Arguably the biggest challenge in analyzing English tense is to account for the double access interpretation, which arises when a present tensed verb is embedded under a past attitude—e.g., "John said that Mary is pregnant". Present-under-past does not always result in a felicitous utterance, however—cf. "John believed that Mary is pregnant". While such oddity has been noted, the contrast has never been explained. In fact, English grammars and manuals generally prohibit present-under-past. Work on double access, on the other hand, has (...) either disregarded the oddity (e.g., Abusch 1997: 39) or treated it as a reflex of a particular dialect (e.g., Kratzer 1998: 14). The goal of the paper is to argue—based on a corpus study—that a present-under-past sentence is grammatical, but modulated by two, interacting pragmatic phenomena: cessation and parentheticality. (shrink)

In December of 2017, President Trump reduced the size of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante Monuments by 2 million acres. Conservatives rejoiced, and progressives railed. Yet neither side has clearly identified the moral facets of the situation. The crucial moral question is this: How ought public property be regulated to protect landscapes with cultural significance? We offer criteria for determining when something has cultural value and argue that the moral merits of the present case turn on whether the reduction adequately (...) addresses the cultural interests at play. (shrink)

Research on the ethics of algorithms has grown substantially over the past decade. Alongside the exponential development and application of machine learning algorithms, new ethical problems and solutions relating to their ubiquitous use in society have been proposed. This article builds on a review of the ethics of algorithms published in 2016, 2016). The goals are to contribute to the debate on the identification and analysis of the ethical implications of algorithms, to provide an updated analysis of epistemic and normative (...) concerns, and to offer actionable guidance for the governance of the design, development and deployment of algorithms. (shrink)

The empirical phenomenon at the center of this paper is projection, which we define (uncontroversially) as follows: (1) Definition of projection An implication projects if and only if it survives as an utterance implication when the expression that triggers the implication occurs under the syntactic scope of an entailment-cancelling operator. Projection is observed, for example, with utterances containing aspectual verbs like stop, as shown in (2) and (3) with examples from English and Paraguayan Guaraní (Paraguay, Tupí-Guaraní).1 The Guaraní example in (...) (2) and its English translation have at least the following implications: (i) Carla has previously smoked, and (ii) Carla stopped smoking. The first but not the second of these implications is also conveyed by the question version of sentence (2), as in (3a), or when (2) is embedded under entailment-cancelling sentential operators, such as negation, as in (3b), the antecedent of a conditional, as in (3c), or an epistemic modal, as in (3d). Hence, by the definition in (14), the first but not the second implication of (2) projects. (shrink)

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) continues to be controversial with arguments for and against its veracity being waged by individuals representing a variety of disciplines from behavioral scientists to philosophers. Our perspective focuses on the epistemological underpinnings of what is now commonly known as ADHD. Its ignominious history and current disputes may stem from a "pessimistic" epistemology, meaning that truth is only the province of persons in authority and power. The authoritative organizations that govern the diagnostic labels and criteria are (...) the American Psychiatric Association and their Diagnostic and Statistical Manual and the World Health Organization that sponsors the International Classification of Disease. We contrast the pessimistic epistemology with criteria for truth from the scientific method. Although scientific scrutiny has been and is being applied subsequent to "authoritarian edicts" of the disorder, we opine that ADHD currently does not have status beyond that of the "hypothetical construct." Moreover, current brain-based causal models have failed to provide rigorous supporting data that comes from testing falsifiable hypotheses. (shrink)

In an online, participatory class, we interpreted 'The Dream of the Three Orcas' knowing nothing of the dreamer beyond age and gender, and having none of the dreamer’s associations. -/- Our interpretation included nine predictions about the dreamer. When it was complete, we asked the bringer of the dream (who had not been present before our interpretation was complete) to give us more information about the dreamer. Later the dreamer also gave us more information. Our predictions were mostly confirmed. The (...) dreamer is standing on beach when huge orca-like floats appear. -/- This record is another iteration of an experiment that is described more fully in the paper 'The Dream of the Six-Legged Dog: An Experimental System that Tests Symbolic Meaning,' soon to be published. This iteration repeats and confirms the evidence given in that paper. ONLINE AUDIO RECORD OF ENTIRE ORCAS' CLASS : link is on title page of the paper you can download here. (shrink)

Representing species-specific proteins and protein complexes in ontologies that are both human and machine-readable facilitates the retrieval, analysis, and interpretation of genome-scale data sets. Although existing protin-centric informatics resources provide the biomedical research community with well-curated compendia of protein sequence and structure, these resources lack formal ontological representations of the relationships among the proteins themselves. The Protein Ontology (PRO) Consortium is filling this informatics resource gap by developing ontological representations and relationships among proteins and their variants and modified forms. Because (...) proteins are often functional only as members of stable protein complexes, the PRO Consortium, in collaboration with existing protein and pathway databases, has launched a new initiative to implement logical and consistent representation of protein complexes. We describe here how the PRO Consortium is meeting the challenge of representing species-specific protein complexes, how protein complex representation in PRO supports annotation of protein complexes and comparative biology, and how PRO is being integrated into existing community bioinformatics resources. The PRO resource is accessible at http://pir.georgetown.edu/pro/. (shrink)

The Protein Ontology (PRO) provides a formal, logically-based classification of specific protein classes including structured representations of protein isoforms, variants and modified forms. Initially focused on proteins found in human, mouse and Escherichia coli, PRO now includes representations of protein complexes. The PRO Consortium works in concert with the developers of other biomedical ontologies and protein knowledge bases to provide the ability to formally organize and integrate representations of precise protein forms so as to enhance accessibility to results of protein (...) research. PRO (http://pir.georgetown.edu/pro) is part of the Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Foundry. (shrink)

Despite the frequency of stillbirths, the subsequent implications are overlooked and underappreciated. We present findings from comprehensive, systematic literature reviews, and new analyses of published and unpublished data, to establish the effect of stillbirth on parents, families, health-care providers, and societies worldwide. Data for direct costs of this event are sparse but suggest that a stillbirth needs more resources than a livebirth, both in the perinatal period and in additional surveillance during subsequent pregnancies. Indirect and intangible costs of stillbirth are (...) extensive and are usually met by families alone. This issue is particularly onerous for those with few resources. Negative effects, particularly on parental mental health, might be moderated by empathic attitudes of care providers and tailored interventions. The value of the baby, as well as the associated costs for parents, families, care providers, communities, and society, should be considered to prevent stillbirths and reduce associated morbidity. (shrink)

This is a protocol for a Cochrane Review (Intervention). The objectives are as follows: -/- The main aim of this review will be to assess the effects of changing practitioner empathy or patient expectations for all conditions. The main objective is to conduct a systematic review of randomised trials where the intervention involves manipulating either (a) practitioner empathy or (b) patient expectations, or (c) both.

Extant theoretical work on the political resource curse implies that dependence on resource revenues should decrease autocracies’ likelihood of democratizing but not necessarily affect democracies’ chances of survival. Yet most previous empirical studies estimate models that are ill-suited to address this claim. We improve upon earlier studies, estimating a dynamic logit model that interacts a continuous measure of resource dependence with an indicator of regime type using data from 166 countries, covering the period from 1816-2006. We find that an increase (...) in resource dependence at time t - 1 increases the likelihood of autocratic persistence at t, but has no appreciable effect on democratic survival. We go beyond existing empirical studies to show that increases in resource dependence have persistent and substantial cumulative effects on autocracies' likelihood of becoming democratic over the long-term, showing that the total effect of resource dependence on regime type is much larger than the short-term (one period) effect indicates. (shrink)

Moral duties are regularly attributed to groups. Does this make conceptual sense or is this merely political rhetoric? And what are the implications for these individuals within groups? Collins outlines a Tripartite Model of group duties that can target political demands at the right entities, in the right way and for the right reasons.

A standard objection to socioeconomic human rights is that they are not claimable as human rights: their correlative duties are not owed to each human, independently of specific institutional arrangements, in an enforceable manner. I consider recent responses to this ‘claimability objection,’ and argue that none succeeds. There are no human rights to socioeconomic goods. But all is not lost: there are, I suggest, human rights to ‘socioeconomic consideration’. I propose a detailed structure for these rights and their correlative duties, (...) while remaining neutral on substantive moral debates. I argue that socioeconomic-consideration human rights are satisfactorily claimable and sufficiently practical. (shrink)

Plausibly, only moral agents can bear action-demanding duties. This places constraints on which groups can bear action-demanding duties: only groups with sufficient structure—call them ‘collectives’—have the necessary agency. Moreover, if duties imply ability then moral agents (of both the individual and collectives varieties) can bear duties only over actions they are able to perform. It is thus doubtful that individual agents can bear duties to perform actions that only a collective could perform. This appears to leave us at a loss (...) when assigning duties in circumstances where only a collective could perform some morally desirable action and no collective exists. But, I argue, we are not at a loss. This article outlines a new way of assigning duties over collective acts when there is no collective. Specifically, we should assign collectivisation duties to individuals. These are individual duties to take steps towards forming a collective, which then incurs a duty over the action. I give criteria for when individuals have collectivisation duties and discuss the demands these duties place on their bearers. (shrink)

A collective duty gap arises when a group has caused harm that requires remedying but no member did harm that can justify the imposition of individual remedial duties. Examples range from airplane crashes to climate change. How might collective duty gaps be filled? This paper starts by examining two promising proposals for filling them. Both proposals are found inadequate. Thus, while gap-filling duties can be defended against objections from unfairness and demandingness, we need a substantive justification for their existence. I (...) argue that substantive justification can be found in the normative force of commitments individuals make to others with regard to ends. Along the way, I argue that gap-filling duties must be conceptualized differently in group agents, as compared to non-agent groups: in the former, gap-filling duties can be understood as duties to “take up the slack”; in the latter, this would be a category error. (shrink)

In order for states to fulfil (many of) their moral obligations, costs must be passed to individuals. This paper asks how these costs should be distributed. I advocate the common-sense answer: the distribution of costs should, insofar as possible, track the reasons behind the state’s duty. This answer faces a number of problems, which I attempt to solve.

The ethics of care has flourished in recent decades yet we remain without a succinct statement of its core theoretical commitment. This book uses the methods of analytic philosophy to argue for a simple care ethical slogan: dependency relationships generate responsibilities. It uses this slogan to unify, specify and justify the wide range of views found within the care ethical literature.

Digital phenotyping will potentially enable earlier detection and prediction of mental illness by monitoring human interaction with and through digital devices. Notwithstanding its promises, it is certain that a person’s digital phenotype will at times be at odds with their first-person testimony of their psychological states. In this paper, we argue that there are features of digital phenotyping in the context of psychiatry which have the potential to exacerbate the tendency to dismiss patients’ testimony and treatment preferences, which can be (...) instances of epistemic injustice. We first explain what epistemic injustice is, and why it is argued to be an extensive problem in health and disability settings. We then explain why epistemic injustice is more likely to apply with even greater force in psychiatric contexts, and especially where digital phenotyping may be involved. Finally, we offer some tentative suggestions of how epistemic injustice can be minimised in digital psychiatry. (shrink)

When a liberal-democratic state signs a treaty or wages a war, does its whole polity do those things? In this article, we approach this question via the recent social ontological literature on collective agency. We provide arguments that it does and that it does not. The arguments are presented via three considerations: the polity's control over what the state does; the polity's unity; and the influence of individual polity members. We suggest that the answer to our question differs for different (...) liberal-democratic states and depends on two underlying considerations: the amount of discretion held by the state's officeholders; the extent to which the democratic procedure is deliberative rather than aggregative. (shrink)

This paper investigates agents’ blameworthiness when they are part of a group that does harm. We analyse three factors that affect the scope of an agent’s blameworthiness in these cases: shared intentionality, interpersonal influence, and common knowledge. Each factor involves circumstantial luck. The more each factor is present, the greater is the scope of each agent’s vicarious blameworthiness for the other agents’ contributions to the harm. We then consider an agent’s degree of blameworthiness, as distinct from her scope of blameworthiness. (...) We suggest that an agent mostly controls her degree of blameworthiness—but even here, luck constrains what possible degrees of blameworthiness are open to her. (shrink)

In this article, I consider the harms inflicted upon transgender persons through “misgendering,” that is, such deployments of gender terms that diminish transgender persons’ selfrespect, limit the discursive resources at their disposal to define their own gender, and cause them microaggressive psychological harms. Such deployments are morally contestable, that is, they can be challenged on ethical or political grounds. Two characterizations of “woman” proposed in the feminist literature are critiqued from this perspective. When we consider what would happen to transgender (...) women upon the broad implementation of these characterizations within transgender women’s social context, we discover that they suffer from two defects: they either exclude at least some transgender women, or else they implicitly foster hierarchies among women, marginalizing transgender women in particular. In conclusion, I claim that the moral contestability of gender-term deployments acts as a stimulus to regularly consider the provisionality and revisability of our deployments of the term “woman.”. (shrink)

Individuals have various kinds of obligations: keep promises, don’t cause harm, return benefits received from injustices, be partial to loved ones, help the needy and so on. How does this work for group agents? There are two questions here. The first is whether groups can bear the same kinds of obligations as individuals. The second is whether groups’ pro tanto obligations plug into what they all-things-considered ought to do to the same degree that individuals’ pro tanto obligations plug into what (...) they all-things-considered ought to do. We argue for parity on both counts. (shrink)

Individuals sometimes pass their duties on to collectives, which is one way in which collectives can come to have duties. The collective discharges its duties by acting through its members, which involves distributing duties back out to individuals. Individuals put duties in and get (transformed) duties out. In this paper we consider whether (and if so, to what extent) this general account can make sense of states' duties. Do some of the duties we typically take states to have come from (...) individuals having passed on certain individual duties? There are complications: states can discharge their duties by contracting fulfilment out to non-members; states seem able to dissolve the duties of non-members; and some of states' duties are not derived in this way. We demonstrate that these complicate, but do not undermine, the general account and its application to states. And the application has an interesting upshot: by asking which individuals robustly participate in this process of duty transfer-and-transformation with a given state, we can begin to get a grip on who counts as a member of that state. (shrink)

In this paper, we focus on the moral responsibility of organized groups in light of historicism. Historicism is the view that any morally responsible agent must satisfy certain historical conditions, such as not having been manipulated. We set out four examples involving morally responsible organized groups that pose problems for existing accounts of historicism. We then pose a trilemma: one can reject group responsibility, reject historicism, or revise historicism. We pursue the third option. We formulate a Manipulation Condition and a (...) Guarding Condition as addendums to historicism that are necessary to accommodate our cases of group responsibility. (shrink)

Climate change is more than a discrete issue demanding political attention and response. A changing climate permeates political life as material processes of planetary change reverberate in our bodies, affecting subterranean processes of attention and evoking bodily responses at and below the threshold of awareness. By way of example, I explore the register of bodily feeling to raise the possibility that proliferating anomalies in atmospheric, oceanic, and seismic activities are entering into subliminal experiences of time and confounding embodied expectations of (...) how the future is likely to flow from the past. The essay concludes with a preliminary discussion of how micropolitical strategies to amplify visceral experiences of climatic changes might valuably contribute to larger programs for climate action. (shrink)

This article argues that through her songs and music videos Pagan Poetry, Cocoon and Hidden Place, versatile artist Björk is able to carve out a space for erotic tenderness. This erotic tenderness will be unearthed as a queer or minor sexuality, in the sense that it goes against a phallic and genital majoritarian account of sexuality. Tender sexuality might not be obviously queer, yet a detour through the early work of Freud will show how our hegemonic account of sexuality is (...) built upon a repression of such a tender sexuality. Freud’s psychoanalysis is only able to regard this sexual tenderness in a negative vein as a pathological symptom. Supported primarily by the works of Deleuze, Guattari and Muñoz, this article will propose that Björk’s artistry is able to produce a line of flight outside of this tender-less sexuality, liberating an otherwise repressed minor tender sexuality through a visually and sonically becoming-woman, becoming-child, becoming-BwO and becoming-molecular. (shrink)

The primary goal of this article is point out certain close parallels between some ideas of the radical feminist theorist Mary Daly and those of the French philosopher Henri Bergson. These similarities are particularly striking regarding distinctions made by both authors between two fundamentally contrasting types of cognitive faculty, of time and temporal experience, and of self and emotion. Daly departs from Bergson inasmuch as she employs these distinctions in her own way. She does not—like Bergson—employ them to depict the (...) result of a natural process of consciousness or life, and the dangers for human freedom and thought of not properly respecting these differences. Rather, she locates these differences within a more liberatory, ethical perspective to ground a sharp, inimical contrast between feminist creative movement on the one hand, and static, fixing, and “fixating” patriarchy, with its “technocratic” pretensions, on the other. My hope is that highlighting the similarities between Daly and Bergson will open new paths of appreciation and critique of Daly’s work. (shrink)

This short article provides an overview of "care ethics" for students who are new to moral theory.

In this reply to an article of Toni Erskine's, I argue that coalitions of the willing are moral agents. They can therefore bear responsibility in their own right.

Robert Cowton’s questions commentary on Peter Lombard’s Sentences originated ca. 1309–1311. This is a pdf of the edition prepared by Michiel Streijger containing Cowton’s questions on distinctions 1–14 of the second book of Sentences.

In July 2017, China’s State Council released the country’s strategy for developing artificial intelligence, entitled ‘New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan’. This strategy outlined China’s aims to become the world leader in AI by 2030, to monetise AI into a trillion-yuan industry, and to emerge as the driving force in defining ethical norms and standards for AI. Several reports have analysed specific aspects of China’s AI policies or have assessed the country’s technical capabilities. Instead, in this article, we focus on (...) the socio-political background and policy debates that are shaping China’s AI strategy. In particular, we analyse the main strategic areas in which China is investing in AI and the concurrent ethical debates that are delimiting its use. By focusing on the policy backdrop, we seek to provide a more comprehensive and critical understanding of China’s AI policy by bringing together debates and analyses of a wide array of policy documents. (shrink)

Gender inequality is still present as it was over 100 years ago when women in the United States were fighting for their given right to vote, a right that was stolen from them by the grips of a male figure. However, with social media, the potential to oppose gender inequality is present. Social media is a modern tool that has the ability to bring different groups together to fight against gender inequality. Social media permits this linkage, especially when the awareness (...) of kidnapping and abduction targeting females is now more present than ever. This raise in awareness motivated the question, is there enough evidence to stay that social media majorly impacts the progress of gender equality? Different sources implement the evidence that social media strongly influences the progress in gender equality by introducing the TIGER program, statistical data explaining the high distressing rates of misogyny, the limits of social media in gender-related issues, and the evidence for why social media is the best tool at the moment. Through these sources, the evidence solidifies to conclude that social media considerably impacts the movement of gender equality. (shrink)

In Switzerland, institutions through which legal knowledge and education are produced have systemi-cally enabled epistemic injustice through forms of silencing and the cultivation of active ignorance along individual and institutional dimensions. As such, we argue that an important form of intervention in the legal education system, which would not only provide instruments to address epistemic injustice, but also better equip lawyers as individuals and as members of a collective, epistemic community, is feminist critical theory. Providing access and engagement with critical (...) legal methodology, throughout legal studies, is integral to the development of epistemic capacities. It would help prevent formation of insensitivities to experiences of injustice and interrupt the perpetuation of silencing and cultivation of active ignorance along individual and institutional dimensions. -/- . (shrink)

1. The Situation in Cognition 2. Situated Cognition: A Potted Recent History 3. Extensions in Biology, Computation, and Cognition 4. Articulating the Idea of Cognitive Extension 5. Are Some Resources Intrinsically Non-Cognitive? 6. Is Cognition Extended or Only Embedded? 7. Letting Nature Take Its Course.

In this paper, we develop an analysis of the structure and content of loneliness. We argue that this is an emotion of absence-an affective state in which certain social goods are regarded as out of reach for the subject of experience. By surveying the range of social goods that appear to be missing from the lonely person's perspective, we see what it is that can make this emotional condition so subjectively awful for those who undergo it, including the profound sense (...) of being unable to realise oneself, in collaboration with others. (shrink)

We introduce two concepts—social certainty and social doubt—that help to articulate a variety of experiences of the social world, such as shyness, self-consciousness, culture shock, and anxiety. Following Carel's (2013) analysis of bodily doubt, which explores how a person's tacit confidence in the workings of their body can be disrupted and undermined in illness, we consider how an individual's faith in themselves as a social agent, too, can be compromised or lost, thus altering their experience of what is afforded by (...) the social environment. We highlight how a loss of bodily or social certainty can be shaped and sustained by the environments in which one finds oneself. As such, we show how certain individuals might be more vulnerable to experiences of bodily and social doubt than others. (shrink)

Moral luck occurs when factors beyond an agent’s control positively affect how much praise or blame she deserves. Kinds of moral luck are differentiated by the source of lack of control such as the results of her actions, the circumstances in which she finds herself, and the way in which she is constituted. Many philosophers accept the existence of some of these kinds of moral luck but not others, because, in their view, the existence of only some of them would (...) make morality unfair. I, however, argue that this intermediary approach is unstable, because either morality is fair in ways that rule out resultant, circumstantial, and constitutive moral luck (and this leads to moral responsibility skepticism), or morality is unfair in ways that permit the existence of those kinds of moral luck. Thus, such intermediary approaches lack the motivation that their proponents have long taken them to have. In the appendix, I point to ways in which morality is unfair concerning the scope of moral responsibility, moral obligation, moral taint, being a good or bad person, and flourishing. (shrink)

ABSTRACT According to edenic idealism, our ordinary object terms refer to items in the manifest world—the world of primitive objects and properties presented in experience. I motivate edenic idealism as a response to scenarios where it is difficult to match the objects in experience with corresponding items in the external world. I argue that edenic idealism has important semantic advantages over realism: it is the most intuitive view of what we are actually talking about when we use terms for objects.

Volume 20, Issue 4, May 2020, Page 46-48.

In his celebrated 1974 essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” Thomas Nagel stages a human-bat encounter to illustrate and support his claim that “subjective experience” is irreducible to “objective fact”: because Nagel cannot experience the world as a bat does, he will never know what it is like to be one. In Nagel’s account, heterogeneity is figured negatively—as a failure or lack of resemblance—and functions to constrain his knowledge of bats. Today, as white-nose syndrome threatens bat populations (...) across North America, might figuring heterogeneity positively, as a condition of creativity, open up new modes of receptivity and responsiveness to species extinctions? This essay turns to philosophies of becoming and to recent research in the biological sciences to explore this possibility. I suggest that attending to the heterogeneity of experience alerts us to more public dimensions of our being and may thereby work against the tendency to understand and experience ourselves as self-contained and closed off from one another and the world we share in common. This may in turn enhance our sense of entanglement with the events, bodies, and forces on the “outside” of experience, including bats and the white-nose syndrome with which they are afflicted today. Such an affirmation of heterogeneity as a condition of creativity holds the greatest promise for multispecies ethics today, I propose, when it is joined to an affirmation of incompatibilities within and between things as a real force of suffering and destruction in a heterogeneous world. (shrink)

The computational argument for individualism, which moves from computationalism to individualism about the mind, is problematic, not because computationalism is false, but because computational psychology is, at least sometimes, wide. The paper provides an early, or perhaps predecessor, version of the thesis of extended cognition.

The general concept of a trope – that of a non-shareable character-grounder – admits of a distinction between modifier tropes and module tropes. Roughly, a module trope is self-exemplifying whereas a modifier trope is not. This distinction has wide-ranging implications. Modifier tropes are uniquely eligible to be powers and fundamental determinables, whereas module tropes are uniquely eligible to play a direct role in perception and causation. Moreover, each type of trope theory faces unique challenges concerning character- grounding. Modifier trope theory (...) faces challenges concerning the inscrutability of predication and the incompatibility with bundle theory, whereas module trope theory faces challenges concerning character overdetermination and a collapse into austere nominalism. These differences indicate that the modifier/module distinction divides the advantages of general trope theory and thus presents the trope theorist with a pivotal choice. (shrink)

'The arrow of time' refers to the curious asymmetry that distinguishes the future from the past. Reversing the Arrow of Time argues that there is an intimate link between the symmetries of 'time itself' and time reversal symmetry in physical theories, which has wide-ranging implications for both physics and its philosophy. This link helps to clarify how we can learn about the symmetries of our world, how to understand the relationship between symmetries and what is real, and how to overcome (...) pervasive illusions about the direction of time. Roberts explains the significance of time reversal in a way that intertwines physics and philosophy, to establish what the arrow of time means and how we can come to know it. This book is both mathematically and philosophically rigorous yet remains accessible to advanced undergraduates in physics and the philosophy of physics. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core. (shrink)

D'Arcy May, in his review, contends Magliola argues that the Buddhist doctrines of no-self and rebirth are contradictory, whereas Magliola in fact argues just the opposite--that these two Buddhist doctrines are not contradictory (and he explains why). What Magliola does contend is that Buddhist no-self and rebirth contradict the Catholic teachings of individual identity and "one life-span only." D'Arcy May's review contends that Magliola admits "authoritative statements" are "hard to come by" in Buddhism, whereas Magliola in his book contends that (...) "authoritative statements" play a very important role in Buddhism: his book explains how "authority" functions in Buddhism, and he directs readers to the careful "vetting" of his book--including his discussions of "authority in Buddhism"-- by Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi (for Theravada) and Ven. Dr. Dhammadipa [Fa Yao] (for both Theravada and the two "Big Vehicles"). His book also cites approvals by several established academics who are Buddhologists. Magliola's "Reply" goes on to argue that D'Arcy May's interpretation of the "sensus fidelium" foists the opinions of "white intellectual elites and higher-income Catholics of the North Atlantic tier of countries and their geographical projections--Australia, etc. (only 9 percent of the world's Catholic population) upon the 68 percent of Catholics who live in the global South and East. Magliola's "Reply" also expresses his dismay that D'Arcy May, throughoout his review, dodges the pivotal Derridean notion of "samenesses erected by irreducible difference" though this "thought-motif" constitutes the scaffolding of Magliola's entire book. (shrink)

The fact that real-world decisions made by artificial intelligences (AI) are often ethically loaded has led a number of authorities to advocate the development of “moral machines”. I argue that the project of building “ethics” “into” machines presupposes a flawed understanding of the nature of ethics. Drawing on the work of the Australian philosopher, Raimond Gaita, I argue that ethical dilemmas are problems for particular people and not (just) problems for everyone who faces a similar situation. Moreover, the force of (...) an ethical claim depends in part on the life history of the person who is making it. For both these reasons, machines could at best be engineered to provide a shallow simulacrum of ethics, which would have limited utility in confronting the ethical and policy dilemmas associated with AI. (shrink)

It has been argued that quantum mechanics forces us to accept the existence of metaphysical, mind-independent indeterminacy. In this paper we provide an interpretation of the indeterminacy involved in the quantum phenomena in terms of a view that we call Plural Metaphysical Supervaluationism. According to it, quantum indeterminacy is captured in terms of an irreducibly plural relation between the actual world and various misrepresentations of it.