-tagged activists and are themselves subjected to terror-tagging. (shrink)

The article presents a pluralistic model of value change, emphasizing the interplay between technology and societal values. It critiques the Simple Change Model, which suggests a uniform transition from one dominant value scheme to another, arguing instead for emergent and differential value change. Emergent value change occurs when new values arise within specific contexts without displacing existing ones, often influenced by generational experiences with technology and niches where new technologies are introduced. Differential value change highlights how distinct groups may adopt (...) different value schemes based on their unique contexts and experiences, sometimes leading to societal polarization and the need to reconcile incompatible value schemes. The article stresses the importance of individual experiences of ethical uncertainty and disruption in understanding these changes. By integrating these complexities, the model offers a rich, non-deterministic framework for analyzing how values evolve in response to technological advancements. (shrink)

Is the societal-level of analysis sufficient today to understand the values of those in the global workforce? Or are individual-level analyses more appropriate for assessing the influence of values on ethical behaviors across country workforces? Using multi-level analyses for a 48-society sample, we test the utility of both the societal-level and individual-level dimensions of collectivism and individualism values for predicting ethical behaviors of business professionals. Our values-based behavioral analysis indicates that values at the individual-level make a more significant contribution to (...) explaining variance in ethical behaviors than do values at the societal-level. Implicitly, our findings question the soundness of using societal-level values measures. Implications for international business research are discussed. (shrink)

A retelling of Plato's famous cave allegory. Inspired by Dōgen, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein.

When comparing alternative courses of action, modern military decision makers often must consider both the military effectiveness and the ethical consequences of the available alternatives. The basis, design, calibration, and performance of a principles-based computational model of ethical considerations in military decision making are reported in this article. The relative ethical violation (REV) model comparatively evaluates alternative military actions based upon the degree to which they violate contextually relevant ethical principles. It is based on a set of specific ethical principles (...) deemed by philosophers and ethicists to be relevant to military courses of action. A survey of expert and non-expert human decision makers regarding the relative ethical violation of alternative actions for a set of specially designed calibration scenarios was conducted to collect data that was used to calibrate the REV model. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the survey showed that people, even experts, disagreed greatly amongst themselves regarding the scenarios’ ethical considerations. Despite this disagreement, two significant results emerged. First, after calibration the REV model performed very well in terms of replicating the ethical assessments of human experts for the calibration scenarios. The REV model outperformed an earlier model that was based on tangible consequences rather than ethical principles, that earlier model performed comparably to human experts, the experts outperformed human non-experts, and the non-experts outperformed random selection of actions. All of these performance comparisons were measured quantitatively and confirmed with suitable statistical tests. Second, although humans tended to value some principles over others, none of the ethical principles involved—even the principle of not harming civilians—completely overshadowed all of the other principles. (shrink)

Frankfurt cases are supposed to provide us with counterexamples to the principle of alternative possibilities. Among the most well known responses to these cases is what John Fischer has dubbed the flicker of freedom strategy. Here we revisit a version of this strategy, which we refer to as the fine-grained response. Although a number of philosophers, including some who are otherwise unsympathetic to Frankfurt’s argument, have dismissed the fine grained response, we believe there is a good deal to be said (...) on its behalf. We argue, in particular, that reflection on certain cases involving omissions undermines the main objections to the response and also provides the groundwork for an argument in support of it. (shrink)

Many have offered accounts of the procreative asymmetry, the claim that one has no moral reason to create a life just because it would be happy, but one has moral reason not to create a life just because it would be miserable. I suggest a new approach. Instead of looking at the procreative asymmetry on its own, we can situate it within a broader landscape of asymmetries. Specifically, there are two other analogous asymmetries in the prudential and epistemic domains. The (...) prudential asymmetry says that one has no prudential reason to acquire a desire just because it would be satisfied, but one has prudential reason not to acquire a desire just because it would be frustrated. The epistemic asymmetry says that one has no epistemic reason to acquire a belief just because it is true, but one has epistemic reason not to acquire a belief just because it is false. The existence of these analogous asymmetries in these normative domains suggests the possibility of a unified account of all three asymmetries as instances of a more fundamental asymmetry of value-based reasons. This paper develops a working model of what such a unified account might look like. Such an account can give us a unified explanation of a variety of phenomena, reinforce the plausibility of each of these asymmetries, and give us a novel picture of how value gives us reasons that might extend beyond these three applications. (shrink)

A person presented with adequate but not conclusive evidence for a proposition is in a position voluntarily to acquire a belief in that proposition, or to suspend judgment about it. The availability of doxastic options in such cases grounds a moderate form of doxastic voluntarism not based on practical motives, and therefore distinct from pragmatism. In such cases, belief-acquisition or suspension of judgment meets standard conditions on willing: it can express stable character traits of the agent, it can be responsive (...) to reasons, and it is compatible with a subjective awareness of the available options. (shrink)

In this paper, we present a survey of the development of the technique of argument diagramming covering not only the fields in which it originated - informal logic, argumentation theory, evidence law and legal reasoning – but also more recent work in applying and developing it in computer science and artificial intelligence. Beginning with a simple example of an everyday argument, we present an analysis of it visualised as an argument diagram constructed using a software tool. In the context of (...) a brief history of the development of diagramming, it is then shown how argument diagrams have been used to analyze and work with argumentation in law, philosophy and artificial intelligence. (shrink)

This paper sets out an account of trust in AI as a relationship between clinicians, AI applications, and AI practitioners in which AI is given discretionary authority over medical questions by clinicians. Compared to other accounts in recent literature, this account more adequately explains the normative commitments created by practitioners when inviting clinicians’ trust in AI. To avoid committing to an account of trust in AI applications themselves, I sketch a reductive view on which discretionary authority is exercised by AI (...) practitioners through the vehicle of an AI application. I conclude with four critical questions based on the discretionary account to determine if trust in particular AI applications is sound, and a brief discussion of the possibility that the main roles of the physician could be replaced by AI. (shrink)

Strong claims have been made for emergence as a new paradigm for understanding science, consciousness, and religion. Tracing the past history and current definitions of the concept, Clayton assesses the case for emergent phenomena in the natural world and their significance for philosophy and theology. Complex emergent phenomena require irreducible levels of explanation in physics, chemistry and biology. This pattern of emergence suggests a new approach to the problem of consciousness, which is neither reducible to brain states nor proof of (...) a mental substance or soul. Although emergence does not entail classical theism, it is compatible with a variety of religious positions. Clayton concludes with a defence of emergentist panentheism and a Christian constructive theology consistent with the new sciences of emergence. (shrink)

A familiar post-Kantian criticism contends that Kant enslaves sensibility under the yoke of practical reason. Friedrich Schiller advanced a version of this criticism to which Kant publicly responded. Recent commentators have emphasized the role that Kant’s reply assigns to the pleasure that accompanies successful moral action. In contrast, I argue that Kant’s reply relies primarily on the sublime feeling that arises when we merely contemplate the moral law. In fact, the pleasures emphasized by other recent commentators depend on this sublime (...) feeling. These facts illuminate Kant’s views regarding the relationship between morality, freedom, and the development of moral feelings. (shrink)

Introductory Chapter to the _Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition_ (CUP, 2009).

Both Philip and Andrew are philosophy students whose interests converge around the philosophy of technology broadly understood. Philip's interest is specifically aimed toward the ethics of Transhumanism and depictions of Transhumanism in works of fiction. On the other hand, Andrew finds himself more focused on religious behavior in the technological world. While the two perspectives might not seem that close, there is certain to be an overlap in Andrew and Philip's shared understanding of how technological phenomena play (...) a crucial role concerning religion and society. (shrink)

The adoption of web-based telecare services has raised multifarious ethical concerns, but a traditional principle-based approach provides limited insight into how these concerns might be addressed and what, if anything, makes them problematic. We take an alternative approach, diagnosing some of the main concerns as arising from a core phenomenon of shifting trust relations that come about when the physician plays a less central role in the delivery of care, and new actors and entities are introduced. Correspondingly, we propose an (...) applied ethics of trust based on the idea that patients should be provided with good reasons to trust telecare services, which we call sound trust. On the basis of this approach, we propose several concrete strategies for safeguarding sound trust in telecare. (shrink)

Free will is often said—by compatibilists and incompatibilists alike—to be a power (or complex of powers) of agents. This paper offers proposals for, and examines the prospects of, a powers-conception of free will that takes the powers in question to be causal dispositions. A difficulty for such an account stems from the idea that when one exercises free will, it is up to oneself whether one wills to do this or that. The paper also briefly considers whether a powers-conception that (...) invokes powers of a different kind, such as agent-causal or noncausal powers, might fare better with respect to this problem. (shrink)

A growing body of recent work in informal logic investigates the process of argumentation. Among other things, this work focuses on the ways in which individuals attempt to understand written or verbalised arguments in light of the fact that these are often presented in forms that are incomplete and unmarked. One of its aims is to develop general procedures for natural language argument recognition and reconstruction. Our aim here is to draw on this growing body of knowledge in informal logic (...) in order to take preliminary steps towards developing an architecture for computer systems that are able to recognise and reconstruct natural language arguments. This architecture aims to structure research of an applied and computational nature that strives to implement linguistic systems of various sorts, and to analyse problems in a way that both yields manageable and relatively independent components and also highlights how implementations can interact with existing resources from natural language processing. (shrink)

Argumentation schemes can be described as abstract structures representing the most generic types of argument, constituting the building blocks of the ones used in everyday reasoning. This paper investigates the structure, classification, and uses of such schemes. Three goals are pursued: 1) to describe the schemes, showing how they evolved and how they have been classified in the traditional and the modern theories; 2) to propose a method for classifying them based on ancient and modern developments; and 3) to outline (...) and show how schemes can be used to describe and analyze or produce real arguments. To this purpose, we will build on the traditional distinctions for building a dichotomic classification of schemes, and we will advance a modular approach to argument analysis, in which different argumentation schemes are combined together in order to represent each step of reasoning on which a complex argument relies. Finally, we will show how schemes are applied to formal systems, focusing on their applications to Artificial Intelligence, AI & Law, argument mining, and formal ontologies. (shrink)

Experiments in particle physics have hitherto failed to produce any significant evidence for the many explicit models of physics beyond the Standard Model (BSM) that had been proposed over the past decades. As a result, physicists have increasingly turned to model-independent strategies as tools in searching for a wide range of possible BSM effects. In this paper, we describe the Standard Model Effective Field Theory (SM-EFT) and analyse it in the context of the philosophical discussions about models, theories, and (bottom-up) (...) effective field theories. We find that while the SM-EFT is a quantum field theory, assisting experimentalists in searching for deviations from the SM, in its general form it lacks some of the characteristic features of models. Those features only come into play if put in by hand or prompted by empirical evidence for deviations. Employing different philosophical approaches to models, we argue that the case study suggests not to take a view on models that is overly permissive because it blurs the lines between the different stages of the SM-EFT research strategies and glosses over particle physicists' motivations for undertaking this bottom-up approach in the first place. Looking at EFTs from the perspective of modelling does not require taking a stance on some specific brand of realism or taking sides in the debate between reduction and emergence into which EFTs have recently been embedded. (shrink)

The case for secrecy in voting depends on the assumption that voters reliably vote for the political outcomes they want to prevail. No such assumption is valid. Accordingly, voting procedures should be designed to provide maximal incentive for voters to vote responsibly. Secret voting fails this test because citizens are protected from public scrutiny. Under open voting, citizens are publicly answerable for their electoral choices and will be encouraged thereby to vote in a discursively defensible manner. The possibility of bribery, (...) intimidation or blackmail moderates this argument but such dangers will be avoidable in many contemporary societies without recourse to secrecy. (shrink)

Writers, philosophers, and theologians have oft made the comparison between being a mature human being and a masterpiece work of art or design. Employing the analogy between the creation of artistic value and the creation of full-fledged human value, this paper stakes out a middle ground between pro-choice and pro-life by considering a more general account of value and the relationship between being a potential X and a mature implementation of X's potential. I argue that the value of a potential (...) X is a function of a number of factors, most importantly, what I call the "accessibility relation" between a potential X and a full-fledged instantiation of this potential. The value is as much intrinsic to the “seed” as to some future implementation of the seed’s potential. This approach inclines even a secular humanist to reasonably confer a significant degree of moral value to a human conceptus, and even more to an early term fetus. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Many of our common-sense moral judgments seemingly imply the existence of moral luck. I attempt to avoid moral luck while retaining most of these judgments. I defend a view on which agents have moral equality of opportunity. This allows us to account for our anti-moral-luck intuitions at less cost than has been previously recognized.

It is great honor to be even a virtual part of an event to celebrate the work of Leslie Zines, and especially to celebrate it in such august company. Leslie was a colleague that I greatly admired and liked. The disciplinary divide between us was not any bar to affection, though Leslie never let me forget that the constitutional-law terrain was sacred ground on which outsiders ventured at their peril. I particularly enjoyed the way that he, like our mutual, recently (...) departed friend, Paul Finn, gently mocked the pretensions of a philosopher to declaim on topics jurisprudential. I fear I’m going to tread on his ground again in this little paper and I can only beg his, and Paul’s, posthumous indulgence. My topic is the dispersion of power within the state. This ideal has a long history but has ceased to be much celebrated by those who endorse it and has come in for fierce attack among populist opponents. It’s not an exaggeration to say, in Yeats’s words, that on this subject ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity’. In this short paper I would like to rehearse reasons why we should warmly endorse the dispersive ideal. And endorse it, regardless of how we dub it: whether, for example, we describe it in a mainly twentieth-century formula, as the separation of powers; in an eighteenth-century antecedent as a regime of checks and balances; in an earlier name that goes back to the Roman Republic as a mixed constitution; or in a term I myself favor as a polycentric arrangement or system. (shrink)

The Stoics claim that the sage is free from emotions, experiencing instead εὐπάθειαι (‘good feelings’). It is, however, unclear whether the sage experiences εὐπάθειαι about virtue/vice only, indifferents only, or both. Here, I argue that εὐπάθειαι are exclusively about virtue/vice by showing that this reading alone accommodates the Stoic claim that there is not a εὐπάθειαι corresponding to emotional pain. I close by considering the consequences of this view for the coherence and viability of Stoic ethics.

Russellianism is the view that the meaning of a proper name is the individual designated by the name. Together with other plausible assumptions, Russellianism entails the following: Sentences containing proper names express Russellian propositions, which involve the individual designated by the name as a direct constituent, and which can be represented as sets of individuals and properties. Moreover, as they occur in ordinary belief reports, ‘that’-clauses designate Russellian propositions. Such belief reports are true if and only if the subject of (...) the belief report bears the belief relation to the proposition designated by the ‘that’-clause. In defending this doctrine, some Russellians appeal to propositional guises, which, roughly speaking, are ways of grasping propositions. However, some Russellians don’t appeal to such entities. In this paper, I explain the varieties of Russellianism and then argue for Modest Russellianism: Believing a Russellian proposition is essentially mediated by guises, so that an agent can’t believe a Russellian proposition without standing in some appropriate relation to both the proposition and a guise. Nonetheless, guises don’t feature in the semantics of ordinary belief reports, so that an adequate account of the meaning of such belief reports needn’t invoke guises. (shrink)

The principle of alternative possibilities tells us that an agent is morally responsible for an action only if he could have done otherwise. Frankfurt-style cases provide an extremely influential challenge to the PAP . And Frankfurt-style compatibilists are motivated to accept compatibilism about responsibility and determinism in part due to FSCs. But there is a significant tension between our judgments about responsibility in FSCs and our judgments about responsibility in certain omissions cases. This tension has thus far largely been treated (...) as an internal puzzle for defenders of FSCs to solve. My goal here is to regiment this tension into a clear argument which undermines the FSC based critique of PAP. I will also argue that there is an in principle reason to doubt that Frankfurt-Style Compatibilists will be able to successfully respond to my argument. (shrink)

This is an unpublished talk written for a meeting of French philosophers. The paper describes the evolution versus creationism/intelligent design controversy in the U.S. A number of philosophers and scientists try to resolve this issue by sharply distinguishing the realm of science versus any talk of the supernatural. These pro-evolutionists often appeal to science's essential commitment to "methodological naturalism," the view that scientific methodology is essentially committed to naturalism and cannot meaningfully entertain hypotheses concerning the supernatural. I criticize methodological naturalism, (...) suggesting that such an appeal is misguided and counterproductive. I suggest an alternative view of the supernatural consistent with scientific knowledge. (shrink)

One very important question about poverty is what rich people like us should do to fight it. In this article, I argue that we can, at little cost to ourselves, give tithes of our money and live within our so-called ‘ecological footprint’. At the end of the article, it is argued that we should, morally, do these things.

Hegel famously criticizes Kant’s resolution of the antinomies. According to Sedgwick, Hegel primarily chastises Kant’s resolution for presupposing that concepts are ‘one-sided’, rather than identical to their opposites. If Kant had accepted the dialectical nature of concepts, then (according to Sedgwick) Kant would not have needed to resolve the antinomies. However, as Ameriks has noted, any such interpretation faces a serious challenge. Namely, Kant’s first antinomy concerns the universe’s physical dimensions. Even if we grant that the concept of the finite (...) is necessarily related to that of the infinite, the physical universe cannot both have and lack a temporal beginning. I argue that Hegel neither adopts Sedgwick’s view that Kant’s antinomies require no resolution nor absurdly accepts that the physical universe both has and lacks a temporal beginning. Instead, Hegel proposes a sophisticated resolution of Kant’s first antinomy (including its physical aspect) that depends on Hegel’s theory of the Absolute. (shrink)

This paper develops a philosophical account of moral disruption. According to Robert Baker (2013), moral disruption is a process in which technological innovations undermine established moral norms without clearly leading to a new set of norms. Here I analyze this process in terms of moral uncertainty, formulating a philosophical account with two variants. On the Harm Account, such uncertainty is always harmful because it blocks our knowledge of our own and others’ moral obligations. On the Qualified Harm Account, there is (...) no harm in cases where moral uncertainty is related to innovation that is “for the best” in historical perspective, or where uncertainty is the expression of a deliberative virtue. The two accounts are compared by applying them to Baker’s historical case of the introduction of mechanical ventilation and organ transplantation technologies, as well as the present-day case of mass data practices in the health domain. (shrink)

The proposition that digital innovations can put people in charge of their health has been accompanied by prolific talk of empowerment. In this paper we consider ethical challenges and opportunities of trying to achieve justice and empowerment using digital health initiatives. The language of empowerment can misleadingly suggest that by using technology, people can control their health and take responsibility for health outcomes to a greater degree than is realistic or fair. Also, digital health empowerment often primarily reaches people who (...) already have high technological and health literacy, leaving others behind. We critically investigate whether the concept of health empowerment could be re-engineered to mean something different, namely the process of improving the health literacy and access of those who least possess it, in line with recent proposals for conceptual engineering in the service of justice. We settle on the weaker conclusion that underlying ethical values including justice should be used to interpret the existing concept of empowerment. To conclude, we take a high-level view of various strategies for achieving the ethical value associated with digital health empowerment. (shrink)

The concept of white ignorance refers to phenomena of not-knowing that are produced by and reinforce systems of white supremacist domination and exploitation. I distinguish two varieties of white ignorance, belief-based white ignorance and practice-based white ignorance. Belief-based white ignorance consists in an information deficit about systems of racist oppression. Practice-based white ignorance consists in unresponsiveness to the political agency of persons and groups subject to racist oppression. Drawing on the antebellum political thought of Black abolitionists Frederick Douglass and Harriet (...) Jacobs, I contend that an anti-racist politics that conceives of its epistemic task in terms of combating practice-based white ignorance offers a more promising frame for liberatory struggle. A focus on practice-based white ignorance calls for a distinctive form of humility that involves recognition of the limits of one’s own political agency in relation to others, which is integral to democratic relations between free, equal, yet mutually dependent persons. (shrink)

Husserlian phenomenology, as the study of conscious experience, has often been accused of solipsism. Husserl’s method, it is argued, does not have the resources to provide an account of consciousness of other minds. This chapter will address this issue by providing a brief overview of the multiple angles from which Husserl approached the theme of intersubjectivity, with specific focus on the details of his account of the concrete interpersonal encounter – “empathy.” Husserl understood empathy as a direct, quasi-perceptual form of (...) intentionality through which the sense of the Other is constituted. Furthermore, his account of empathy is holistically integrated with his overall theory of intersubjectivity, including his discussions of the objectivity of nature, and the social, historical, and communal aspects of subjectivity. Husserl’s theory of empathy continues to cast a long shadow, influencing both the analytic and continental approaches to the problem of other minds, as well as contemporary account of social cognition in the cognitive sciences. (shrink)

This dissertation provides a careful reading of the later Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mathematics centered around three major themes: reality, determination, and infinity. The reading offered gives pride of place to Wittgenstein’s therapeutic conception of philosophy. This conception views questions often taken as fundamental in the philosophy of mathematics with suspicion and attempts to diagnose the confusions which lead to them. In the first essay, I explain Wittgenstein’s approach to perennial issues regarding the alleged reality to which mathematical truths or propositions (...) correspond. Wittgenstein diagnoses exotic pictures of mathematical reality as stemming from misleading analogies formed across empirical and mathematical propositions. The second essay explains Wittgenstein’s treatment of perplexity regarding the ability of a mathematical rule to determine its applications in advance. This too is found to depend on a misleading analogy, in this case across behavioral and mathematical senses of ‘determine’. The third and final essay discusses Wittgenstein’s general critical approach to “the infinite”. Philosophical perplexity about infinity is shown to depend on the verbal imagery regularly associated with proofs and their power to take hold of one’s imagination. Wittgenstein dampens the imaginative excesses often associated with “the infinite” by offering a sober redescription of Cantor’s famous method of diagonalization. (shrink)

The current COVID-19 pandemic and the previous SARS/MERS outbreaks of 2003 and 2012 have resulted in a series of major global public health crises. We argue that in the interest of developing effective and safe vaccines and drugs and to better understand coronaviruses and associated disease mechenisms it is necessary to integrate the large and exponentially growing body of heterogeneous coronavirus data. Ontologies play an important role in standard-based knowledge and data representation, integration, sharing, and analysis. Accordingly, we initiated the (...) development of the community-based Coronavirus Infectious Disease Ontology in early 2020. -/- As an Open Biomedical Ontology (OBO) library ontology, CIDO is open source and interoperable with other existing OBO ontologies. CIDO is aligned with the Basic Formal Ontology and Viral Infectious Disease Ontology. CIDO has imported terms from over 30 OBO ontologies. For example, CIDO imports all SARS-CoV-2 protein terms from the Protein Ontology, COVID-19-related phenotype terms from the Human Phenotype Ontology, and over 100 COVID-19 terms for vaccines (both authorized and in clinical trial) from the Vaccine Ontology. CIDO systematically represents variants of SARS-CoV-2 viruses and over 300 amino acid substitutions therein, along with over 300 diagnostic kits and methods. CIDO also describes hundreds of host-coronavirus protein-protein interactions (PPIs) and the drugs that target proteins in these PPIs. CIDO has been used to model COVID-19 related phenomena in areas such as epidemiology. The scope of CIDO was evaluated by visual analysis supported by a summarization network method. CIDO has been used in various applications such as term standardization, inference, natural language processing (NLP) and clinical data integration. We have applied the amino acid variant knowledge present in CIDO to analyze differences between SARS-CoV-2 Delta and Omicron variants. CIDO's integrative host-coronavirus PPIs and drug-target knowledge has also been used to support drug repurposing for COVID-19 treatment. -/- CIDO represents entities and relations in the domain of coronavirus diseases with a special focus on COVID-19. It supports shared knowledge representation, data and metadata standardization and integration, and has been used in a range of applications. (shrink)

In this paper I focus on how far the republican ideal of freedom as non-domination can and should command allegiance across different cultures. Is the ideal bound to western culture, as its provenance may suggest? Or does it have a hold on the human imagination and sensibility that survives across various cultural and historical divides? I argue, in a deeply unfashionable vein,that it does command a form of universal allegiance. Or, to be more exact, I argue that freedom as non-domination (...) has this status in its role as an ideal of social justice. Reasons of space make it impossible to extend the argument to its role as an ideal of political and international justice —as an ideal of democracy and sovereignty —but the considerations I muster should make clear how that argument would go. (shrink)

Against the apparent casting away of poetry from contemporary philosophy of language and aesthetics which has left poetry forceless, I argue that poetry has a linguistic, philosophical, and even political force. Against the idea that literature (as novel) can teach us facts about the world, I argue that the force of literature (as poetry) resides in its capacity to change our ways of seeing. First, I contest views which consider poetry forceless by discussing Austin’s and Sartre’s views. Second, I explore (...) the concept of force in the realm of art—focusing on Nietzsche’s philosophy and Menke’s Kraft der Kunst—and the relations between linguistic, artistic, and political forces. Third, I consider how the transformative force of poetry can be considered political by turning to Kristeva’s Revolution in Poetic Language and Meschonnic’s conception of poetry according to which the poem does something to language and the subject. To illustrate this transformative force of poetry, I analyse Caroline Zekri’s poem ‘Un pur rapport grammatical’. I therefore think of poetry not only as doing something with language, but also as doing something to language. To rephrase Austin’s famous title, and thus reverse his evaluation of poetry, poetry might reveal to us not only How to Do Things with Words, but how to do things to words and, through this doing, how to transform and affect the world. (shrink)

Politics is a vital aspect of every society. This is due to the fact that the general development of any country is first measured by its level of political development. Good political condition in a nation is a sine qua non to economic growth. A corrupt and unstable political system in any country would have a domino-effect on the country's economic outlook and social lives of the people. The concept of politics itself continued to be interpreted by many political scholars, (...) critics and the masses from different perspectives. Corruption, political assassination, greed, perpetrated not only by politicians but also by the masses are the societal ills that continue to militate against socio-economic and political development in most African countries, particularly Nigeria. Peaceful political transition to the opposition party in Nigeria in recent times has given a different dimension to the country’s political position for other countries in the region to emulate. This paper addresses the concept of politics and presents corruption in Nigerian society from the point of theatre, using Osita Ezenwanebe’s Giddy Festival. The investigation is grounded in sociological theory and the concept of political realism. This paper recommends that politics can be violent-free if all the actors in the game develop selfless qualities of leadership for the benefit of the ruled. (shrink)

According to a traditional view, humans are superior to their non‐human terrestrial companions because they alone are “rational animals.” Although the traditional view is presupposed by our social and legal institutions, it has been called into question by modern science: Darwin himself claimed that humans differ in degree rather than in kind from animals, and recent discoveries in comparative animal cognition have seemed to confirm Darwin's assertion. Sustaining the traditional view in light of these discoveries calls out for a careful (...) comparison of the human mind with its precursors, the vertebrate mind and the mammalian mind. Psychological capacities shared across the animal kingdom are repurposed in humans, rendering humans uniquely capable of rationality. To be rational is to respond appropriately to value. Humans as such are not rational animals, but have the potential to become rational animals. This potential marks a morally relevant difference in kind between humans and non‐human animals. (shrink)