Are groups ever capable of bearing responsibility, over and above their individual members? This chapter discusses and defends the view that certain organized collectives – namely, those that qualify as group moral agents – can be held responsible for their actions, and that group responsibility is not reducible to individual responsibility. The view has important implications. It supports the recognition of corporate civil and even criminal liability in our legal systems, and it suggests that, by recognizing group (...) agents as loci of responsibility, we may be able to avoid “responsibility gaps” in some cases of collectively caused harms for which there is a shortfall of individual responsibility. The chapter further asks whether the view that certain groups are responsible agents commits us to the view that those groups should also be given rights of their own and gives a qualified negative answer. (shrink)

Can a group be morally responsible instead of, or in addition to, its members? An influential defense of corporate responsibility is based on results in social choice theory suggesting that a group can form and act on attitudes held by few, or even none, of its members. The members therefore cannot be (fully) responsible for the group’s behavior; the group itself, as a corporate agent, must be responsible. In this paper, I reject this view of corporate responsibility by (...) showing how it pays insufficient attention to individual agency. By accounting for group members’ strategic behavior, we shall see how they control collective attitude formation and are therefore responsible for their group’s behavior. (shrink)

This article explores the norms that govern regular users’ acts of sharing content on social networking sites. Many debates on how to counteract misinformation on Social Networking Sites focus on the epistemic norms of testimony, implicitly assuming that the users’ acts of sharing should fall under the same norms as those for posting original content. I challenge this assumption by proposing a non-epistemic interpretation of (mis) information sharing on social networking sites which I construe as infrastructures for forms of life (...) found online. Misinformation sharing belongs more in the realm of rumour spreading and gossiping rather than in the information-giving language games. However, the norms for sharing cannot be fixed in advance, as these emerge at the interaction between the platforms’ explicit rules, local norms established by user practices, and a meta-norm of sociality. This unpredictability does not leave us with a normative void as an important user responsibility still remains, namely that of making the context of the sharing gesture explicit. If users will clarify how their gestures of sharing are meant to be interpreted by others, they will implicitly assume responsibility for possible misunderstandings based on omissions, and the harms of shared misinformation can be diminished. (shrink)

Legal positivism emerged in response to natural law, as an indictment on the latter’s metaphysical predilections. Natural law dominance created a yearning for empiricism, or even a ‘hard scientism’ in approach to understanding socially constructed phenomenon, including legal praxis. From its Benthamite origins, it has since been developed, with recent, spirited debate still undertaken among towering legal scholars. Although its validity is contested to some, it remains as an analytic point of view of the law. Yet, within its design, there (...) is quite a bit of subject matter put out of view of the positivist, even though it is observable phenomenon within the sphere of legal praxis. This creates a void in which certain problems are unsolvable by the theory of law embodied in positivism. Rather than adjust the theory, the positivists either designate the void as the province for legal decision-making based on an internal morality in hard cases; or it criticises systems that do not strictly adhere to the positivist account as crude in the case of the international legal system. What follows is an account of HLA Hart’s brand of positivism, as it has remained dominant and perhaps the easiest to understand. I then identify subject-matter put out of view of positivism, with reference to Kelsen’s account of ‘authority’. I conclude that the positivist project is incomplete given its limited account of decision-making in hard cases and the international legal system. (shrink)

A study is reported testing two hypotheses about a close parallel relation between indicative conditionals, if A then B , and conditional bets, I bet you that if A then B . The first is that both the indicative conditional and the conditional bet are related to the conditional probability, P(B|A). The second is that de Finetti's three-valued truth table has psychological reality for both types of conditional— true , false , or void for indicative conditionals and win , lose (...) , or void for conditional bets. The participants were presented with an array of chips in two different colours and two different shapes, and an indicative conditional or a conditional bet about a random chip. They had to make judgements in two conditions: either about the chances of making the indicative conditional true or false or about the chances of winning or losing the conditional bet. The observed distributions of responses in the two conditions were generally related to the conditional probability, supporting the first hypothesis. In addition, a majority of participants in further conditions chose the third option, “void”, when the antecedent of the conditional was false, supporting the second hypothesis. (shrink)

In _Metaphysics_ A.4, Aristotle provides crucial information about fundamental aspects of the chemistry and microphysics of the atomic theory of Leucippus and Democritus of Abdera. Besides the plenum and the void, which he identifies as the elements of the atomic theory, he presents what he himself names as _differences_. These fundamental differences are named so because they ought to be responsible for the emergence of all other differences in the physical world, and especially the ones that hit our senses. Aristotle (...) provides a list of three differences both in what is recognized as autochthonous terminology from Leucippus and Democritus, and in a translation to terms apparently more intelligible to Aristotelian listeners. Among those differences there is one in particular that is harder to comprehend than the other ones: _rhysmos_. Aristotle’s translation of _rhysmos_ into _sch__ēma_ has led most interpreters to acknowledge that it referred solely to atoms individually, while the other two differences would refer to relations between atoms. In this paper, I want to propose an interpretation in which _rhysmos_ actually refers to several aspects of the chemistry and microphysics of the atomic theory. (shrink)

Following the pioneering studies of the receptive field (RF), the concept gained further significance for visual perception by the discovery of input effects from beyond the classical RF. These studies demonstrated that neuronal responses could be modulated by stimuli outside their RFs, consistent with the perception of induced brightness, color, orientation, and motion. Lesion scotomata are similarly modulated perceptually from the surround by RFs that have migrated from the interior to the outer edge of the scotoma and in this way (...) provide filling-in of the void. Large RFs are advantageous to this task. In higher visual areas, such as the middle temporal and inferotemporal lobe, RFs increase in size and lose most of their retinotopic organization while encoding increasingly complex features. Whereas lowerlevel RFs mediate perceptual filling-in, contour integration, and figure–ground segregation, RFs at higher levels serve the perception of grouping by common fate, biological motion, and other biologically relevant stimuli, such as faces. Studies in alert monkeys while freely viewing natural scenes showed that classical and nonclassical RFs cooperate in forming representations of the visual world. Today, our understanding of the mechanisms underlying the RF is undergoing a quantum leap. What had started out as a hierarchical feedforward concept for simple stimuli, such as spots, lines, and bars, now refers to mechanisms involving ascending, descending, and lateral signal flow. By extension of the bottom-up paradigm, RFs are nowadays understood as adaptive processors, enabling the predictive coding of complex scenes. Top-down effects guiding attention and tuned to task-relevant information complement the bottom-up analysis. (shrink)

Plato’s philosophy is important to Badiou for a number of reasons, chief among which is that Badiou considered Plato to have recognised that mathematics provides the only sound or adequate basis for ontology. The mathematical basis of ontology is central to Badiou’s philosophy, and his engagement with Plato is instrumental in determining how he positions his philosophy in relation to those approaches to the philosophy of mathematics that endorse an orthodox Platonic realism, i.e. the independent existence of a realm of (...) mathematical objects. The Platonism that Badiou makes claim to bears little resemblance to this orthodoxy. Like Plato, Badiou insists on the primacy of the eternal and immu- table abstraction of the mathematico-ontological Idea; however, Badiou’s reconstructed Platonism champions the mathematics of post-Cantorian set theory, which itself af rms the irreducible multiplicity of being. Badiou in this way recon gures the Platonic notion of the relation between the one and the multiple in terms of the multiple-without-one as represented in the axiom of the void or empty set. Rather than engage with the Plato that is gured in the ontological realism of the orthodox Platonic approach to the philosophy of mathematics, Badiou is intent on characterising the Plato that responds to the demands of a post-Cantorian set theory, and he considers Plato’s philosophy to provide a response to such a challenge. In effect, Badiou reorients mathematical Platonism from an epistemological to an ontological problematic, a move that relies on the plausibility of rejecting the empiricist ontology underlying orthodox mathematical Platonism. To draw a connec- tion between these two approaches to Platonism and to determine what sets them radically apart, this paper focuses on the use that they each make of model theory to further their respective arguments. (shrink)

Isaiah Berlin famously attacked a view he called historical inevitability. He believed that a causal view of history entails the adoption of an extreme deterministic position – a kind of determinism which would rule out the possibility of free will, turning moral responsibility a notion void of meaning. His thesis was also based on the assumption that historians are not just chroniclers of the past but need to engage in moral judgments; therefore should determinism hold true of our world, (...) our moral language – and consequently much of our historical language – would need to undergo serious revision. In this brief article we look in some detail at the arguments offered by Berlin in support of his thesis and offer criticism. (shrink)

Agents have powers to bring about change. Do agents have normative powers to bring about normative change directly? This chapter distinguishes between direct normative change and descriptive and institutional changes, which may indirectly be normatively significant. This article argues that agents do indeed have the powers to bring about normative change directly. It responds to a challenge claiming that all normativity is institutional and another claiming that exercises of normative powers would violate considerations of supervenience. The article also responds to (...) a challenge - generalizing Kent Hurtig’s recent challenge about consent - which states that exercises of normative powers are valid only in cases that do not matter - they never bring about a “normative transformation” of what the agent overall ought to do. It turns out that consent is normatively transformative in some cases, but the main contribution of exercises of normative powers is at the contributory level not that of overall oughts. Invalid exercises of normative powers are void of any normative effects. Rational agents as possessors of normative powers are not merely responsive to pre-existing normative reasons, but they can also create normative reasons. A “responsive” view of rational agency sees us as being able to track existing normative reasons and make descriptive changes (on which normative changes supervene). The “creative” view of rational agency sees us as being able not only to construct institutions but also to create normative reasons directly. The chapter concludes that agents are both responsive and creative. (shrink)

Abstract A Note to Cogito Les Jones Blackburn College Previous submissions include -Intention, interpretation and literary theory, a first lookWittgenstein and St Augustine A DiscussionAreas of Interest – History of Western Philosophy, Miscellaneous Philosophy, European A Note on Cogito Descartes' brilliance in driving out doubt, and proving the existence of himself as a thinking entity, is well documented. Sartre's critique (or maybe extension) is both apposite and grounded and takes these enquiries on to another level. Let's take a look. 'I (...) think' somehow, for all its power, lacks something. What? Consider what one does when thinking (difficult, but we can try). Implicit in the word 'think', in fact the very essence of the word 'think', is that activity is going on, and if such activity is going on then it must be going on about something, an object, an emotion, a problem,or maybe some dreamlike state, but common to all these is that something is going on. Is that really so? Well, if that wasn't so we would be able to think in a pure state, wouldn't we? But what does a pure state of 'thinking' mean? It can't mean that there isnothing there, because if there were nothing there then no thinking would be taking place. Can it mean that we are thinking of nothing? Well no, because if we are thinking of nothing then we are thinking of something, we are contemplating the notion, or the nature, of nothing. In fact, one can argue that if we talk of something, inthis case nothing or nothingness, then in our head we have some notion of what that is, i.e. something exists in the mind for it to come out of our mouths. Thinking is a recognition of something outside the individual, for the very act of direction, which isan indispensable part of thinking, recognises, must recognise, that there are things to address outside the individual. Something else to bear in mind. According to Sartre human beings are condemned to freedom. Why condemned? Human beings did not choose to be born, but the act ofbeing born also imparts the freedom of which Sartre speaks. Freedom is something which we parrot off as being a sine qua non for the human condition. I believe that's true, but freedom in this sense isn't without its consequences for the individual humanbeing, for individual human beings handle freedom differently. To some it enables them to fly, to others it imparts immense pressures, anguish, heartbreak, unhappiness can all be associated with such freedom. Each individual is responsible for his destiny, for his direction. If someone says that God impelled him, that individual chose his or her God, and chose to obey his or her God. This believer has to sift through the multitude of things that his or her God desire of him or her. All this is fine, so long as we acknowledge what is going on here. Belief in God is, by definition, a belief. Belief, following Wittgenstein, is a language game with its rules and its boundaries. The essential feature of religion as language game are its boundaries, which can be summed up in the word belief. OK, belief has its practises which are its constituent parts, but belief is the boundary between religion and other language games, as the proof constituents are different. Our world is determined by the language used to describe everything that goes on within it. The boundaries of our world are set by the language we use. This might be better put as language gives access to ever expending boundaries. Ever expanding boundaries are only possible by ever expanding thought, and ever expanding thought is only possible by ever expanding directions to our thought brought about through language. It is a fact taken that to be conscious is to think. How could this be otherwise? Consciousness without thought just does not make sense. Imagine a state of consciousness without directional thought. What would it be like? It would be something never experienced, completely out of our understanding. Why? Because understanding itself is a directional thought process. If we say we are going outside our understanding then that is a world of void, and a world of void does not exist. Can such a world be contemplated in our thinking? Well, yes, but then it requires thinking, and thinking requires direction, and such direction requires language. Why does direction require language? Because there is no other way for human beings to articulate a directional thought. Could one point at an image without language? Well, one could have an image in mind, but the essence of saying something about it, of descriptive power, brings us back to the essence, to the power of language to direct. So what of this language of which we speak? Wittgenstein's private language argument points us towards the notion that language itself constantly develops and redevelops through human interaction. Descarte's cogito implies that thinking rules out doubt of one's own existence. But such thinking, to be valid, to make sense, to direct, must develop in a language that has developed, has been verified, by a plurality, by a plurality whose essence is social. Correct use of language symbols, i.e. words, requires that we verify and reverify the accuracy of such symbols. How do we do that? We do that in constant usage, in constant interaction, with other human beings. An individual using a private language could not be understood by others, his symbol system has not been verified by others, his meanings may not be your meanings. It follows from what we have said above that language is constructed, and is continually constructed, in a social context. Given our previous thoughts regarding verification this could not be otherwise. Language has a normative form. All language users are required, by their very use of the language, to verify the use of terms, grammar etc etc. As Wittgenstein cites (appropriately) games as a model, let us take a look. If I play e.g. Ludo, I am governed by the rules. It is not just that I may play dishonestly, for if I were to play at all that very dishonesty, to count as Ludo, would have to be rule governed. The rules of Ludo are Ludo, they are the essence and the constitution of it. Wittgenstein, particularly in his later writings, interweaves many concepts, and connects them in different and sometimes rather elusive ways. Wittgenstein sees concepts like emotions, sentiments and experiences in these interweaving maps. Of course these can be regarded as psychological concepts ** Language can be considered in another but related way, as embodying the elements of a cultural heritage. Language was seen as embodying the notion of higher culture in the arts, architecture etc. Over recent decades this has tended to shift to consider less tangible benefits, such things as oral traditions, cultural values and cultural identity. So language enables us to explore, through the achievements of past generations, cultural mores that may have laid unchallenged for many years. Many of these values and mores may be seen as independent of the language by which they are transmitted, but still this monumental accomplishment of mankind i.e. language, enables man to explore, to modify, to codify, to extend the boundaries of human experience. There are therefore massive implications for our Note on Cogito of Wittgenstein's work. Following Wittgenstein emotions and other psychological concepts can be termed depth grammar, and are distinguished by the fact that the third person of the present is recognised by observation, the first person is not. Taking Wittgenstein's well known pain example the sentence 'He is in pain' is a third person statement of an observational nature. The sentence 'I am in pain' is not derived from observation but from experience, it is an expression of that experience, it's essence is the experience. The asymmetry consists in the fact that predicting psychological attributes of others is warranted by what they do and say. By contrast, the use of such statements in the first person present tense does not rest on one's observation of one's own behaviour. (Hacker 2010:287) p 9 According to Wittgenstein 'I am in pain' is more like a cry of pain, an expression of pain, than a report of some pain. Of course this appertains for other similar statements. 'I feel good' etc. (shrink)

The paper is focused on the intedermination in compositive processes. In particular on John Cage. The art and the thought of Cage were a response to the growing complexity of the world through a practice and a reflection that focuses heavily on the concept of emptiness, understood as technical decentralization of: the author of the musical structure and the individual and of the same identification of sounds. This complexity results from a network of independent nodes, subjects, activities and institutions that (...) interact in no particular order. You can no longer assume the existence of an ultimate subject for whose wisdom assumes all sense. There is no longer any author. Events happen randomly. Relinquishing control is one of the main themes running through the compositional work of Cage. (shrink)

My task in this paper is to study Sartre’s ontology as a godless theology. The urgency of defending freedom and responsibility in the face of determinism called for an overarching first principle, a role that God used to play. I first show why such a principle is important and how Sartre filled the void that God had left with a solipsist consciousness. Then I characterize Sartre’s ontology of this consciousness as a “dualist monism”, explaining how it supports his radical (...) conception of freedom. Then, by assessing Sartre’s dualist monism through a theological lens, I disclose an inconsistency in his thought concerning the idea that the in-itself is a deterministic plenitude, which presumes a theos different from consciousness and hence threatens monism. Finally I argue that his inconsistency originates from the finitude of Sartre’s first principle and analyze this finitude by examining the modes of temporality it implies. The entire trajectory problematizes the practice of theo-logy, the idea that a theos stands at the origin of the “logic” (organization or intelligibility) of everything such that all must be conceived under the logos of the theos. While Sartre forcefully criticized the theology of the infinite, his was nonetheless a theology of finitude. (shrink)

Preface/Introduction: The question under discussion is metaphysical and truly elemental. It emerges in two aspects — how did we come to be conscious of our own existence, and, as a deeper corollary, do existence and awareness necessitate each other? I am bold enough to explore these questions and I invite you to come along; I make no claim to have discovered absolute answers. However, I do believe I have created here a compelling interpretation. You’ll have to judge for yourself. -/- (...) What follows is the presentation of three essays I have worked on over the past several years seeing publication for the first time. “Hollows of Experience” was written first as an invited chapter for a collection on the ontology of consciousness. However, when cuts became necessary, my chapter got the knife. Its length has prohibited it from publication in any print journal. “Myth and Mind” was written next as a journal article, but as my involvement with it grew so did its length, so it has also idled on my websty awaiting its call. “From Panexperientialism to Conscious Experience” was written most recently, but it is the only one to have been available to the public elsewhere than my own website. Under the name, “The Continuum of Experience”, it was Target Article #95 on the recently closed Karl Jaspers Forum (for discussion purposes only). -/- I have put them in a different sequence here, for reasons of logical sense. Up first, “Panexperientialism” deals with an idea difficult for many to accept, namely that conscious experience is a particular mode of symbolically reflected experience that is largely unique to our species. However, I aver that experienced sensation in itself (as found, for example, in autonomic sensory response systems) goes “all the way down” into nature, and thus the title, panexperientialism. -/- Understanding this idea is helpful to dealing with the focus on language in Part I of “Hollows”, next, since here speech and general symbolic interaction in general are found to be the catalysts for the creation of our consciously experienced world (our “lived reality”). In Part II, however, I explore how experienced sensations must be coeval with existence, and, with even greater temerity, how all this sensational existence might have arisen within some literally inconceivable background of awareness-in-itself that yet has a dynamism that occasionally breaks into existence as experiential events and entities. (The latter may sound wacky, but physicists and cosmologists are themselves attempting to come to terms with that which seethes with vast potential energy in what they refer to as the quantum vacuum.) -/- “Myth and Mind” was put third since it deals with a major lacuna in “Hollows” — that presumed prehistoric period when members of our species made the painful crossing of the symbolic threshold into the beginnings of cultural consciousness. Speech plays a central role here, too, but I look more at narrative structures from the dawn of self-awareness when ritual and myth became vital to human survival. Why would fantastic stories and bizarre rituals be necessary? I speculate that growing foresight led to the unavoidable realization of certain mortality, from which, in turn, emerged the secondary realization that we were now alive. In contrast to our yet-to-come death, we have life here and now, and by ritually identifying with a symbolically expanded mythic, i.e., sacred, reality, we may continue to live on after bodily death, just as our ancestors and loved ones must also do. Language and mythmaking are necessary to avoid mortal despair and they remain at the core of human consciousness. -/- As Ernst Cassirer (1944) has noted, language and myth are “twin creatures”, both metaphoric webs over a reality we can never wholly comprehend. We live in the symbolic and construct our works of imagination and wars of conquest to make life meaningful, to feel immortal, and to sense that we ourselves participate in a reality greater than ourselves. No doubt we do, but this does not mean our culturally constructed self-identities survive the death of our bodies, and it does not imply that our symbolic concepts can ever indicate the ultimate truth. We simply must symbolize an extended reality that was sacred to our ancestors: “Is it not our way, as illusory as it may be, to force continuance on our world and our life in the face of their inevitable ending? Are we not compelled to extend those imaginary horizons as far as we can despite the terror and the sometime joy their extension incites? Is their closure not a form of death?” (Crapanzano, p. 210) -/- Of course, this leaves me in the uncomfortable position of being forced to admit that this venture of mine must inevitably be another attempt at meaningful mythmaking. But what else could it be? This is certainly not a scientific proof though it is indeed an academically rigorous exploration. (Just try to count the citations!) I hope the reader will judge my thesis on the basis of its coherence, the sense of meaning it evokes, my intellectual responsibility, and, finally, the engagement it inspires. If you have read my expositions and found yourself immersed in the timeless questions I here call forth, I would call these writings successful (even if you violently disagree with my answers). -/- I am very grateful to Huping Hu for granting me this special issue of JCER in which to present my ideas in some detail. He has patiently dealt with my exuberant approach and allowed the many changes I kept coming up with right until the final publication date. I also wish to thank the many potential commentators who politely replied to my invitation, and, even more, I thank those who made time to write actual commentaries. -/- References -/- Cassirer, E. (1944). An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture. New Haven/London: Yale UP. -/- Crapanzano, V. (2004). Imaginative Horizons: An Essay in Literary-Philosophical Anthropology. Chicago: U of Chicago Press. -/- Gregory M. Nixon University of Northern British Columbia Prince George, British Columbia, Canada Email: [email protected] Websty: http://members.shaw.ca/doknyx. (shrink)

In Foucault, thought is spatial, and unfolds within the density of becoming, in the void that separates the subject and the object. It is ontologically independent from the authority of the contemplating self, the ‘I’. Thought is a being of its own, and comes from the outside – the world of relationships. The present study poses to itself the following question: if thinking indeed comes from the outside, then under what condition thinking can encounter itself – its colour, texture and (...) topography? That is, under what condition can man encounter himself and the world? Since this problem does not have its origin in Foucault’s work, this work does not arrive at any conclusion merely by analysing and evaluating his work alone. Rather, it aims to explore how Foucault has incorporated Kant and Nietzsche into his thinking, on the one hand, and contextualises him within the Western tradition in general and his responses to contemporaries Deleuze and Derrida, in particular, on the other. Consequently, this study is limited by the sheer weight of its own problematisation. However, the problem of ‘under what condition thought encounters itself?’ is here posed not for the sake of constituting a form of knowledge on it, but rather, it is asked from the point of view of ethics. This, in fact, demands a reordering of the forms of ontology that Foucault has developed at different stages of his career. There are three forms of ontology in Foucault’s work: the first analyses man as the subject of truth; the second takes up man as the subject of power; and the third analyses man as an ethical being. The present study reverses the order and examines his work in its totality from the standpoint of his later writings that deal with the problem of truth and ethics. It tries to connect two problems that pop up at different stages of Foucault’s career. The Order of Things asks the question, “what is man?” and in his later writings Foucault labours on the question, “how should I live my life?” This study tries to relate these two questions, as it unfolds itself. (shrink)

In this paper, we explore how a conversational theory of moral responsibility can provide illuminating resources for building a theory about the nature and norms of moral forgiveness.

Seeing one’s laptop to be missing, hearing silence and smelling fresh air; these are all examples of perceptual experiences of absences. In this paper I discuss an example of absence perception in the tactual sense modality, that of tactually perceiving a tooth to be absent in one’s mouth, following its extraction. Various features of the example challenge two recently-developed theories of absence perception: Farennikova’s memory-perception mismatch theory and Martin and Dockic’s meta-cognitive theory. I speculate that the mechanism underlying the experience (...) is a body schema that has failed to update itself. (shrink)

The author argues for a theory of responsibility for outcomes of imposed risk, based on whether it was permissible to impose the risk. When one tries to apply this persuasive model of responsibility for outcomes of risk imposition to procreation, which is a risk imposing act, one finds that it doesn’t match one’s intuitions about responsibility for outcomes of procreative risk. This mismatch exposes a justificatory gap for procreativity, namely, that procreation cannot avail itself of the shared (...) vulnerability to risks and their constraints—to the balance one is forced to strike between one’s interest in being free to impose risks on others and one’s interest in being safe from harm resulting from the risk imposed by others—which serves to justify risk imposition, generally. Whereas most risk impositions involve trade-offs of liberty and security among people who share the vulnerabilities associated with the taking, imposing, or being constrained from imposing risks, procreation involves the introduction of people into that position of vulnerability in the first place. Thus, when one procreates, one imposes risks in the absence of the shared vulnerability that usually serves as a justification for risk imposition. Procreative risks may not be wrongfully imposed, but they aren’t permissibly imposed in a manner fully comparable to other permissibly imposed risks. This makes procreation a unique form of risk imposition, with unique implications for its justification and for one’s responsibility for its outcomes. This insight can help explain several puzzling procreative asymmetries. (shrink)

Objectives Practitioners in contemplative traditions commonly report experiencing an awareness that is distinct from sensory objects, thoughts, and emotions (“awareness itself”). They also report experiences of a void or underlying silence that is closely associated with this awareness. Subjects who carry out the Headless Way exercises frequently report an experience of emptiness or void at the same time as other contents (void-like experiences). The goals of this study were to (1) assess the reliability of these methods in eliciting the recognition (...) of awareness and void-like experiences in participants who had no prior exposure to these techniques, (2) investigate the prevalence of these experiences in these tasks, and (3) to differentiate these experiences from closely related and potential precursor experiences. -/- Method Twenty adults participated in in-depth individual interviews in which they were guided through the Headless Way exercises. A thematic analysis was conducted on the interview transcripts. -/- Results Twelve of the participants reported a void-like experience, and five participants reported an experience of awareness itself. These experiences were respectively categorized as subsets of the more general categories of perceptual absences and the sense of not being person-like. Another novel finding was the real-time reports of awareness and void-like experiences during the exercises. -/- Conclusions Our findings provide preliminary evidence that the Headless Way exercises can effectively induce experiences of emptiness and awareness in participants without prior experience. The findings suggest that such experiences can be elicited outside of a traditional meditation context, including in non-meditators. Furthermore, the experience of not being person-like and of perceptual absences may be precursors and more general forms of recognizing awareness itself and the void-like nature of the mind. (shrink)

My essay will take as its point of departure the paragraph from Gershom Scholem’s “Reflections on Jewish Theology,” in which he depicts the modern religious experience as the one of the "void of God" or as "pious atheism". I will first argue that the "void of God" cannot be reduced to atheistic non-belief in the presence of God. Then, I will demonstrate the further development of the Scholemian notion of the ‘pious atheism’ in Derrida, especially in his Lurianic treatment of (...) Angelus Silesius, whose modern mysticism emerges in Derrida’s reading as the ‘almost-atheism’. The interesting feature of this development is that, while for Scholem, the ‘void of God’ is a predominantly negative experience, for Derrida, it becomes an affirmative model of modern – not just Jewish, but more generally, Abrahamic – religiosity which, on the one hand, touches upon atheistic non-belief in the divine presence here and now, yet, on the other, still insists on commemorating the ‘withdrawn God’ through his ‘traces.’ What, therefore, for Scholem, constitutes the ultimate cry of despair, best embodied in Kafka’s work – for Derrida, reveals the more positive face of the modern predicament in which God has absented himself in order to make room for the creaturely reality. And while Scholem envisages redemption as the full restoration of the divine presence – Derrida redefines redemption as the ‘pious’ work of deconstruction to be undertaken in the ‘almost-atheistic’ condition of irreversible separation between God and the world. (shrink)

What exists at the fundamental level of reality? On the standard picture, the fundamental reality contains (among other things) fundamental matter, such as particles, fields, or even the quantum state. Non-fundamental facts are explained by facts about fundamental matter, at least in part. In this paper, I introduce a non-standard picture called the "cosmic void” in which the universe is devoid of any fundamental material ontology. Facts about tables and chairs are recovered from a special kind of laws that satisfy (...) strong determinism. All non-fundamental facts are completely explained by nomic facts. I discuss a concrete example of this picture in a strongly deterministic version of the many-worlds theory of quantum mechanics. I discuss some philosophical and scientific challenges to this view, as well as some connections to ontological nihilism. (shrink)

This paper cuts across three nineteenth-century Russian thinkers—Pyotr Chaadaev, Mikhail Bakunin and Nikolai Fedorov—to reconstruct a speculative trajectory that seeks to think an ungrounding and delegitimation of the (Christian-modern) world and its logics of violence, domination, and exclusion. In Chaadaev, Russia becomes a territory of nothingness—an absolute exception from history, tradition, and memory, without attachment or relation to world history. Ultimately, Chaadaev affirms this atopic void in its immanence, as capable of creating immanently from itself a common future. Bakunin is (...) antagonistic to political theology as an apparatus of transcendence spanning across nature and history, cannibalism and patriotism, abstraction and religious transcendence. Against these amalgams, and against Schmitt’s naturalist reading of Bakunin, we detect in him the idea of socialism or anarchism as what has never taken place in nature or history, and the image of an unnatural humanity affirmed as the common task linking an absolute futurity with a revolutionary nowness. Against the violence of nature and history in which the present is sacrificed, and death is justified, for future life, Fedorov (the founder of Russian Cosmism) seeks to think the apocalyptic common task of immanent resurrection—and the void as the cosmic void, the expanse of the universe to be inhabited in-common. For him, thought must proceed from death and the ashes (of history and the earth) as what we have in common. The resulting trajectory is ambivalent, caught between an ungrounding of modernity and world-history, and providential or theodical modes of its justification. (shrink)

Void is at the heart of Stoic metaphysics. As the incorporeal par excellence, being defined purely in terms of lacking body, it brings into sharp focus the Stoic commitment to non-existent Somethings. This article argues that Stoic void, far from rendering the Stoic system incoherent or merely ad hoc, in fact reflects a principled and coherent physicalism that sets the Stoics apart from their materialist predecessors and atomist neighbors.

Dr Stockmann, the principal character in Henrik Ibsen's A Public Enemy, is a classic example of a whistle-blower who, upon detecting and disclosing a serious case of environmental pollution, quickly finds himself transformed from a public benefactor into a political outcast by those in power. If we submit the play to a 'second reading', however, it becomes clear that the ethical intricacies of whistle-blowing are interwoven with epistemological issues. Basically, the play is about the complex task of communicating scientific (notably (...) microbiological) data to lay audiences. This becomes even more apparent when we realise that Stockmann was a contemporary of real 'microbe hunters' such as Pasteur and Koch. The play's basic message is that epoch-making scientists (such as Pasteur and Koch) not only produced convincing and reliable data from a scientific point of view, but also acquired the skills and insights needed to enter into a dialogue with their cultural and societal environment. (shrink)

In The Stubborn System of Moral Responsibility (2015), Bruce Waller sets out to explain why the belief in individual moral responsibility is so strong. He begins by pointing out that there is a strange disconnect between the strength of philosophical arguments in support of moral responsibility and the strength of philosophical belief in moral responsibility. While the many arguments in favor of moral responsibility are inventive, subtle, and fascinating, Waller points out that even the most (...) ardent supporters of moral responsibility acknowledge that the arguments in its favor are far from conclusive; and some of the least confident concerning the arguments for moral responsibility—such as Van Inwagen—are most confident of the truth of moral responsibility. Thus, argues Waller, whatever the verdict on the strength of philosophical arguments for moral responsibility, it is clear that belief in moral responsibility—whether among philosophers or the folk—is based on something other than philosophical reasons. -/- He goes on to argue that there are several sources for the strong belief in moral responsibility, but the following four are particularly influential: First, moral responsibility is based in a powerful “strike back” emotion that we share with other animals. Second, there is a deep-rooted “belief in a just world”—a belief that, according to Waller, most philosophers reject when they consciously consider it, but which has a deep nonconscious influence on what we regard as just treatment and which provides subtle (but mistaken) support for belief in moral responsibility. Third, there is a pervasive moral responsibility system—extending over criminal justice as well as “common sense”—that makes the truth of moral responsibility seem obvious, and makes challenges to moral responsibility seem incoherent. Finally, there is the enormous confidence we have in the power of reason, which mistakenly leads us to believe that our conscious, rational, and critically reflective selves are constantly guiding our behavior in accordance with our deep values. -/- In these comments, I would like to discuss the many points of agreement I have with Waller, providing along the way additional fuel for his skeptical fire (i.e., his moral responsibility skepticism and his skeptical analysis of the source of our strong belief in moral responsibility). I will also discuss, however, my one main point of disagreement—i.e., his desire to preserve the conception of free will. Waller believes free will can “flourish” in the absence of moral responsibility (see Ch.8), while I maintain they that the variety of free will that is of central philosophical and practical importance is the sort required for moral responsibility in a particular but pervasive sense. This sense of moral responsibility is set apart by the notion of basic desert and is purely backward-looking and non-consequentialist (see Pereboom 2001, 2014; Caruso and Morris, forthcoming). Understood this way, the sort of free will at issue in the historical debate is a kind of power or ability an agent must possess in order to justify certain kinds of desert-based judgments, attitudes, or treatments in response to decisions or actions that the agent performed or failed to perform. (shrink)

The issue of how to identify the liability of subjects after a traffic accident takes place remains a puzzle regarding the SAE classification system. The SAE system is not good at dealing with the problem of responsibility evaluation; therefore, building a new classification system for self-driving cars from the perspective of the subject's liability is a possible way to solve this problem. This new system divides automated driving into three levels: i) assisted driving based on the will of drivers, (...) ii) automated driving based on the will of the manufacturers, and iii) fully automated driving based on social will. The corresponding responsible subjects for level one, level two, and level three are the drivers, the manufacturers, and society, respectively. (shrink)

Some physical theories predict that almost all brains in the universe are Boltzmann brains, i.e. short-lived disembodied brains that are accidentally assembled as a result of thermodynamic or quantum fluctuations. Physicists and philosophers of physics widely regard this proliferation as unacceptable, and so take its prediction as a basis for rejecting these theories. But the putatively unacceptable consequences of this prediction follow only given certain philosophical assumptions. This paper develops a strategy for shielding physical theorizing from the threat of Boltzmann (...) brains. The strategy appeals to a form of phenomenal externalism about the physical basis of consciousness. Given that form of phenomenal externalism, the proliferation of Boltzmann brains turns out to be benign. While the strategy faces a psychophysical fine-tuning problem, it both alleviates cosmological fine-tuning concerns that attend physics-based solutions to Boltzmann brain problems and pays explanatory dividends in connection with time’s arrow. (shrink)

Francis Bacon's position on the existence of void and its nature has been mostly studied with regard to his views on the atom. This approach is undoubtedly right, but it disregards further topics related to Bacon's account of void, namely the world system and the transmutation of bodies. Consequently, a more comprehensive study of Bacon's view on vacuum seems desirable where all the contexts are taken into account. To address this desideratum, the present paper examines Bacon's different views on vacuum (...) drawing attention to the various contexts of the discussion. It also gives an evaluation of the arguments put forward in support of his positions. The first section presents a reconstruction of Bacon's consecutive positions and the reasons for his changes of mind. The second section lists the experimental facts traditionally cited in debates about vacuum and Bacon's interpretation of these. The final section evaluates the role that these experimental facts played in Bacon's arguments. As a result, it is shown that Bacon fits entirely into the general pattern of the early seventeenth century. Empirical arguments by themselves had little value for solving the question of the void; it was also necessary to have a formerly established theory. (shrink)

In this paper, we focus on whether and to what extent we judge that people are responsible for the consequences of their forgetfulness. We ran a series of behavioral studies to measure judgments of responsibility for the consequences of forgetfulness. Our results show that we are disposed to hold others responsible for some of their forgetfulness. The level of stress that the forgetful agent is under modulates judgments of responsibility, though the level of care that the agent exhibits (...) toward performing the forgotten action does not. We argue that this result has important implications for a long-running debate about the nature of responsible agency. (shrink)

The study aimed at identifying responsive flexibility and its role in improving service quality, from the point of view of the internal beneficiary in non-governmental hospitals in Gaza Strip. The study relied on the descriptive and analytical approach, and the questionnaire was designed as a tool to collect data, and the researchers used the comprehensive survey method, and the number of the study population was (536) single, where (434) questionnaires were retrieved, and the recovery rate was (80.97%). The study showed (...) many results, the most important of which were: The presence of moderate degree of approval by the study sample on the responsive flexibility, as it was evident through the response flexibility field obtaining a relative weight (60.50%), and the results of the study indicated that there is a high degree of approval by the members of the study sample. On the quality of service, as it was evident through the field of service quality obtaining a relative weight (79.90%). The results of the study revealed a statistically significant relationship between responsive flexibility and service quality in non-governmental hospitals in Gaza Strip, with a correlation coefficient of 0.418, and the results of the study revealed a statistically significant effect between responsive flexibility and service quality in non-governmental hospitals in Gaza Strip. The study reached many recommendations, the most important of which were: Finding mechanisms by which stored information can be used to enhance the decision-making process, and setting up an effective system to receive patients' complaints in a manner that ensures rapid response and treatment, to achieve continuous communication between patients and the hospital management, and to notify patients of abuse With the complaints that they submit, and working to provide all medical and health specialties in the hospitals under study, by making use of the medical delegations that visit Gaza Strip, involving them in the treatment processes, bringing in doctors and specialists from abroad, and updating the standards related to measuring the services provided to patients continuously, based on On patients' suggestions and complaints, developing facilities in hospitals, as well as updating medical devices and equipment used in hospitals periodically. (shrink)

This paper presents a pilot study that explores instances of objectless awareness during sleep: conscious experiences had during sleep that prima facie lack an object of awareness. This state of objectless awareness during sleep has been widely described by Indian contemplative traditions and has been characterised as a state of consciousness-as-such; while in it, there is nothing to be aware of, one is merely conscious (cf. Evans-Wentz, 1960; Fremantle, 2001; Ponlop, 2006). While this phenomenon has received diferent names in the (...) literature, such as ‘witnessing-sleep’ and ‘clear light sleep’ among others, the specifc phenomenological profle of this state has not yet been rigorously studied. This paper aims at presenting a preliminary investigation of objectless consciousness during sleep using a novel tool in qualitative research that can guide future research. Five participants experiencing objectless consciousness during sleep were interviewed following the Micro-phenomenological Interview technique (MPI; Petitmengin, 2005, 2006). All participants reported an experience they had during sleep in which there was no scenery and no dream. This period labelled as ‘No Scenery/Void’ was either preceded by the dissolution of a lucid dream or by other forms of conscious mentation. The analysis of the results advances four experiential dimensions during this state of void, namely (1) Perception of absence, (2) Self-perception, (3) Perception of emotions, and (4) Perception of awareness. While the results are primarily explorative, they refer to themes found in the literature to describe objectless sleep and point at potential avenues of research. The results from this study are taken as indications to guide future operationalisations of this phenomenon. (shrink)

My primary target in this paper is a puzzle that emerges from the conjunction of several seemingly innocent assumptions in action theory and the metaphysics of moral responsibility. The puzzle I have in mind is this. On one widely held account of moral responsibility, an agent is morally responsible only for those actions or outcomes over which that agent exercises control. Recently, however, some have cited cases where agents appear to be morally responsible without exercising any control. This (...) leads some to abandon the control-based account of responsibility and replace it with an alternative account. It leads others to deny the intuition that agents are responsible in these troublesome cases. After outlining the account of moral responsibility I have in mind, I look at some of the arguments made against the viability of this theory. I show that there are conceptual resources for salvaging the control account, focusing in particular on the nature of vigilance. I also argue that there is empirical data that supports the control account so conceived. (shrink)

Discussion of epistemic responsibility typically focuses on belief formation and actions leading to it. Similarly, accounts of collective epistemic responsibility have addressed the issue of collective belief formation and associated actions. However, there has been little discussion of collective responsibility for preventing epistemic harms, particularly those preventable only by the collective action of an unorganized group. We propose an account of collective epistemic responsibility which fills this gap. Building on Hindriks' (2019) account of collective moral (...) class='Hi'>responsibility, we introduce the Epistemic Duty to Join Forces. Our theory provides an account of the responsibilities of scientists to prevent epistemic harms during inquiry. (shrink)

Many assume that we can be responsible only what is voluntary. This leads to puzzlement about our responsibility for our beliefs, since beliefs seem not to be voluntary. I argue against the initial assumption, presenting an account of responsibility and of voluntariness according to which, not only is voluntariness not required for responsibility, but the feature which renders an attitude a fundamental object of responsibility (that the attitude embodies one’s take on the world and one’s place (...) in it) also guarantees that it could not be voluntary. It turns out, then, that, for failing to be voluntary, beliefs are a central example of the sort of thing for which we are most fundamentally responsible. (shrink)

Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) reflects an innovation paradigm that acknowledges that market innovations do not automatically deliver on socially desirable objectives, and requires a broad governance of knowledge coalitions of governmental bodies as well as industrial and societal actors to address market deficits. Responsible Innovation should be understood as a new paradigm for innovation which requires institutional changes in the research and innovation system and the public governance of the economy. It also requires the institutionalisation of an ethics of (...) co-responsibility as well as the introduction of new standards and certification processes for products. Dr. Dr. phil. von Schomberg will introduce Responsible Innovation against the background of 6 deficits of the (global) research and innovation system. (shrink)

In this study, I reconstruct and compare Alain Badiou’sBeing and Event(2005) and Graham Priest’sOne(2014), arguing that the ontologies pursued within the two texts are intriguingly analogous in a number of ways. Both Badiou and Priest are committed to thinking through classically ontological problems without denying the validity of the paradoxes they raise; both regard Plato’sParmenidesas an early and formative account of these paradoxes; both establish conclusions to the effect that unity – or “oneness” – is indeed a contradictory phenomenon; and (...) both, as a corollary of this conclusion, develop frameworks which confer ontological prominence uponthe voidandemptinessrespectively, thereby arriving at what appears to be a shared ontological nihilism. In this comparative study, I not only enquire whether the frameworks adopted by Badiou and Priest really do lead to nihilist conclusions, but also attempt to clearly outline their trajectories of thought for the benefit of those who might be tempted to dismiss their seemingly outlandish theses out of hand. (shrink)

Garrath Williams claims that truly responsible people must possess a “capacity … to respond [appropriately] to normative demands” (2008:462). However, there are people whom we would normally praise for their responsibility despite the fact that they do not yet possess such a capacity (e.g. consistently well-behaved young children), and others who have such capacity but who are still patently irresponsible (e.g. some badly-behaved adults). Thus, I argue that to qualify for the accolade “a responsible person” one need not possess (...) such a capacity, but only to be earnestly willing to do the right thing and to have a history that testifies to this willingness. Although we may have good reasons to prefer to have such a capacity ourselves, and to associate ourselves with others who have it, at a conceptual level I do not think that such considerations support the claim that having this capacity is a necessary condition of being a responsible person in the virtue sense. (shrink)

This essay attempts to provide and defend what may be the first actual argument in support of P. F. Strawson's merely stated vision of a response-dependent theory of moral responsibility. It does so by way of an extended analogy with the funny. In part 1, it makes the easier and less controversial case for response-dependence about the funny. In part 2, it shows the tight analogy between anger and amusement in developing the harder and more controversial case for response-dependence (...) about a kind of blameworthiness. It then defends the view from three serious skeptical challenges. (shrink)

How can we be responsible for our attitudes if we cannot normally choose what we believe, desire, feel, and intend? This problem has received much attention during the last decades, both in epistemology and in ethics. Yet its connections to discussions about reasons and rationality have been largely overlooked. Responsibility for Rationality is the first book that connects recent debates on responsibility and on rationality in a unifying dialectic. It achieves four main goals: first, it reinterprets the problem (...) of responsibility for attitudes as a problem about the normativity of rationality; second, it breaks the stalemate between rationalist and voluntarist accounts of mental responsibility by defending a hybrid view; third, it provides novel support to recent accounts of the normativity of rationality by arguing that epistemic reasons and other ‘right-kind’ reasons are genuine normative reasons; fourth, it sets the foundations and the research agenda for an ‘ethics of mind’, including an illustration of how to approach applied issues in epistemology within the presented framework. After spelling out connections between responsibility and rationality (part I), the book engages in debates in normative epistemology (part II) and brings them to bear on the broader field of an ethics of mind (part III). -/- Full draft of current version available on request, comments welcome! (shrink)

This chapter explores the relationship between an agent’s moral responsibility for their actions and the situations in which an agent acts. Decades of research in psychology are sometimes thought to support situationism, the view that features of an agent’s situation greatly influence their behavior in powerful and surprising ways. Such situational fea­tures might therefore be thought to threaten agents’ abilities to act freely and responsi­bly. This chapter begins by discussing some relevant empirical literature on situationism. It then surveys several (...) ways of construing the situationist threat to moral responsibility as reducible to worries about determinism, manipulation, or luck. It is then argued that the best way to understand the situationist challenge is as a threat to reasons-responsive­ness. A common strategy for responding to the situationist threat to reasons-responsive­ness—the so-called modal response—is discussed. The chapter then defends a view called pessimistic realism: While the situationist literature puts human agency in an unflattering light, it does not show that agents’ reasons-responsiveness capacities are generally un­dermined by situational features. Several objections both to the modal strategy and to pessimistic realism are discussed. The chapter concludes with three thoughts concerning future directions. (shrink)

Response to Don Baxter, Don Garrett and Jennifer Marusic regarding my book Imagined Causes: Hume's Conception of Objects; initially delivered at the 2016 Hume Conference in Sydney, Australia as part of the Author Meets Critics session.

It is commonplace to attribute obligations to φ or blameworthiness for φ-ing to groups even when no member has an obligation to φ or is individually blameworthy for not φ-ing. Such non-distributive attributions can seem problematic in cases where the group is not a moral agent in its own right. In response, it has been argued both that non-agential groups can have the capabilities requisite to have obligations of their own, and that group obligations can be understood in terms of (...) moral demands on individual group members. It has also been suggested that members of groups can share responsibility for an outcome in virtue of being causally or socially connected to that outcome. This paper discusses the agency problem and argues that the most promising attempts at solutions understand group obligations and blameworthiness as grounded in demands on individual agents. (shrink)

The purpose of this inquiry is to explicate the sense, unities, and points of departure of the Parmenidean “what-is-not” and the void as conceived of in Ancient Atomic Theory purported to Leucippus and Democritus, hereafter referred to as AAT. I assert that Parmenidean One can be accommodated by AAT given Parmenides relaxes his requirement the One be motionless and hold his commitment to the necessity of limit.

In this paper, we present three necessary conditions for morally responsible animal research that we believe people on both sides of this debate can accept. Specifically, we argue that, even if human beings have higher moral status than nonhuman animals, animal research is morally permissible only if it satisfies (a) an expectation of sufficient net benefit, (b) a worthwhile-life condition, and (c) a no unnecessary-harm/qualified-basic-needs condition. We then claim that, whether or not these necessary conditions are jointly sufficient conditions of (...) justified animal research, they are relatively demanding with the consequence that many animal experiments may fail to satisfy them. (shrink)

P.F. Strawson’s compatibilism has had considerable influence. However, as Watson has argued in “Responsibility and the Limits of Evil”, his view appears to have a disturbing consequence: extreme evil exempts an agent from moral responsibility. This is a reductio of the view. Moreover, in some cases our emotional reaction to an evildoer’s history clashes with our emotional expressions of blame. Anyone’s actions can be explained by his or her history, however, and thereby can conflict with our present blame. (...) Additionally, we too might have been evil if our history had been like the unlucky evildoer’s. Thus, our emotional responses to the evildoer compromise our standing to blame them. Since Strawson’s view demarcates moral responsibility by moral emotional responses, his view appears to be self-defeating. In this paper, I defend the Strawsonian view from the reductio and self-defeat problems. I argue that two emotions, disgust and elevation, can be moral reactive attitudes in Strawson’s sense. First, moral disgust expresses neither blame nor exemption from responsibility. Instead, moral disgust presupposes blameworthiness but is instead a distinct response to the extreme wrongdoer. Secondly, moral disgust involves self-directed attitudes that explain away our apparent lack of standing to blame the evil agent. The structure of disgust as a reactive attitude is mirrored along the positive dimension by the emotion that Haidt has called “elevation”, a feeling of moral inspiration. I conclude by defending my view from objections about the moral appropriateness of disgust. (shrink)

The concept of distributed moral responsibility (DMR) has a long history. When it is understood as being entirely reducible to the sum of (some) human, individual and already morally loaded actions, then the allocation of DMR, and hence of praise and reward or blame and punishment, may be pragmatically difficult, but not conceptually problematic. However, in distributed environments, it is increasingly possible that a network of agents, some human, some artificial (e.g. a program) and some hybrid (e.g. a group (...) of people working as a team thanks to a software platform), may cause distributed moral actions (DMAs). These are morally good or evil (i.e. morally loaded) actions caused by local interactions that are in themselves neither good nor evil (morally neutral). In this article, I analyse DMRs that are due to DMAs, and argue in favour of the allocation, by default and overridably, of full moral responsibility (faultless responsibility) to all the nodes/agents in the network causally relevant for bringing about the DMA in question, independently of intentionality. The mechanism proposed is inspired by, and adapts, three concepts: back propagation from network theory, strict liability from jurisprudence and common knowledge from epistemic logic. (shrink)