Agency is a central concept in the organisational approach to organisms, which accounts for their internal purposiveness. Recent recognition of the active role played by organisms in evolution has led researchers to use this concept in an evolutionary approach. Agency is then considered in terms of ‘unintentional’ choice: agents choose from a given repertoire the behaviour most appropriate to their goal, with this choice influencing evolutionary pathways. This view, while allowing for the evolutionary role of the activity of organisms, presents (...) two pitfalls. First, it restricts organisms’ agency by confining their choice within the bounds of a behavioural repertoire, and assuming their goals are dictated by natural selection. Second, this view, while claiming to eliminate the idea of intentionality, retains its structure: organisms are portrayed as rational entities, persistently pursuing specific goals. This leads us back to a teleological thinking, whose use in evolutionary theory has already been heavily criticised. This paper proposes a conception of biological agency which does not assume goal-directedness but considers agency as inventiveness. An organism will be said to be an agent if it is the triggering cause of behaviours falling outside the known repertoire and whose form can only be explained by the unique relationship between the organism and the environment. If these behaviours have implications in evolution, the agent will be considered an evolutionary agent. The merit of this approach is further validated by evidencing the significant role behavioural innovations play in evolution. Finally, the last section delves into the process of invention by examining animal play. (shrink)

I offer new arguments for an unorthodox reading of J. L. Mackie’s Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, one on which Mackie does not think all substantive moral claims are false, but allows that a proper subset of them are true. Further, those that are true should be understood in terms of a “hybrid theory”. The proposed reading is one on which Mackie is a conceptual pruner, arguing that we should prune away error-ridden moral claims but hold onto those already free (...) of error. This reading is very different from the standard ones found in the literature. I build on recent work by Moberger and argue that this reading is better corroborated by close attention to the way in which Mackie argues at length that terms like “good” and “ought” are systematically context-sensitive, as well as by considerable additional textual evidence. This reading, however, faces an important challenge—to explain in what sense, if any, morality retains its “normativity” on the proposed reading. I argue that this challenge can be met, at least given some of Mackie’s further assumptions about the nature of rationality. (shrink)

This paper is a response to Val Plumwoods call for writers to engage in ‘the struggle to think differently’. Specifically, she calls writers to engage in the task of opening up an experience of nature as powerful and as possessing agency. I argue that a critical component of opening up who or what can be understood as possessing agency involves challenging the conception of time as linear, externalised and absolute, particularly in as much as it has guided Western conceptions of (...) process, change and invention. I explore this through anthropologist Carol Greenhouse's claim that social conceptions of time can be read as theories of agency. Thus, in seeking to respond to Plumwood’s call to think differently, the question becomes: what kind of writing would enable a fundamental re-thinking of agency without, however, ignoring the way Western notions of agency have been shaped by linear accounts of time? I look to Jacques Derrida's work as one example. I first locate the possibility of re-writing time and agency in the experiential aspects of his writing, which I argue interrupt both the reader’s sense of agency and linear models of reading. But further, I connect Derrida’s work directly with Plumwood’s by examining how his deconstruction of the Western concept of invention may enable another account of creative change that could reshape what counts as ‘agency’ within the Anthropocene. (shrink)

To Stiegler’s notion of pansable (curable), one might also need to add that penser (to think) relates to the Latin penso, the frequentative of pendo, to hang, suspend. The pansable (that which can be healed) is as much the pensable (that which can be thought) and the suspensible (that which can be hung). Stiegler’s final act revealed that which was always already there: an unhealed pharmacological shadow that preceded him. While he entered philosophy with the argument of technics as the (...) impensé (unthought) of continental philosophy, he concluded in a final acting out, an impansable (uncurable) that ended his life. He, who believed that life is about cultivating rêveries and protentions capable of promise. Protention means both a capacity to invent and an ability to project oneself into the future through the practice of imagination and desire. He, who pondered about the retentions we have and the various forms of memory they take, and how to make them become the true modes of being-in-the-world. I know now that his fatal transgression is as much an accident as a departure, an emotional ceasefire and a bifurcative ending. Somehow, he found a way to remain faithful to the originary beginning of his thinking in act. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to theorize insurgent political action on the basis of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason. It reconstructs a Sartrean model of insurgency that prioritizes an insurgent group’s capacity for situated inventions. It argues that, similar to Fanon, Sartre theorized that groups that struggle against oppression and exploitation constantly invent novel conditions that steer society in unforeseeable directions. However, these inventions of insurgent action are never absolutely contingent but always take place in concrete situations which (...) never cease to condition them. This paper analyses two concrete factors which condition the inventions of insurgent action: the seriality from which the group arises and to which it always threatens to return, and the actions of hostile groups. Taken together, this paper claims that Sartre provides a coherent and innovative account of insurgent political action. (shrink)

The first collection of Leibniz's key writings on the binary system, newly translated, with many previously unpublished in any language. -/- The polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) is known for his independent invention of the calculus in 1675. Another major—although less studied—mathematical contribution by Leibniz is his invention of binary arithmetic, the representational basis for today's digital computing. This book offers the first collection of Leibniz's most important writings on the binary system, all newly translated by the authors with many (...) previously unpublished in any language. Taken together, these thirty-two texts tell the story of binary as Leibniz conceived it, from his first youthful writings on the subject to the mature development and publication of the binary system. -/- As befits a scholarly edition, Strickland and Lewis have not only returned to Leibniz's original manuscripts in preparing their translations, but also provided full critical apparatus. In addition to extensive annotations, each text is accompanied by a detailed introductory “headnote” that explains the context and content. Additional mathematical commentaries offer readers deep dives into Leibniz's mathematical thinking. The texts are prefaced by a lengthy and detailed introductory essay, in which Strickland and Lewis trace Leibniz's development of binary, place it in its historical context, and chart its posthumous influence, most notably on shaping our own computer age. (shrink)

Inventing novel knowledge to solve problems is a crucial, creative, mechanism employed by humans, to extend their range of action. In this paper, we present TCL (typicality-based compositional logic): a probabilistic, non monotonic extension of standard Description Logics of typicality, and will show how this framework is able to endow artificial systems of a human-like, commonsense based, concept composition procedure that allows its employment in a number of applications (ranging from computational creativity to goal-based reasoning to recommender systems and affective (...) computing). -/- The framework relies on 3 main ingredients: a non monotonic extension of standard Description Logics (allowing to reason on exceptions to inheritance in standard knowledge bases) a probabilistic extension coming from the field of logic programming (the DISPONTE semantics) a cognitive heuristics known ad HEAD-Modifier determining preference rules for the inheritance mechanisms of the novel concepts to be generated via commonsense rules. -/- We report the obtained results and the lessons learned of this research path in the context of model-based AI applications. -/- . (shrink)

Traditionally, kairos has been seen as a “timely” concept, and so invention is said to emerge fromthe timeliness of a cultural and historical situation. But what if invention was thought of as thepotential to shift historical courses through the injection of something new or alien into a situation?This essay argues that kairos has not been able to free itself from its historical constraints becauseit has been bound to a human sense of temporality. By evolving along patterns different from print,the apparatus (...) of the cinema developed in a way where it was not bound to illustrating movement ortimeas it occurs in human-centered experience. Following the work of Gilles Deleuze on cinema,this article argues that the outside of a human sense of time is an untapped source of invention,already present yet dormant within kairos. (shrink)

Much ink has been spilled to explain why Darwin avoided publishing his views for many years. Although a general consensus was never achieved on any one reason, not much doubt has been raised as to the existence of such a delay. In this article I argue that there was no delay. Darwin published his views as soon as he developed a defensible theory. I argue that the appearance of a delay emerged as a consequence of reading Darwin out of context. (...) Once we distinguish what would constitute a satisfactory account of transmutation for Darwin from what it would be for us, there will be no plausible case to argue that Darwin delayed publication. (shrink)

This provocative study presents philological, philosophical, and historical arguments that with the Greek term καθῆκον and its Latin equivalent officium the ancient Stoics invented a new concept that anticipated the modern notion of moral duty, for example, Pflicht in Kant. Scholars began to shift from translating kathēkon as "duty" to translating it as "appropriate or fitting action" in the late 1800s, according to Visnjic. The usage of the verb kathēkein in Greek literature prior to the Stoics suggests to him that (...) it described something prescribed by law, tradition, or decree. Visnjic argues that the Stoics did not conceive of kathekonta as rules of conduct but as prescriptions specific to situations. They held that there are some universal duties, like believing in the gods, believing that the gods are benevolent guardians of humanity, and being a good person, but that such duties offer no concrete, practical guidance for determining how to act. The most innovative contribution of this work is the collection and collation of pieces of practical advice scattered throughout extant sources to devise a four-stage process of deliberation. The two chapters on Kant seem comparatively cursory. On the whole, this book, at times daringly inventive, is occasionally unapologetically speculative. (shrink)

From the early eighteenth century onward, primacy for the invention of binary numeration and arithmetic was almost universally credited to the German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716). Then, in 1922, Frank Vigor Morley (1899–1980) noted that an unpublished manuscript of the English mathematician, astronomer, and alchemist Thomas Harriot (1560–1621) contained the numbers 1 to 8 in binary. Morley’s only comment was that this foray into binary was “certainly prior to the usual dates given for binary numeration”. Almost thirty years later, (...) John William Shirley (1908–1988) published reproductions of two of Harriot’s undated manuscript pages, which, he claimed, showed that Harriot had invented binary numeration “nearly a century before Leibniz’s time”. But while Shirley correctly asserted that Harriot had invented binary numeration, he made no attempt to explain how or when Harriot had done so. Curiously, few since Shirley’s time have attempted to answer these questions, despite their obvious importance. After all, Harriot was, as far as we know, the first to invent binary. Accordingly, answering the how and when questions about Harriot’s invention of binary is the aim of this short paper. (shrink)

Cet essai a été présenté à l’atelier sur La démocratie de l’espace et l’espace de la démocratie, qui a eu lieu à Newcastle, en Angleterre, le 11 janvier 2008. Une version antérieure a été présentée à l’Université de Tokyo le 13 novembre 2007. Il sera publié en néerlandais, traduit par Freek Jansens, sous le titre “het plannen van ruimtes van (on)mogelijkheid” dans une collection éditée par Maarten Hajer et Jantine Grijzen sur les questions de politique contemporaine. Il a été traduit (...) de l’anglais par Martin Blanchard et révisé par Daniel Weinstock. (shrink)

A background assumption of this paper is that the repertoire of inference schemes available to humanity is not fixed, but subject to change as new schemes are invented or refined and as old ones are obsolesced or abandoned. This is particularly visible in areas like health and environmental sciences, where enormous societal investment has been made in finding ways to reach more dependable conclusions. Computational modeling of argumentation, at least for the discourse in expert fields, will require the possibility of (...) modeling change in a stock of schemes that may be applied to generate conclusions from data. We examine Randomized Clinical Trial, an inference scheme established within medical science in the mid-20th Century, and show that its successful defense by means of practical reasoning allowed for its black-boxing as an inference scheme that generates (and warrants belief in) conclusions about the effects of medical treatments. Modeling the use of a scheme is well-understood; here we focus on modeling how the scheme comes to be established so that it is available for use. (shrink)

Ethical, Legal and Social Aspects (ELSA) originated in the 4thEuropean Research Framework Programme (1994) andresponsible research and innovation (RRI) from the EC researchagenda in 2010. ELSA has received renewed attention inEuropean funding schemes and research. This raises the questionof how these two approaches to social responsibility relate toone another and if there is the possibility to align. There is aneed to evaluate the relationship/overlap between ELSA and RRIbecause there is a possibility that new ELSA research will reinventthe wheel if it (...) does not engage with the body of literaturealready present in RRI research. This provides unneeded extrabureaucracy, reformulations of research agendas, extrainvestment, and an overabundance of frameworks to implement,and ELSA research does not take advantage of the body ofresearch developed in RRI. This paper evaluates how ELSA andRRI diverge, are complementary, and can be aligned. (shrink)

Dynamic conceptual reframing represents a crucial mechanism employed by humans, and partially by other animal species, to generate novel knowledge used to solve complex goals. In this talk, I will present a reasoning framework for knowledge invention and creative problem solving exploiting TCL: a non-monotonic extension of a Description Logic (DL) of typicality able to combine prototypical (commonsense) descriptions of concepts in a human-like fashion [1]. The proposed approach has been tested both in the task of goal-driven concept invention [2,3] (...) and has additionally applied within the context of serendipity-based recommendation systems [4]. I will present the obtained results, the lessons learned, and the road ahead of this research path. -/- . (shrink)

In Book 3 of Herodotus’Histories, seven Persian noblemen discuss which form of government would best fit the empire. If we accept its dramatic date, 522 BCE, this scene offers the first example of a comparative definition of monarchy, oligarchy and democracy. It offers, even more strikingly, the very first description of the government of the many — a novel political order that will eventually be called a democracy. The power of the people, this quintessentially Hellenic thing, was then a Persian (...) invention, an idea that occurred originally not to the masses of a polis, not to an Athenian demagogue, but to a relative of the Great King. In the course of the narrative, democracy will prove to be a unique form of government: the winning one. The Histories take up the challenge of recounting, and accounting for, a most improbable defeat, and for an even less foreseeable victory. The text does so not by preaching a morality of self-knowledge and self-control, but by exposing the realistic effects of different kinds of rule. Against the odds, democracy enhances and strengthens a small polis, Athens, making it grand and successful. Notwithstanding its immeasurable capabilities, the Persian monarchy fails. The turning point is the battle of Salamis, a prowess of the dêmos. A theatrical pause, in the narration of how the Great Kings came to prepare their campaigns against Greece, the debate offers a counterfactual explanation to historical events, in terms of political theory. This is, I will argue, the effect of the scene on the Histories. (shrink)

Inventing novel knowledge to solve problems is a crucial, creative, mechanism employed by humans, to extend their range of action. In this talk, I will show how commonsense reasoning plays a crucial role in this respect. In particular, I will present a cognitively inspired reasoning framework for knowledge invention and creative problem solving exploiting TCL: a non-monotonic extension of a Description Logic (DL) of typicality able to combine prototypical (commonsense) descriptions of concepts in a human-like fashion. The proposed approach has (...) been tested both in the task of goal-driven concept invention and has additionally applied within the context of serendipity-based recommendation systems. I will present the obtained results, the lessons learned, and the road ahead of this research path. (shrink)

I present a developmental account of Aristotle’s concept of hê hylê (usually translated “the matter”), focused the earliest developments. I begin by analyzing fragments of some lost early works and a chapter of the Organon, texts which indicate that early in his career Aristotle had not yet begun to use he hylê in a technical sense. Next, I examine Physics II 3, a chapter in which Aristotle conceives of he hylê not as a kind of cause in its own right, (...) but merely as an example of the so-called “out of which” cause : the material is the cause out of which an artifact is made. Next, I examine Physics II 7, a chapter in which Aristotle names "the material" as one of the four kinds of cause in its own right. But Aristotle’s model of "the material" remains the material out of which an artifact is made. (shrink)

Summary We offer a novel historical-philosophical framework for discussing experimental practice which we call ‘Generating Experimental Knowledge’. It combines three different perspectives: experimental systems, concept formation, and the pivotal role of error. We then present an historical account of the invention of the Scanning Tunnelling Microscope (STM), or Raster-Tunnelmikroskop, and interpret it within the proposed framework. We show that at the outset of the STM project, Binnig and Rohrer—the inventors of the machine—filed two patent disclosures; the first is dated 22 (...) December 1978 (Switzerland), and the second, two years later, 12 September 1980 (US). By studying closely these patent disclosures, the attempts to realize them, and the subsequent development of the machine, we present, within the framework of generating experimental knowledge, a new account of the invention of the STM. While the realization of the STM was still a long way off, the patent disclosures served as blueprints, marking the changes that had to be introduced on the way from the initial idea to its realization. (shrink)

An important artistic topic of Italian Renaissance painting was the rendering of the human figure. As leading actors in a painted narrative, figures had to convince beholders of the reality of the matter depicted with appropriated attitudes and gestures. This article is about two ways of drawing or rather constructing the human figure artists developed to achieve this goal. The first was only an adaptation to an old method: because of the rather simple and coarse elements used, constructions often resulted (...) in faulty pictures and were for that matter often criticized. As this article will show, the second method involved a new and very successful drawing skill, which not just required a different kind of knowledge of visual forms but of procedures of moving the hand, too. (shrink)

This book on the topic of ethics and poetry consists of contributions from different continents on the subject of applied ethics related to poetry. It should gather a favourable reception from philosophers, ethicists, theologians and anthropologists from Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America and allows for a comparison of the healing power of words from various religious, spiritual and philosophical traditions. The first part of this book presents original poems that express ethical emotions and aphorism related to a philosophical questioning (...) of the grounding of our values for life. The poems are written by twelve authors coming from four continents, for whom poetic emotions are sources of artistic inspiration and that can be used for conflict resolution. In the second part, which features short essays, nine authors tackle how poems, symbolic representations, metaphorical narratives and lies impact the space of possibilities, in which we are moved to action, knowledge formation, and how we imagine the world together. (shrink)

Akin to the mathematical recreations, John Wilkins' Mathematicall Magick (1648) elaborates the pleasant, useful and wondrous part of practical mathematics, dealing in particular with its material culture of machines and instruments. We contextualize the Mathematicall Magick by studying its institutional setting and its place within changing conceptions of art, nature, religion and mathematics. We devote special attention to the way Wilkins inscribes mechanical innovations within a discourse of wonder. Instead of treating ‘wonder’ as a monolithic category, we present a typology, (...) showing that wonders were not only recreative, but were meant to inspire Wilkins' readers to new mathematical inventions. (shrink)

Is it possible that the most famous critic of quantum mechanics actually invented most of its fundamentally important concepts? -/- In his 1905 Brownian motion paper, Einstein quantized matter, proving the existence of atoms. His light quantum hypothesis showed that energy itself comes in particles (photons). He showed energy and matter are interchangeable, E = mc2. In 1905 Einstein was first to see nonlocality and instantaneous action-at-a-distance. In 1907 he saw quantum “jumps” between energy levels in matter, six years before (...) Bohr postulated them in his atomic model. Einstein saw wave-particle duality and the “collapse” of the wave in 1909. And in 1916 his transition probabilities for emission and absorption processes introduced ontological chance when matter and radiation interact, making quantum mechanics statistical. He discovered the indistinguishability and odd quantum statistics of elementary particles in 1925 and in 1935 speculated about the nonseparability of interacting identical particles. -/- It took physicists over twenty years to accept Einstein’s light-quantum. He explained the relation of particles to waves fifteen years before Heisenberg matrices and Schrödinger wave functions. He saw indeterminism ten years before the uncertainty principle. And he saw nonlocality as early as 1905, presenting it formally in 1927, but was ignored. In the 1935 Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paper, he explored nonseparability, which was dubbed “entanglement” by Schrödinger. The EPR paper has gone from being irrelevant to Einstein’s most cited work and the basis for today’s “second revolution in quantum mechanics.” -/- In a radical revision of the history of quantum physics, Bob Doyle develops Einstein’s idea of objective reality to resolve several of today’s most puzzling quantum mysteries, including the two-slit experiment, quantum entanglement, and microscopic irreversibility. (shrink)

Abstract: The present study analyzes the anthropological theory of Étinne Bimbenet. It focuses on his proposal for an “expanded anthropocentrism” that admits the anthropological difference between man and animal. His central thesis affirms that realism is a human invention and also constitutes its basic attitude before reality. El presente estudio analiza la teoría antropológica de Étinne Bimbenet. Se centra en su propuesta de un “antropo- centrismo ampliando” que admite la diferencia antropológica entre el hombre y el animal. Su tesis central (...) afirma que el rea- lismo es una invención humana y constituye también su actitud básica ante la realidad. Palabras clave: Antropocentrismo ampliado, nuevo realismo, fenomenología, Étienne Bimbenet. (shrink)

As known from the academic literature on Hinduism, the foreign, Persian word, “Hindu” (meaning “Indian”), was used by the British to name everything indigenously South Asian, which was not Islam, as a religion. If we adopt explication as our research methodology, which consists in the application of the criterion of logical validity to organize various propositions of perspectives we encounter in research in terms of a disagreement, we discover: (a) what the British identified as “Hinduism” was not characterizable by a (...) shared set of beliefs or shared outlook, but a disagreement or debate about basic topics of philosophy with a discourse on tenets of moral philosophy anchoring the debate; and (b), the Western tradition’s historical commitment to language as the vehicle of thought not only leads to the conflation of propositions with beliefs, but to interpreting (explaining by way of belief) on the basis of the Eurocentric tradition rooted exclusively in ancient Greek philosophy. Interpretation on the basis of the Western tradition leads to the Western tradition vindicating itself as the non-traditional, non-religious, rational platform—the secular—for explaining everything—the residua are what get called religions on a global scale. This serves the political function of insulating Western colonialism from indigenous moral and political criticism. Given that Western colonialism is the pivotal event, before which South Asians just had philosophy, and after which they had religion (the explanatory residua of Eurocentric interpretation), we can ask about Hindu religious belief. This only pertains to the period after colonialism, when Hindus adopted a Westcentric frame for understanding their tradition as religious because of colonization. Prior to this, the tradition the British identified as “Hindu” had a wide variety of philosophical approaches to justification, which often criticized propositional attitudes, like belief, as irrational. (shrink)

It was Lord Northbourne who gifted to the world the term ‘organic farming’. His 1940 book Look to the Land is a manifesto of organic agriculture. In it he mooted a contest of “organic versus chemical farming” which he foresaw as a clash of world views that may last for generations. Northbourne’s ideas were foundational in launching the worldwide organics movement, and the book was a turning point in his own life. This biography relies on primary sources to draw a (...) picture of Lord Northbourne. He was a very shy man, a talented artist, a capable linguist, a keen sportsman and an Olympic silver medallist, a graduate and lecturer in agriculture of the University of Oxford, a lifelong farmer, he was profoundly spiritual, an accomplished author, and as a wordsmith he could be a compelling advocate for his cause as Look to the Land shows. His interest in biodynamics led him to visit Switzerland in 1939 to invite the leading advocate of the times, Dr Ehrenfried Pfeiffer, to present the first conference on biodynamic farming in Britain, and it was in the following year that Look to the Land appeared. Rather than the mechanics or the practices of organics, Northbourne’s book presents the philosophy, the rationale, and the imperative of organic farming. The ideas of his organics manifesto took on a life of their own and were quickly spread globally, with early uptakes in the USA and Australia. Meanwhile, while maintaining lifelong interests and commitments to agriculture and education, Northbourne became progressively more engaged with spiritual matters, and his subsequent writings reflect his growing interest in metaphysics. He translated books by leading perennialist authors Frithjof Schuon, René Guénon, and Titus Burckhardt. Northbourne led a full life, but it is Look to the Land that is his enduring ideological legacy. This biography examines: firstly, the book, its ideas, history, uptake and impact; secondly, Northbourne’s life before Look to the Land; and thirdly, his life after Look to the Land. (shrink)

A summary is provided of Ruyer's important contribution, also a reversal from some conclusions held in his secondary doctoral dissertation, about the limits inherent in technological progress, and an attempt is made to show the coherence of this position to Ruyer's metaphysics. Simondon's response is also presented, and subsequently analyzed especially as it culminates in a concept of concretizations. As Simondon indicated, and with a displacement in Ruyer's limitating framework on unconditional growth, we end up searching for what represents the (...) category of the ultimate for those two philosophers of the cyberworld. (shrink)

It is not uncommon in time travel stories to find that the mechanism by which the time travel is achieved is not invented. A time traveller could journey to his/her own past and give the designs of the time travel machine to his/her earlier self as s/he was given the designs as a younger person. These designs never get thought up by anyone. Such a situation would conflict with the usual conception of the acquisition of knowledge. This situation is called (...) the Temporal Epistemic Anomaly and would arise if knowledge is gained at a time prior to the information in question being transmitted but is not discovered or invented at any time. This article examines the implications of information propagating around a causal chain that is closed in time (which is required to create the Anomaly) and whether this information need have a specific origin point. (shrink)

Whether the hands-on experience of creating inventions can promote Students’ interest in pursuing a science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) career has not been extensively studied. In a quantitative study, we drew on the attitude-behavior-outcome framework to explore the correlates between hands-on making attitude, epistemic curiosities, and career interest. This study targeted students who joined the selection competition for participating in the International Exhibition of Young Inventors (IEYI) in Taiwan. The objective of the invention exhibition is to encourage young students (...) to make innovative projects by applying STEM knowledge and collaborative design. We collected 220 valid data from participants in the 2021 Taiwan IEYI selection competition and conducted a confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling to test the hypotheses. Results indicated that: (1) hands-on making attitude was positively related to two types of epistemic curiosity; (2) interest-type epistemic curiosity (IEC) and deprivation-type epistemic curiosity (DEC) were positively associated with STEM career interest; additionally, DEC had a higher coefficient on STEM career interest than IEC; (3) both types of EC had a mediating role between hands-on making attitude and STEM career interest. It is expected that encouraging students to participate in invention exhibition competitions can raise both types of EC and increase their interest in pursuing STEM careers. (shrink)

The objective of this chapter is to clarify the social theory underlying in Foucault’s genealogy of power/knowledge thanks to a comparison with Tarde’s microsociology. Nietzsche is often identified as the direct (and unique) predecessor of this genealogy, and the habitual criticisms are worried about the intricate relations between Foucault and Marx. These perspectives omit to point to another – and more direct – antecedent of Foucault`s microphysics: the microsociology of Gabriel Tarde. Bio-power technologies must be read as Tardian inventions that, (...) by propagation, have reconfigured pre-existing social spaces, building modern societies. We will see how the Tardean source in Foucault’s genealogy sheds new clarity about the micro-socio-logic involved in it, enabling us to identify some of its aporiae and to imagine some solutions in this respect as well. (shrink)

Software patents are commonly criticised for being fuzzy, context-sensitive, and often granted for trivial inventions. More often than not, these shortcomings are said to be caused by the abstract nature of software - with little further analysis offered. Drawing on Plato’s Parmenides, this paper will argue (1) that the reason why software patents seem to be elusive is that patent law suggests to think about algorithms as paradigmatic examples and (2) that Plato’s distinction between two modes of predication and the (...) role of competence in his account of knowledge are helpful not only for conceptualising knowledge of algorithms, but also for understanding the limits of software patent regimes. (shrink)

Invention of artificial general intelligence is predicted to cause a shift in the trajectory of human civilization. In order to reap the benefits and avoid pitfalls of such powerful technology it is important to be able to control it. However, possibility of controlling artificial general intelligence and its more advanced version, superintelligence, has not been formally established. In this paper, we present arguments as well as supporting evidence from multiple domains indicating that advanced AI can’t be fully controlled. Consequences of (...) uncontrollability of AI are discussed with respect to future of humanity and research on AI, and AI safety and security. This paper can serve as a comprehensive reference for the topic of uncontrollability. (shrink)

Well prior to the invention of the term ‘biology’ in the early 1800s by Lamarck and Treviranus, and also prior to the appearance of terms such as ‘organism’ under the pen of Leibniz in the early 1700s, the question of ‘Life’, that is, the status of living organisms within the broader physico-mechanical universe, agitated different corners of the European intellectual scene. From modern Epicureanism to medical Newtonianism, from Stahlian animism to the discourse on the ‘animal economy’ in vitalist medicine, models (...) of living being were constructed in opposition to ‘merely anatomical’, structural, mechanical models. It is therefore curious to turn to the ‘passion play’ of the Scientific Revolution – whether in its early, canonical definitions or its more recent, hybridized, reconstructed and expanded versions: from Koyré to Biagioli, from Merton to Shapin – and find there a conspicuous absence of worry over what status to grant living beings in a newly physicalized universe. Neither Harvey, nor Boyle, nor Locke (to name some likely candidates, the latter having studied with Willis and collaborated with Sydenham) ever ask what makes organisms unique, or conversely, what does not. In this paper I seek to establish how ‘Life’ became a source of contention in early modern thought, and how the Scientific Revolution missed the controversy. (shrink)

Legal norms are an invention. This paper advances a proposal about what kind of invention they are. The proposal is that legal norms derive from rules which specify role functions in a legal system. Legal rules attach to agents in virtue of their status within the system in which the rules operate. The point of legal rules or a legal system is to solve to large scale coordination problems, specifically the problem of organizing social and economic life among a group (...) of people and their successors, though not every legal rule pertains to a coordination problem. The framework for thinking about legal norms that I describe is a framework for thinking about institutions and policies more generally. The idea is to show that legal norms are a species of institutional norm. There are two central ideas. The first is the idea of a role in an institution. The second is the idea of proxy agency. Proxy agency involves one agent or group acting under the authorization of another agent or group (perhaps subsuming it) in a way that makes the actions of the proxy count as actions (under a description) of the individual or group for which it is a proxy. We get the characteristic structure of a legal system by conceiving of an institutional group, itself conceived of as a set of interlocking roles realized in individuals, as having one or more roles for proxy agents who are authorized by the group to make policy for the group. The set of rules governing the basic constitution of the group and spelling out the powers of the policy proxies determine fundamental norms for the group with specific role responsibilities attaching to particular positions in institutional arrangements. The policies determine further norms whose force derives from the fundamental norms. We must then say some further things to distinguish institutions and policies which we wish to designate as legal. (shrink)

Are the long, wildly inventive etymologies in Plato’s Cratylus just some kind of joke, or does Plato himself accept them? This standard question misses the most important feature of the etymologies: they are a competitive performance, an agôn by Socrates in which he shows that he can play the game of etymologists like Cratylus better than they can themselves. Such show-off performances are a recurrent feature of Platonic dialogue: they include Socrates’ speeches on eros in the Phaedrus, his rhetorical discourse (...) in the Menexenus, and his literary interpretation in the Protagoras. The paper compares these cases to work out the ground rules, purposes and implications of the Platonic agôn, and the Cratylus etymologies in particular. (shrink)

In her inventive and tightly argued book Defensive Killing, Helen Frowe defends the view that bystanders—those who do not pose threats to others—cannot be liable to being harmed in self-defence or in defence of others. On her account, harming bystanders always infringes their rights against being harmed, since they have not acted in any way to forfeit them. According to Frowe, harming bystanders can be justified only when it constitutes a lesser evil. In this brief essay, I make the case (...) that some bystanders can indeed be liable to harm. They can be liable, I will argue, because they can be morally responsible for threats of harm, and in becoming responsible they can forfeit their rights. While bystanders cannot be responsible for initiating threats, they can become responsible for the persistence of threats, and for culpably failing to prevent them from being initiated in the first place. (shrink)

I present three invented languages, in order to support a claim that vagueness and demonstrativity are related. One of them handles vagueness like English handles demonstratives, the second handles demonstratives like English handles vagueness, and the third combines the resources of the first two. The argument depends on the claim that all three can be learned and used by anyone who can speak English.

Poetry and Ethics: Inventing Possibilities in Which We Are Moved to Action and How We Live Together, Obiora Ike / Andrea Grieder / Ignace Haaz (Eds.), Global Series No. 16, Geneva: Globethics Publications, 2018, pp. 247-262.

Mikhail Bakhtin aimed to invent a phenomenology of the self-experience and of the experience of the other in his early work. In order to realize such a phenomenology he combined different approaches he called idealism and materialism / naturalism. The first one he linked to Edmund Husserl, but did hardly name him directly concerning his phenomenology. Does this intersubjective phenomenology give a hint that Bakhtin used Husserlian ideas more than considered yet? Or did they both invent similar ideas independently from (...) each other? Both thinkers dealt with the issue of intersubjectivity. Husserl judged statements on other psycho-physical realities as metaphysics in the Logical Investigations II, but in his Ideas I he described the others as enhancing one’s experience through their “experiential surpluses”. In the same way Bakhtin described the unique perspective of the other as a mandatory and valuable part of the world of the act in his Philosophy of the Act and his investigations on Author and Hero. In order to understand the influence of Husserl’s phenomenology for Bakhtin’s early philosophy we need to take a look closer at those contentual parallels as well as some paraphrases yet unnoticed. This gives hint for the question if for Bakhtin Husserl was more than just a name dropped. In this article I reconstructed the relations between both thinkers and answered the question if the dating of Bakhtin’s early work until 1928 has to be re-considered. (shrink)