In the presence of chance moves in a semantical game, the existence of pure optimal strategies does not guarantee the existence of winning ones. This fact provides a basis for constructing supervaluational semantical games with a chance move. Additional possibilities of using chance moves in game-theoretical semantics are also discussed.

We associate the semantic game with chance moves conceived by Blinov with Blamey’s partial logic. We give some equivalent alternatives to the semantic game, some of which are with a third player, borrowing the idea of introducing the pseudo-player called Nature in game theory. We observe that IF propositional logic proposed by Sandu and Pietarinen can be equivalently translated to partial logic, which implies that imperfect information may not be necessary for IF propositional logic. We also indicate that (...) some independent quantifiers can be regarded as dependent quantifiers of indeterminate sequence, using the interjunction connective in partial logic. We conclude our paper by indicating some further research in a more general setting. (shrink)

In this chapter we explore the importance of the Pantheism Controversy for the evolution of Kant’s so-called “Moral Argument” for the Highest Good and its postulates. After an initial discussion of the Canon of the Critique of Pure Reason, we move on to the relationship between faith and reason in the Pantheism Controversy, Kant’s response to the Controversy in his 1786 “Orientation” Essay, Thomas Wizenmann’s criticisms of that essay, and finally to the Critique of Practical Reason. We argue that while (...) Kant used the Pantheism Controversy to reset his account of the Highest Good, its treatment in the Orientation Essay was susceptible to the objections raised by Thomas Wizenmann, and thus in need of the further advances found in the Critique of Practical Reason. (shrink)

This article aims to highlight the extent to which Kant’s account of belief draws on the views of his contemporaries. Situating the non-evidentialist features of Crusius’s account of belief within his broader account, I argue that they include antecedents to both Kant’s distinction between pragmatic and moral belief and his conception of a postulate of pure practical reason. While moving us closer to Kant’s arguments for the first postulate, however, both Crusius’s and Meier’s arguments for the immortality of the soul (...) fail to anticipate the most important aspect of their Kantian counterparts. Developing the non-evidentialist features of Basedow’s account of belief, I distinguish it from its Pascalian and Jamesian relatives and argue that it is the clearest antecedent to Kant’s arguments for the first and second postulates. Finally, I consider the development of Kant’s account of belief after the first Critique in light of the foregoing, and discuss the broader implications of my analysis. (shrink)

Responding to the need for a timely and authoritative volume dedicated to this burgeoning and expansive area of research, this handbook will provide readers with a map of themes, topics, and arguments in the field of engineering ethics education (EEE). Featuring critical discussion, research collaboration, and a team of international contributors of globally recognised standing, this volume comprises six key sections which elaborate on the foundations of EEE; teaching methods; accreditation and assessment; and interdisciplinary contributions. Over 100 researchers of EEE (...) from around the globe consider the field from the perspectives of teaching, research, philosophy, and administration. The chapters cover fast-moving topics central to our current understanding of the world such as GDPR, AI, biotechnology, and ChatGPT; new insights into best practices research to equip programme leaders and instructors delivering ethics content to students. This Open Access volume will be of interest to researchers, scholars, postgraduate students, and faculty involved with engineering education, engineering ethics, and philosophy of education. Curriculum designers, staff developers teaching pedagogical courses to faculty, and engineering professionals may also benefit from this volume. (shrink)

Suicidal Thoughts is a compilation of some of the most moving and insightful writing accomplished on the topic of suicide. It presents the thoughts and experiences of fifteen writers who have contemplated suicide-some on a professional level, others on a personal level, and a few, both personally and professionally. Through this collection, the reader is able to bear witness to the struggle between life and death and to the devastating aftermath of suicide. Suicidal Thoughts provides readers with a better understanding (...) of the reasons why some individuals give serious consideration to killing themselves. (shrink)

Ross Cameron’s the moving spotlight reminds me a bit of Pirates of the Caribbean. Although there are no pirates, it’s a rip roaring swashbuckling adventure. It’s a wild ride. Truth be told, many of us will probably conclude that it’s no more plausible an account of our world than is Pirates of the Caribbean a faithful depiction of piracy. I’m not a moving spotlight theorist. There aren’t many of them out there. I’m not even an A-theorist, though there are plenty (...) of those. And there was little chance that this book would convert me. But for all that it’s well worth the read; because even if you come away from the book holding onto the same view of time as you had going in, you will certainly learn something along the way. (shrink)

Humean accounts of chance have a problem with undermining futures: they have to accept that some series of events are physically possible and have a nonzero chance but are inconsistent with the chances being what they are. This contradicts basic platitudes about chances (such as those given by Bigelow et al. (1993) and Schaffer (2007)) and leads to inconsistency between plausible constraints on credences. We show how Humeans can avoid these contradictions by drawing on metaphysically impossible worlds that (...) are, nevertheless, scientifically possible. One major advantage of our approach is that one single move deals with these both problems, whereas previous Humean approaches to undermining (such as that given by Lewis (1994), Thau (1994), and Hall (1994)) have only addressed the connection between credence and chance. Furthermore, our approach connects more closely with the way we employ stochastic scientific theories. And it’s part of a unified solution to other challenges that the Humean faces. (shrink)

Moving is hard. Moving to a new neighbourhood, city or country is difficult without money to buy a bus ticket, money to pay for a visa, or even a passport from a rich country: a citizen in Afghanistan, with a GDP-per-capita of roughly $500 a year, has a close to 0% chance of obtaining any visa to any wealthy country. Wealthy countries fear that those trying to enter from poor countries will try to stay, particularly if fleeing persecution. As (...) a result, wealthy states ensure that those most eager to escape their homes are least able to do so. (shrink)

David Lewis' "Principal Principle" is a purported principle of rationality connecting credence and objective chance. Almost all of the discussion of the Principal Principle in the philosophical literature assumes classical probability theory, which is unfortunate since the theory of modern physics that, arguably, speaks most clearly of objective chance is the quantum theory, and quantum probabilities are not classical probabilities. This paper develops an account of how chance works in quantum theory that reveals a connection between credence (...) and quantum chance quite unlike what is envisioned in the philosophical literature: as a theorem of quantum probability, updating a completely additive chance function on a knowledge of chance brings credence into line with chance. The account also suggests a way of construing the Humean supervenience of chance that has the virtue of dissolving some puzzles about the "undermining" of chances. A number of interpretative moves in quantum theory are needed to generate the account of quantum chance on offer here, and they can all be disputed. But engaging in these disputes is part and parcel of naturalized metaphysics, and as such it can be more productive than engaging in the battle of intuitions among analytical metaphysicians about how chance ought to work this and other possible worlds. -/- . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Chance to CutBruce H. CampbellMy gloved hand reaches for progressively sharper surgical instruments. The prior radiation therapy and recurrent cancer [End Page E3] have made his neck tissues as stiff and hard as an old block of wood; everything appears too dull and feels too dry under the bright operating room lights. I push, dissect, urge, divide, prod, and spread with little effect.The nursing staff keeps to (...) its routine—completing computer entries, retrieving supplies, counting sponges—only intermittently aware that things are not going well at the point of attack. Nondescript music plays softly and the anesthesia machine continues to emit its gentle sounds. The junior resident—assisting me with the first of many neck dissections she will see during her five years of training—grips the retractor as she has been told and dabs the wound periodically to clear any blood or fluid.I glance up to recheck the CT scan. It confirms that this man’s recurrent cancer is just below the next layer of neck muscles. There are also some large blood vessels and major nerves nearby. I am confident, though, that I will be able to expose the mass, protect all of the critical structures, and safely remove the cancer.Curing cancer with surgery is no small feat, mind you. Cancer is, after all, a molecular disease not easily confined to an obvious lump, even though we sometimes refer to a malignant mass being “like a walnut” or “as hard and round as a marble.” The actual disease rests deep inside each cancer cell where the genetic code—the DNA—makes mistake–after–mistake. If cancer is to be cured with a surgical procedure, the surgeon must remove every last cell that is capable of making the same nonsensical, life–threatening error. Given Science’s rudimentary knowledge of cancer cell dynamics and signaling, it’s a miracle that surgery ever works. Yet, we continue to try. And we succeed just often enough to keep on trying.I rearrange the retractors and alter my approach. My mentors would have known what to do next, I imagine. My training included time well–spent with brilliant and technically–gifted surgeons. How would they have approached this case? Their experience and instincts might have told them to open the wound more widely, work the lateral and deep margins first, or position the instruments differently.Perhaps, one of my mentors would have attacked this man’s tumor using the same approach I am attempting but would have known exactly where to exploit some area of weakness that I cannot locate. A few swift, confident moves and he would have held the mass in his hands. “That’s it. We’re done,” he would have said.I met this patient several months ago when his cancer was first discovered and have seen him throughout his course of treatment. Recently, his daughter had accompanied him to the office to review his options. “Treatment has been rugged, Doc,” he reminded me. “The cancer’s still there and they said I can’t get any more radiation. Chemo would only prolong things. I don’t really want surgery, but what choice do I have if I want to be cured?”“Supportive care is an option, but the only curative approach is surgery.”“Well, I’m not ready to quit yet, Doc. I got grand-kids, y’know. I want to watch them grow up.” He nodded to his daughter. “I’m in charge of spoiling her little boys.”The daughter smiled. We crowded around the computer screen to look at the scans. I showed them how the tumor was invading and destroying surrounding structures. I described the surgery and the risks.“There are many things I will not know about your tumor until we are actually in the operating room,” I explained. Surgery in the setting of recurrent disease involves a series of on–the–spot decisions and course corrections. The odds of success are unknowable. “Sometimes, the only way to find out if we can remove the cancer is simply to try.”He took a deep breath and looked at his daughter. “Well then, Doc, if surgery is the only... (shrink)

Individual creativity is standardly treated as an ‘internalist’ process occurring solely in the head. An alternative, more interactionist view is presented here, where working with objects, media and other external things is seen as a fundamental component of creative thought. The value of chance interaction and chance cueing — practices widely used in the creative arts — is explored briefly in an account of the creative method of choreographer Wayne McGregor and then more narrowly in an experimental study (...) that compared performance on a Scrabble-like word discovery problem. Subjects were presented with seven letters and given two minutes to call out three-to-seven-letter English words. There were three conditions: The tiles were fixed in place, subjects were free to move the tiles manually or the tiles could be randomly shuffled. Results showed that random shuffling was best, with manual movement second. Three reasons are provided: Shuffling is faster and cheaper than mentally thinking of candidates; randomizing strings covers the search space better than a deterministic method based on past successes; and randomizing is equivalent to adding diversity to a team, which is known empirically to lead to more creative solutions. (shrink)

Thinking through Error: The Moving Target of Knowledge argues that there is a positive view of error. Making errors does not only mean that we’ve done something wrong, but also that we —more or less unaware— are given a chance to find something new and true. Trying to avoid errors is a social request, but it is uncertainty that has a liberating function on the philosophical level, as well as on the individual, psychological level.

‘Chance’ is arguably a context‐sensitive expression, a fact that some have thought bears upon the debate about the compatibility of determinism with objective, non‐trivial chances (chances with values other than 0 or 1). In this paper, I argue that this attempted move from context sensitivity to compatibilism is misguided, for a number of reasons. First, it relies on a theory of context sensitivity that we have independent reason to reject. Second, the resulting compatibilist position leaves unanswered precisely the sorts (...) of questions we reasonably expect a metaphysical account of chance to answer. (shrink)

Encounters in the Arts, Literature, and Philosophy focuses on chance and scripted encounters as sites of tensions and alliances where new forms, ideas, meanings, interpretations, and theories can emerge. By moving beyond the realm of traditional hermeneutics, Jérôme Brillaud and Virginie Greene have compiled a volume that vitally illustrates how reading encounters represented in artefacts, texts, and films is a vibrant and dynamic mode of encountering and interpreting. With contributions from esteemed academics such as Christie McDonald, Pierre Saint-Amand, Susan (...) Suleiman, and Jean-Jacques Nattiez, this book is a multidisciplinary collaboration between scholars from a range of disciplines including philosophy, literature, musicology and film studies. It uses examples chiefly from French culture and covers the Early Modern era to the twentieth century while providing a thorough and representative array of theoretical and hermeneutical approaches. (shrink)

The role of chance in producing a picture by snapping a shutter release before a complex and quickly changing scene weakens the bond between the historic action photograph and the meanings it is routinely asked to bear. To appreciate this problem and to understand the array of popular notions that have been marshaled to finesse or suppress the role of chance in photographic production, I consider the case of Joe Rosenthal’s 1945 photograph of American servicemen raising a flag (...) on Iwo Jima. The analysis pushes the production of this famous photograph through a series of zoological analogies: Is it like a fisherman reeling in a trophy catch? Like a cat pouncing on a mouse or a spider setting a trap for a fly? Like a pig pushing its snout through the dirt? Like chimpanzees banging at typewriters? These analogies are playful but also serious. We need new models for understanding the production of the historic action photograph because the predominant modern and postmodern approaches to that production have suppressed the role of chance. Whereas the modern regime tends to understand the historic action photograph as an inspired flash of history, the postmodern regime tends to understand it as a discursive effect. Entertaining the notion that such a photograph is instead a stochastic result leads to a new conception of photography and its relationship to history. Chance emerges as a third kind of photographic madness, alongside the industrial madness decried by Charles Baudelaire and the indexical madness that moved Roland Barthes. (shrink)

To many, chance and art are antagonistic terms. But a number of 20th century artists have turned this notion on its head by attempting to create artworks based on randomness. Among those, three in particular articulated a well-argued and thorough theory of the radical use of chance in art: André Breton (writer), John Cage (composer) and François Morellet (visual artist). The implications of such a move away from established aesthetics are far-reaching, as much in conceptual as in practical (...) terms, as this book hopes to make clear. Of paramount importance in this coincidentia oppositorum is the suggested possibility of a correlation between the artistic use of chance and a system of thought itself organised around chance. Indeed placing randomness at the centre of one’s art may have deeper philosophical consequences than just on the aesthetical level. (shrink)

Despite the expansion of post-school education and incentives to participate in lifelong learning, institutions and labour markets continue to interlock in shaping life chances according to starting social position, family and private resources. The dominant view that the economic and social returns to public investment in adult learning are too low to warrant large-scale public funding has been challenged by recent LLAKES research that shows significant returns to participants in lifelong learning with improvements in both their employability and employment prospects. (...) It is argued that, under conditions of growing social polarisation and economic uncertainty, lifelong learning can have a significant protective effect by keeping adults close to a changing labour market. In this paper we review research from different disciplinary and epistemological traditions, providing evidence of the beneficial effects of lifelong learning, especially when taking into account the dynamics of the life course. Transitions and turning-points in youth and in adult life are markers of diversification of the life course; how far these diversifications amount to 'de-standardisation' of the life course is debated. They involve biographical negotiation, in which any decision is consequential upon previous decisions and involves the exercise of contextualised preferences as well as the calculations of 'rational choice'. Gaining a better understanding of how changing demands are negotiated at different life stages offers a new perspective, moving from narrow versions of rational choice theory towards models of biographical negotiation as promising avenues for effective policy-making. (shrink)

Are mandatory lockdown measures, which place restrictions on one’s freedom to move and assemble, justifiable? Offhand, such measures appear to compromise important rights to secure goals of public health. Proponents of such measures think the trade-off is worth it; opponents think it isn’t. However, one might think that casting the debate in these terms concedes too much to the opponents. Mandatory lockdown measures don’t infringe important rights because no one has a right to impose a risk of grievous harm on (...) others—and, in the context of a pandemic, participating in the prohibited activities (e.g., going out to the bar) does just that. -/- This chapter explores whether this defense of mandatory lockdown measures holds up. It, first, considers whether we have a right against risk imposition—and, if so, how such a right is best understood. It then considers the objection that, even if there is such a right, people who voluntarily choose to engage in the prohibited activities—at least if fully appraised of the risks involved—effectively waive it. The chapter argues that this objection fails. (shrink)

In this special issue, our objective is to clarify what biosemioticians may mean insofar as they claim that living systems are capable of making choices or that biosemiotic interpretations are partially indeterminate. A number of different senses of the term “chance” are discussed as we move toward a consensus. We find that biosemiosic chance may arise out of conditions involving quantum indeterminacy, randomness, deterministic chaos, or unpredictability, but biosemiosic chance is mainly due to the fact that living (...) entities invest their environments with different meanings and values, which are not inherent in the material aspects. Accordingly, interpretive responses are in part self-determined. A self-determined interpretation may be thought of as a process in which localized biases constrain the probabilities of the outcomes of the interactions between an agent and its environment. The agent’s internal formal constraints that are defined by similarity and proximity are relative and, as such, vague, and thus interpretation may be somewhat underdetermined and involve an element of chance. (shrink)

The compatibility of divine providence with the contingency of human freedom is widely-debated within medieval thought. Following recent works on the Islamicphilosopher Averroes, this essay expands the issue of causal indeterminism to include the less disputed question of contingency in the larger framework of chance. In tradition of Latin Averroism, Siger of Brabant provides a unique and heterodox perspective on the compatibility of chance with providence. Unlike his fellow scholastics who attempt to preserve contingency under the watchful gaze (...) of divine providence, Siger rejects such moves as destructive of contingency. He instead argues for restrictions on the determination of such events by the arche of divine providence, thus leaving them anarchic with respect to its order but capable of introducing new beginnings in the otherwise closed universe of causes. (shrink)

There is a way of teaching philosophy as a way of life that is focused on delivering content. In this paper, I consider a different way. It is focused on giving students the experience of philosophy as a way of life—in particular, the experience of being in love with wisdom. The main question of my paper is what it might be to teach philosophy in a way that prioritizes giving students the chance to fall in love with wisdom. I (...) do not so much argue for an answer as invite the reader to follow me along a path of metaphor, reflections on teaching philosophy, and quotations. (shrink)

How can constructivism and feminism inform and strengthen one another? The author of this text is a constructivist-feminist hermaphrodite, and so s/he addresses this question in the form of an inner dialogue. Instead of taking sex as a characteristic of individuals, s/he analyzes it as something performed locally in ways that vary from one situation to another. Investigating these performances offers constructivism an interesting theoretical opportunity and a chance to turn away from a sterile anti-epistemological stance. For feminism, a (...) radicalized notion of the construction of sexes opens up new political spaces and strategies. Constructivist texts, moreover, have the potential to "do" both the contingency and the necessity of our forms of life in their very style. (shrink)

In this paper I explore the question of the ways we might form enabling assemblages with non-human others, by returning to Spinoza’s theory of the composite individual. The challenge, as I see it, is less that of a need to move beyond a romanticized view of Nature as a harmonious whole, Nature as a perpetual threat, or Nature as motivated by a final cause (whether good or evil). The problem that confronts us, rather, is a problem of composition—which Nature do (...) we ally with, what components? How do we understand or define, much less defend, localized ecosystems which are supported (and threatened) by a dizzying and infinite array of intensive and extensive properties? This is a problem of the monstrous infinite. (shrink)

In 1945, the day after his famous public lecture on existentialism, Sartre gave an interview to a reporter at the café Le Flore; in it, he talks more about his novels The Age of Reason and The Reprieve than about Being and Nothingness , and he talks about the project for the future volume, The Last Chance . In this article I touch on how he reiterates points from the famous lecture in the interview, but especially on some of (...) his comments about Mathieu and Brunet in terms of freedom and 'bad faith'. I move on to discuss why the next volume, Death in the Soul (translated in the USA as Troubled Sleep ), was not the final one, and why The Last Chance was never completed. Then I turn to the largely unrecognized fact that the American translation of the third volume distorts Sartre's text for 150 pages by failing to show that he wrote the action of all of Part II in the present tense without paragraph breaks; I will offer an interpretation of this tense choice on Sartre's part. (shrink)

There is room for everyone in the Catholic Church, but there is no consent for same-sex marriage in that Church as marriage only between a baptized man and a woman is a sacrament. Same-sex marriage is inconsistent with the Holy Scripture where marriage is based on God’s natural law. This official Scripture’s interpretation results in lack of possibility to reconciliate the official teaching of the Church with the recognition of same-sex marriage. The world is moving forward and so are the (...) opinions of Christians and their growing support for same-sex marriage. Such marriage is recognized in thirty states worldwide, including states with dominant Catholic religion. Regardless the official teaching, the Catholic Church’s position is not uniform. The paper discusses the official interpretation of the Scripture concerning homosexuals, analyses the position of the Catholic Church toward same-sex marriage and indicates differences in Christians’ attitudes with respect to same-sex couples in Western and Eastern Europe. (shrink)

In this paper, I will argue that Rawls’s duty of assistance offers an incomplete picture of our international social and economic responsibilities. I will start by presenting the two main interpretations of the ‘Rawlsian circumstances of egalitarian distributive justice’ – the first requiring the existence of a ‘certain kind’ of cooperation, the second the existence of a ‘certain kind’ of interaction with the will – and then show that none of them rules out the applicability of international principles of egalitarian (...) distributive justice. My argument will draw on societies’ participation in the World Trade Organisation (WTO). So, in the second section I will show that even though this organization is not endowed with a centralized coercive authority, its participants are asked to accept significant constraints on their behaviour and are therefore owed a special justification for these constraints. I will also suggest that the alleged voluntariness of this organization may not only be contested (especially when developing societies are involved), but may also not be sufficient to rule out requirements of distributive equality. In the third section, I will show that, as any system of cooperation, the WTO gives rise to requirements of fairness and that, given the purpose it claims to serve, not all inequalities that can be traced back to so-called ‘domestic’ factors can be considered justified. More specifically, I will argue that the fairness of the WTO requires that all its participants be given a fair chance of benefiting from global market competitions, and that this is likely to entail significant egalitarian distributive duties among societies. (shrink)

It is somewhat of a mystery why one of Foucault's most important concepts—that of ‘dispositif’—is still quite vague in social and political theory; and while a small number of analyses have moved understanding forward, it remains stubbornly opaque. This paper argues that a strengthening of Foucault's concept can be achieved by integrating elements of Althusser’s formulation of a dispositif events), and a detailed examination of the shared conceptual history between dispositifs and discursive formations. Regarding, the paper contends that dispositifs restrict (...) three types of aleatory event: first, a ‘continuous present’ exerted upon objects and subjects; second, overdetermining repetitious occurrences; and third, negating the effects of unexpected aleatory events. The paper also argues that dispositifs are capable of producing certain forms of aleatory change. Regarding, four developmental thresholds of dispositifs are identified: strategic emergence, political elaboration, overdetermined a priori, and aleatory dominance. These two developments are argued to move Foucault's concept from being descriptive and largely passive to becoming a more theoretically active resource—what Deleuze terms changing the analytical to the diagnostic. (shrink)

Research in penalty kicking has primarily focused on spatial decision making, while temporal decision making has largely been neglected, even though it is as critical for success. Temporal decision making concerns goalkeepers choosing when to initiate their jump to the ball during the penalty taker's run-up, and penalty takers deciding where to kick the ball, either prior to the run-up or after the goalkeeper has committed to one side. We analyzed penalty takers' and goalkeepers' behavior during penalty shoot-outs at FIFA (...) World Cups and UEFA European Championships to scrutinize if temporal aspects of decision making have an impact on penalty kick success. Results indicate that the likelihood of a penalty kick being scored depends on the combination of penalty takers' and goalkeepers' temporal decision-making strategies. Hence, moving early more often seems fruitful for goalkeepers, while penalty takers should consider varying penalty kick strategy between attempts. (shrink)

This paper reflects on Virtue as a key concept at the source of the common, and still prevalent, classification of drawings as bad or good, which shifted from the moral or Ethical to the Aesthetics domain between 1400 and 1600. It is suggested that clarity and control were characteristics of goodness in a particular period, while fastness and chance were characteristics of goodness in subsequent times, yet both revealing the projections of the ethical over the aesthetic.

This paper attempts to identify behavioral patterns and compare their average success considering several criteria of bounded rationality. Experimentally observed choice behavior in various decision tasks is used to assess heterogeneity in how individual participants respond to 15 randomly ordered portfolio choices, each of which is experienced twice. Treatments differ in granting probability information and in eliciting aspirations. Since in our setting neither other regarding concerns nor risk attitude matter and probability of the binary chance move is choice irrelevant, (...) categorizing decision types relies on parameter dependence and choice adaptations. We find that most participants reduce systematically sub-optimality when following the identified criteria. (shrink)

Hintikka and Sandu’s independence-friendly logic is a conservative extension of first-order logic that allows one to consider semantic games with imperfect information. In the present article, we first show how several variants of the Monty Hall problem can be modeled as semantic games for IF sentences. In the process, we extend IF logic to include semantic games with chance moves and dub this extension stochastic IF logic. Finally, we use stochastic IF logic to analyze the Sleeping Beauty problem, (...) leading to the conclusion that the thirders are correct while identifying the main error in the halfers’ argument. (shrink)

Problem solving in a materially rich environment requires interacting with chance. Sixty-four participants were invited to solve 5-letter anagrams presented as movable tiles in conditions that either allowed the participants to move the tiles as they wished or only allowed random shuffling (without rearranging the tiles post shuffling) thus contrasting pure luck with an interactive model. We hypothesised that shuffling would break unhelpful mental sets and introduce beneficial unplanned problem-solving trajectories. However, participants performed significantly worse when shuffling, which suggests (...) luck plays less of a role than has been previously suggested. Granular analysis of seven critical cases revealed arbitrary path dependency across both conditions and moments of missed luck. It also questions current models of non-agentic luck and the ability to separate agent and luck. This research has implications for fostering better problem solving in an uncertain and fluid world. (shrink)

Moving from the correspondence beween Yorck von Wartenburg and Dilthey, this essay highlights the affinities between the two thinkers and their common belief that life represents the point of view of philosophy and the foundation of knowledge and science. More specifically, it is stressed how Yorck prefers, to the concept of Leben, too much static, that of Lebendigkeit, through which the dynamism proper of the lebend – the living – is made visible. Starting from the concept of Lebendigkeit and from (...) that of Geschichtlichkeit which is connected to it, this essay shows the intrinsic bond existing between the knowledge of life and the knowledge of history. Indeed, they both aim at the man’s self-knowledge and, consequently, at the chance of a representation of the present. (shrink)

A moving meditation on the hidden, sometimes difficult topics we must consider to live an authentic life, from the New York Times bestselling author of To Shake the Sleeping Self. We aren't born into a self. It is created without our consent, built on top of our circumstances, the off-handed comments we hear from others, and the moments that scared us most when we were young. But in the busyness of our daily life, we rarely get the chance to (...) think clearly about the questions that matter most. Who am I? Where do I belong? How much of who I am and what I do boils down to avoiding the things that make me feel small? We tuck these questions into the corner of our minds, but they drive our behavior far more than we give them credit for, even after we become adults. Writing with the passion and clarity that made his debut, To Shake the Sleeping Self, a national bestseller, Jenkins makes space to explore the seven topics we must think about in order to live a deeply considered life: ego, family, work, love, nature, death, and the soul. He considers the experiences that shape us into who we are, whether they're as heart-pounding as a rafting trip through the whitewater of the Grand Canyon, or as ordinary as the moment when we look in the mirror each morning. Through it all, Jenkins leads readers on a wide-ranging conversation about finding fulfillment in the people and places around us, and discovering the courage to show our deepest selves to the world. Like Streams to the Ocean is a profound reflection from one of our most original writers, a necessary read for anyone seeking a companion on the road to understanding. (shrink)

Between the zone of certainty beyond all doubt and the zone of incomprehensible uncertainty, the sources of which are nothing but chance, we need to use solid results from a vast interdisciplinarity. We wish to give here a sense of the factors in play and the state of the debate and advance in the territory of how interdisciplinarity may help to solve problems which are common in many areas of knowledge. Chaos and complexity certainly put limits on what we (...) can know. High complexity, asymmetry and/or non-linearity are universal types of imprecision. Can hazard have purpose and direction?The idea is that the more effort we put into project design to cover as many details and possible consequences as possible we can grasp in our in-depth analysis aiming to create the project (in art or science or society), the greater the chances that the random occurrence of the unpredictable event will settle on the project's purpose and direction and not on contrary to them. There is no vicious circle here. This kind of method can explain many good results already obtained in such circumstances. Simplicity, beauty, rationalistic optimism, are features of unshakeable scientific results We may call this feature of scientific theory or art _uniqueness. _Uniqueness is strongly correlated with _essentialization. _Science is working in that sense: to simplify a phenomenon to its essence in order to study it easily without losing anything important in the analysis. That is _essentialization. _Why and how complex systems move to the edge of chaos? And what do they do to stay there? They are in constant struggle to create or keep order in complexity. That is the pattern of self-organization, the specific feature of human nature. That is why our action is meant to build resilience to deal better with unpredictable events and prevent the emergence of a critical threshold. Uncertainty, indeterminacy, randomness, and contradictions appear, not as non-essential substances of debate to be eliminated by explanation, but as everlasting ingredients of our conception of reality. There are compelling reasons to believe that it is impossible to make accurate, nontrivial predictions concerning human behavior. Logic and reason are and remain priority, but unpredictability forces us to imagination and creative thinking. Indeed we are confronted with a new human landscape. The anomalies become the new normal. (shrink)

This book brings together eleven case studies of inductive risk-the chance that scientific inference is incorrect-that range over a wide variety of scientific contexts and fields. The chapters are designed to illustrate the pervasiveness of inductive risk, assist scientists and policymakers in responding to it, and productively move theoretical discussions of the topic forward.

This article identifies philosophical tensions and limitations within contemporary intersectionality theory which, it will be argued, have hindered its ability to explain how positioning in multiple social categories can affect life chances and influence the reproduction of inequality. We draw upon critical realism to propose an augmented conceptual framework and novel methodological approach that offers the potential to move beyond these debates, so as to better enable intersectionality to provide causal explanatory accounts of the ‘lived experiences’ of social privilege and (...) disadvantage. (shrink)

Time is woven into the fabric of our lives. Everything we do, we do in and across time. It is not just that our lives are stretched out in time, from the moment of birth to the moment of our death. It is that our lives are stories. We make sense of ourselves, today, by understanding who we were yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that; by understanding what we did and why we did it. Our memories (...) shape our present selves, since we are the product of who we were, and who we remember being. Yet who we are lasts for but a moment. It is who we will be that demands attention. We are forever projecting ourselves into the future. We painstakingly plan for the needs of our future selves, all the while knowing that while what we do will make those future selves who they are, still, our future selves are elusive. So it is not simply that we happen to live our lives in time, the way, say, one might happen to live in Australia, or Singapore. It is hard to fathom how things could be otherwise. What would it be to live a life without time? Yet time itself is intangible. Though we are keenly aware of what has been ‒ of pain and loss, regret and pride ‒ and of what might be ‒ of anticipation, and dread, and longing ‒ time itself seems unaffected by anything we do. Though we can anticipate a future birthday cake, time itself cannot be tasted. Though we can dread a future dentist’s appointment, time itself cannot be touched. Though we remember the crunching of leaves this past autumn, time itself cannot be heard. How can it be that something so central to each of us, to who we are, and what we care about, can be so spectral? What, in the end, is time? Is time real, like a substance in which each of us, like insects in amber, finds ourselves trapped? Is time a dimension through which we can move? Is time not a thing at all, but some connection between events? If time is real, what is it like? Does it flow like a river, taking each of us prisoner in its current, washing us ever closer to the end of our lives? Is time like a cresting wave, coming ever closer to each of us from the future, engulfing us, and then receding into the past? Or is time static? Like a one-way road that each of us might wander, with no chance to turn back? Or perhaps time is like none of these things. Perhaps time is more like space; something we can navigate freely, so that we can visit different times just like we visit different places. Perhaps we can we travel in time the way we can travel in space. These questions, and many more, are the focus of this book. Now, you might wonder what philosophers are doing writing a book about time. Surely that’s a job for physicists! It is true: a great deal of what we know about time stems from our understanding of physics. However, even in physics we find that there are questions about time that go unanswered. Moreover, increasingly, physicists are turning to philosophers for help in understanding the role that time plays in current physical theories. Our goal is to get the reader up to speed on some of the central issues that influence our understanding of time so that they too may play a role in this ongoing discussion between science and philosophy. We hope that in doing so it will become clear what philosophy can bring to the study of time. There is a natural narrative in philosophy regarding the study of time, and we have chosen to organise this book according to that narrative. However, the book may also be approached in a ‘choose-your-own adventure’ spirit. While later chapters build on material introduced in earlier chapters, you can skip around, reading the book in any order you choose. For the instructor, this means that she can design her course around this book in any number of ways, depending on the particular topic she wishes to focus on. (shrink)

In this wide-ranging and probing book Erin Manning extends her previous inquiries into the politics of movement to the concept of the minor gesture. The minor gesture, although it may pass almost unperceived, transforms the field of relations. More than a chance variation, less than a volition, it requires rethinking common assumptions about human agency and political action. To embrace the minor gesture's power to fashion relations, its capacity to open new modes of experience and manners of expression, is (...) to challenge the ways in which the neurotypical image of the human devalues alternative ways of being moved by and moving through the world—in particular what Manning terms "autistic perception." Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis and Whitehead's speculative pragmatism, Manning's far-reaching analyses range from fashion to depression to the writings of autistics, in each case affirming the neurodiversity of the minor and the alternative politics it gestures toward. (shrink)

Originally published in 1951, Homo Faberis an examination of the scientific outlook on human mental evolution through the lens of parapsychology. The book aims to undermine what its terms, the 'scientific outlook' examining the human interpretation of the world, and the preconceived scientific concepts that reality does not extend beyond the realm that our senses reveal. The book expands upon this and moves to examine the broader human understanding of the entire cosmos, challenging the scientific conception that this can (...) be grasped in principal by human intellect, arising from the chance combination of material particles. The book argues that the scientific outlook prevents humans from discovering in the Universe the meaning and purpose which are everywhere to be found if sought in the appropriate contemplative states of mind. This book provides a unique take on the examination of human psychology and the evolution of the brain from an alternative scientific stance. It will be of interest to anthropologists, historians and psychologists alike. will be of interest to anthropologists, historians and psychologists alike. (shrink)

According to the standard story of action, a story that can be traced back at least to David Hume , actions are those bodily movements that are caused and rationalized by a pair of mental states: a desire for some end, where ends can be thought of as ways the world could be, and a belief that something the agent can just do, namely, move her body in the way to be explained, has some suitable chance of making the (...) world the relevant way. Bodily movements that occur otherwise aren't actions, they are mere happenings. (shrink)

The philosophical controversy concerning the logical status of MAXENTmay be in large measure due to the conflation of two distinct logical roles:(1) A general inductive principle for updating subjective probabilities (2)a supposing rule for moving from one chance probability to another.When judged under standards of dynamic coherence appropriate to (1),MAXENT is found wanting. When judged in terms of the logic appro-priate to (2) MAXENT yields for convex closed constraint sets a reason-able selection function with interesting connections with sufficiency andconditioning. (...) Indeed it is just the features of MAXENT which make itappropriate for (2) which make it inappropriate for (1). MAXENT canbe thought of as part of Bayesian logic. But it is part of the logic ofsupposition rather than the logic of induction. (shrink)

This paper uses the figure of the inbred laboratory mouse to reflect upon the management and mobilization of biological difference in the contemporary biosciences. Working through the concept of shifting experimental systems, the paper seeks to connect practices concerned with standardization and control in contemporary research with the emergent and stochastic qualities of biological life. Specifically, it reviews the importance of historical narratives of standardization in experimental systems based around model organisms, before identifying a tension in contemporary accounts of the (...) reproduction and differentiation of inbred mouse strains within them. Firstly, narratives of new strain development, foregrounding personal biography and chance discovery, attest to the contingency and situatedness of apparently universal biotechnological production. Secondly, discoveries of unexpected animal litters challenge efforts to standardize mouse phenotypes and control the reproduction of murine strains over space. The co-existence of these two narratives draws attention to the importance of and interplay between both chance and control, determination and emergence, and the making and moving of experimental life in biomedical research. The reception or denial of such biological excess reflects the distribution of agencies and the emerging spatialities of the global infrastructures of biotechnological development, with implications for future relations between animal lives and human becomings in experimental practices. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Notes and Discussions HEDONISM IN THE PROTAGORAS SOME INSOLUBLEPROBLEMSOf historical scholarship are posed by the fact that the hero of Plato's dialogues was also an historical figure. Commentators are prone to identify the Socrates of the dialogues with the man who drank the hemlock and walked the streets of Athens. This is perhaps unexceptionable 9 But beyond this they are often tempted (even when they know better) to speak (...) of the dialogues as if they were reports or descriptions of actual events in the life of the historical Socrates. Even so astute a scholar as Gregory Vlastos, in his recent lucid Introduction to the Protagoras, falls into this pit. The dramatic date of the Protagoras is no later than 433, five years before the birth of Plato. It would require clear and strong evidence (of which there is none) to convince us that a verbatim report of this encounter was preserved for thirty years or more, to be handed on to Plato at the appropriate moment. Vlastos, of course, would laugh at this suggestion, but hear him talking about the logic of Socrates' argument: I trust I have made it clear that Socrates' performance in this argument is much better than would appear from the fact, which it would be folly to hush up, that he has made a definite error. For the error he does make is one that he could easily have detected when he got the chance to think out his moves in a more leisurely moment. He would then have seen that he could have produced a valid deductive argument for his immediate objective, and did not have to revoke a single inference he had made.... This is not to deny that he occasionally makes grave errors. 9 It is only to insist that as a practitioner of logical inference, and one who practices on his feet, in the stress of live debate, and with no calculus or any formal patterns of valid inference to guide him, Socrates is not a bungler, but a master? This is all very well, except that the argument Vlastos is discussing was not constructed in the stress of live debate but rather, as it were, in the cool of Plato's study. Plato was not practicing on his feet, and, we may presume, had ample time to think through and revise the arguments in question. Are we to interpret Vlastos as claiming that in later, real encounters witnessed by Plato, Socrates did argue in this way? And that Plato here has Socrates commit logical errors (which he, Plato, knows are errors; for he has Protagoras object to them) in order to portray Socrates as a man who makes frequent mistakes but thinks pretty well on his feet? 1Plato's Protagoras, edited, with an Introduction, by Gregory Vlastos (New York, Liberal Arts Press, 1956), pp. xxxv-xxxvi. [7s] 74 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY In fact, we tend to think of the dialogues as having two authors, Plato and Socrates, and we frequently cannot choose between them. In the Protagoras it is even worse; for many scholars have assumed the existence of a third author, Protagoras, who is credited with having written at least part of his role in the dialogue. I offer here the radical thesis that the Protagoras has but one author, Plato, and that everything in the dialogue is to be laid to him.2 My assumptions are that from beginning to end the Protagoras is a product of Plato's imagination, and that Plato is primarily a philosopher and only secondarily a biographer--or perhaps we might say he is a biographer of ideas, not of persons. The philosophical stances assumed by the disputants may or may not resemble those of the historical figures, but we have no reason to attribute the words spoken or the turns taken in the argument to anyone but Plato. The question, why does Socrates say this at this point, must, if it is to be sensible, mean why does Plato have Socrates say this at this point. The answers, if there are answers, will be found within the dialogues and not in speculative history. In the final argument in the Protagoras (351b... (shrink)

The greatest intensity of “live” life is captured from as close as possible in order to be borne as far as possible away. Jacques Derrida. Echographies of Television . Rainer Ganahl has made a study of studying. As part of his extensive autobiographical art practice, he documents and presents many of the ambitious educational activities he undertakes. For example, he has been videotaping hundreds of hours of solitary study that show him struggling to learn Chinese, Arabic and a host of (...) other languages. The stacked boxes of tapes are then presented like minimalist monoliths, dense archives of effort. About fifteen years ago, Ganahl began photographing the lectures that he attends. At the time, he hadn’t seen anyone else doing it, so besides his spare selection of images of the speaker and the audience, much of the time the lectures would just pass into memory, undocumented, or recorded in writing alone. Since then, he has felt the transition to digital cause a significant shift in his process. At the same time, he has seen the habit become ubiquitous as others photograph, record, and videotape the lectures all around him. In keeping with the theme of this inaugural issue of continent. , can we propose each small grouping of photographs that result an isthmus stretching between two disparate bodies of mind? The first being the body of the lecture as spelled out in the title of each work – the experience of the event in all its constituent parts. The second is the body of the recipient, the listener, in this case an artist, who plays a minimal role just beyond the prescripted behavior of sitting and listening. He uses a gesture of documentation to draw a line between himself and the event, creating an artwork. Františka + Tim Gilman: As we mentioned before, the theme of the magazine for this issue is "isthmus." It seems like a very good way into your work, and it leads us to ask what connection you see between your photographs of the lecture and the lecture itself? Rainer Ganahl: The relationship is of course a concrete, pictorial one, or if you want a mimetic one but also an abstract one because the photographs carry the title of the lecture, the names of the lecturers, the site, the institution and the time of the lecture. Photos are fixed moments of time and can reproduce images displayed and reproduce visuals presented at a moment but they don’t come with time based recordings that video or sound takes are offering. What remains of a lecture is usually just the memory, some notes and all the announcements of it. In my case I end up with a visual product I declare as my artwork. It might not differ from any snapshot taken by any other student or member of the audience but I do this in a semi-systematic way with certain rules and procedures I have set up. While I am at a lecture I am mainly focusing on the lecture itself. Last night I went to one of Slavoj Žižek which demanded quite some concentration. I even was asking him a question at the end. I took photos as well but still didn’t lose track of the lecture. I didn’t walk around, I was not preoccupied by where I was sitting and what light I was having like some of the other photographing and filming people in the room who came and left, moved around and tried to capture him from this and that angle, from close and far. I just sat there and concentrated on the lecture and yet managed to take about 30 or so images of him, the public around me and of the film clips he presented. Once the lecture is over the story changes: it all becomes a question of the images, their selection, their visual qualities, their labeling and archiving. The function of the images also change: not only do they stand for an intellectual event in a row of lectures that become part of my intellectual history within many possible such histories but they also have to function as art, something not everybody else with images of lecturers demands of their images. This is my specific claim as an artist to impose them as artworks. And as with all artistic propositions the offer can be accepted or rejected. I basically spend my life trying to do exactly that: making what I declare as art, offering something to anybody interested in it as my art, an offer that is not and will never be accepted as such by all people. F+T: What are your criteria for selection, i.e. how do you choose which lectures to photograph, by lecturer, by topic, or do you photograph any and every lecture you can? RG: As everything in my life, I go by my interest which is the result of many factors. If I am aware of a lecturer, read his books or appreciate his works my interest of attending his much higher than if I am not aware of it. I usually don’t go to lecturers simply based on their subjects—something that can happen of course, if the subject, the title of the lecture is promising or at the heart of my interest. Sometimes I also wait for years to get a change to photograph certain people but I do that in a very low-level “keep your ears up” mentality and not in a systematic scanning of all channels and possibilities. I do not go into philosophy departments and photograph everybody teaching there. I go with the flow—and unfortunately a great deal of great talks I also miss because I hear too late of them. Often, I also stumble into them by traveling, by getting emails from friends and by simply being in the right spot at the right time. Somehow you could look at my lecture par cours as some kind of loose intellectual flâneurism . If you know of interesting lectures and events, please, let me know. F+T: Is your selection of images more of a production or post-production method? That is, do you take a lot of photos and select only a few images from each lecture, or do you take them very selectively? Do you have a particular methodology for the selection of images? RG: This all changed a bit with the arrival of digital photography. In the beginning I had to pay a lot of money for film developing. Hence, I was taking either one role - 36 images - or half a role - 13 images - depending on who talked and whether they projected images. With the unlimited capacity of digital imaging I easily end up between 30 and 150 images of one event still depending of whether images are presented or not. In the first years of that project when I wasn’t fully aware yet of what I was doing, I printed at least 2 images of any lecture and sometimes three or even four, a choice that was also constrained by costs. But again, since I have a web site and since images can easily be selected and presented on my web site without generating remarkable costs I have now more and more pain to reduce them to less than ten or eight images for an event. Now, before I have them printed which really is expensive, I can present them already as artwork on my web site without any immediate costs. Thus the economic factor is at the end of the chain which enables me to be more ‘generous’ and include more images. Over the last years I have been mostly selecting at least four photographs for a lecture unit but recently also as many as ten. But so far only one set above four images has been actually printed and sold. What might sound even more shocking is the likely fact that if a curator or a collector demands me to reduce the number of images due to costs, I might compromise at this current stage if the images have not been yet printed or published outside my own web site. This means that to a certain degree any selection that has only seen publication on my web site and not yet been produced runs the risk to change in numbers of images included. Needless to say, I am the last one that finally makes a decision and I do honor all given earlier decision if those were final. F+T: How do you feel the act of photographing the lecture affects your reception of the contents of the lecture? And your recollection afterwards, do you remember the lecture more having photographed it, or just having sat and listened? RG: As mentioned above, I get very little distraction from photographing since I can multitask well and do not obsess about the quality of the image: I photograph from where I am and listen with my ears and not my eyes. I am not sure whether the images serve as a mnemonic devise to the content of the lecture if there are no images involved but they at least remind me that the lecture existed, the title of the lecture and the name of the people and institutions involved. The titles of the hundreds of lectures I took during the past 15 years can also be read as an essay of theoretical life in that period. This will be come more and more visible as time passes by. These images age much better than I do. F+T: You mentioned at the outset of our discussions that you started this practice some time ago and have seen the practice of photographing lecturers become more commonplace. Why do you think that this shift has taken place? RG: The answer is very simple. Photographing is now free of any charge and hence omnipresent. You buy a phone or any other personal digital assistant and it has a camera integrated in it whether you want it or not. There is no need to develop images and there is no hassle to keep images, to distribute images, to organize images and save them. It is all virtual, not creating any costs and doesn’t require any efforts. You don’t spend twenty dollars for photo-developing anymore, you don’t need to walk anymore to your pharmacy or your photo shop to drop off and return to pick up and pay. You don’t need to go to the post office to send somebody a picture. You have a program like Photoshop already built into your camera. Photographing is now a thing for everybody—with functioning cameras made for two year olds. It is technically now nearly impossible to make bad images. The image quality is virtually guaranteed by cheap, high performing, mini-computers packed into miniscule cameras. With all these technological changes, we are undergoing now a cultural paradigm shift that includes permanent recording (not only still image taking) of everything. I wonder even whether babies are just born to be photographed—at least a process where the first photograph is right there. What is interesting now, is how the law is trying to catch up. I am experiencing and expecting more restrictions on photographing and recording—something already in place in many museums and in certain galleries—as the recording devices become more and more invisible and undetectable. It is an interesting cat and mouse play and will end up with some of us that are photographing the world around us in court. The world has become very transparent and everybody is contributing to it with social networking technologies—like twitter and Facebook—that are designed to monitor and communicate every step we make in our lives. F+T: Why did you start the practice? As a way to remember, or to capture the experience of the lecture and the environment there? RG: A couple of years earlier I started to photograph my own reading seminars as part of my art work with results that surprised me positively. I really liked these images of students and people discussing heavy non-fiction with me. The reading seminars justified this kind of pictorialism. Then in 1995 I had the chance to attend an entire seminar by Edward Said entitled “The Representation of Intellectuals at Columbia University,” which really gave me the idea to start this series. Why not also photograph these lectures I visit all the time since this really is a way of representing intellectuals? F+T: The constellation of images and the title seem like a kind of portrait, do you agree? If so, is it a portrait of the speaker, of yourself, or of the event? RG: Well, to follow up on the previous question the lectures are more than just portraits of lecturers since I include not only the speakers but also the audience, an audience that is not named or specifically highlighted as is the speaker. So if we stick with the metaphor of the portrait we would have to extend it also to the environment, the class room, the lecture hall, the arrangements of seats or benches, tables, lecture stands and other stuff typically seen on my images. Often the walls are decorated or even tagged with graffiti or posters and other stuff. There is a big difference between a small seminar room at the English Department of Columbia University, full with books and cabinets and a lecture room at a Paris or Frankfurt university that accommodates 50 to 150 people. We should, maybe, also distinguish between lectures that are one time events—mostly open to the public, free of charge or paid—and events that are weekly, closed to the public and held mostly in universities that can cost fortunes or be paid by the State as it is still predominantly the case in continental Europe. All this, of course, is not necessarily announced in the title of the lecture and is subject to information that isn’t visible on the images. To a certain degree we see also portraits of a general privilege when it comes to the public of certain institutions that are highly selective and extremely costly without forgetting that most of the lectures are dealing with theory, art, philosophy and other highbrow subjects. In general, I would say we see very little if we don’t know already what’s going on, who the lecturer, the institutions, the context are in which we subsequently can zoom into variants like sexual, racial, or age-related make-up without ignoring clothing fashions, hair styling, body mannerisms, gadgets and stuff. F+T: Do you see a relation between this body of work and your other work, for example your language studies? RG: Everything I do is “unfortunately” related. I say unfortunately because this makes my work not so easy to grasp. The relationship to the language studies is relatively clear since both are originally grounded in the domain of education and knowledge production. Nearly all my work comes across that nexus where knowledge and power are addressed. I was at one point wondering what the relationship was to some of my earlier indexical work where I was happy alone with footnotes from books painted on the walls: I came to understand that both are just different manifestations of knowledge and information. F+T: Do you foresee continuing the series indefinitely, or is there an end to it? RG: I think that I will continue this series indefinitely or to be more precise, as long as I go listen to lectures and want to learn something which brings me to your previous question: What do the reading seminars, language studies, historical research and lecture hopping have in common: I learn something. Further Reading Rainer Ganahl’s website William Kaizen. “ Vulgar Politics .” art&education . April 2009. Web. Smith, Roberta. “ Rainer Ganahl: ‘Language of Emigration & Pictures of Emigration .’” New York Times April 23 2010. Web. (shrink)

The paper offers the outlines of a response to the often-made suggestion that it is impossible to see how indeterminism could possibly provide us with anything that we might want in the way of freedom, anything that could really amount to control, as opposed merely to an openness in the flow of reality that would constitute the injection of chance, or randomness, into the unfolding of the processes which underlie our activity. It is suggested that the best first move (...) for the libertarian is to make a number of important concessions to the compatibilist. It should be conceded, in particular, that certain sorts of alternative possibilities are neither truly available to real, worldly agents nor required in order that those agents act freely; and it should be admitted also that it is the compatibilist who tends to give the most plausible sorts of analyses of many of the 'can' and 'could have' statements which seem to need to be assertible of those agents we regard as free. But these concessions do not bring compatibilism itself in their wake. The most promising version of libertarianism, it is argued, is based on the idea that agency itself (and not merely some special instances of it which we might designate with the honorific appellation 'free') is inconsistent with determinism. This version of libertarianism, it is claimed, can avoid the objection that indeterminism is as difficult to square with true agential control as determinism can sometimes seem to be. (shrink)

In Section IV above we start with texts whose prima facie import speaks so strongly for the Identity Thesis that any interpretation which stops short of it looks like a shabby, timorous, thesis-saving move. What else could Socrates mean when he declares with such conviction that ‘no evil’ can come to a good man (T19), that his prosecutors ‘could not harm’ him (T16(a)), that if a man has not been made more unjust he has not been harmed (T20), that ‘all (...) of happiness is in culture and justice’ (T16(a)), that living well is ‘the same’ as living justly (T15)? But then doubts begin to creep in. Recalling that inflation of the quantifier is normal and innocuous in common speech (“that job means everything to him, he'll do anything to get it, will stick at nothing ”) we ask if there is really no chance at all that ‘no evil’ in T19, ‘not harmed’ in T20 might be meant in the same way? The shift from ‘no harm’ at T16(a) to ‘no great harm’ at T16(b), once noticed, strengthens the doubt. It gets further impetus in T21(b) when to explain how ‘all of happiness is in culture and justice’ he depicts a relation (that recurs more elaborately in T22) which, though still enormously strong, is not quite as strong as would be required by identity. The doubt seeps into T15 when we note that current usage did allow just that relation as a respectable use of ‘the same’. At that point we begin to wonder if resort to the Identity Thesis might not be just a first approximation to a subtler, more finely nuanced, doctrine which would give Socrates as sound a foundation for what we know he wants to maintain at all costs - the Sovereignty of Virtue - without obliterating the eudaemonic value of everything else in his world. We cast about for a credible model of such a relation of virtue to happiness and hit on that multicomponent pattern sketched on p. 9 above. We ascertain that this will afford a comprehensively coherent eudaemonist theory of rational action, while its rival would not, and will fit perfectly a flock of texts in Section V which the latter will not fit at all. Are we not entitled to conclude that this is our best guide to the true relation of virtue to happiness in Socrates' thought - the one for which he would have declared if he had formulated explicitly those two alternative theses and made a reasoned choice between them? (shrink)

Most of us are familiar with the phenomenology of mental effort accompanying cognitively demanding tasks, like focusing on the next chess move or performing lengthy mental arithmetic. In this paper, I argue that phenomenology of mental effort poses a novel counterexample to tracking intentionalism, the view that phenomenal consciousness is a matter of tracking features of one’s environment in a certain way. I argue that an increase in the phenomenology of mental effort does not accompany a change in any of (...) the following candidate representational contents: representation of externally presented features, e.g. brightness, contrast, and so on representation of task difficulty, representation of the possibility of error, representation of trying to achieve some state of affairs, representation of bodily changes like muscle tension, or representation of change in cognitive resource availability and lost opportunity cost. While tracking intentionalism about some phenomenal experiences like pains might obtain, it does not seem to obtain for all phenomenal experiences. This puts the intentionalist into an uncomfortable position of trying to explain why some phenomenal experiences have representational content and not others. Since many believe that tracking intentionalism or something like it provides the best chance of naturalizing consciousness, these arguments deserve detailed consideration. (shrink)

The manner in which limited vaccines are distributed during a pandemic is an ethical issue. The utility principle has been used to argue priority be given to certain individuals based on factors such as the epidemiology of the spread of disease and maintaining the functioning of society. The equity principle has been used to encourage fair practices that account for the economic and social costs of all decisions made. We argue that both principles are met through priority vaccination of homeless (...) individuals, as this strategy protects a medically vulnerable population while reducing the chances of transmission to others as they move through populated urban spaces. We begin by reviewing debates around ethical vaccine distribution. We then argue the homeless are a medically high-risk population who may contribute to the spread of disease through their mobility. As immunization rates are generally lower among the homeless and many do not access mainstream health care, we argue that community vaccine clinics must be used to reach these individuals. We provide support by analyzing Toronto Public Health’s operation of vaccine clinics in shelters and drop-in centres during pH1N1 and conclude that this strategy is effective for immunizing homeless individuals, bringing together the equity and utility principles. (shrink)