The Walking Dead is a popular TV series depicting a catastrophic and violent world. After a pandemic that turns humans into zombies, we witness the collapse of civilization with all its institutions, the depletion of the resources, and the struggle to build a new world in the middle of the wars between surviving groups. It illustrates a world of literal and metaphorical homo homini lupus. Some people choose sheer survival, and others try to build a moral, civil world. (...) In this article, I propose a reading of this series from a Kantian perspective by employing his interrelated ideas on history, ethics, and politics. I claim that The Walking Dead represents the state of nature and the violence it contains, and illustrates the course of history toward a civil society as defined by Kant. (shrink)

Erotic Nights of the Living Dead (1980) may have featured both animated corpses and hardcore sex scenes, but only recently have Re-Penetrator (2004) and Porn of the Dead (2006) managed to fully eroticise the living dead, allowing these creatures to engage in intercourse. In doing so, the usually a-subjective zombie is allotted a key facet of identity - sexuality. This development within the sub-genre needs accounting for outside of the contexts of porn studies, where it has only (...) been briefly touched upon in relation to its "extremity". -/- Moreover, the gendering of the undead opens a discussion which expand the horizons of zombie studies away from the overt critiques of capitalism, race and psychoanalysis that have pervaded analyses of these narratives. The dichotomy of binary oppositions so often associated with psychoanalytic approaches dictates that "passive (non-phallic) = female", and "active (phallic) = male". In these terms, the zombies are feminine - soft-bodied and passive, despite their murderous intent (which has been accounted for, by Barabara Creed (1993) amongst others, by invoking the vagina-dentata motif). Humans (active) are deemed masculine, not least since they tend to dispatch zombies with "phallic guns". Taking this logic to an extreme, the zombie may be read as allegorising feminism: the "feminised" figures (zombies) become fearsome in their will to exert themselves despite their seeming disempowerment in the face of "masculine" hegemony. Ultimately, by grouping together as a force, they overthrow or at least significantly damage that "normality" (an ideological paradigm usually read in terms of race, class and economics). (shrink)

In this paper, we report on an experiment with The Walking Dead (TWD), which is a narrative-driven adventure game with morally charged decisions set in a post-apocalyptic world filled with zombies. This study aimed to identify physiological markers of moral decisions and non-moral decisions using infrared thermal imaging (ITI). ITI is a non-invasive tool used to capture thermal variations due to blood flow in specific body regions that might be caused by sympathetic activity. Results show that moral decisions (...) seem to elicit a significant decrease in temperature in the chin region 20 seconds after participants are presented with a moral decision. However, given the small sample involved, and the lack of significance in other regions, future studies might be needed to confirm the results obtained in this work. (shrink)

Historically the focus of moral decision-making in games has been narrow, mostly confined to challenges of moral judgement (deciding right and wrong). In this paper, we look to moral psychology to get a broader view of the skills involved in ethical behaviour and how these skills can be employed in games. Following the Four Component Model of Rest and colleagues, we identify four “lenses” – perspectives for considering moral gameplay in terms of focus, sensitivity, judgement and action – and describe (...) the design problems raised by each. To conclude, we analyse two recent games, The Walking Dead and Papers, Please, and show how the lenses give us insight into important design differences between these games. (shrink)

Historically the focus of moral decision-making in games has been narrow, mostly confined to challenges of moral judgement (deciding right and wrong). In this paper, we look to moral psychology to get a broader view of the skills involved in ethical behaviour and how they may be employed in games. Following the Four Component Model of Rest and colleagues, we identify four “lenses” – perspectives for considering moral gameplay in terms of focus, sensitivity, judgement and action – and describe the (...) design problems raised by each. To conclude, we analyse two recent games, The Walking Dead and Papers, Please, and show how the lenses give us insight into important design differences between them. (shrink)

The trial took place at Bristol Crown Court, England, United Kingdom for the murder of Joanna Yeates, and Dr Vincent Tabak was the Defendant. The author attended at court for this trial and this paper notes many of the obvious and unsatisfactory legal and procedural points in this trial. Dr Vincent Tabak was convicted of the murder at this trial. Of course the jury were not to know the finer points of law as the lower court judge did not advise (...) the jury of any such points before they adjourned to make their decision. All but one concluded that Dr Tabak was guilty as charged, although even the charge was vague and all-encompassing as he was charged with ‘murder between Friday 17 December 2010 and Sunday 19 December 2010’. Defence counsel, very eminent barrister-at-law, appeared to be cowed by the other side and let them walk all over this case procedurally. For example, prosecution counsel handed him 1200 pages of evidence on the first day of the trial, as if to FULFIL disclosure obligations. E was stunned and asked the court for time off. But this was never again discussed. -/- The lower court judge appeared as if he had already decided on the case. When Defence Counsel asked him if he had before him a copy of a certain document, he flippantly say he had it but had left it on his desk in his room. When Defence Counsel, of international renown, was ready to present his opening speech and cross-examination of his client, Dr Vincent Tabak, this lower court judge dismissed the jury to their lunch break knowing that counsel was going to speak. Court had to be adjourned and the members of the jury quickly assembles by the court porters as they were leaving the court, which must have hampered their interest in what counsel’s statement said. A photograph of a dead body by a roadside, allegedly, Miss Yeates, was shown by projector slide a dozen irrelevant times during the trial period, thus embedding that photograph in the jury’s mind. The computer evidence leaves much to be desired and could, some suggested, easily have been concocted by the prosecution team, abusing the law of metadata evidence. Te lady who presented it did not give the court her qualifications and her expertise if any- and much more that beggars belief and loses trust in the British Criminal Justice System, such as it is, following ‘form over substance’. -/- . (shrink)

In _Deaths in Venice_ Philip Kitcher explores the bearing that _Death in Venice_ by Thomas Mann may have on 'the oldest and deepest question of philosophy: _how to live_'. In this paper, I will distinguish two ways in which this question can be interpreted. One one reading, it amounts to the question 'how to lead a valuable or worthy life?', whereas on the other it involves a more elusive idea, namely, that a person may breath and walk and still be (...) dead in a relevant sense, that is, from the perspectivo in which being alive does not reduce to biological survival. In my view, Kitcher's reflection on Mann's novella relies on the first, more standard reading. I argue, though, that the being-alive interpretation sheds a more unified light on _Death in Venice_; in fact, I will conclude that the need to shift from one to another interpretation constitutes a fundamental concern in the novella. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: The Seven Deadly Sins: Society and Evil. By Stanford M. Lyman. The Seven Deadly Sins Today. By Henry Fairlie.

In this entry, DeYoung defines the seven deadly sins, also known as the capital vices, as a schema for understanding and analyzing sin for Christians interested in self-examination, confession, preaching, and spiritual formation. DeYoung carefully looks at the difference between 'sin' and 'vice' and goes back to the capital vices of the Desert Fathers to draw out the tradition. She also looks at Aquinas's analysis to help articulate how the Christian tradition has used the vices.

To become a public figure or celebrity, I claim, is to exist alongside a zombie version of yourself. This zombie shares the same name and physical likeness but operates independently of its flesh-and-blood counterpart. In fact, public figures do not have any special authority over the zombie version of themselves, and in some contexts, they enjoy less authority over their zombie counterparts than others do. In the US, for example, public figures are not legally entitled to protections against criticism via (...) parody, which can include unauthorized use of their likeness for offensive images, insulting jokes, and other forms of public mockery. As Michel Foucault observed, a work is entitled to become the “murderer” of its author, which suggests that the author’s name exists among the living dead. An artist’s works can bear their name yet operate independently of their attitudes or mental states. In June of 2019, the master rights to Taylor Swift’s first six albums were sold without her knowledge or consent, effectively “murdering” her rights as their author. Swift’s 2019 decision to re-record her first six studio albums can thus be understood as an act of institutional revenge, a way to get back at the people who have wielded power over her and the institutions that enable exploitation—a battle with her zombified works: the “stolen” original albums. In this chapter I sketch an institutional theory of celebrity names to explain the institutional, personal, and political significance of self-appropriation, using Taylor Swift’s act of re-recording her own music as a paradigm case. (shrink)

One of the vexed questions in the philosophy of wonder and indeed education is how to ensure that the next generation harbours a sense of wonder. Wonder is important, we think, because it encour- ages inquiry and keeps us as Albert Einstein would argue from ‘being as good as dead’ or ‘snuffed-out candles’ (Einstein 1949, 5). But how is an educator to install, bring to life, or otherwise encourage a sense of wonder in his or her stu- dents? Biologist (...) Rachel Carson suggests that exploring nature and specifically undertaking walks along the rocky coast of Maine would keep alive a person’s inborn sense of wonder (Carson 1984). Philosopher Jesse Prinz thinks that exposure to art will encourage wonderment because artworks, as he puts it, are “inventions for feeding the appetite that wonder excites in us” (Prinz 2013). Weird fiction (a subgenre of speculative fiction) – and in particular the work of one of its greatest exponents, the early-20th-century American author How- ard Phillips Lovecraft – is likewise a catalyst for wonder. The reason behind this is that Lovecraft’s ‘wonder-stories’ are densely packed with wonder per design; and in support of this claim I shall in what is to come 1) provide a brief introduction to Lovecraft and weird fiction; 2) present a working definition of wonder; and 3) clarify what is meant by something being ‘densely packed with wonder’ via bringing to the fore evidence of Lovecraft’s literary wonder- mongery. The paper ends with some reflections on the notion of ‘dark wonder’, why this peculiar label might be suitable for the kind of wonder we find in Lovecraft’s work, and why exposure to ‘dark wonder’ can be edifying, and in that sense educational. (shrink)

The giving up of the body or suicide for spiritual reasons has been dealt with by James Benn and D Max Moermane. The relationships of the dead and the living are discussed by Bryan J Cuevas, John Cliff ord Holt, and Matthew T Kapstein, while Hank Glassman, Mark Rowe, and Jason A Carbine talk about different funeral practices. With glossaries for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters and an elaborate index, this book is a unique peek into Buddhist practices regarding (...) the dead and deserves attention by researchers, students, and admirers of this religion. (shrink)

Upon its release in 1968, George Romero's Night of the Living Dead was attacked by many critics as an exploitative low budget film of questionable moral value. I argue in this paper that Night of the Living Dead is indeed nihilistic, but in a deeper philosophical sense than the critics had in mind.

Frank Snare had a puzzle. Noncognitivism implies No-Ought-From-Is but No- Ought-From-Is does not imply non-cognitivism. How then can we derive non-cognitivism from No-Ought-From-Is? Via an abductive argument. If we combine non-cognitivism with the conservativeness of logic (the idea that in a valid argument the conclusion is contained in the premises), this implies No-Ought-From-Is. Hence if No-Ought-From-Is is true, we can arrive at non-cognitivism via an inference to the best explanation. With prescriptivism we can make this argument more precise. I develop (...) an account of imperative consequence that underwrites Hare’s principle that you cannot derive imperatives from indicatives. Thus if moral judgments contain an imperative component, it will be impossible to derive moral conclusions from indicative or non-moral premises. Given this account of imperative consequence, we can explain No-Ought-From-Is without appealing to anything as nebulous as the conservativeness of logic. Hence if No-Ought-From-Is is true, we have an inference to the best explanation for prescriptivism. Both lines of argument face problems from Prior. Given Prior’s counterexamples, No-Ought-From-Is as originally conceived is false. The version that survives is No-Non-Vacuous-Ought-From-Is. But the best explanation of this does not include non-cognitivism. With prescriptivism it is worse. For the version of No-Ought-From-Is that prescriptivism ‘explains’ – that is, the version of No-Ought-From-Is that prescriptivism implies – would exclude Prior’s counter-examples to Autonomy as invalid. But they are not invalid. Thus Prior’s counter-examples to No-Ought-From- Is refute prescriptivism. Thus from 1960 onwards R. M.Hare was a dead philosopher walking. But if non-cognitivism cannot be derived from No-Ought-From-Is, this suggests that it is not what Hume was trying to prove. I argue that what Hume was trying to prove is that moral truths are not demonstrable. To be demonstrable, a proposition must be either self-evident or logically derivable from self-evident propositions. By Treatise 3.1.1.27, Hume had proved to his own satisfaction that no moral propositions are self-evident. That leaves open the possibility that they are logically derivable from self-evident but NON-moral propositions. The point of No-Ought-From-Is was to exclude this possibility. If you cannot logically derive moral conclusions from non-moral premises, you cannot demonstrate the truths of morality by deriving them from self-evident but NON-moral truths. I also discuss why Hume abandoned No-Ought-From-Is in the EPM. He had no need of it since he thought he had a proof that (with some exceptions) no nontrivial truths are demonstrable. Hence no non-trivial MORAL truths are demonstrable. No-Ought-From-Is drops out as unnecessary. (shrink)

A review of Rebecca DeYoung's book, "Glittering Vices: A New Look at the Seven Deadly Sins and Their Remedies", 2nd ed.

This article was championed in view of the notion of (perceived) economic rationalisation which seem to be the foremost of patients' care in the NHS as opposed to addressing distress to their existing well-being, while in a state of being tormented with agonising news of prolonged ill health. Serious consideration is given to addressing the need to rationalise resources in ensuring the long standing history of the NHS' free health care is critically addressed, but not in a way that destroys (...) confidence on the ability of professionals to manifest ethical prudence in their acts of judgments about whether patients' care is to be imminent or prolonged on a waiting list. There is certainly serious impacts to be comprehended with in situations of economic rationality through services provided by the NHS, but it is believed that tangible outcomes about definitive care for patients should be addressed collaboratively. (shrink)

The wishes of registered organ donors are regularly set aside when family members object to donation. This genuine overruling of the wishes of the deceased raises difficult ethical questions. A successful argument for providing the family with a veto must (a) provide reason to disregard the wishes of the dead, and (b) establish why the family should be allowed to decide. One branch of justification seeks to reconcile the family veto with important ideas about respecting property rights, preserving autonomy, (...) and preventing harm. These arguments are ultimately unsuccessful. Another branch of arguments is consequentialist, pointing out the negative consequences of removing the veto. Whether construed as concerning family distress or as a potential drop in the organs available, these arguments are unsuccessful; the first fails to recognize the tremendous distress associated with waiting for an organ, while the second has little supporting evidence. A final section considers and rejects whether combining some of the arguments just examined could justify the family veto. We should thus remove the family veto in organ donation. (shrink)

Plato’s Phaedrus is a dialogue of journeys, a tale of transitions. It begins with Socrates’ question, ‘Where to and from whence, my dear Phaedrus?’ and concludes with the Socrates’ decision, ‘Let’s go’ (sc. back into the city from whence they’ve come). In the speech that forms its centre-piece Socrates narrates another famous journey—the descent of the soul into the body and its reascent to the realm of Forms through erotic madness. It is not too implausible to suppose that Plato himself (...) saw fit to relate his powerful images of the human soul’s fall and re-ascent by dramatic means that highlight the movement from one place to another. This explains how Hermias of Alexandria -- author of the longest sustained work on the Phaedrus to survive from antiquity related the physical journey to the Ilissus to the soul's descent and ascent. This seemingly implausible allegorising gains a certain kind of sense when we consider that the Neoplatonic commentary tradition formed part of a philosophic way of life with an ethical telos. (shrink)

There are increasing calls for rejecting the ‘dead donor’ rule and permitting ‘organ donation euthanasia’ in organ transplantation. I argue that the fundamental problem with this proposal is that it would bestow more worth on the organs than the donor who has them. What is at stake is the basis of human equality, which, I argue, should be based on an ineliminable dignity that each of us has in virtue of having a rational nature. To allow mortal harvesting would (...) be to make our worth contingent upon variable quality of life of judgments that can only be based on properties that come in degrees. Thus, rejecting the ‘dead donor’ rule comes at the expense of our egalitarian principles with respect to the value each individual human life has in relation to the protections against killing. (shrink)

The dead donor rule justifies current practice in organ procurement for transplantation and states that organ donors must be dead prior to donation. The majority of organ donors are diagnosed as having suffered brain death and hence are declared dead by neurological criteria. However, a significant amount of unrest in both the philosophical and the medical literature has surfaced since this practice began forty years ago. I argue that, first, declaring death by neurological criteria is both unreliable (...) and unjustified but further, the ethical principles which themselves justify the dead donor rule are better served by abandoning that rule and instead allowing individuals who have suffered severe and irreversible brain damage to become organ donors, even though they are not yet dead and even though the removal of their organs would be the proximal cause of death. (shrink)

Intergenerational transfers are a core feature of the practice of private philanthropy. A substantial portion of the resources committed to charitable causes comes from transfers (either during life or at death) that continue to pay out after death. Indeed, much of the power of the charitable foundation lies in its ability to extend the life of an enterprise beyond the mortal existence of its initiating agents. Despite their prevalence, whether and in what way the instruments of intergenerational philanthropy can be (...) justified is controversial. Many have argued that these instruments unfairly privilege the interests of the dead at the expense of the living and unborn. More recently, others have argued that intergenerational charitable transfers comport with the demands of distributive justice and are therefore legitimate. This paper contends that both of these perspectives fail to see the problem for what it is. Intergenerational charitable transfers may indeed promote justice in certain respects, but they do so at the cost of imposing the judgments of the dead onto the living. Respecting the wishes of the past conflicts with an interest in “generational sovereignty.” The paper concludes that properly accounting for this interest in generational sovereignty doesn’t require the abolition of intergenerational philanthropy. But it does tell in favor of a different regulatory orientation than most legal systems currently adopt. (shrink)

Since 2007, I conduct philosophical walks as individual consultations, teachings or Socratic group exercises. A philosophical walk is intended to make participants think, to deepen thoughts and to become conscious of oneself in relation to the surroundings by walking. It is a form of philosophical practice, facilitating dialogue so that a meaningful story can be obtained. Participants are encouraged to (i) walk in such a way that they obtain space for thoughts and thinking, (ii) conceptualize, (iii) identify a place (...) related to a concept, (iv) question concepts, place and space, and (v) connect concepts with their experience. In this paper, I will describe the method of my philosophical walks and give an example: a philosophical walk at the campus of Nanjing University, China, in 2013. The aim is to provide readers a tool for conducting philosophical walks themselves and walk just like Lao-Tzu, Confucius, Socrates, Aristotle, Nietzsche and many other philosophers have done in order to philosophize and produce concepts related to life, person and place. (shrink)

Are the wishes of the dead more important than the needs of the living? This question is prompted by consideration of the Hershey Trust Company, a perpetual charitable trust that not only owns and operates the Milton Hershey School in Pennsylvania, but also owns a controlling interest in various Hershey-related for-profit entities. This unusual arrangement, and the conditions under which it was formed, have produced a situation in which a small, private boarding school for low-income students has an endowment (...) of $12 billion (in addition to its other corporate and real estate interests). The trust has been operating according to its founder’s wishes for decades, but some have wondered whether its resources could be put to better use for more urgent needs. This case will invite students to consider the question of how we should weigh the needs of the living against the wishes of the dead. (shrink)

Grief is, and has always been, technologically supported. From memorials and shrines to photos and saved voicemail messages, we engage with the dead through the technologies available to us. As our technologies evolve, so does how we grieve. In this paper, we consider the role chatbots might play in our grieving practices. Influenced by recent phenomenological work, we begin by thinking about the character of grief. Next, we consider work on developing “continuing bonds” with the dead. We argue (...) that for some, chatbots may play an important role in establishing these continuing bonds by helping us develop what we term “habits of intimacy”. We then turn to the “ick factor” some may feel about this prospect, focusing especially on ethical concerns raised by Patrick Stokes and Adam Buben about the risk of replacing our dead with chatbots. We argue that replacement worries are not as pressing as Stokes and Buben suggest. We resist these replacement worries by appealing to the “thin reciprocity”, as we refer to it, that such bots offer, as well as the fictionalist stance that we think users of the bots adopt when engaging with them. We conclude by briefly raising some additional concerns and highlighting future research questions. (shrink)

Some people insist that they are dead. Rather than starting with the usual assumption that delusions are ‘false beliefs about external reality’ I want to consider how interpreting their claim as a report of a certain kind of anomalous experience assists us in understanding why they are certain, why their claim is immune from evidence to the contrary, and why they do not act in ways we would expect were they to believe their claim to be true of the (...) world. While this helps us understand cases where people do not act on their delusions, more must be said about the people who do act on their delusions. I shall attempt to describe a process where an intense anomalous experience leads to a context-specific narrowing of attention. The ultimate result of this is that the appearance / reality distinction becomes lost in the context of the anomalous experience. The sense of conviction that would be appropriately associated with a report of experience thus becomes inappropriately associated with a claim about external reality. While there have been efforts to provide cognitive therapy for delusional subjects such therapy seems to be based on the notion that confronting them with their contradictions will assist in weakening their sense of certainty about the delusional utterance. I consider whether more progress could be made via empathetic validation of the sense of certainty which is appropriate when associated with the person’s anomalous experience. (shrink)

The undead have been evoked in philosophical hypotheses regarding consciousness, but such discussions often come across as abstract academic exercises, inapplicable to personal experience. Movie zombies illuminate these somewhat opaque philosophical debates via storytelling devices – narrative, characterization, dialogue and so forth – which approach experience and consciousness in an instinctively accessible manner. This chapter focuses on a particular strand of the subgenre: transition narratives, in which human protagonists gradually turn into zombies. Transition stories typically centralize social relationships; affiliations and (...) interactions with other beings that give her (human) life meaning. These narratives routinely posit that consciousness and sociosexuality are intertwined aspects of experience that distinguish human from zombie, foregrounding a core romantic coupling and charting its decline as the protagonist transforms into a flesh-eating monster. These notions are explored via an indicative case study: Pretty Dead (2013). The film brings two views on the self – intuitive and empirical – into direct conflict, questioning their compatibility. The protagonist’s sociosexual decline is employed to illustrate that a) there is a troubling disjuncture between rationalist-theoretical conceptions of selfhood and selfhood as it is experienced in the real, social realm, and b) there is a natural bridge between personal, introspective self-knowledge and external social selfhood. By depicting a form of selfhood that defies rationalist logic (zom-being), transitional zombie films not only animate philosophical debates about consciousness, but also challenge their viewers to develop new conceptual (theoretical and imaginative) vocabularies via which to describe and engage with both selfhood and sociosexuality. (shrink)

Bringing together a genealogy of authors, concepts, and aesthetic case studies, this article aims to contribute to the discussion on ordinary aesthetics by focusing on the tensions that are intrinsic to walking as a fundamental embodied action in everyday urban life. These tensions concern the movement of walking itself and its relation to one’s surroundings, but it also concerns a certain complementarity between home (familiarity) and wandering. Experiencing space and thresholds that disrupt one’s relationship with home and the (...) everyday can be understood as part of a modern “anti-home” tendency that lies at the core of several artistic and aesthetic practices. On the other hand, the study of walking and its relationship with the ordinary has also been enhanced and complexified by the mediation of images and technologies of reproduction. Approaching the paradoxes and ambiguities of everydayness from the perspective of walking allows us to better understand the ordinary as an in-between concept composed of evidence and mystery, familiarity and strangeness. Walking itself, as an ordinary element of life, is an unstable stabilisation, an unconsciousness that may become awareness, an immersive action that knows interruptions, a way of repeating paths that can also lead to detours and discoveries. (shrink)

In the present essay, we are going to develop a concept of contemplative walking in light as an aesthetic attitude that can be linked to somaesthetics. My understanding of this type of aesthetic activity is underpinned by the broader framework developed in my PhD thesis, which is based on the poetics of light, to explain how the spectator experiences light installations. So, we are going to analyse what we understand by contemplative walking in light and how it is (...) made possible through a perception based on corporeality and movement. To do this, we are going to analyse two installations – Your Rainbow Panorama (2011) by Olafur Eliasson and YellowBluePink (2015) by Ann Veronica Janssens- to see how they instantiate this type of aesthetic attitude and how it can be related to somaesthetics. (shrink)

In everyday language, we readily attribute experiences to groups. For example, 1 might say, “Spain celebrated winning the European Cup” or “The uncovering of corruption caused the union to think long and hard about its internal structure.” In each case, the attribution makes sense. However, it is quite difficult to give a nonreductive account of precisely what these statements mean because in each case a mental state is ascribed to a group, and it is not obvious that groups can have (...) mental states. In this article, I do not offer an explicit theory of collective experience. Instead, I draw on phenomenological analyses and empirical data in order to provide general conditions that a more specific theory of collective experience must meet in order to be coherent. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore several versions of the bundle theory and the substratum theory and compare them, with the surprising result that it seems to be true that they are equivalent (in a sense of 'equivalent' to be specified). In order to see whether this is correct or not, I go through several steps : first, I examine different versions of the bundle theory with tropes and compare them to the substratum theory with tropes by going through various standard (...) objections and arguing for a tu quoque in all cases. Emphasizing the theoretical role of the substratum and of the relation of compresence, I defend the claim that these views are equivalent for all theoretical purposes. I then examine two different versions of the bundle theory with universals, and show that one of them is, here again, equivalent to the substratum theory with universals, by examining how both views face the famous objection from Identity of Indiscernibles in a completely parallel way. It is only the second, quite extreme and puzzling, version of the bundle theory with universals that is not be equivalent to any other view; and the diagnosis of why this is so will show just how unpalatable the view is. Similarly, only a not-so-palatable version of the substratum theory is genuinely different from the other views; and here again it's precisely what makes it different that makes it less appealing. (shrink)

An extended review essay on Andrew Feenberg's Heidegger and Marcuse that argues that the concept of negation in Hegel is distinct from that in Heidegger which makes such an attempted synthesis problematic.

How we have learnt to overcome our shortcomings, face our fears, and grow as competent researchers in the harsh academic world. Published in Behavioural and Social Sciences at Nature Research.

It is commonly believed that considering nature different from us, human beings (qua rational, cultural, religious and social actors), is detrimental to our engagement for the preservation of nature. An obvious example is animal rights, a deep concern for all living beings, including non-human living creatures, which is understandable only if we approach nature, without fearing it, as something which should remain outside of our true home. “Walking with the earth” aims at questioning any similar preconceptions in the wide (...) sense, including allegoric-poetic contributions. We invited 14 authors from 4 continents to express all sorts of ways of saying why caring is so important, why togetherness, being-with each others, as a spiritual but also embodied ethics is important in a divided world. (shrink)

This chapter sketches a literary history of writing the colonial interregnum through the comparison of a canonical Dublin text and its filmic adaptation with a canonical Johannesburg text and its filmic adaptation. Njabulo Ndebele’s short story ‘Fools’ (1983) repurposes formal elements from Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ (1914), transposing strategies for representing late colonial Dublin to a Johannesburg township during the height of apartheid in a context of extreme racial domination; beginning with close comparative readings of both stories, my chapter argues (...) that the context in which ‘Fools’ emerges determines the significance of its reappropriation of Joycean formal devices and simultaneously forces a re-reading of Joyce’s flirtation with bourgeois naturalism in ‘The Dead.’ Further, the respective publishing contexts of ‘Fools’ and ‘The Dead’ go on to determine their reception and recirculation, as demonstrated by the diverse histories of the American John Huston’s adaptation of ‘The Dead’ (1984), and Ramadan Suleman’s South African adaptation of ‘Fools’ (1997). In following this circumatlantic history of influence and adaptation from Joyce to Ndebele to Huston to Suleman, across hemispheres and media, I mean to articulate a relationship between modernist form and forms of modernity, particularly as those forms that appear and reappear in the global south over the course of the long twentieth century. Particular attention is paid here to the history of underdevelopment in the global south and how it impinges upon the production and circulation of literary adaptations. (shrink)

Political candidates often believe they must focus their campaign efforts on a small number of swing voters open for ideological change. Based on the wisdom of opinion polls, this might seem like a good idea. But do most voters really hold their political attitudes so firmly that they are unreceptive to persuasion? We tested this premise during the most recent general election in Sweden, in which a left- and a right-wing coalition were locked in a close race. We asked our (...) participants to state their voter intention, and presented them with a political survey of wedge issues between the two coalitions. Using a sleight-of-hand we then altered their replies to place them in the opposite political camp, and invited them to reason about their attitudes on the manipulated issues. Finally, we summarized their survey score, and asked for their voter intention again. The results showed that no more than 22% of the manipulated replies were detected, and that a full 92% of the participants accepted and endorsed our altered political survey score. Furthermore, the final voter intention question indicated that as many as 48% (69.2%) were willing to consider a left-right coalition shift. This can be contrasted with the established polls tracking the Swedish election, which registered maximally 10% voters open for a swing. Our results indicate that political attitudes and partisan divisions can be far more flexible than what is assumed by the polls, and that people can reason about the factual issues of the campaign with considerable openness to change. (shrink)

Through Alfred North Whitehead’s metaphysics, the Philosophy of Organism, it will be argued that psychedelic experience is a vertical, lateral and temporal integration of sentience.

The Dead Past Growing Block theory of time—DPGB-theory—is the metaphysical view that the past and the present tenselessly exist, whereas the future does not, and that only the present hosts mentality, whereas the past lacks it and is, in this sense, dead. One main reason in favour of this view is that it is immune to the now-now objection or epistemic objection (which aims at undermining the certainty, within an A-theoretical universe, of being currently experiencing the objective present (...) time). In this paper, I examine the additional arguments offered by P. Forrest and G. A. Forbes to back the DPGB-theory and show that they do not work. I also examine a proposal to rescue the DPGB-theory suggested by an anonymous reviewer for this journal and argue that it does not work either. Moreover, in line with D. Braddon-Mitchell and against Forbes, I argue that the DPGB-theory is indeed committed to the existence of zombies in the past. Being ad hoc and burdened by a very odd and counterintuitive ontological commitment, the DPGB-theory turns out to be rather unpalatable. (shrink)

Since Gintis is a senior economist and I have read some of his previous books with interest, I was expecting some more insights into behavior. Sadly he makes the dead hands of group selection and phenomenology into the centerpieces of his theories of behavior, and this largely invalidates the work. Worse, since he shows such bad judgement here, it calls into question all his previous work. The attempt to resurrect group selection by his friends at Harvard, Nowak and Wilson, (...) a few years ago was one of the major scandals in biology in the last decade, and I have recounted the sad story in my article ‘Altruism, Jesus and the End of the World—how the Templeton Foundation bought a Harvard Professorship and attacked Evolution, Rationality and Civilization -- A review of E.O. Wilson 'The Social Conquest of Earth' (2012) and Nowak and Highfield ‘SuperCooperators’ (2012).’ Unlike Nowak, Gintis does not seem to be motivated by religious fanaticism, but by the strong desire to generate an alternative to the grim realities of human nature, made easy by the (near universal) lack of understanding of basic human biology and blank slateism of behavioral scientists, other academics, and the general public. -/- Gintis rightly attacks (as he has many times before) economists, sociologists and other behavioral scientists for not having a coherent framework to describe behavior. Of course the framework needed to understand behavior is an evolutionary one. Unfortunately he fails to provide one himself (according to his many critics and I concur), and the attempt to graft the rotten corpse of group selection onto whatever economic and psychological theories he has generated in his decades of work, merely invalidates his entire project. Although Gintis makes a valiant effort to understand and explain the genetics, like Wilson and Nowak, he is far from an expert, and like them, the math just blinds him to the biological impossibilities and of course this is the norm in science. As Wittgenstein famously noted on the first page of Culture and Value “There is no religious denomination in which the misuse of metaphysical expressions has been responsible for so much sin as it has in mathematics.” -/- It has always been crystal clear that a gene that causes behavior which decreases its own frequency cannot persist, but this is the core of the notion of group selection. Furthermore, it has been well known and often demonstrated that group selection just reduces to inclusive fitness (kin selection), which, as Dawkins has noted, is just another name for evolution by natural selection. Like Wilson, Gintis has worked in this arena for about 50 years and still has not grasped it, but after the scandal broke, it took me only 3 days to find, read and understand the most relevant professional work, as detailed in my article. It is mind boggling to realize that Gintis and Wilson were unable to accomplish this in nearly half a century. -/- I discuss the errors of group selection and phenomenology that are the norm in academia as special cases of the near universal failure to understand human nature that are destroying America and the world. -/- Those who wish to read all my articles please consult the ebook here Philosophy, Human Nature and the Collapse of Civilization -- Articles and Reviews 2006-2016 by Michael Starks 662p (2016) -/- All of my papers and books have now been published in revised versions both in ebooks and in printed books. -/- Talking Monkeys: Philosophy, Psychology, Science, Religion and Politics on a Doomed Planet - Articles and Reviews 2006-2017 (2017) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071HVC7YP. -/- The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language in Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Searle--Articles and Reviews 2006-2016 (2017) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071P1RP1B. -/- Suicidal Utopian Delusions in the 21st century: Philosophy, Human Nature and the Collapse of Civilization - Articles and Reviews 2006-2017 (2017) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0711R5LGX -/- . (shrink)

Through an analysis of Kierkegaard’s and Dostoevsky’s approaches to the theme of the death of Christ – one of the major leitmotifs in the debate of their contemporaries conveyed through theological and philosophical considerations, but also expressed in novels and in art – I show how the thinkers comprehended and articulated in their works the religious challenges awaiting the modern man.

We provide here irrefutable facts that prove the falsehood of the claims published in [1] by Dehmer and Mowshowitz (DM) against our paper published in [2]. We first prove that Dehmer’s definition of node probability [3] is flawed. In addition, we show that it was not Dehmer in [3] who proposed this definition for the first time. We continue by proving how the use of Dehmer’s definition does not reveal all the physico-mathematical richness of the walk entropy of graphs. Finally, (...) we show a few facts about the failure of DM themselves to cite properly the relevant literature in their field. We also show here how the Editors of Complexity have failed to manage the publication of [1] in an appropriate way according to the accepted guidelines given in the Code of Conduct and Best Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors, published by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). (shrink)

Resumo: O projeto semântico de Davidson toma a forma de reducionismo que visa explicar as noções intencionais com base em noções puramente extensionais. O objetivo desse trabalho consiste na investigação do fracasso do projeto de Davidson como um argumento indireto contra sua suposição segundo a qual a chamada interpretação radical seria o fundamento do significado linguístico e do pensamento. Abstract: Davidson's semantic program is a form of semantic reductionism that aims to account for intensional notions on a purely extensional basis. (...) My aim in this paper is not to show that Davidsons fails in addressing the so-called extensionality problem. That is no novelty. Even Davidsonians recognize Davidson's failure. My main goal is to explore Davidson's failure as an indirect argument against his key assumption that the radical interpretation is the basis of sense and hence the possibility of thought. There is no priority of language over thought. This is a remnant of the so-called linguistic turn that Davidson inherited from the analytical tradition. The moral is the following: we must come back to Lockean common sense that to learn a natural language and to translate an alien tongue into our own is merely to learn a vehicle for communicating and expressing thoughts we have already had. (shrink)

While environmental claims are increasingly used by companies to appeal consumers, they also attract greater scrutiny from independent parties interested in consumer protection. Consumers are now able to compare corporate environmental claims against external, often disconfirming, information to form their brand attitudes and purchase intentions. What remains unclear is how the level of information specificity of both the environmental claims and external disconfirming information interact to influence consumer reactions. Two experiments address this gap in the CSR communication literature. When specific (...) claims are countered by specific external information, consumers report more negative brand attitudes and lower purchase intentions. The effect is serially mediated by skepticism toward the claims and lack of corporate credibility. We conclude by discussing strategies that firms can utilize to avoid information dilution and ensure that external disconfirming information percolates to consumers as specific. (shrink)

Building on theoretical insights and rich experimental data of our preprints, we present here new theoretical and experimental results in three interrelated approaches to the Collatz problem and its generalizations: algorithmic decidability, random behavior, and Diophantine representation of related discrete dynamical systems, and their cyclic and divergent properties.

Although much has been written on the dead-donor rule in the last twenty-five years, scant attention has been paid to how it should be formulated, what its rationale is, and why it was accepted. The DDR can be formulated in terms of either a Don’t Kill rule or a Death Requirement, the former being historically rooted in absolutist ethics and the latter in a prudential policy aimed at securing trust in the transplant enterprise. I contend that the moral core (...) of the rule is the Don’t Kill rule, not the Death Requirement. This, I show, is how the DDR was understood by the transplanters of the 1960s, who sought to conform their practices to their ethics—unlike today’s critics of the DDR, who rethink their ethics in a question-begging fashion to accommodate their practices. A better discussion of the ethics of killing is needed to move the debate forward. (shrink)

The paper is devoted to controversies in computer games studies connected with game classification and characteristics. Controversies on walking simulators are discussed in depth; also historical roots of these games and their ergodicity.

Digital records, from chat transcripts to social media posts, are being used to create chatbots that recreate the conversational style of deceased individuals. Some maintain that this is merely a new form of digital memorial, while others argue that they pose a variety of moral hazards. To resolve this, I turn to classical Chinese philosophy to make use of a debate over the ethics of funerals and mourning. This ancient argument includes much of interest for the contemporary issue at hand, (...) including the use of impersonators of the dead to help the bereaved to deal well with their grief. I connect this historical discussion with a modern trend in clinical psychology that reframes therapeutic interventions with bereaved individuals. The trend directs practitioners away from facilitating detachment and toward affirming continuing bonds. I conclude that these chatbots can offer an important source of support to mourners, but also discuss parameters and features of social context that will be important to avoid the moral hazards identified by sceptics. (shrink)

In the paper I argue that the "falling elevator" model once proposed by Dean Zimmerman to improve some drawbacks of Peter van Inwagen's account of how a belief in Christian resurrection could be made compatible with a materialist understanding of human persons is not satisfactory. Christian resurrection requires not only a survival, but also true death of a person, while the falling elevator can merely provide us with an account of how a material person is able miraculously to escape its (...) own death. (shrink)

Can the machines that play board games or recognize images only in the comfort of the virtual world be intelligent? To become reliable and convenient assistants to humans, machines need to learn how to act and communicate in the physical reality, just like people do. The authors propose two novel ways of designing and building Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). The first one seeks to unify all participants at any instance of the Turing test – the judge, the machine, the human (...) subject as well as the means of observation instead of building a separating wall. The second one aims to design AGI programs in such a way so that they can move in various environments. The authors of the article thoroughly discuss four areas of interaction for robots with AGI and introduce a new idea of techno-umwelt bridging artificial intelligence with biology in a new way. (shrink)

The popular belief that our mind either depends on or (in stronger terms) is identical with brain functions and processes, along with the belief that advances in technology in virtual reality and computability will continue, has contributed to the contention that one-day (perhaps this century) it may be possible to transfer one’s mind (or a simulated copy) into another body (physical or virtual). This is called mind-uploading or whole brain emulation. This paper serves as an introduction to the area and (...) some of the major issues that arise from the notion of mind-uploading. The topic of mind/brain uploading is, at present, both a philosophical and scientific minefield. This paper ties together several thoughts on the topic in the popular, philosophical, and scientific literature, and brings up some related issues that might be worth exploring. A challenge is made that uploading a mind from a brain may have intrinsic limitations on what can be uploaded: whatever is uploaded may not be recognizably human, or will be a very limited version. (shrink)

[This piece is written for those working in communication studies and in healthcare writ large, with the aim of bringing insights from disability studies and philosophy of disability to bear on discussion concerning disability in those fields.] Despite being assailed for decades by disability activists and disability studies scholars spanning the humanities and social sciences, the medical model of disability—which conceptualizes disability as an individual tragedy or misfortune due to genetic or environmental insult—still today structures many cases of patient–practitioner communication. (...) Synthesizing and recasting work done across critical disability studies and philosophy of disability, I argue that the reason the medical model of disability remains so gallingly entrenched is due to what I call the “ableist conflation” of disability with pain and suffering. In an effort to better equip healthcare practitioners and those invested in health communication to challenge disability stigma, discrimination, and oppression, I lay out the logic of the ableist conflation and interrogate examples of its use. I argue that insofar as the semiosis of pain and suffering is structured by the lived experience of unwelcome bodily transition or variation, experiences of pain inform the ableist conflation by preemptively tying such variability and its attendant disequilibrium to disability. I conclude by discussing how philosophy of disability and critical disability studies might better inform health communication concerning disability, offering a number of conceptual distinctions toward that end. (shrink)