The essay defines two different modes of filmic violence: sublime and drastic pictures of violence. Based on the definitions of the sublime by Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, I argue that the sublime has the tendency to detach the viewer from possible affective end empathetic response to pictures of bodies in pain on the screen. By contrast, the drastic mode has potential to evoke empathetic reactions. Both modes are grounded in specific ways of showing violence: the sublime mode diminishes the (...) bodies on the screen, the drastic mode shows us the faces in close-up and tries to immerse the viewer in the violence.Both definitions are informed by phenomenological film theory, which positions the body of the viewer at the centre of film reception. Nevertheless, the somatic experience is not the only scope of film reception. Films not only show us a filmic world but also suggest a more or less specific way of seeing the world outside the cinema.To this effect, both ways of staging violence have ideological implications. The sublime violence allows the viewer to experience himself as strong and invulnerable, while drastic pictures of violence tend to victimize the viewer.These assumptions are tested on two exemplary instances: the helicopter scene in Francis Ford Coppolas war movie Apocalypse Now and the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. (shrink)

“Sophisticated” theories of welfare face two potentially devastating criticisms. They are based upon two claims: that theories of welfare should be tested for what they imply about newborn infants and that even if a theory of welfare is intended to apply only to adults, we might still have sufficient reason to reject it because it implies an implausible divergence between adult and neonatal welfare. It has been argued we ought reject sophisticated theories of welfare because they have significantly counterintuitive implications (...) about neonatal welfare and because they imply an implausible divergence between the welfare of adults and that of newborns. I argue against both claims. (shrink)

Many philosophers and legal theorists worry about punishing the socially disadvantaged as severely as their advantaged counterparts. One philosophically popular explanation of this concern is couched in terms of moral standing: seriously unjust states are said to lack standing to condemn disadvantaged offenders. If this is the case, institutional condemnation of disadvantaged offenders (especially via hard treatment) will often be unjust. I describe two problems with canonical versions of this view. First, its proponents groundlessly claim that disadvantaged offenders may be (...) punished as severely as advantaged ones, even though such punishment is unjust in light of the state’s loss of standing. Second, and more importantly, moral standing arguments prohibit states from blaming advantaged as well as disadvantaged offenders. This unwelcome outcome suggests that standing approaches incorrectly analyze the source of moral misgivings about punishing the disadvantaged. I conclude that those who share such concerns should put standing accounts aside. (shrink)

: It is argued here that Mozi's critique of warfare in the chapter "Against Offensive War" ("Fei gong") cannot be fully understood without the arguments presented in the chapter "Explaining Ghosts" ("Ming gui"). For Mozi, the problem of war can only be resolved if the existence of providential ghosts can be proven. But he indicates in his arguments concerning the existence of ghosts that it is doubtful whether such a condition can be met. Consequently, despite the apparently optimistic tenor of (...) chapters such as "Imperial Love" ("Jian ai"), Mozi's political thought reveals an implicit understanding of the rational limits of resolving fundamental problems of injustice in the world. (shrink)

Invasive neurotechnologies are a frequent subject of discussion in neuroethics. Technologies, like deep brain stimulation and implantable brain-computer interfaces, are thought to hold significant promise for human health and well-being, but they also raise important ethical questions about autonomy, safety, stigma, privacy, and agency, among others. The terms ‘invasive’ and ‘invasiveness’ are commonly applied to these and other neurotechnologies, yet the concept of invasiveness itself is rarely defined or delimited. Some have suggested that invasiveness may have multiple meanings – physical, (...) emotional, or lifestyle – and that confusion about how people use the terms may lead to harm, especially for users of invasive devices. It is uncertain if debates in neuroethics contribute to this confusion. To investigate this, we conducted a study of how the term ‘invasiveness’ is used in neuroethics. We found that neuroethicists almost always use ‘invasiveness’ to refer to the physical features of interventions, and rarely to refer to other senses of invasiveness. We also found that referencing invasiveness does not determine which ethical issues are prioritized for a given type of neurotechnology. Overall, this study affirms the importance of understanding the meaning and use of the concept of invasiveness in ethical discussion of neurotechnology while also suggesting the need for further work in the area and consideration for rethinking what forms of technology we consider to be invasive. (shrink)

Sheds new light on Heidegger's early theological development.

Marking the centenary of Walter Benjamin's immensely influential essay, "Toward the Critique of Violence," this critical edition presents readers with an altogether new, fully annotated translation of a work that is widely recognized as a classic of modern political theory. The volume includes twenty-one notes and fragments by Benjamin along with passages from all of the contemporaneous texts to which his essay refers. Readers thus encounter for the first time in English provocative arguments about law and violence advanced (...) by Hermann Cohen, Kurt Hiller, Erich Unger, and Emil Lederer. A new translation of selections from Georges Sorel's Reflections on Violence further illuminates Benjamin's critical program. The volume also includes, for the first time in any language, a bibliography Benjamin drafted for the expansion of the essay and the development of a corresponding philosophy of law. An extensive introduction and afterword provide additional context. With its challenging argument concerning violence, law, and justice-which addresses such topical matters as police violence, the death penalty, and the ambiguous force of religion-Benjamin's work is as important today as it was upon its publication in Weimar Germany a century ago. (shrink)

Thinking in Public examines the ambivalence that public political life and the figure of the intellectual provoked in the generation of European Jewish thinkers born around 1900. By comparing Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, and Leo Strauss, Wurgaft offers a new perspective on the relationship between philosophers and politics.

This dissertation offers a phenomenology of that mode of self-interpretation in which it becomes possible for an interpreter to intentionally participate in the production of moral norms to which the interpreter himself or herself feels bound. Part One draws on Richard Rorty's notion of the "ironist" in order to thematize the phenomenon I call "moral friction"; a condition in which an interpreter becomes explicitly aware of the historical and cultural contingencies of their own moral vocabularies, practices, and concerns and as (...) a result find themselves incapable of feeling the normative weight implicit in these. Part Two draws on Heidegger's existential analytic of human being, Gadamer's development of Hermeneutic Phenomenology, and Hegel's notion of "sublation" in order to map how novel interpretations can irreversibly displace the coherence of older interpretations. I call this form of interpretation "moral phenomenology." Finally, in Part Three, I utilize a selective phenomenology of musical improvisation to plot the unique temporal orientation of self-interpretation that results from intentionally deploying this irreversible displacement of older interpretations that involve normative moral implications. I call the form of life that is marked by this hermeneutic mode the "improviser." The result is a description of a form of life in which it becomes possible to explicitly participate in the production of moral norms within a historical and culturally contingent context that nevertheless preserves standards of rational justification for normative moral judgment without the need for atemporal first principles. The availability of this mode of self-interpretation displaces the sharp distinction between non-normative descriptive phenomenology and normative moral reasoning by placing the latter within a non-teleological historical practice that engages in the production of interpretations which irreversibly displace older interpretations--a practice that is governed by the critical cultivation of contingent moral norms within the open investigation into the good life for human being. (shrink)

Any comprehensive theory of smell must account for (1) the distal nature of smells, (2) how smells are represented within odorous experiences, and (3) the olfactory quality of smells. Molecular Structure Theory (MST) and more recent developments arguably provide an account of these questions. It has been argued that we can account for (3) olfactory quality in light of the molecular structure of chemical compounds that compose the odorant plumes which we perceive as (1) distal mereological complex perduring objects within (...) smellscapes. Additionally it has been argued that olfactory perceptual and cognitive processing implements (2) a non-conceptual representational system that is incompatible with the compositional format employed by semantic processing systems. The theory I have been developing generates a comprehensive account of smell by treating these as nested issues inherent in for the nature of smell (Young, 2016, 2019a-d, 2020). However, the chapter assesses the adequacy of my theory by addressing recent criticisms of MST’s account of olfactory quality (Barwich 2014, 2015; Keller 2015, 2017), the need for positing odor objects (Barwich 2019), and a possible incompatibility between my account of synchronic odor perception in MST and more recent developments focusing on the diachronic experiences of smellscapes. (shrink)

This paper is about the moral status of those human beings with profound intellectual disabilities (PIDs). We hold the common sense view that they have equal status to ‘normal’ human beings, and a higher status than any non-human animal. We start with an admission, however: we don’t know how to give a fully satisfying theoretical account of the grounds of moral status that explains this view. And in fact, not only do we not know how to give such an account, (...) but the most satisfying account of moral status that we know (which we call ‘the standard account’) entails that our view is false. It entails that those with PIDs have a lower status than ordinary human beings and an equal status to non-human animals. Now, in this paper, we do absolutely nothing to try to show where the standard account goes wrong, and we do absolutely nothing to resolve the difficulties we see in developing an alternative account that supports our view. Indeed, we do not give any argument against the standard account or in favour of our own view. Instead, we raise the following question: in order to be justified in continuing to hold our view, are we obliged to give such an account? Our answer will be that we are not. (shrink)

What happens when there is not enough data to train machine learning algorithms? In recent years, so-called ‘synthetic data’ have been increasingly used to add to or supplement the training regimes of various machine learning algorithms. Seeking to read the notion of supplementarity differently through an engagement with the work of Jacques Derrida, I propose that the nascent emergence of synthetic data embodies what I call the logic of the synthetic supplement in algorithmic societies. I argue, on the one hand, (...) that the synthetic supplement promises and claims to resolve the ethico-political tensions, frictions, and intractabilities of machine learning. On the other hand, it always falls short of these promises because it necessarily intervenes in that which it claims to merely augment. Ultimately, this means that the gaps and frictions of machine learning cannot be completely filled, supplemented, or resolved. (shrink)

Physical theories continue to be interpreted in terms of particles. The idea of a particle required modification with the advent of quantum theory, but remains central to scientific explanation. Particle ontologies also have the virtue of explaining basic epistemic features of the world, and so remain appealing for the scientific realist. However, particle ontologies are untenable when coupled with the empirically necessary postulate of permutation invariance—the claim that permuting the roles of particles in a representation of a physical state results (...) in a representation of the same physical state. I demonstrate that any theory which is permutation invariant in this sense is incompatible with a particle ontology. (shrink)

Consider the following 'principles':2(Norm of Belief Schema) Necessarily, a belief of is correct (relative to some scenario) if and only if p (at that scenario) — where 'p' has the aforementioned content .(Generalized Norm of Belief) Necessarily, for all propositions , a belief of is correct (relative to some scenario) if and only if is true (at that scenario).Both 'principles' appear to capture the aim(s) of belief. (NBS) particularizes the aims to beliefs of distinct content-types. (GNB) generalizes these aims of (...) beliefs as truth. Properly understood, the instances of (NBS) appear to be at least approximately true as does (GNB). Of course, one might harbor concerns about whether these are mere .. (shrink)

This review essay looks at Andrew Brei’s edited volume, Ecology, ethics and hope, Candis Callison’s How climate change comes to matter: The communal life of facts, Randall Curren and Ellen Metzger’s Living well now and in the future: Why sustainability matters, Willis Jenkins’ The future of ethics: Sustainability, social justice, and religious creativity, and Byron Williston’s The Anthropocene project: Virtue in the age of climate change. These recent works highlight various normative approaches for engaging with what is often referred to (...) as the Anthropocene. Drawing on virtue ethics, pragmatism, and concepts such as intergenerational justice, they seek to address some of the defining moral challenges of our time: how we should respond to this unprecedented era of anthropogenic climate and environmental change, and what ethical resources we can draw on to guide our response. On a larger level, they reveal how the climate crisis is testing the limits of our current moral systems and helping to drive greater ethical innovation and adaptation in the process. (shrink)

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)

The history of design arguments stretches back to before Aquinas, who claimed that things which lack intelligence nevertheless act for an end to achieve the best result. Although science has advanced to discredit this claim, it remains true that many biological systems display remarkable adaptations of means to ends. Versions of design arguments have persisted over the centuries and have culminated in theories that propose an intelligent designer of the universe. This volume is the only comprehensive survey of 2,000 years (...) of debate, drawing on both historical and modern literature to identify, clarify and assess critically the many forms of design argument for the existence of God. It provides a neutral, informative account of the topic from antiquity to Darwin, and includes concise primers on probability and cosmology. It will be of great value to upper-level undergraduates and graduates in philosophy of religion, theology, and philosophy of science. (shrink)

The ethical considerations of insider trading have been widely debated in the academic literature :171–182, 1990). In 2013, the STOCK Act, which was initially passed to mitigate insider trading by government officials, was quickly and unexpectedly amended to allow certain government employees to withhold their financial information. To identify and quantify the potential costs placed on investors by non-corporate insider traders, we use the unusual circumstances surrounding this amendment. For a sample of stocks most held by members of Congress, we (...) find that, relative to control stocks, liquidity significantly worsens and volatility increases during the post-amendment period. Our results highlight the costs that are incurred by investors in the presence of non-corporate insider trading. These findings call for a stronger development of an ethical framework that justifies the restriction of all types of insider trading. (shrink)

What am I? And what is my relationship to the thing I call ‘my body’? Thus each of us can pose for himself the philosophical problems of the nature of the self and the relationship between a person and his body. One answer to the question about the relationship between a person and the thing he calls ‘his body’ is that they are two things composed of the same matter at the same time (like a clay statue and the piece (...) of clay which presently constitutes it). This is the ‘constitution view’. In this paper we give a novel overview of the literature on personal identity, the constitution view, and surrounding topics. (shrink)

_Steal This University_ explores the paradox of academic labor. Universities do not exist to generate a profit from capital investment, yet contemporary universities are increasingly using corporations as their model for internal organization. While the media, politicians, business leaders and the general public all seem to share a remarkable consensus that higher education is indispensable to the future of nations and individuals alike, within academia bitter conflicts brew over the shape of tomorrow's universities. Contributors to the volume range from the (...) star academic to the disgruntled adjunct and each bring a unique perspective to the discussion on the academy's over-reliance on adjuncts and teaching assistants, the debate over tenure and to the valiant efforts to organize unions and win rights. (shrink)

Despite their centrality to the scientific enterprise, both the nature of scientific variables and their relation to inductive inference remain obscure. I suggest that scientific variables should be viewed as equivalence classes of sets of physical states mapped to representations (often real numbers) in a structure preserving fashion, and argue that most scientific variables introduced to expand the degrees of freedom in terms of which we describe the world can be seen as products of an algorithmic inductive inference first identified (...) by William W. Rozeboom. This inference algorithm depends upon a notion of natural kind previously left unexplicated. By appealing to dynamical kinds—equivalence classes of causal system characterized by the interventions which commute with their time evolution—to fill this gap, we attain a complete algorithm. I demonstrate the efficacy of this algorithm in a series of experiments involving the percolation of water through granular soils that result in the induction of three novel variables. Finally, I argue that variables obtained through this sort of inductive inference are guaranteed to satisfy a variety of norms that in turn suit them for use in further scientific inferences. (shrink)

Various causal details of the genetic process of translation have been singled out to account for its privileged status as a ‘code'. We explicate the biological uses of coding talk by characterizing a class of special causal processes in which topological properties are the causally relevant ones. This class contains both the process of translation and communication theoretic coding processes as special cases. We propose a formalism in terms of graphs for expressing our theory of biological codes and discuss its (...) utility in understanding biological systems. *Received May 2007; revised May 2008. †To contact the authors, please write to: Department of Philosophy, Baker Hall 135, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213; e-mail: [email protected] or [email protected]. (shrink)

The inconsistent definition of empathy has had a negative impact on both research and practice. The aim of this article is to review and critically appraise a range of definitions of empathy and, through considered analysis, to develop a new conceptualisation. From the examination of 43 discrete definitions, 8 themes relating to the nature of empathy emerged: “distinguishing empathy from other concepts”; “cognitive or affective?”; “congruent or incongruent?”; “subject to other stimuli?”; “self/other distinction or merging?”; “trait or state influences?”; “has (...) a behavioural outcome?”; and “automatic or controlled?” The relevance and validity of each theme is assessed and a new conceptualisation of empathy is offered. The benefits of employing a more consistent and complete definition of empathy are discussed. (shrink)

Most attempts to answer the question of whether populations of groups can undergo natural selection focus on properties of the groups themselves rather than the dynamics of the population of groups. Those approaches to group selection that do emphasize dynamics lack an account of the relevant notion of equivalent dynamics. I show that the theory of ‘dynamical kinds’ I proposed in Jantzen :3617–3646, 2014) can be used as a framework for assessing dynamical equivalence. That theory is based upon the notion (...) of a dynamical symmetry, a transformation of a system that commutes with its evolution through time. In the proposed framework, structured sets of dynamical symmetries are used to pick out equivalence classes of systems. These classes are large enough to encompass the range of phenomena we associate with natural selection, yet restrictive enough to guarantee a sort of causal homogeneity. By characterizing dynamical kinds via symmetry structures in this way, the question of levels of selection becomes a precise question about which populations respect the dynamical symmetries of Darwinian evolution. Standard population genetic models suggest that populations undergoing evolution by natural selection are partially characterized by a group of fitness-scaling symmetries. I demonstrate conditions under which these symmetries may be satisfied by populations of individuals, populations of groups of individuals, or both simultaneously. (shrink)

Many theories on cognition assume that people adapt their decision strategies depending on the situation they face. To test if and how affect guides the selection of decision strategies, we conducted an online study (N = 166), where different mood states were induced through video clips. Results indicate that mood influenced the use of decision strategies. Negative mood, in particular anger, facilitated the use of non-compensatory strategies, whereas positive mood promoted compensatory decision rules. These results are in line with the (...) idea that positive mood broadens the focus of attention and thus increases the use of compensatory decision strategies that take many pieces of information into account, whereas negative mood narrows the focus of attention and thus fosters non-compensatory strategies that rely on a selective use of information. The results further indicate that gaining a deeper theoretical understanding of the cognitive mechanisms that govern decision processes requires taking emotions into account. (shrink)

There can be some direct clinical value to receiving valid incidental findings of XXY for most individuals with Klinefelter’s syndrome. The severity of Klinefelter’s and the magnitude of benefit fr...

Die Frage nach der Quelle von Freiheit ist, angesichts einer wesentlich durch neoliberalistische Lebens- und Wirtschaftsmodelle ausgelösten planetarischen Krise, zu einer Herausforderung der vorwiegend individualistischen Grundlage pädagogischer Theorie geworden. Wir stellen dieser unter dem Titel der „kulturellen Resilienz“ einen relational-transformatorischen bildungstheoretischen Ansatz gegenüber, in dessen Zentrum eine relationale Freiheitstheorie steht. Im Rahmen einer agentiell-realistischen (Barad 2012) Reinterpretation soziologischer Resilienztheorie (Brown 2015) verorten wir Freiheit im Spannungsfeld aufeinander bezogener Momente der Rootedness als Praxis eines sinnlich-leiblichen und zugleich kritisch-ästhetischen Gewahrwerdens von Entanglement (...) (versus desengagierte Rationalität), Resourcefulness als diffraktionale (versus reflexive) umgestaltende Praxis der Hervorbringung von Welt, sowie „Resistance“ als performative und strukturbildende intra-aktionale, d.h. aus Relationierungen (versus abstrahierende Distanz) hervorgehende Praxis der Kritik. „Freiheit“ wird demnach bildungstheoretisch wie pädagogisch nicht durch eine Position außerhalb von Bindungen verwirklicht, sondern durch die Möglichkeit, bindende Strukturen innerhalb materieller Kollektive und kultureller Apparate neu zu konfigurieren. (shrink)

Análise da ascensão do comunitarismo cultural, tal como ele se coloca supranacionalmente diante da repactualização política internacional originária do crash financeiro de 2008. A partir do lócus enunciativo, colocam-se dois enlaces principais, do ponto de vista literário e cultural: para os países de língua portuguesa e ibero-americanos. Tais formulações não restringem políticas de cooperação e de solidariedade, pois que, de acordo com o autor, o mundo configura-se cada vez mais como de fronteiras múltiplas e identidades plurais. O texto, a partir (...) dessas configurações, centra-se no comunitarismo cultural dos países de língua portuguesa, levantando questões de ordem política no sentido de problematizar a atual assimetria dos fluxos culturais e as estratégias de administração da diferença para a preservação de hegemonias estabelecidas. (shrink)

Despite the historical and contemporary significance of the Sharia, it has not yet been possible to solve the puzzle of its origins. Whereas previous research has postulated a greater or lesser degree of endogenous Islamic development, the present study reaches a different conclusion, namely that at the end of the 8th century Muslim state lawyers in Baghdad codified an Islamic "Imperial Law", oriented strongly towards Roman-Byzantine law. It is part of an Islamic-Byzantine context, and can only be explained against this (...) intercultural background. (shrink)

Der weit verbreitete, aber ausserordentlich mehrdeutige Begriff der Identitat wird in dieser Arbeit zunachst einer analytischen und historischen Untersuchung unterzogen. Eine anschliessende ausfuhrliche Rekonstruktion der Identitatstheorie G. H. Meads fuhrt zu einer kritischen Differenzierung von selbstbewusster,Identitat' und asthetischem bzw. asthetisch-existenziellem,Selbst'. Letztere werden als Momente einer unhintergehbaren Selbstfremdheit des Subjekts erkannt, welche es in Theorie und Praxis zu berucksichtigen gilt.

According to infinitism, beliefs can be justified by an infinite chain of reasons. So far, infinitism has rarely been taken seriously and often even dismissed as inconsistent. However, Peijnenburg and Atkinson have recently argued that beliefs can indeed be justified by an infinite chain of reasons, if justification is understood probabilistically. In the following, I will discuss the formal result that has led to this conclusion. I will then introduce three probabilistic explications of justification and examine to which extent they (...) support Peijnenburg’s and Atkinson’s claim. (shrink)

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In this article we show how to extract with the use of the Buchholz -Cichon-Weiermann approach to subrecursive hierarchies from Rathjen's 1991 ordinal analysis of KPM a characterization of the provably total number-theoretic functions of KPM and some of its subsystems in a uniform and direct way.

World-leading philosopher Andrew Benjamin presents a radically new materialist philosophy of art and a rethinking of the history of art in that context.