Privacy is gravely endangered in the digital age, and we, the digital citizens, are its principal threat, willingly surrendering it to avail ourselves of new technology, and granting the government and corporations immense power over us. In this highly original work, Firmin DeBrabander begins with this premise and asks how we can ensure and protect our freedom in the absence of privacy. Can—and should—we rally anew to support this institution? Is privacy so important to political liberty after all? DeBrabander (...) makes the case that privacy is a poor foundation for democracy, that it is a relatively new value that has been rarely enjoyed throughout history—but constantly persecuted—and politically and philosophically suspect. The vitality of the public realm, he argues, is far more significant to the health of our democracy, but is equally endangered—and often overlooked—in the digital age. (shrink)

This important book examines Spinoza's moral and political philosophy. Specifically it considers Spinoza's engagement with the themes of Stoicism and his significant contribution to the origins of the European Enlightenment. Firmin DeBrabander explores the problematic view of the relationship between ethics and politics that Spinoza apparently inherited from the Stoics and in so doing asks some important questions that contribute to a crucial contemporary debate. Does ethics provide any foundation for political theory and if so in what way? Likewise, (...) does politics contribute anything essential to the life of virtue? And what is the political place and public role of the philosopher as a practitioner of ethics? In examining Spinoza's Ethics, his most important and widely-read work, and exploring the ways in which this work echoes Stoic themes regarding the public behaviour of the philosopher, the author seeks to answer these key questions and thus makes a fascinating contribution to the study of moral and political philosophy. (shrink)

Social care responses to extra-familial harm require social workers to work across the binaries of welfare and justice, victim and perpetrator, parent and professional, risk and protection. This paper examines the ethical consequences of working in this manner, through qualitative data (focus groups, interviews, observations, case file analysis and documentary review) from three children's social care organisations in England who trialled new child protection pathways for significant harm outside of family homes/relationships. The extent to which these pathways created five conditions (...) for a welfare response to extra-familial harm are considered, before these results are brought into conversation with Bourdieu’s meta theory of capital, habitus and doxa, and Fenton's practice theory of ethical stress. The challenges identified evidence of the importance foregrounding social work values in the pursuit of welfare-based response to extra-familial harm. They also offer a rationale for studying theories of care ethics in social work in the context of interagency practice. (shrink)

Thanks to its doctrines of natural right and moral egalitarianism and to its prominent historical role in defying totalitarian government, Stoicism is often cited as a touchstone for liberal democracy. Less well known, however, is an alternate lineage, culminating in a Stoic Realpolitik that emerges in Justus Lipsius’s political writings. The foundation of this Realpolitik becomes increasingly clear in the progression of Stoic thought through Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. Tracing this lineage reveals that the subject of politics isfundamentally problematic (...) for Stoicism, especially since the denigration of politics is central to Stoic ethics. The Stoics ultimately arrive at a surprising moral pessimism, evidenced most prominently in Marcus’s Meditations. In Lipsius’s version of Stoic Realpolitik, the populace is characterized as being of inconstant behavior, and Stoicism is viewed as a resource for steeling the prince’s character against the masses, whose moral emendation is hopeless. (shrink)

Spinoza’s philosophy has bequeathed longstanding query and dispute regarding the meaning of several doctrines and elements of his system as well as the influences of his innovative, controversial project. Prominent among those debated aspects of Spinoza’s Ethics are its presentation in more geometrico and the goal toward which it purportedly directs us, a scientia intuitiva that will make us blessed, free, and eternal in some sense. In his book Meaning in Spinoza’s Method, Aaron Garrett maintains that the method and the (...) goal of Spinoza’s Ethics are mutually informative: we can only properly understand Spinoza’s method by viewing it in light of its ethical goal, Spinoza’s aim to “transform readers”. In turn, in elucidating Spinoza’s method, we can gain greater insight into what he means by our eternity. (shrink)

As the capabilities of artificial intelligence systems improve, it becomes important to constrain their actions to ensure their behaviour remains beneficial to humanity. A variety of ethical, legal and safety-based frameworks have been proposed as a basis for designing these constraints. Despite their variations, these frameworks share the common characteristic that decision-making must consider multiple potentially conflicting factors. We demonstrate that these alignment frameworks can be represented as utility functions, but that the widely used Maximum Expected Utility paradigm provides insufficient (...) support for such multiobjective decision-making. We show that a Multiobjective Maximum Expected Utility paradigm based on the combination of vector utilities and non-linear action–selection can overcome many of the issues which limit MEU’s effectiveness in implementing aligned AI. We examine existing approaches to multiobjective AI, and identify how these can contribute to the development of human-aligned intelligent agents. (shrink)

Malgré l’usage peu fréquent qu’il fait des termes epistrophè, epistrepheïn, metanoïa et metanoeïn, Paul n’accorde pas moins d’importance à la conversion dans ses écrits. À partir de la distinction qu’il établit entre la conversion- epistrophè et la conversion- metanoïa et du double mouvement qui les caractérise, il appelle ses auditeurs à la conversion au moyen d’un langage nouveau, notamment de nouvelles métaphores.

For most of its career philosophy of religion has been a controversial dis cipline: it has usually ended up becoming a substitute for what it set out to explain. Born out of the religious scepticism of the late seventeenth century it remained for many years what it was to Hume and Lessing: an instrument for criticizing rather than for interpreting faith. Gradually the hostility subsided, but not the tendency to reduce. Nearly each one of the great names in this area (...) represents a theory that goes "beyond" faith. Phenomenology changed that situation. Conceived for accurate under standing of acts and meanings rather than for the building of vast synthe ses, its method was more apt to yield understanding than criticism. Moreover, by distinguishing the ideal meanings from the psychic realities of the act, it chased its followers from the quagmire of psychic genesis, causal justification and rational "proof" of the religious object, and forced them to concentrate on the intentional terminus of the experience. (shrink)

Le XVIIIe siècle, siècle des Lumières, évoque immanquablement dans nos esprits les noms de Diderot, Rousseau, Voltaire, D'Alembert. Né à Uzès (Gard) en 1679, mort en 1767, Firmin Abauzit, réfugié à Genève après la révocation de l'édit de Nantes en 1685, marqua cependant de son empreinte cette époque si riche, et ce, malgré l'ignorance que notre siècle paraît en avoir ; adulé, recherché par ses contemporains pour sa science infinie et sa tolérance inflexible, il fut le père spirituel de (...) Jean-Jacques Rousseau, et le maître à penser des plus éminents scientifiques (Newton, Leibniz), philosophes (Voltaire, Rousseau), et souverains de son temps (Guillaume III d'Angleterre), illuminant de sa clarté cet aréopage. Même l'intransigeant Sainte-Beuve condescendit à faire son éloge au XIXe siècle. Malheureusement oublié par son excès de modestie, son refus de publier, il mérite par la modernité de ses idées et la profondeur de son esprit, de ressurgir aujourd'hui du passé et de retrouver sa place au sommet, comme Rousseau l'a si bien clamé dans la Nouvelle Héloïse : " Non ce siècle de la philosophie ne passera point sans avoir connu un vrai philosophe et un seul! Sage et savant Abauzit... " Que notre siècle lui rende cet honneur. (shrink)

Savant aux intérêts multiples--historiques, scientifiques et religieux, connu et estimé dans l'Europe du XVIIIe siècle, bien qu'ayant très peu publié de son vivant, Firmin Abauzit reste à beaucoup d'égards un mystère. Comment ce réfugié huguenot, arrivé à Genève encore enfant après la révocation de l'édit de Nantes, a-t-il pu bénéficier d'une réputation flatteuse dans la ville d'accueil alors que ses opinions hétérodoxes sur la trinité ou la christologie ou les prophéties bibliques étaient notoires? Au-delà des étiquettes faciles, quelle était (...) la nature exacte de son hétérodoxie? Comment sa légendaire 'modestie', qui lui a fait refuser honneurs et charges publiques, se concilie-t-elle avec le fait de laisser copier et circuler abondamment en Europe ses manuscrits? Quel rapport existe-t-il entre une telle circulation et son refus obstiné d'autoriser la publication de ses travaux? Comment interpréter, dans son cas, la tension entre réputation et publication? À ces questions, souvent escamotées ou abordées dans une visée hagiographique, le volume répond par une réflexion large qui croise l'histoire des religions, de la littérature, de la philosophie et du fait religieux. Une approche qui intègre des aspects peu ou pas du tout étudiés de la vaste production de l'auteur, tels que le rapport entre idolâtrie et religion, ou sa lecture de textes déistes anglais, ou encore ses écrits de controverse confessionnelle, mais qui reprend aussi, en les renouvelant, des thèmes plus classiques, comme la célèbre note de Rousseau sur Abauzit philosophe ou les éditions concurrentes qui ont été publiées peu après la mort du savant"--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Many critics of American gun culture and policy argue that the public health benefits of stricter regulations compensate for the associated loss of freedom: a bit less freedom is an acceptable cost for the expected gains in public safety. By contrast, gun advocates sometimes claim that freedom to own guns underlies all other important freedoms and therefore deserves priority over considerations of public health. In this volume, philosopher Firmin DeBrabander takes a distinct critical approach, denying any significant loss of (...) freedom associated with gun control. Widespread gun ownership in the context of lax regulation makes Americans—and anyone else similarly situated—less free. In developing his... (shrink)

In “Life After Privacy: Reclaiming Democracy in a Surveillance Society,” Firmin DeBrabander proposes that the stakes associated with the loss of personal privacy are even higher than is generally acknowledged. Personal privacy is a compelling issue, and his review of it is engaging and accessible. He is successful in demonstrating that powerful forces—corporations, governments, and partisan activists—have many ways of intruding on our private lives and thoughts. DeBrabander’s largest contribution to the ongoing dialogue about privacy, however, is an assertion (...) that the loss of privacy threatens democracy itself. Disturbingly, he may be right—although maybe not for all the reasons he claims.DeBrabander’s focus is on... (shrink)

The fifteen essays collected here set out to demonstrate why the critical philosophy of race needs to take a historical turn. Genealogies of the concepts of both race and racism are deployed to clarify why some of the dominant strategies for combatting racism tend either miss the target altogether or give it only a glancing blow. For example, relying on biology to reject the concept of race as a way of disarming racism misses the fact that racism precedes the biology (...) of race. It also ignores the prevalence of forms of racism, such as cultural racism that do not take their starting point in biology. Drawing on the work of Frantz Fanon, the late Sartre, and Michel Foucault, Robert Bernasconi argues for a holistic approach that integrates the concrete experience of racism faced by individuals into the study of institutional, structural, and systemic racism. Studying the interventions of such Black philosophers as Ottobah Cugoano, Anténor Firmin, and W. E. B. Du Bois, shows the value of allowing them to set the terms of the debate, instead of trying to fit them into debates shaped by other areas of philosophy. If race is indeed a social construct, then it is necessary to uncover the different forces, material as well as intellectual, that at different times shaped the various forms the concept of race has taken and the value then placed on preserving racial purity. Critical philosophy of race has a role to play in rendering both the material and psychological effects of slavery and segregation more intelligible as forms of systemic racism. When critical philosophers of race ignore the history of racism, they are in danger of being complicit with that part of society that seeks to erase that history. (shrink)

This article explores Carter G. Woodson’s The Mis‐Education of the Negro in terms of its political philosophical content. It examines how Woodson’s account of the miseducation of Black people and the accordant miseducation of whites is involved in the production and reproduction of an unjust basic structure, with reference to John Rawls and Frantz Fanon. It then turns to Woodson’s critique of leadership and its relationship to miseducation, drawing on E. Franklin Frazier’s study of the Black bourgeoisie and the political (...) philosophy of Enrique Dussel. Finally, it examines miseducation as a site for the reproduction of racist knowledge production in light of the work of Anténor Firmin and examines how, for Woodson, rigor in the human sciences was essential for counteracting miseducation and serving the greater cause of liberation. (shrink)

Recent work has argued that there may be cases where no attitude – including withholding – is rationally permissible. In this paper, I consider two such epistemic dilemmas, John Turri’s Dilemma from Testimony and David Alexander’s Dilemma from Doubt. Turri presents a case where one’s only evidence rules out withholding (without warranting belief or disbelief). Alexander presents a case where higher order doubt means one must withhold judgment over whether withholding judgment is rational. In both cases, the authors conclude that (...) no doxastic attitude is warranted. In this paper, I argue against the possibility of these epistemic dilemmas. I argue that withholding cannot be irrational in either case. But meditating on the dilemmas gives us an important – and overlooked – insight into the nature of rational withholding. First, rational withholding is a function of evidence failing to sufficiently support belief or disbelief. As a result, withholding is not symmetrical to belief and disbelief. Second, there can be two distinct grounds for rational withholding. First, propositional withholding, which arises when our evidence does not support belief or disbelief in p. And second, doxastic withholding, which arises when we cannot determine whether our evidence supports belief or disbelief in p. Accepting two grounds of rational withholding licenses a kind of Weak Permissivism. But this Weak Permissivism should not be troubling to anyone. (shrink)

In this article, we present results from a literature review of intrinsic, instrumental, and relational values of nature conducted for the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, as part of the Methodological Assessment of the Diverse Values and Valuations of Nature. We identify the most frequently recurring meanings in the heterogeneous use of different value types and their association with worldviews and other key concepts. From frequent uses, we determine a core meaning for each value type, which is (...) sufficiently inclusive to serve as an umbrella over different understandings in the literature and specific enough to help highlight its difference from the other types of values. Finally, we discuss convergences, overlapping areas, and fuzzy boundaries between different value types to facilitate dialogue, reduce misunderstandings, and improve the methods for valuation of nature's contributions to people, including ecosystem services, to inform policy and direct future research. © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Institute of Biological Sciences. (shrink)

Книга рассчитана на тех, кто по своей специальности занимается философией, литературоведением и в дальнейшем углубят свои знания в этом вопросе, а также для широкого круга читателей.

I would like to begin with the role of philosophy in solving ecological problems, emphasizing two aspects of its role: the struggle against hostile ideology and the organizing and guiding of activity in the sphere of the development of science and the shaping of its problems. This role of Marxist-Leninist philosophy clearly appears in the complex interdisciplinary problem of the interaction between nature and society.

Сборник содержит материалы докладов участников межвузовской конференции, посвященной проблемам связи философии, культуры и истории, влиянию социально-культурологических аспектов на развитие философских идей.

In this paper, the authors have detected a new effect in the area of geomagnetism, related to the behavior of a magnetic dipole freely floating on water surface. An experiment is described in the present paper in which a magnetic dipole fixed upon a float placed on non- magnetized water surface undergoes displacement along with reorientation caused by fine structure of the earth's magnetic field. This fact can probably be explained by secular decrease of the earth's major dipole moment. Further, (...) a detailed study of the phenomenon may create interesting premises for its practical use, particularly for the analysis of fine structure of geomagnetic field and its time-dependent anomalies. A strange behavior of some sea fish species prior to strong earthquakes may be explained if the fish are assumed as 'live magnetic dipoles'. (shrink)