Is a devoted Nazi or a zombie bureaucrat a greater moral and political problem? Because the dangers of immoral fanaticism are so clear, the dangers of mindless bureaucracy are easy to overlook. Yet zombie bureaucrats have contributed substantially to the greatest catastrophes of the 20th century, doing so seemingly oblivious to the monstrous qualities of their actions. Hannah Arendt’s work on thoughtlessness raises a dilemma: if Eichmann, the architect of the Nazi Final Solution, truly was a thoughtless ‘cog’, lacking (...) in intentionality, can one really hold him morally accountable for the evil qualities of his acts? This article relates Arendt’s ‘thought’ and Strawson’s and Bilgrami’s discussion of ‘reactive attitudes’ and Sartre’s concept of ‘bad faith’. To find a basis for moral accountable in seemingly thoughtless cases like Eichmann’s. Although Arendt’s Eichmann is an extreme example, finding a basis to hold him accountable is valuable because ‘little Eichmanns’ will persist as long as impersonal forces structure and depress reactive attitudes. (shrink)

This article explores problems of thoughtlessness through a critical engagement with Hannah Arendt. Thoughtlessness was more complicated for Arendt than her interpreters have acknowledged. She described it as the failure of conscience; as ideology; and as an everyday condition that sustains ideology. While the first has been widely acknowledged, the latter two have been virtually ignored. Arendt identifies the cultivation of everyday thoughtfulness as a remedy for failures of conscience, but this provides no defence against ideological and everyday (...) thoughtlessness, which can actually reinforce failures of conscience. To address them Arendt turns to storytelling. But narratives can combat and reinforce thoughtlessness. To confront thoughtlessness we need to attend to narrative production and reception. Drawing on Paul Ricoeur I call for deeper engagement between political theorists, literary critics and philosophers of literature on the roles of narrative in promoting or undermining thinking in contemporary politics. (shrink)

I examine the Kierkegaardian intellectual vice of thoughtlessness (Tankeløshed) and its opposite, the Aristotelian intellectual virtue of phronēsis, or practical wisdom. I argue that thoughtlessness is primarily an intellectual problem rather than a moral one. My emphasis on intellectual virtue in Kierkegaard contrasts with more typical characterizations of passion, will, and action as Kierkegaard’s main concerns and reliance on intellect as an obstacle to be overcome. Drawing on Aristotle’s account of phronēsis as the intellectual virtue related to action, (...) I show that Kierkegaard offers a rich account of practical wisdom and a critique of its opposite, thoughtlessness. I conclude that, since there are different kinds of wisdom, Kierkegaard can say that faith is not a form of knowledge in the sense of epistēmē, or scientific knowledge, while preserving a central role for intellect in the task and life of faith. (shrink)

Political decay in Islamic societies has for the most part been the subject of structural analyses while philosophical studies have been rare, often speculative and deterministic. Thoughtlessness and Religious Decadence in Iran: A Sojourn in Comparative Political Theory explores from a theoretical perspective the problem of democracy deficit--or, political decadence--, in contemporary Iran and, by implication, in present-day Middle Eastern societies. This decadence, the book argues, is in part a religion-based decadence, and deliverance from it requires collective thoughtfulness about (...) religion. Alireza Shomali conceptualizes the Iranian Reality in terms of a lack of not only good life but also thinking of good living. This thoughtlessness means dissolution of critical consciousness and, as such, it heralds escalating decadence. At this moment of rapid decay, the book argues, thought must become relevant to society: the communicative practice of thinking must emerge to examine the pathologies of a religiously administrated life. Opening a dialogue between Adorno, Strauss, Farabi and Razi, among others, Shomali underlines the critical points of similarity and difference between these thinkers and envisions a "local" emancipatory project that, noting the specifics of the Iranian case, takes lessons from the western experience without blind imitation. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt has a particular notion of thinking that both is and is not philosophical. While not guided by the search for meta principles, nor concerned with establishing logical systems, her notion of thinking as the examination of “whatever happens to come to pass,” and its significance for saving our world from thoughtlessness, retains and is motivated by the fundamental pathos at the heart of philosophy—wonder. In this paper, I consider the limiting and enabling sense in which Arendt invokes (...) “wonder” for the possibility of thinking. I do so, in turn, to explore what the pathos of wonderment might offer education—an institution charged with cultivating “thinking” and, yet, constantly susceptible to the thoughtless trappings of technocratic jargon and the mechanical logic of assessment, learning processes and social reproduction. Can wonder—the very pathos of philosophy—cultivate a thinking that helps us retain an “unclouded attentiveness” to what is educational in education? Might wonder help us to overcome the thoughtlessness that dulls our attention to what we do to each other through education? (shrink)

While many Christians are finding comfort in forms of prayer that emphasize silence, others find concern with just such forms, seeing them as doctrinally unfaithful innovations of early monks. This article, then, investigates one influential early monk, Evagrius of Pontus, regarding thoughtless prayer. The article summarizes Evagrius’ life and monastic practice. It explores Evagrius’ mystical theology in general and particularly his understanding of the roles that prayer plays in the various stages of development in Christian maturity. The article then develops (...) a biblical and evangelical response to Evagrius’ approach, examining themes of the transcendent greatness of God, silence, and prayer in the Scriptures. Based on these investigations, the article offers three practical suggestions concerning the use of thoughtless prayer for Christians today. (shrink)

In this book, Justin Pack proposes a genealogy of the traditional suspicion of money and merchants. This genealogy is framed both by how money itself has changed and how different traditions responded to money. Money and merchants became heavily debated concerns in the Axial Age, which coincided with the spread of coinage. A deep suspicion of money and merchants was particularly notable in the Greek, Confucian and Christian traditions, and continued into the Middle Ages. These traditions wrestled with a new (...) dialectic of purity that also appears with the widespread use of money. How were these concerns dealt with politically, socially and philosophically? How did they change over time? How did medieval Europe deal with money and how did this inform modern governmentality? To answer these questions, Pack turns to Hanna Arendt’s work. Arendt argues that one of the outstanding characteristics of our time is thoughtlessness. This thoughtlessness is related to how modern life, especially under neoliberalism, is increasingly structured by abstract systems, abstract calculative rationality, abstract relations, and the profit motive. Money both drives and embodies this machinery. The hyper-complex abstract systems of modernity discourage, to use Arendtian terms, “thinking” (wonder, questioning everything) in favor of “cognition” (problem solving). Too often the result is thoughtless cognition—the ability to make things more productive and efficient paired with the incapacity to question and challenge the implications and morality of these systems. (shrink)

In the Philebus Plato argues that every rational human being, given the choice, will prefer a life that is moderately thoughtful and moderately pleasant to a life that is utterly thoughtless or utterly pleasureless. This is true, he thinks, even if the thoughtless life at issue is intensely pleasant and the pleasureless life at issue is intensely thoughtful. Evidently Plato wants this argument to show that neither pleasure nor thought, taken by itself, is sufficient to make a life choiceworthy for (...) us. But there is some disagreement among commentators about whether or not he also wants the argument to show why. Is the argument designed to establish that we should reject thoughtless and pleasureless lives because some pleasures and some thoughts are goods? Or is it silent on this issue? Many interpreters take the first option, claiming that Plato uses the argument to attack both the hedonist view that only pleasures are goods and the intellectualist view that only thoughts are goods. My aim in this paper is to show that the second option is at least as attractive as the first, both exegetically and philosophically. (shrink)

This work examines thoughtlessness and seeks to illuminate the necessity and extent that reflection is involved in becoming practically wise within an Aristotelian virtue ethical framework. Derived from an Arendtian reading of Kantian aesthetic judgment, an account of thinking and judging is offered to supplement traditional accounts of practical wisdom.

During October 1953, Hannah Arendt made a short list, divided into two columns, which represents what she sought to move away from, singularity, and what she was moving towards, plurality. The purpose of the present contribution is to interpret her concept of the duality of the two-in-one as a middle term which opens up an ambiguous field that can either facilitate the movement towards plurality and human worldliness or turn the human soul towards itself, withdrawing it from the world. Exemplified (...) by such phenomena as thinking and friendship, the duality of the two-in-one will prove to be precisely as double and dual as its name indicates. Despite Arendt’s scepticism about the capacity of thinking and friendship to bring about a common, plural world, it will be argued, in a critical discussion of her views, that she needs and treasures both phenomena enough to give them a significant role to play in the movement towards plurality. (shrink)

According to Hannah Arendt, the first impetus for her final project, The Life of the Mind, was her astonishment at the apparent lack of thought at the root of Adolf Eichmann’s crimes against humanity—a “manifest shallowness” which, nevertheless, “was not stupidity, but thoughtlessness.” This spectacle of the absence of thought, in the light of the immeasurable harm done to the victims of the Nazi regime, motivated her to get to the bottom of what it means to think. Since thinking (...) is often portrayed by philosophers as a withdrawal from the world, Arendt raises the question “Where are we when we think?” In pursuit of an answer, she provides a reading of Kafka’s parable “HE,” which she interprets as a description of the “region of thought” as a battleground between the past and thefuture. This parable enables Arendt to understand the activity of thinking in terms of temporality. While Kafka’s protagonist dreams of rising above the conflict and adopting a position outside time, Arendt argues that thoughtful reflection happens in the “gap between past and future” which philosophers have called the nunc stans or the moment. Rather than being timeless, in her view, thinking moves along a diagonal “thought-train” emerging from this gap. Arendt sheds more light on thinking by considering how its temporality differs from that of willing, which is determined by a primacy of the future. This difference between thinking and willing produces a conflict between them, which many philosophers have struggled to resolve. Arendt presents Hegel as a case in which this conflict is resolvednot, as we might expect, by a triumph of thought, but rather a triumph of the will. Arendt’s reflections on the temporality of thinking in Kafka and Hegel enable us to distinguish several different forms of thoughtlessness according to their dominant tense. Although Arendt does not spell out these distinctions herself, they make it possible to develop a deeper understanding of Eichmann’s thoughtlessness and its relation to evil. (shrink)

This paper proposes that Hannah Arendt’s book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil furnishes both philosophical and empirical elements to understand not only the Nazi crimes but also cases of wrongdoing by and within current organizations. It is suggested that Arendt provides three relevant standpoints to how wrongdoing is banalized within organizations: a critique of bureaucratic administration, an account of the role of interactive socialization, and a reflection on the cognitive and meaning-attribution processes. Arendt originally connected (...) these three dimensions to thoughtlessness, understood as a process of routinization in which organizations discourage critical thinking, personal responsibility, and reflection about the ultimate meaning and consequences of actions and decisions. As opposed to this, thoughtfulness is proposed as an approach based on meaningful pursuit within organizations to avoid some of the normative, cognitive, and routine elements that encourage, justify, and reproduce the banalization of misconduct. (shrink)

As the modern university is increasingly run like a business, students and faculty are losing the time and space to wonder and think under the hypercompetitive demands to produce. The goals of critical self-knowledge and good citizenship are being undermined by the demands of profit.

Witnessing the fate of the various definitions of truth, Donald Davidson has recently called the very drive to define truth a “folly.” Before him, Kant and Frege had given independent arguments why a general definition of truth is impossible. After a quick summary of their arguments, I recount several reasons that Gangeśa gave for not counting truth as a genuine natural universal. I argue that in spite of defining truth as a feature of personal and ephemeral awareness episodes, the Nyāya (...) ya realists such as Gangeśa could maintain that truth is independent of recognition of truth. In the course of my argument, I also show that Roy Perrett’s alleged proof against realism does not succeed. I conclude that realism does not need nonmental atemporal truth-bearers (propositions) which are eternally wholly true (or wholly false), and that knowledge-independence from truths and things can be shown without admitting the existence of unknowable things or truths. (shrink)

The global challenge of climate change presents a daunting task that requires human thinking and ingenuity. In this context, stories, narratives, and images can provide incentives for the imagination, essential in grappling with the complex perplexities of abstract dimensions while also anchoring thinking in human spatial and temporal existence.

In this paper, I present a sample spiritual exercise—a contemporary form of the written practice that ancient philosophers used to shape their characters. The exercise, which develops the ancient practice of the examination of conscience, is on the sixth mass extinction and seeks to understand why the extinction appears as a moral wrong. It concludes by finding a vice in the moral character of the author and the author’s society. From a methodological standpoint, the purpose of spiritual exercises is to (...) create a habit of thoughtfulness in the writer, and by way of teaching, to suggest one to the reader. Such a habit is important, at least, because virtue is a habit. In other words, there can be no learning of virtue itself without habituation into it. Accordingly, I frame the sample spiritual exercise with a deliberately controversial objection to contemporary academic virtue ethics and with a justification for why the spiritual exercise is important for taking virtue ethically. And I end the paper with some further remarks explaining the form of the exercise and its relevance to doing philosophy. In this way, the paper makes and illustrates a methodological point about virtue ethics based on a meta-ethical assumption about virtue as a habit, and it does this by focusing on a pressing environmental problem in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

This paper presents what I will call Arendt’s genealogy of thinking. My purpose in doing so is to strengthen Arendt’s critique of thoughtlessness which I believe is both a powerful, but underappreciated analytic tool and a consistent, but under-examined thread that occurs throughout Arendt’s oeuvre. To do so I revisit her phenomenology of thinking and the distinction between thinking and cognition she introduces in her last, unfinished work, The Life of the Mind. When read alongside the genealogy of action (...) in The Human Condition to create a parallel genealogy of thinking, we can begin to see that the implications of this distinction between thinking and cognition are radical, challenging, and deeply important. (shrink)

Background:Ideas of patient involvement are related to notions of self-determination and autonomy, which are not always in alignment with complex interactions and communication in clinical practice.Aim:To illuminate and discuss patient involvement in routine clinical care situations in nursing practice from an ethical perspective.Method:A case study based on an anthropological field study among patients with advanced cancer in Denmark.Ethical considerations:Followed the principles of the Helsinki Declaration.Findings:Two cases illustrated situations where nurses refused patient involvement in their own case.Discussion:Focus on two ethical issues, (...) namely ‘including patients’ experiences in palliative nursing care’ and ‘relational distribution of power and knowledge’, inspired primarily by Hannah Arendt’s concept of thoughtlessness and a Foucauldian perspective on the medical clinic and power. The article discusses how patients’ palliative care needs and preferences, knowledge and statements become part of the less significant background of nursing practice, when nurses have a predefined agenda for acting with and involvement of patients. Both structurally conditioned ‘thoughtlessness’ of the nurses and distribution of power and knowledge between patients and nurses condition nurses to set the agenda and assess when and at what level it is relevant to take up patients’ invitations to involve them in their own case.Conclusion:The medical and institutional logic of the healthcare service sets the framework for the exchange between professional and patient, which has an embedded risk that ‘thoughtlessness’ appears among nurses. The consequences of neglecting the spontaneous nature of human action and refusing the invitations of the patients to be involved in their life situation call for ethical and practical reflection among nurses. The conditions for interaction with humans as unpredictable and variable challenge nurses’ ways of being ethically attentive to ensure that patients receive good palliative care, despite the structurally conditioned logic of healthcare. (shrink)

We thoughtlessly use the Nietzschean language of values to encompass our moral principles, our intuitions of the holy and the beautiful, our need for truth. Yet Nietzsche showed that “values” are the creations or products of human will, not discoveries of intelligence, illuminations of love, or exigencies of need. We hear talk of “absolute values” or “objective values” as if there can be values without evaluation: Nietzsche was clear that nothing is intrinsically good or valuable in itself; values are human (...) choices, estimations, decisions, the expressions of human will. An alternative language is more appropriate to communicate what we hold to be intrinsically valuable, namely Würde . Human beings have value if we can use them for our own purposes but they have an invaluable dignity beyond whatever purposes we may have in mind for them. Activities may have an intrinsic worthiness whatever the market demand or current estimation establishes their value to be. (shrink)

This paper presents and defends Kant’s non-voluntarist conception of political obligations. I argue that civil society is not primarily a prudential requirement for justice; it is not merely a necessary evil or moral response to combat our corrupting nature or our tendency to act viciously, thoughtlessly or in a biased manner. Rather, civil society is constitutive of rightful relations because only in civil society can we interact in ways reconcilable with each person’s innate right to freedom. Civil society is the (...) means through which we can rightfully interact even on the ideal assumption that no one ever succumbs to immoral temptation. (shrink)

Having children is probably as old as the first successful organism. It is often done thoughtlessly. This book is an argument for giving procreating some serious thought, and a theory of how, when, and why procreation may be permissible.Rivka Weinberg begins with an analysis of the kind of act procreativity is and why we might be justifiably motivated to engage in it. She then proceeds to argue that, by virtue of our ownership and control of the hazardous material that is (...) our gametes, we are parentally responsible for the risks we take with our gametes and for the persons that develop when we engage in activity that allows our gametes to unite with others and develop into persons. Further argument establishes that when done respectfully, and in cases where the child's chances of leading a life of human flourishing are high, procreation may be permissible. Along the way, Weinberg argues that the non-identity problem is a curiously common mistake. Arguments intending to show that procreation is impermissible because life is bad for people and imposed on them without their consent are shown to have serious flaws. Yet because they leave us with lingering concerns, Weinberg argues that although procreation is permissible under certain conditions, it is not only a welfare risk but also a moral risk. Still, it is a risk that is often permissible for us to take and impose, given our high level of legitimate interest in procreativity. In order to ascertain when the procreative risk is permissible to impose, contractualist principles are proposed to fairly attend to the interests prospective parents have in procreating and the interests future people have in a life of human flourishing. The principles are assessed on their own merits and in comparison with rival principles. They are then applied to a wide variety of procreative cases. (shrink)

Descartes' proof that his essence is thinking.--Thoughtless brutes.--Descartes' proof that he is essentially a non-material thing.--Behaviorism as a philosophy of psychology.--The privacy of experience.--Wittgenstein on the nature of mind.--The myth of cognitive processes and structures.--Moore and Wittgenstein on the sense of "I know."--The groundlessness of belief.

Hannah Arendt is recognized as one of the most important political theorists of the 20th century. This paper, however, suggests that she is as much a thinker as a theorist. Against the professionalized discourse of political theory that offers theories of democracy, citizenship, and liberalism, Arendt insists that political thinking is of more importance that political theory. The force of Arendt's political insight is that we court danger when we take thinking for granted. Against the worship of reason and rationalized (...) calculation that dominates political discourse, Arendt holds up an idea of thinking that sets up obstacles to hasty and thoughtless action. The paper develops Arendt's particular articulation of what it calls Arendt's activity of thinking. (shrink)

We uncover a surprising discovery about the basis of thoughts. We begin by giving some plausible axioms about thoughts and their grounds. We then deduce a theorem, which has dramatic ramifications for the basis of all thoughts. The theorem implies that thoughts cannot come deterministically from any purely “thoughtless” states. We expect this result to be too dramatic for many philosophers. Hence, we proceed to investigate the prospect of giving up the axioms. We show that each axiom’s negation itself has (...) dramatic consequences that should be of interest to philosophers of mind. Our proof of the theorem provides a new guiderail for thinking about the nature and origin of thoughts. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to provide a constructive criticism of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) standards. After pointing out a number of benefits and limitations in the effectiveness of CSR standards, both from a theoretical point of view and in the light of empirical evidence, we formulate and discuss a Paradox of CSR standards: despite being well-intended, CSR standards can favor the emergence of a thoughtless, blind and blinkered mindset which is counterproductive of their aim of enhancing the social (...) responsibility of the organization. We analyze three problems that might underlie the Paradox—namely the problem of deceptive measurements; the problem of responsibility erosion and the problem of blinkered culture. We apply the philosophical tradition of American Pragmatism to reflect on these issues in relation to different types of existing standards, and conclude by suggesting a number of considerations that could help both CSR standards developers and users to address the Paradox. (shrink)

I cannot here withhold the statement that optimism, where it is not merely the thoughtless talk of those who harbor nothing but words under their shallow foreheads, seems to me to be not merely an absurd, but also a really wicked, way of thinking, a bitter mockery of the unspeakable sufferings of mankind.1I am now, and always shall be, in that very sense no optimist, but a maintainer of the sterner view that life is forever tragic. In so far as (...) Schopenhauer has sought to make this plain, I follow him unhesitatingly, and honor him for his mercilessness.2Josiah Royce’s lifelong battle with the pessimism of Arthur Schopenhauer supplies valuable insight into the development of one of the central concepts of his system... (shrink)

Bauman’s writing adopts different modes of address – it moves from the conventionally academic, through the essayistic, the diaristic and, most obviously, the conversational. This movement reflects the emergence of a late style in Bauman’s work. This late style is understood through Adorno. It highlights the bankruptcy and thoughtlessness of the hegemonic – world doubling – forms of sociology. Bauman’s late style is thinking with and for otherness. As such, the late style works are an active catastrophe. They refute (...) the ‘ideology of existing conditions’, repudiate world doubling and are, instead, a praxis of and for othering. In this way the mode of address can be understood to be ethical in and of itself. (shrink)

This article turns to Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem in order to illustrate the difficulties involved in approaching the (formerly) metaphysical concept of evil as a secular phenomenon. It asks how the advocate of plurality, natality and forgiveness could also vouch for the death sentence of Eichmann based on a rhetoric of retribution and revenge. It then shows that Arendt's surprisingly consistent view of evil is based on a quasi-ontological understanding of the human condition that allowed her to negate Eichmann's (...) humanity. Rather than simply unmasking a metaphysical account in disguise, however, the article develops an alternative perspective that emerges from the conversation between Arendt and Jaspers. It argues that Jaspers's interpretation of Kant offers a way to defend the idea of secular evil and judge Eichmann on the basis of his thoughtlessness. (shrink)

How can human beings acknowledge and experience the burdens of political responsibility? Why are we tempted to flee them, and how might we come to affirm them? Jade Larissa Schiff calls this experience of responsibility 'the cultivation of responsiveness'. In Burdens of Political Responsibility: Narrative and the Cultivation of Responsiveness, she identifies three dispositions that inhibit responsiveness - thoughtlessness, bad faith, and misrecognition - and turns to storytelling in its manifold forms as a practice that might facilitate and frustrate (...) it. Through critical engagements with an unusual cast of characters hailing from a variety of disciplines, she argues that how we represent our world and ourselves in the stories we share, and how we receive those stories, can facilitate and frustrate the cultivation of responsiveness. (shrink)

So far, interpreters have not made the import of this last clause clear. F. J. Church translates the last phrase ‘they act at random’. Burnet says of Adam that he seems to have been the first to point out that the meaning cannot be ‘they act at random’. Instead, ‘the phrase expresses indifference’. Adam′s idea, which Burnet here commends, is that the many are thoughtless in their treatment of the individual; and Adam compares 48C below: the many would lightly put (...) someone to death and just as lightly bring him back to life again. The Burnet-Adam point is evidently that the many have a policy of acting indifferently, or just as it occurs to them—by contrast with the ‘at random’ in Church′s translation, which suggests that they act without policy at all. (shrink)

This article compares Hannah Arendt's famous essay on Adolf Eichmann's trial in Israel in 1961 to Simone de Beauvoir's little studied piece, "An Eye for an Eye," on the trial of Robert Brasillach in France in 1945. Arendt and Beauvoir each determine the complicity of individuals acting within a political order that seeks to eliminate certain forms of otherness and difference, but come to differing conclusions about the significance of the crimes. I explain Beauvoir's account of ambiguity, on which she (...) draws in her judgment of Brasillach and elaborates in her 1948 Ethics of Ambiguity, ana measure it against Arendt's account of Eichmann's thoughtlessness and its effects on the destruction of conditions of worldly plurality. Linking the failure of ethical judgment on the part of individuals to prior systemic political conditions, Beauvoir helps us recognize struggles over the meaning of bodies and conditions of inequality as central to politics. (shrink)

One of the scholars that made sustained contributions to the development of philosophy of history is Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel offers a dialectical conception of history in which the absolute spirit moves towards self-actualization. However, Hegel’s idea of history appears prejudiced and misguided because he not only derided and battered Africans using his imprudent racial schemes, he even excluded Africa from historical considerations in his uncouth racial agenda. This paper uses the critical analytic model to deleted ultimately show that (...) not only was Hegel uninformed to comment on the ontology of Africa and Africans, but that even the system was self-defeating. That is, it was a case of _Hegel against Hegel._ This is the novelty of this paper since a Hegelian system that is against itself cannot muster the necessary guts and logic to lampoon and destroy another system, worse still, thoughtlessly and irrationally too. The paper also argued that the disposition to colour-brand people using racial scheme is uncritical and inhumane. (shrink)

Data science is not simply a method but an organising idea. Commitment to the new paradigm overrides concerns caused by collateral damage, and only a counterculture can constitute an effective critique. Understanding data science requires an appreciation of what algorithms actually do; in particular, how machine learning learns. The resulting ‘insight through opacity’ drives the observable problems of algorithmic discrimination and the evasion of due process. But attempts to stem the tide have not grasped the nature of data science as (...) both metaphysical and machinic. Data science strongly echoes the neoplatonism that informed the early science of Copernicus and Galileo. It appears to reveal a hidden mathematical order in the world that is superior to our direct experience. The new symmetry of these orderings is more compelling than the actual results. Data science does not only make possible a new way of knowing but acts directly on it; by converting predictions to pre-emptions, it becomes a machinic metaphysics. The people enrolled in this apparatus risk an abstraction of accountability and the production of ‘thoughtlessness’. Susceptibility to data science can be contested through critiques of science, especially standpoint theory, which opposes the ‘view from nowhere’ without abandoning the empirical methods. But a counterculture of data science must be material as well as discursive. Karen Barad’s idea of agential realism can reconfigure data science to produce both non-dualistic philosophy and participatory agency. An example of relevant praxis points to the real possibility of ‘machine learning for the people’. (shrink)

This article connects the theory of Hannah Arendt and the philosophy of Stanley Cavell to the questions of what thinking is and how it appears on film. It focuses on two theatrical trials: Adolph Eichmann’s trial (1961) and the ending sequence in Frank Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) in which the questions of thought and thoughtlessness are at stake. Whereas Arendt considers the ways that thinking poses challenges to representation (there is, she writes, a “scarcity of documentary (...) evidence”), Cavell turns to cinema and the camera’s “knowledge of the metaphysical restlessness” that becomes manifest when the mind thinks and the body fidgets. He goes so far as to argue that cinema may even “prove thinking.” Though they arrive at opposite conclusions, Cavell and Arendt share a critique of modern subjectivity that these trials bring to light: reason has replaced thinking and skepticism of the world has replaced consciousness in it. But film, as read through Cavell, may reveal a crisis of altogether different order. It is not that thinking cannot be represented, as Arendt argues; in the age of cinema, thinking cannot be concealed. If anything, thoughtlessness defies representation. (shrink)

In this paper which consists of two parts (Teil I and Teil II) we champion Diophantus of Alexandria and Isabella BaÅ¡makova against Norbert Schappacher. In two publications ([Schappacher 1998a] and [Schappacher 1998b]) he puts forward inter alia two propositions: Questioning Diophantus’ originality he considers affirmatively the possibility that the Arithmetica are the joint work of a team of authors like Bourbaki. And he calls BaÅ¡makova’s claim (in [BaÅ¡makova 1972]) that Diophantus uses negative numbers, a nonsense , reproaching her for her (...) thoughtlessness . Teil I: First, we disprove Schappacher’s Bourbaki thesis. Second, we investigate the semantic meaning and historical significance of Diophantus’ keywords $ λvarepsilon tildeιψιζ and ὕπαρξιζ. Next, we discuss Schappacher’s epistemology of the history of mathematics and defend BaÅ¡makova’s methods. Finally we analyse in detail three problems from Diophantus’ Arithmetica (and their solutions) given by Thomas Heath and Helmuth Gericke as proof of the their claim that Diophantus did not use negative numbers. Teil II: In this Part, we give 33 places where Diophantus uses negative quantities as intermediate results; they appear as differences a − b of positive rational numbers, the subtrahend b being bigger than the minuend a; they each represent the (negative) basis ( πλvarepsilonυρacuteα ) of a square number ( τvarepsilonτρacuteαγω ν o ζ ), which is afterwards computed by the formula (a - b) 2 = a 2 + b 2 - 2ab $ . Finally, we report how the topic Diophantus and the negative numbers has been dealt with by translators and commentators from Maximus Planudes onwards. Und er kommt zu dem Ergebnis: ≪Nur ein Traum war das Erlebnis. Weil≫, so schlieβt er messerscharf, ≪nicht sein k a n n, was nicht sein d a r f.≫ CHRISTIAN MORGENSTERN: Palmstrm. (shrink)

The problem addressed by this paper concerns the responsibility of higher education in the growing thoughtlessness of culture. By “thoughtlessness” is meant not the absence of mental “busyness,” but indifference to the self-reflective life. How do we cope with the fact that, for so many, the educative act has little or nothing to do with the cultivation of self-reflection, especially when this indifference is amply represented within higher education as well as the wider culture? The paper unfolds in (...) three sections. First, it explores the factors complicating the search for effective materials by which to instigate and encourage the transformation to a self-reflective life. Second, it argues that stories, particularly what it calls “transforming stories,” play an important role in provoking and providing insight into the “turning around of the soul” from unreflective to reflective living. Finally, it illustrates how one such transforming story, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, by Leo Tolstoy, helps accomplish this educational goal. (shrink)

The Sea of Galilee and the Jordan River figure prominently in scripture. The ecosystem of this area has been damaged as a result of technology thoughtlessly applied in the context of anthropocentrism. A contrasting relational approach toward the natural world is offered by ecofeminism, which speaks for those whose voices, both human and nonhuman, have been ignored or negated. This article discusses the environmental history of the Sea of Galilee, the Jordan River, and the adjacent wetlands and forests. It applies (...) an ecofeminist hermeneutic to Mark 4:35-41, the story of Jesus’s calming the Wind and the Sea, as a religious rationale for the ethical use of science and technology. (shrink)

It is necessary to evaluate the next “thoughtless” instruction of the President to the Ministry of Education: to work for 1-2 months and introduce the lesson “Ethics of Faith” in schools from September 1. It requires an immediate reaction of the deputies of the Verkhovna Rada, structures related to the education and upbringing of children, and the general public: in a veiled form, the Basic Law is grossly violated - the Constitution of the country, in particular, the second section of (...) Art. 32, where it is written in black and white: "... The church is separated from the state, and the school is separated from the church...". If the guarantor of the Constitution has forgotten about this, he needs to be reminded, and he must cancel his order. Otherwise, people, parents, and, most importantly, children, our younger generation, will be agitated. (shrink)

This chapter examines whether, as Jeff McMahan argues, we should not integrate what he refers to as the “deep morality” of war into our military and international public policies and laws, because of the possible negative consequences of doing so. On the basis of feminist epistemology, I argue that McMahan is wrong to think that publicizing and legalizing the deep morality of war will have the negative consequences that he claims. Through a comparison with the Women's Suffrage Movement in the (...) United States, I argue that McMahan's argument is epistemically biased, in that it reflects and incorporates stereotypical views of poor people as stupid, thoughtless, and brutish. We would do better to think hard about how we conceptualize combatants, and to recognize in our arguments that the abilities to reason well and to act morally are not restricted to the upper echelons of society. (shrink)

With more than two million members and supporters, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is the world’s largest animal-rights organization, and its founder and president, Ingrid Newkirk, is one of the most well-known and most effective activists in America. She has spearheaded worldwide efforts to improve the treatment of animals in manufacturing, entertainment, and elsewhere. Every day, in laboratories, food factories, and other industries, animals by the millions are subjected to inhumane cruelty. In this accessible guide, Newkirk teaches (...) readers hundreds of simple ways to stop thoughtless animal cruelty and make positive choices. For each topic, Newkirk provides hard facts, personal insight, inspiration, ideas, and resources, including: • How to eat healthfully and compassionately • How to adopt animals rather than support puppy mills • How to make their vote count and change public opinion • How to switch to cruelty-free cosmetics and clothing • How to choose amusements that protect rather than exploit animals. With public concern for the well-being of animals greater than ever—particularly among young people—this timely, practical book offers exciting and easy ways to make a difference. (shrink)

Modern humanities are in an ambiguous situation. Their organization is experiencing a radical challenge from the expansion of science-based assessment methods from modern business. We are talking about evaluating the results of researchers’ work on indicators from scientometrics. As a result, the evaluation subject is not the content of the research result, but their popularity and relevance to dominant views and approaches. The science organization turned upside down: it turns out not scientometrics for science, but rather science for the sake (...) of scientometrics. At the same time, digitalization and related information and communication technologies are a great achievement of civilization. Therefore, it is all the more important and useful to resist the thoughtless digitized bureaucracy using the digitization itself. This article is an attempt not to criticize digital methods, but to consider the possibilities of using blockchain technology, its advantages and the problems it generates. There are such opportunities as transparent self-organization of scientific communities, assessing the contribution and its priority, encouraging researchers. At the same time, the implementation of the blockchain implies the interest of a critically significant group of scientists with a high reputation. It is equally important to demonstrate the convenience and effectiveness of scientific work using the blockchain. The article draw attention to the significance to propose and discuss approaches to methods for assessing the quality of humanitarian and interdisciplinary studies that are adequate to the scientific practice itself, that arouse the general confidence of scientists. (shrink)