A letter replying to Bayne et al. "Tests for consciousness in humans and beyond", 2024, arguing that the search for consciousness "beyond" healthy adult humans should begin with other animals.

This special issue aims to redress the balance and to open up Gaston Bachelard's work beyond a small in-crowd of experts and aficionado’s in France. It aims to stimulate the discovery of new and understudied aspects of Bachelard’s work, including aspects of the intellectual milieu he was working in. Fortunately, for this purpose we were able to rely both on renowned Bachelard specialists, such as Hans-Jörg Rheinberg-er, Cristina Chimisso and Dominique Lecourt, as well as on a number of younger scholars (...) who are discovering their work in a different intellectual context. At the same time we also want to reassess the value of this oeuvre, which also entails examining the reasons and causes of the relative neglect of Bachelard’s work in recent times. Has it exhausted its possibilities? Does it have intrinsic limitations that have contributed to the eclipse, as some influential, mainly French, philoso-phers have more or less explicitly suggested? (shrink)

Medicine is often thought of as a science of the body, but it is also a science of data. In some contexts, it can even be asserted that data drive health. This article focuses on a key piece of data technology central to contemporary practices of medicine: the medical record. By situating the medical record in the perspective of its history, we inquire into how the kinds of data that are kept at sites of clinical encounter often depend on informational (...) requirements that originate well outside of the clinic, in particular in health insurance records systems. Although this dependency of today's electronic medical records on billing requirements is widely lamented by clinical providers, its history remains little studied. Following the archaeology of medicine developed by Michel Foucault in The Birth of the Clinic and expanding his methodology in light of more recent contributions to the field of media archaeology, this article excavates some of the underexplored technological conditions that help constitute today's electronic medical record. If in some contexts, it is true that data drive health, then an archaeology of medical records helps reveal how health insurance records often impact clinical care and, by extension, health and disease. (shrink)

People are increasingly exposed to conflicting health information and must navigate this information to make numerous decisions, such as which foods to consume, a process many find difficult. Although some consumers attribute these disagreements to aspects related to uncertainty and complexity of research, many use a narrower set of credibility-based explanations. Experts’ views on disagreements are underinvestigated and lack explicit identification and classification of the differences in causes for disagreement. Consequently, there is a gap in existing literature to understand the (...) range of reasons for these contradictions. Combining the findings from a literature study and expert interviews, a taxonomy of disagreements was developed. It identifies 10 types of disagreement classified under three dimensions: informant-, information- and uncertainty-related causes for disagreement. The taxonomy may assist with adoption of more effective strategies to deal with conflicting information and contributes to research and practice of science communication in the context of disagreement. (shrink)

Creativity pervades human life. It is the mark of individuality, the vehicle of self-expression, and the engine of progress in every human endeavor. It also raises a wealth of neglected and yet evocative philosophical questions: What is the role of consciousness in the creative process? How does the audience for a work for art influence its creation? How can creativity emerge through childhood pretending? Do great works of literature give us insight into human nature? Can a computer program really be (...) creative? How do we define creativity in the first place? Is it a virtue? What is the difference between creativity in science and art? Can creativity be taught? The new essays that comprise The Philosophy of Creativity take up these and other key questions and, in doing so, illustrate the value of interdisciplinary exchange. Written by leading philosophers and psychologists involved in studying creativity, the essays integrate philosophical insights with empirical research. CONTENTS I. Introduction Introducing The Philosophy of Creativity Elliot Samuel Paul and Scott Barry Kaufman II. The Concept of Creativity 1. An Experiential Account of Creativity Bence Nanay III. Aesthetics & Philosophy of Art 2. Creativity and Insight Gregory Currie 3. The Creative Audience: Some Ways in which Readers, Viewers and/or Listeners Use their Imaginations to Engage Fictional Artworks Noël Carroll 4. The Products of Musical Creativity Christopher Peacocke IV. Ethics & Value Theory 5. Performing Oneself Owen Flanagan 6. Creativity as a Virtue of Character Matthew Kieran V. Philosophy of Mind & Cognitive Science 7. Creativity and Not So Dumb Luck Simon Blackburn 8. The Role of Imagination in Creativity Dustin Stokes 9. Creativity, Consciousness, and Free Will: Evidence from Psychology Experiments Roy F. Baumeister, Brandon J. Schmeichel, and C. Nathan DeWall 10. The Origins of Creativity Elizabeth Picciuto and Peter Carruthers 11. Creativity and Artificial Intelligence: a Contradiction in Terms? Margaret Boden VI. Philosophy of Science 12. Hierarchies of Creative Domains: Disciplinary Constraints on Blind-Variation and Selective-Retention Dean Keith Simonton VII. Philosophy of Education (& Education of Philosophy) 13. Educating for Creativity Berys Gaut 14. Philosophical Heuristics Alan Hájek. (shrink)

The article presents the idea that works of art are technologies for self-transformation and contextualises this idea within the discursive field of “aesthetic thinking”. It takes L. A. Paul’s concept of “transformative experiences” as a reference point and analyses the materiality of music as an example for an artistic medium through which these transformations can be initiated in a paradigmatic way. Contemporary philosophies of art by Alva Noë, Georg Bertram, and Christoph Menke, all dealing with the influence of art (...) on the self, are referenced and tentatively mapped onto one another, followed by a final presentation of twelve theses that subsume the leading ideas. (shrink)

Raymond Aron was a student of Léon Brunschvicg, a representative of French historical epistemology. This article explores Aron’s relation to this tradition through three claims. First of all, it contests that Raymond Aron’s philosophy of history constituted a complete break with this tradition. Secondly, resituating Aron in this tradition is valuable, because it highlights how Aron’s own philosophy of history is to be understood as a normative project, seen as an alternative to that of Brunschvicg. Finally, Aron’s philosophy can still (...) hold valuable lessons for present-day historical epistemology and history and philosophy of science in general. (shrink)

Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre struggled for the whole of their philosophical careers against one of modern Western philosophy's most pervasive concepts, the Cartesian notion of self. A notion of self is always a complex of ideas; in the case of Beauvoir and Sartre it includes the ideas of embodiment, temporality, the Other, and intersubjectivity. This essay will show the considerable part that gender, especially Beauvoir's position as a woman in twentieth-century France, played in the development, presentation and (...) reception of the couple's alternative formulation. (shrink)

In reaching his narrative view of the self in Oneself as Another, Paul Ricoeur argues that, while literature offers revealing insights into the nature of the self, the sort of fictions involving brain transplants, fission, and so on, that philosophers often take seriously do not (and cannot). My paper is a response to Ricoeur's charge, contending that the arguments Ricoeur rejects are not flawed in the way he suggests, and that his own arguments are sometimes guilty of the very (...) charges he lays at the door of his opponents. (shrink)

Michael Stocker’s “The Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical Theories” attacks versions of consequentialism and deontological ethics on the grounds that they are self-effacing. While it is often thought that Stocker’s argument gives us a reason to favour virtue ethics over those other theories, Simon Keller has argued that this is a mistake. He claims that virtue ethics is also self-effacing, and is therefore afflicted with the self-effacement- related problems that Stocker identifies in consequentialism and deontology. This paper defends virtue ethics (...) against this claim. Although there is a kind of self-effacement invol- ved in the exercise of virtue, this is quite different from the so-called schizophrenia that Stocker thinks is induced by modern ethical theory. Importantly, manifesting virtue does not require one to embrace mutually inconsistent moral commitments, as is at times encouraged by consequentialists and deontologists. This paper also considers a reading of the virtue-ethical criterion of right action that is encouraged by Bernard Williams’s distinction between a de re and a de dicto interpretation of the phrase “acting as the virtuous person would.” I argue that such a reading addresses concerns that a virtue-ethi- cal criterion of right action inevitably generates a problematic form of self-effacement. (shrink)

Central to philosophical practice is the application of philosophers' work by philosophical practitioners to inspire, educate, and guide their clients. For example, in Logic-Based Therapy (LBT) philosophical practitioners help their clients to find an uplifting philosophy that promotes guiding virtues that counteract unrealistic and often self-defeating conclusions derived from irrational premises. I will present the argument that Simone de Beauvoir’s existentialist ethics can be applied as an uplifting philosophy as per LBT methodology, and therefore has utility for philosophical practice. Additionally, (...) I will propose that Beauvoir’s existentialist ethics, as an uplifting philosophy, may act as an antidote for ideological obsession and ideology addiction. I will also suggest that LBT may be a suitable intervention when challenging the unrealistic conclusions derived from illogical premises in practical reasoning that contribute to ideological obsession, because it can contest irrational beliefs in a way that could mitigate the fragmentation anxiety that often arise when individuals relinquish maladaptive self-object organizations. (shrink)

Michèle Le Dœuff considers the relationship between Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir as a paradigmatic case of what she calls an "erotico-theoretical transference" relationship: De Beauvoir devoted herself to Sartre theoretically by adopting his existentialist perspective for the analysis of reality in general and the analysis of women's oppression in particular. The latter is especially strange since Sartre used strongly sexist metaphors and adopted a macho attitude towards women. In her book Hipparchia's Choice, Le Dœuff speaks in this (...) context of "theoretical masculinism." She convincingly shows in this book that Sartre without using images could not have closed his existentialist philosophy: without the feminine drawback he would not have been able to explain why man cannot become god. Sartre not only understands gaining knowledge as a rape of a woman he also fears that the possessed feminine (body) could reverse its position from being dominated to the dominating force by appropriating the masculine through slime. In Being and Nothingness Sartre states that "slime is the revenge of the In-itself. A sickly–sweet, feminine revenge." Despite of the fact that De Beauvoir used Sartre's heterosexist ontology and metaphysics she managed to provide a highly influential depiction of women's condition and offered an original approach to the understanding of selfhood which places woman inside the subject. (shrink)

The purpose of this study is exposition on the themes of method and mysticism in the work of Simone Weil. Nearly a decade before the onset of her first mystical experience, Weil developed a method to be rigorously applied in daily philosophical reflection. She outlines this method in her dissertation on Descartes (1929-1930). I examine the question of how Weil applied method to philosophical reflection on her mystical experiences (onset 1938-1939). I analyze Weil’s mystical experiences as a type of transformative (...) experience in L. A. Paul’s strict sense of the term. On Paul’s view, an experience is transformative if it is both epistemically and personally transformative. An experience is epistemically transformative if the only way to know what it is like to have it is to have it yourself. An experience is personally transformative if it changes your point of view, including your core preferences (Paul, 2014). I present a thought experiment and textual evidence to motivate the claim that Weil’s mystical experiences meet Paul’s conditions for transformative experience. I then propose two epistemological facts that can be revealed by philosophical reflection on mystical experience. First, it is possible to read meaning erroneously in the appearances of things. Second, it is possible to come to hold to the certainty of a conviction for reasons that elude the intellect. My findings suggest that Weil’s late views on philosophy accommodate these two epistemological constraints, thereby demonstrating a possible connection between Weil’s mystical experiences and her mature views on the nature, scope, and proper method of philosophy. However, my preliminary findings also suggest that Weil’s early work on method may have anticipated these epistemological obstacles prior to the onset of her first mystical experience. Thus, further exposition of Weil’s method is needed to support or elucidate the claim (Rozelle-Stone and Davis, 2021) that Weil’s epistemology underwent significant changes because of her mystical experiences. (shrink)

1. The most original discovery in Beauvoir’s book is one more Columbus’s egg, namely that it is far from evident that a woman is a woman. That is, she discovers that a woman is the result of a process that made so that she is like she is. The paper discusses two aspects of the so-to-say ‘ideology’ inspiring the work. The first is its ideology in the proper, Marxian sense. My claim is that the work still pays a heavy price (...) to the dominating ideology. It leaves still too much unquestionedof what was assumed at the time to be obvious, necessary, and unchanging. This ballast depends firstly on the inherited prevailing climate of opinion, corresponding to a situation of alienation, producing two distorted views of the male and female gender. On the other hand, it depends on an unquestioned legacy from the modern episteme (in Foucault’s sense of the word) carrying presupposed Cartesian dualism. The other side of the work’s ideology, that is, the positive program presented or better the utopia it formulates is less innovative than it could be, In a few passages, where she seems to make use of suggestions from Merleau-Ponty, she points at a view where the bodily and emotional dimension is rescued from its negation in the male-dominated Capitalist society. Still, these suggestions are forgotten in the bulk of the work. -/- 2. The making of a philosophical work does not depend just on the kind of philosophical influences behind it. A book is also the product of an author with a story living in one society at a given time of social history. In this case, the book was written in the afterwar time when women were pushed back home again from the wartime labor market and when several of the goals reached by the first phase of feminist movements had gone lost in several European countries under Fascist or semi-fascist regimes and were being eroded in America by the reactionary climate of McCarthyism. It was a book written by an intellectual young woman in almost total isolation. These circumstances account for some more naïve suggestions from work: for ex., the idea that the alternative to the strategy once adopted by nineteenth-century emancipationist movements should be an individual inner process of transformation confined within the boundaries of one woman’s consciousness, or also, the idea that the goal of women’s liberation should be to bring all women to a condition similar of Simone de Beauvoir herself who, as an educated woman, earning her life by her work, and living in an allegedly equal state with an enlightened man (Jean-Paul Sartre!) in a relationship free from constraints (an unmarried couple!), was already exemplifying what a liberated woman’s life would be. -/- 3. The reconstruction of the idea of femininity is still the most fruitful part of the work. It rejects the notion of femininity as an essence depending on biology or other factors and explores the making of this image as a result of a condition made of the social and economic state of affairs but as revived and actively mirrored through and by the consciousness of the very subjects suffering an oppressive situation. And the main novelty is the ‘discovery’ of asymmetry between the self-image of the male and the (self)-image of the woman, an asymmetry depending on the fact that the woman sees herself through the other’s eyes. -/- 4. Later feminist writers such as Shulamit Firestone remarked that 'The Second Sex' heavily depended on several key-ideas from Sartre existential ontology. One crucial aspect is accepting the mind-body dualistic framework without any suspicion that such dualism could have been itself a projection of the basic experience of the male-female duality. I suggest that the philosophical legacy inherited from Sartre is on occasion an asset for Beauvoir’s innovative existential analysis of the feminine ‘condition,’ but on several occasions, it creates unnecessary obstacles for her project of a new comprehension of the feminine ‘situation,’ aimed at rescuing women from an 'inauthentic' self-definition. -/- 5. The first among these poisoned gifts is Sartre’s idea of the individual as pure freedom and project. Merleau-Ponty’s criticism is well-known: Sartre draws a picture of the world as containing no more than ‘human beings and things,’ thus denying any substance to social relations, institutions, and culture. -/- 6. The second is Sartre’s reconstruction of dialectics, understood as dialectics without synthesis. This is an enlightening tool when used to describe conflicts, in so far as it accounts for the emergence of the ‘other’ as what is excluded. But it becomes a boomerang when used to interpret any kind of relationship, leading to equate inter-subjectivity with conflict. -/- 7. Suggestions coming from Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approach of positive value of the bodily dimension as such, and hence of the feminine body, are evoked here and there but never fully spelled out. The most shocking consequence of acceptance of the Cartesian or Sartrean dualist view is an almost total de-evaluation of sexuality, understood as an activity involving just one tiny part of the human body, going with the idea that overcoming the oppression of women implies de-empathizing biological differences that are after all tiny and devoid of value. Besides, Beauvoir falls back into the trap of grounding claims of equality between men and women on the assumption that biological differences are of limited relevance. The eventual reason for such a step back is the distorting Cartesian mirror into which Beauvoir still looks in the vain hope of discovering a disembodied self as the (Cartesian) subject of an impossible kind of liberation.The first among these poisoned gifts is Sartre’s idea of the individual as pure freedom and project. Merleau-Ponty’s criticism is well-known: Sartre draws a picture of the world as containing no more than ‘human beings and things’, thus denying any substance to social relations, institutions and culture. The second is Sartre’s reconstruction of dialectics, understood as a dialectic without a synthesis. This view of dialectics is an enlightening tool when used to describe conflicts. It may account for the emergence of the ‘other’ as what is excluded. However, it becomes a boomerang when used to interpret any relationship, leading to equate inter-subjectivity with conflict. Suggestions coming from Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approach would tend to admit that the bodily dimension as such has a positive value, and hence the feminine bodily dimension is not just indifferent, but instead gives women a point of view on the world different from the male point of view. These suggestions, yet, are evoked here and there but never fully spelt out. The most shocking consequence of acceptance of the Cartesian or Sartrean dualist view is an almost total de-evaluation of sexuality, understood as an activity involving just one tiny part of the human body, going with the idea that overcoming the oppression of women implies understressing biological differences that are after all tiny and devoid of value. Furthermore, Beauvoir falls back into the trap of grounding claims of equality between men and women on the assumption that physical differences are of limited relevance. The eventual reason for such step back is the distorting Cartesian mirror into which Beauvoir still looks in the vain hope of discovering a disembodied self as the (Cartesian) subject of an impossible kind of liberation. -/- . (shrink)

‘...if you learn to think like Peter Cave – with freshness, humour, objectivity and penetration – you will have been amply rewarded.’ :::: Prof. Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, University of Notre Dame __________________ Chapter Titles:>>> ___ 1 Lao Tzu: The Way to Tao >>> 2 Sappho: Lover >>> 3 Zeno of Elea: Tortoise Backer, Parmenidean Helper >>> 4 Gadfly: aka ‘Socrates’ >>> 5 Plato: Charioteer, Magnificent Footnote Inspirer – ‘Nobody Does It Better’ >>> 6 Aristotle: Earth-Bound, Walking >>> 7 Epicurus: Gardener, Curing (...) the Soul, Ably Assisted by Lucretius >>> 8 Avicenna: Flying Man, Unifier >>> 9 Descartes: With Princess, With Queen >>> 10 Spinoza: God-Intoxicated Atheist >>> 11 Leibniz: Monad Man >>> 12 Bishop Berkeley, ‘That Paradoxical Irishman’: Immaterialist, Tar-Water Advocate >>> 13 David Hume: The Great Infidel or Le Bon David >>> 14 Kant: Duty Calls, Categorically >>> 15 Schopenhauer: Pessimism With Flute >>> 16 John Stuart Mill: Utility Man, With Harriet, Soul-Mate >>> 17 Søren Kierkegaard: Who? >>> 18 Karl Marx: Hegelian, Freedom-Fighter >>> 19 Lewis Carroll: Curiouser and Curiouser >>> 20 Nietzsche: God-Slaying Jester, Trans-Valuer >>>> 21 Bertrand Russell: Radical, Aristocrat >>> 22 G. E. Moore: Common-Sense Defender, Bloomsbury’s Sage >>> 23 Heidegger: Hyphenater >>> 24 Jean-Paul Sartre: Existentialist, Novelist, French >>> 25 Simone Weil: Refuser and Would-Be Rescuer >>> 26 Simone de Beauvoir: Situated, Protester, Feminist >>> 27 Ludwig Wittgenstein: Therapist >>> 28 Hannah Arendt: Controversialist, Journalist? >>> 29 Iris Murdoch: Attender >>> 30 Samuel Beckett: Not I >>>. (shrink)

What it would mean for phenomenology to move in an ontological direction that would render its relevance to contemporary political movement less ambiguous while at the same time retaining those aspects of its method that are epistemologically and politically advantageous? The present study crafts the beginnings of a response to this question by examining four configurations of consciousness that seem to be respectively tied to certain oppressive contexts and certain kinds of oppressed bodies: 1. false consciousness, 2. bad faith, 3. (...) double consciousness, and 4. se faire objet (making oneself an object). Such a comparison both promises to widen our understanding of the ontology of consciousness in general and generate a suggestive vision of what it would take to follow through, ontologically speaking, on the idea that consciousness is fundamentally and irrevocably of a bodily nature. (shrink)

I examine some recent claims put forward by L. A. Paul, Barry Dainton and Simon Prosser, to the effect that perceptual experiences of movement and change involve an (apparent) experience of ‘passage’, in the sense at issue in debates about the metaphysics of time. Paul, Dainton and Prosser all argue that this supposed feature of perceptual experience – call it a phenomenology of passage – is illusory, thereby defending the view that there is no such a thing (...) as passage, conceived of as a feature of mind-independent reality. I suggest that in fact there is no such phenomenology of passage in the first place. There is, however, a specific structural aspect of the phenomenology of perceptual experiences of movement and change that can explain how one might mistakenly come to the belief that such experiences do involve a phenomenology of passage. (shrink)

In 1890 Christian von Ehrenfels published his classic paper "Über 'Gestaltqualitäten'", the first systematic investigation of the philosophy and psychology of Gestalt. Ehrenfels thereby issued an important challenge to the psychological atomism that was still predominant in his day. His paper not only exerted a powerful influence on the philosophy of the Meinong school, it also marked the beginning of the Gestalt tradition in psychology, later associated with the work of Wertheimer, Köhler and Koffka in Berlin. Includes papers by C. (...) Von Ehrenfels, Kurt Grelling and Paul Oppenheim and contributions by K. Mulligan, P.M. Simons and Barry Smith. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to explore the basis and implications of the disagreement between Sartre and de Beauvoir about love, indicating the points at which de Beauvoir implicitly challenges and moves away from Sartre’s theoretical framework. I will do this by first setting out the logic of Sartre’s analysis, and then by comparing it with de Beauvoir’s descriptions. I will conclude by offering some reasons for the tension between these two views of love, and suggesting how the tension (...) might be understood. (shrink)

Since the release of ChatGPT, there has been a lot of debate about whether AI systems pose an existential risk to humanity. This paper develops a general framework for thinking about the existential risk of AI systems. We analyze a two-premise argument that AI systems pose a threat to humanity. Premise one: AI systems will become extremely powerful. Premise two: if AI systems become extremely powerful, they will destroy humanity. We use these two premises to construct a taxonomy of ‘survival (...) stories’, in which humanity survives into the far future. In each survival story, one of the two premises fails. Either scientific barriers prevent AI systems from becoming extremely powerful; or humanity bans research into AI systems, thereby preventing them from becoming extremely powerful; or extremely powerful AI systems do not destroy humanity, because their goals prevent them from doing so; or extremely powerful AI systems do not destroy humanity, because we can reliably detect and disable systems that have the goal of doing so. We argue that different survival stories face different challenges. We also argue that different survival stories motivate different responses to the threats from AI. Finally, we use our taxonomy to produce rough estimates of ‘P(doom)’, the probability that humanity will be destroyed by AI. (shrink)

La producción alemana Heimat (1984) del director Edgar Reitz consta de 11 largometrajes que abordan, principalmente, la Primera Guerra Mundial y la Segunda Guerra Mundial; además de las repercusiones psicológicas, sociales y económicas que generan en los pobladores estos eventos históricos. Este conjunto de filmes se enfoca en un espacio rural denominado Schabbach. En ese lugar, se aprecia el desarrollo y la evolución de una genealogía que se supedita a la relación de María y Paul Simon, pero desde (...) una perspectiva disociada. Prevalecerán situaciones individualistas como alejarse del núcleo familiar para ser partidario de la guerra, migrar a otras localidades, buscar superarse, evitar a los congéneres o vivir en el recuerdo. En ese sentido, esta investigación se basará en esas motivaciones de los personajes y se recurrirá al análisis interdisciplinario, epistemología propia de los Estudios Culturales, para confrontar y explicar esa realidad social frente a la guerra. (shrink)

In this paper, we engage in dialogue with Jonathan Pugh, Hannah Maslen, and Julian Savulescu about how to best interpret the potential impacts of deep brain stimulation on the self. We consider whether ordinary people’s convictions about the true self should be interpreted in essentialist or existentialist ways. Like Pugh et al., we argue that it is useful to understand the notion of the true self as having both essentialist and existentialist components. We also consider two ideas from existentialist philosophy (...) – Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir’s ideas about “bad faith” and “ambiguity” – to argue that there can be value to patients in regarding themselves as having a certain amount of freedom to choose what aspects of themselves should be considered representative of their true selves. Lastly, we consider the case of an anorexia nervosa-patient who shifts between conflicting mind-sets. We argue that mind-sets in which it is easier for the patient and his or her family to share values can plausibly be considered to be more representative of the patient’s true self, if this promotes a well-functioning relationship between the patient and the family. However, we also argue that families are well-advised to give patients room to figure out what such shared values mean to them, since it can be alienating for patients if they feel that others try to impose values on them from the outside. (shrink)

THE PRINCIPLE OF SUPERPOSITION. The need for a quantum theory Classical mechanics has been developed continuously from the time of Newton and applied to an ...

The increasing workplace use of artificially intelligent (AI) technologies has implications for the experience of meaningful human work. Meaningful work refers to the perception that one’s work has worth, significance, or a higher purpose. The development and organisational deployment of AI is accelerating, but the ways in which this will support or diminish opportunities for meaningful work and the ethical implications of these changes remain under-explored. This conceptual paper is positioned at the intersection of the meaningful work and ethical AI (...) literatures and offers a detailed assessment of the ways in which the deployment of AI can enhance or diminish employees’ experiences of meaningful work. We first outline the nature of meaningful work and draw on philosophical and business ethics accounts to establish its ethical importance. We then explore the impacts of three paths of AI deployment (replacing some tasks, ‘tending the machine’, and amplifying human skills) across five dimensions constituting a holistic account of meaningful work, and finally assess the ethical implications. In doing so we help to contextualise the meaningful work literature for the era of AI, extend the ethical AI literature into the workplace, and conclude with a range of practical implications and future research directions. (shrink)

Many of our most important goals require months or even years of effort to achieve, and some never get achieved at all. As social psychologists have lately emphasized, success in pursuing such goals requires the capacity for perseverance, or "grit." Philosophers have had little to say about grit, however, insofar as it differs from more familiar notions of willpower or continence. This leaves us ill-equipped to assess the social and moral implications of promoting grit. We propose that grit has an (...) important epistemic component, in that failures of perseverance are often caused by a significant loss of confidence that one will succeed if one continues to try. Correspondingly, successful exercises of grit often involve a kind of epistemic resilience in the face of failure, injury, rejection, and other setbacks that constitute genuine evidence that success is not forthcoming. Given this, we discuss whether and to what extent displays of grit can be epistemically as well as practically rational. We conclude that they can be (although many are not), and that the rationality of grit will depend partly on features of the context the agent normally finds herself in. In particular, grit-friendly norms of deliberation might be irrational to use in contexts of severe material scarcity or oppression. (shrink)

AI companies are racing to create artificial general intelligence, or “AGI.” If they succeed, the result will be human-level AI systems that can independently pursue high-level goals by formulating and executing long-term plans in the real world. Leading AI researchers agree that some of these systems will likely be “misaligned”–pursuing goals that humans do not desire. This goal mismatch will put misaligned AIs and humans into strategic competition with one another. As with present-day strategic competition between nations with incompatible goals, (...) the result could be violent and catastrophic conflict. Existing legal institutions are unprepared for the AGI world. New foundations for AGI governance are needed, and the time to begin laying them is now, before the critical moment arrives. -/- This Article begins to lay those new legal foundations. It is the first to think systematically about the dynamics of strategic competition between humans and misaligned AGI. The Article begins by showing, using formal game-theoretic models, that, by default, humans and AIs will be trapped in a prisoner’s dilemma. Both parties’ dominant strategy will be to permanently disempower or destroy the other, even though the costs of such conflict would be high. -/- The Article then argues that a surprising legal intervention could transform the game theoretic equilibrium and avoid conflict: AI rights. Not just any AI rights would promote human safety. Granting AIs the right not to be needlessly harmed–as humans have granted to certain non-human animals–would, for example, have little effect. Instead, to promote human safety, AIs should be given those basic private law rights–to make contracts, hold property, and bring tort claims–that law already extends to non-human corporations. Granting AIs these economic rights would enable long-run, small-scale, mutually-beneficial transactions between humans and AIs. This would, we show, facilitate a peaceful strategic equilibrium between humans and AIs for the same reasons economic interdependence tends to promote peace in international relations. Namely, the gains from trade far exceed those from war. Throughout, we argue that human safety, rather than AI welfare, provides the right framework for developing AI rights. This Article explores both the promise and the limits of AI rights as a legal tool for promoting human safety in an AGI world. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

Recent studies indicate that indicative conditionals like "If people wear masks, the spread of Covid-19 will be diminished" require a probabilistic dependency between their antecedents and consequents to be acceptable (Skovgaard-Olsen et al., 2016). But it is easy to make the slip from this claim to the thesis that indicative conditionals are acceptable only if this probabilistic dependency results from a causal relation between antecedent and consequent. According to Pearl (2009), understanding a causal relation involves multiple, hierarchically organized conceptual dimensions: (...) prediction, intervention, and counterfactual dependence. In a series of experiments, we test the hypothesis that these conceptual dimensions are differentially encoded in indicative and counterfactual conditionals. If this hypothesis holds, then there are limits as to how much of a causal relation is captured by indicative conditionals alone. Our results show that the acceptance of indicative and counterfactual conditionals can become dissociated. Furthermore, it is found that the acceptance of both is needed for accepting a causal relation between two co-occurring events. The implications that these findings have for the hypothesis above, and for recent debates at the intersection of the psychology of reasoning and causal judgment, are critically discussed. Our findings are consistent with viewing indicative conditionals as answering predictive queries requiring evidential relevance (even in the absence of direct causal relations). Counterfactual conditionals in contrast target causal relevance, specifically. Finally, we discuss the implications our results have for the yet unsolved question of how reasoners succeed in constructing causal models from verbal descriptions. (shrink)

What is it to believe something might be the case? We develop a puzzle that creates difficulties for standard answers to this question. We go on to propose our own solution, which integrates a Bayesian approach to belief with a dynamic semantics for epistemic modals. After showing how our account solves the puzzle, we explore a surprising consequence: virtually all of our beliefs about what might be the case provide counterexamples to the view that rational belief is closed under logical (...) implication. (shrink)

In this chapter, we analyze the relationships between the Internet and its users in terms of situated cognition theory. We first argue that the Internet is a new kind of cognitive ecology, providing almost constant access to a vast amount of digital information that is increasingly more integrated into our cognitive routines. We then briefly introduce situated cognition theory and its species of embedded, embodied, extended, distributed and collective cognition. Having thus set the stage, we begin by taking an embedded (...) cognition view and analyze how the Internet aids certain cognitive tasks. After that, we conceptualize how the Internet enables new kinds of embodied interaction, extends certain aspects of our embodiment, and examine how wearable technologies that monitor physiological, behavioral and contextual states transform the embodied self. On the basis of the degree of cognitive integration between a user and Internet resource, we then look at how and when the Internet extends our cognitive processes. We end this chapter with a discussion of distributed and collective cognition as facilitated by the Internet. (shrink)

Some ‘naturalist’ accounts of disease employ a biostatistical account of dysfunction, whilst others use a ‘selected effect’ account. Several recent authors have argued that the biostatistical account offers the best hope for a naturalist account of disease. We show that the selected effect account survives the criticisms levelled by these authors relatively unscathed, and has significant advantages over the BST. Moreover, unlike the BST, it has a strong theoretical rationale and can provide substantive reasons to decide difficult cases. This is (...) illustrated by showing how life-history theory clarifies the status of so-called diseases of old age. The selected effect account of function deserves a more prominent place in the philosophy of medicine than it currently occupies. _1_ Introduction _2_ Biostatistical and Selected Effect Accounts of Function _3_ Objections to the Selected Effect Account _3.1_ Boorse _3.2_ Kingma _3.3_ Hausman _3.4_ Murphy and Woolfolk _4_ Problems for the Biostatistical Account _4.1_ Schwartz _5_ Analysis versus Explication _6_ Explicating Dysfunction: Life History Theory and Senescence _7_ Conclusion. (shrink)

In this paper, the authors show that there is a reading of St. Anselm's ontological argument in Proslogium II that is logically valid (the premises entail the conclusion). This reading takes Anselm's use of the definite description "that than which nothing greater can be conceived" seriously. Consider a first-order language and logic in which definite descriptions are genuine terms, and in which the quantified sentence "there is an x such that..." does not imply "x exists". Then, using an ordinary logic (...) of descriptions and a connected greater-than relation, God's existence logically follows from the claims: (a) there is a conceivable thing than which nothing greater is conceivable, and (b) if <em>x</em> doesn't exist, something greater than x can be conceived. To deny the conclusion, one must deny one of the premises. However, the argument involves no modal inferences and, interestingly, Descartes' ontological argument can be derived from it. (shrink)

Plato's _Republic_ divided subsequent study of justice in two, as a virtue of people and of institutions. Here, the start of a reunification is attempted. Justice is first understood personally as the virtuous mean between arrogance and servility, where just people properly respect themselves and others. Because justice requires that like cases be treated alike and self-respect is a special instance of respect generally, justice requires a single standard for self and others. In understanding justice in terms of respect, structural (...) analogies become apparent between “recognition” and “appraisal” respect, on the one hand, and Rawls' two principles of justice on the other. The present view is then compared to “social egalitarian” theories of justice and the essay concludes with a discussion of how mercy is related to justice and an explanation of why just people always look for reasons to mitigate blame and punishment but never to aggravate them. (shrink)

Suppose some person 'A' sets out to accomplish a difficult, long-term goal such as writing a passable Ph.D. thesis. What should you believe about whether A will succeed? The default answer is that you should believe whatever the total accessible evidence concerning A's abilities, circumstances, capacity for self-discipline, and so forth supports. But could it be that what you should believe depends in part on the relationship you have with A? We argue that it does, in the case where A (...) is yourself. The capacity for "grit" involves a kind of epistemic resilience in the face of evidence suggesting that one might fail, and this makes it rational to respond to the relevant evidence differently when you are the agent in question. We then explore whether similar arguments extend to the case of "believing in" our significant others -- our friends, lovers, family members, colleagues, patients, and students. (shrink)

En abril de 1961, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir y Frantz Fanon se reunieron en un café de Roma. La reunión, por lo menos tal como la registró Beauvoir, duró horas, hasta las dos de la mañana, hasta el momento en que el cuerpo de Sartre, de 56 años, sufrió fatiga. Sartre necesitaba descansar, instó Beauvoir. Fanon, con su cuerpo de 36 años muriendo de leucemia, se resintió de su insistencia: “No me gustan los hombres que acumulan sus recursos”. (...) Él quería aprovechar esa oportunidad de oro de hablar con Sartre durante semanas sin descanso si era necesario. Sin embargo, el agotamiento prevaleció, aunque la reunión legendaria consistió en una conversación sin parar durante casi tres días. Sartre, impresionado por el joven revolucionario, había acordado escribir el prefacio de Los condenados de la tierra, una obra que se supone compuesta durante diez semanas agotadoras, y él y el colectivo editorial también acordaron publicar el primer capítulo en la edición de junio de Les Temps Modernes. La salud de Fanon empeoró a medida que pasaba el año. Eventualmente fue a Bethesda, Maryland, para tratamiento a finales de noviembre, donde fue detenido por la CIA y se le negó el tratamiento. Murió el 6 de diciembre de neumonía. (shrink)

The dispute between realists about color and anti-realists is actually a dispute about the nature of color properties. The disputants do not disagree over what material objects are like. Rather, they disagree over whether any of the uncontroversial facts about material objects--their powers to cause visual experiences, their dispositions to reflect incident light, their atomic makeup, and so on--amount to their having colors. The disagreement is thus about which properties colors are and, in particular, whether colors are any of the (...) properties in a particular set that is acknowledged on both sides to exhaust the properties of material objects. In a previous paper we discussed at length one attempt to identify colors with particular properties of material objects--namely, with their dispositions to cause visual experiences. Here we shall discuss a different and perhaps more influential version of realism, which says that the colors of material objects are microphysical properties of their surfaces. We shall call this theory physicalism about color (physicalism, for short). In order to evaluate this theory, however, we shall first have to clarify some methodological issues. Our hope is that we can bring some further clarity to the question of color realism, whether or not we succeed in our critique of the physicalists' answer. (shrink)

Griffiths and Russell D. Gray (1994, 1997, 2001) have argued that the fundamental unit of analysis in developmental systems theory should be a process – the life cycle – and not a set of developmental resources and interactions between those resources. The key concepts of developmental systems theory, epigenesis and developmental dynamics, both also suggest a process view of the units of development. This chapter explores in more depth the features of developmental systems theory that favour treating processes as fundamental (...) in biology and examines the continuity between developmental systems theory and ideas about process in the work of several major figures in early 20th century biology, most notable C.H Waddington. (shrink)

Extended and distributed cognition theories argue that human cognitive systems sometimes include non-biological objects. On these views, the physical supervenience base of cognitive systems is thus not the biological brain or even the embodied organism, but an organism-plus-artifacts. In this paper, we provide a novel account of the implications of these views for learning, education, and assessment. We start by conceptualising how we learn to assemble extended cognitive systems by internalising cultural norms and practices. Having a better grip on how (...) extended cognitive systems are assembled, we focus on the question: If our cognition extends, how should we educate and assess such extended cognitive systems? We suggest various ways to minimize possible negative effects of extending one’s cognition and to efficiently find and organise (online) information by adopting a virtue epistemology approach. Educational and assessment implications are foregrounded, particularly in the case of Danish students’ use of the Internet during exams. (shrink)

In the first part of this paper, I will briefly introduce the concept of incongruity and its relation to humor and seriousness, connecting the ideas of Arthur Schopenhauer and the contemporary work of John Morreall. I will reveal some of the relations between Schopenhauer's notion of "seriousness" and the existentialists such as Jean Paul Sartre, Simone Be Beauvoir, and Lewis Gordon. In section II, I will consider the relationship between playfulness and incongruity, noting the role that enjoyment of incongruity (...) plays in creative, non-dogmatic thinking. In section III, I will critique Morreall's arguments against the efficacy of humor as a means of serious protest, analyzing the complex relationship between the ambiguous terms "seriousness" and "playfulness". In the final section, I contend that Morreall's conception of humor, with which I generally agree, fails to adequately address subversive humor. He is cognizant of the benefits of a humorous attitude and of the work of rebellious groups who use humor, but his insistence that the play mode of humor precludes emotional attachment and practical concern, renders his philosophical analysis of humor far less comprehensive than his title suggests. I will make the case, contra Morreall, and he is the most prominent of many humor theorists who make similar points, that some humor in play mode is non-existentially, non-gravely serious, and intends to do more than simply "delight" audiences; the subversive humorist, in particular, is attempting to disclose and transmit information in such a way as to create change in both attitudes and practical social interactions. (shrink)

Public reason views hold that the exercise of political power must be acceptable to all reasonable citizens. A growing number of philosophers argue that this reasonable acceptability principle (RAP) can be justified by appealing to the value of civic friendship. They claim that a valuable form of political community can only be achieved among the citizens of pluralistic societies if they refrain from appealing to controversial ideals and values when justifying the exercise of political power to one another. This paper (...) argues against such accounts. In order to justify RAP, one must explain and defend a conception of reasonableness. Civic friendship is unfit to perform this task, rendering it unable to ground public reason alone. Meanwhile, pluralist views that combine civic friendship with other considerations in order to specify RAP either fail or make civic friendship a spare wheel in the argument for public reason. (shrink)

This chapter explores a case study in contemporary fanaticism. We adopt Katsafanas’s conceptualization of fanaticism to make possible an in-depth discussion of and evaluation of a diffuse but important social movement — the anglophone manosphere. According to Katsafanas, fanatics are fruitfully understood as members of a group that adopts sacred values which they hold unconditionally to preserve their own psychic unity, and who feel that those values are threatened by those who do not accept them. The manosphere includes several social (...) movements, including incels, men’s rights activists, and men-going-their-own-way. We show that many members of these groups are well-characterized by Katsafanas’s theory of fanaticism, and that they have forged their fanatical group identity using tools that philosophers have tended to associate with more benign social movements and the task of “conceptual engineering.” Indeed, we think that manosphere groups have in many cases been more successful than more palatable liberationist movements, and that this case study in the dark side of conceptual engineering may be both sobering and informative. (shrink)

Despite all controversies that might otherwise divide them, most phenomenologists agree that consciousness entails some form of self-consciousness. In fact, they go even further, as they virtually all agree on the necessity of fleshing out this insight in bodily terms: from the phenomenological point of view, self-consciousness is primarily experienced as a form of bodily self-consciousness (or self-awareness). Following Edmund Husserl's insight that the lived body (Leib), i.e. the body as it is subjectively felt or experienced, must necessarily be presupposed (...) by all object consciousness, including the thematic consciousness of me as a body, there is a long-standing discussion within the phenomenological movement on how to conceive of this self-relation. This entry focuses on the French reception of Husserl and highlights the distinctive ways in which French phenomenologists such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Henry, Jean-Paul Sartre and Jacques Derrida have elaborated on and disputed this key insight. It will be shown that discussions on this question have open onto two further debates: one revolves around the paradigmatic role Husserl grants to touch in the analysis of consciousness, while the other concerns the differences between the experience of one's own body and the experience of the body of others. Finally, we point to the fact that one's body can be experienced and evaluated as other, as is shown in the critical analyses of Frantz Fanon, Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, and recent critical phenomenology. Here, it becomes clear that the bodily self-awareness of concrete subjects is shaped by the material conditions, norms, and discourses of their respective situation. (shrink)

A basic challenge to naturalistic moral realism is that, even if moral properties existed, there would be no way to naturalistically represent or track them. Here, the basic structure for a tracking account of moral epistemology is given in empirically respectable terms, based on a eudaimonist conception of morality. The goal is to show how this form of moral realism can be seen as consistent with the details of evolutionary biology as well as being amenable to the most current understanding (...) of representationalist or correspondence theories of truth. (shrink)

The existence of evil is often held to pose philosophical problems only for theists. I argue that the existence of evil gives rise to a philosophical problem which confronts theist and atheist alike. The problem is constituted by the following claims: (1) Successful human beings (i.e., those meeting their basic prudential interests) are committed to a good-enough world; (2) the actual world is not a good-enough world (i.e., sufficient evil exists). It follows that human beings must either (3a) maintain a (...) state of epistemic ignorance regarding the nature of the actual world or (3b) abandon their basic prudential interests. Theists resolve this problem by rejecting (2), only to confront the problem of evil as it is traditionally understood. Successful atheists also reject (2), but without adequate grounds for doing so. (shrink)

Dans cet article, nous présentons une formulation néo-aristotélicienne de la doctrine du juste milieu. Nous commençons par décrire la formulation classique de la doctrine par Aristote, telle qu'elle est exposée dans l’Éthique à Nicomaque. Nous présentons en outre les éléments fondamentaux qui régissent les matrices de concepts (Franceschi 2002). Nous proposons ensuite une nouvelle formulation de la doctrine du juste milieu, directement dérivée de la structure-même des matrices de concepts. Nous comparons également la présente formulation de la doctrine du juste (...) milieu avec celle d'Aristote, en mettant en évidence les points communs et les différences. Nous proposons aussi une interprétation de la formulation aristotélicienne de la doctrine du juste milieu. Enfin, nous montrons comment la version néo-aristotélicienne de la doctrine du juste milieu permet de répondre à plusieurs objections, et notamment à celles qui ont été classiquement soulevées à l’encontre de sa version aristotélicienne. (shrink)

Conwy Lloyd Morgan (1852–1936) is widely regarded as the father of modern comparative psychology. Yet, Morgan initially had significant doubts about whether a genuine science of comparative psychology was even possible, only later becoming more optimistic about our ability to make reliable inferences about the mental capacities of non-human animals. There has been a fair amount of disagreement amongst scholars of Morgan’s work about the nature, timing, and causes of this shift in Morgan’s thinking. We argue that Morgan underwent two (...) quite different shifts of attitude towards the proper practice of comparative psychology. The first was a qualified acceptance of the Romanesian approach to comparative psychology that he had initially criticized. The second was a shift away from Romanes’ reliance on systematizing anecdotal evidence of animal intelligence towards an experimental approach, focused on studying the development of behaviour. We emphasize the role of Morgan’s evolving epistemological views in bringing about the first shift – in particular, his philosophy of science. We emphasize the role of an intriguing but overlooked figure in the history of comparative psychology in explaining the second shift, T. Mann Jones, whose correspondence with Morgan provided an important catalyst for Morgan’s experimental turn, particularly the special focus on development. We also shed light on the intended function of Morgan’s Canon, the methodological principle for which Morgan is now mostly known. The Canon can only be properly understood by seeing it in the context of Morgan’s own unique experimental vision for comparative psychology. (shrink)

The paper looks at three big ideas that have been associated with the term “relativism.” The first maintains that some property has a higher-degree than might have been thought. The second that the judgments in a particular domain of discourse are capable only of relative truth and not of absolute truth And the third, which I dub with the oxymoronic label “absolutist relativism,” seeks to locate relativism in our acceptance of certain sorts of spare absolutist principles. -/- The first idea (...) is well illustrated by the famous cases drawn from physics, but is ill suited for providing a model for the sorts of relativism about normative domains that have most interested philosophers. -/- The second idea – according to which it is the truth of certain judgments that is relative – seems subject to a very difficult dilemma. -/- The final idea provides a coherent model of cases like etiquette but is not plausibly applied to the moral or epistemic domains. (shrink)

To several critics of the philosophical method of cases—Robert Cummins, Jonathan Weinberg and his colleagues, and Avner Baz—the fact that philosophical intuitions cannot be calibrated means that we cannot rule out the skeptical hypothesis that the outcome of our theorizing based on these intuitions is deeply distorted by our cognitive artifacts. Moreover, they take this hypothesis to license the negative conclusion that we are unable to have much of the armchair knowledge we typically attribute to ourselves when philosophizing based on (...) appeal to philosophical intuitions. This paper addresses this skeptical argument and shows how this negative conclusion can be resisted. (shrink)