This essay considers and evaluates recent results and arguments from classical chaotic systems theory and non-relativistic quantum mechanics that pertain to the question of whether our world is deterministic or indeterministic. While the classical results are inconclusive, quantum mechanics is often assumed to establish indeterminism insofar as the measurement process involves an ineliminable stochastic element, even though the dynamics between two measurements is considered fully deterministic. While this latter claim concerning the Schrödinger evolution must be qualified, the former fully depends (...) on a resolution of the measurement problem. Two alleged proofs that nature is indeterministic, relying, in turn, on Gleason's theorem and Conway and Kochen's recent 'free will theorem', are shown to be wanting qua proofs of indeterminism. We are thus left with the conclusion that the determinism question remains open. (shrink)

Suppose that the members of a group each hold a rational set of judgments on some interconnected questions, and imagine that the group itself has to form a collective, rational set of judgments on those questions. How should it go about dealing with this task? We argue that the question raised is subject to a difficulty that has recently been noticed in discussion of the doctrinal paradox in jurisprudence. And we show that there is a general impossibility theorem that that (...) difficulty illustrates. Our paper describes this impossibility result and provides an exploration of its significance. The result naturally invites comparison with Kenneth Arrow's famous theorem (Arrow, 1963 and 1984; Sen, 1970) and we elaborate that comparison in a companion paper (List and Pettit, 2002). The paper is in four sections. The first section documents the need for various groups to aggregate its members' judgments; the second presents the discursive paradox; the third gives an informal statement of the more general impossibility result; the formal proof is presented in an appendix. The fourth section, finally, discusses some escape routes from that impossibility. (shrink)

Spacetime as we know and love it is lost in most approaches to quantum gravity. For many of these approaches, as inchoate and incomplete as they may be, one of the main challenges is to relate what they take to be the fundamental non-spatiotemporal structure of the world back to the classical spacetime of GR. The present essay investigates how spacetime is lost and how it may be regained in one major approach to quantum gravity, loop quantum gravity.

The detailed interpretation and translation of Nietzsche’s early Latin odes clearly show that Horace’s lyric poetry has an exemplary function for the development of Nietzsche’s own poetic language. Even in his later works, such as Twilight of the Idols and the Dionysos-Dithyrambs, Nietzsche’s poetic style and rhetorical strategies remain indebted to his early attempts to emulate classical Latin poetry when he was a pupil at the Pforta boarding school.

The Humean theory of motivation remains the default position in much of the contemporary literature in meta-ethics, moral psychology, and action theory. Yet despite its widespread support, the theory is implausible as a view about what motivates agents to act. More specifically, my reasons for dissatisfaction with the Humean theory stem from its incompatibility with what I take to be a compelling model of the role of motivating reasons in first-person practical deliberation and third-person action explanations. So after first introducing (...) some assumptions about the nature of agency in section one, I will turn to articulating and defending this account of motivating reasons in sections two through four of the paper. Section five then provides some background on the Humean theory before I argue directly against it in section six and critically examine the leading arguments for the view in section seven. Given limitations of space, however, I save the task of developing a positive anti-Humean view for another occasion. (shrink)

I model sequential decisions over multiple interconnected propositions and investigate path-dependence in such decisions. The propositions and their interconnections are represented in propositional logic. A sequential decision process is path-dependent if its outcome depends on the order in which the propositions are considered. Assuming that earlier decisions constrain later ones, I prove three main results: First, certain rationality violations by the decision-making agent—individual or group—are necessary and sufficient for path-dependence. Second, under some conditions, path-dependence is unavoidable in decisions made by (...) groups. Third, path-dependence makes decisions vulnerable to strategic agenda setting and strategic voting. I also discuss escape routes from path-dependence. My results are relevant to discussions on collective consistency and reason-based decision-making, focusing not only on outcomes, but also on underlying reasons, beliefs, and constraints. (shrink)

Approaches to quantum gravity often involve the disappearance of space and time at the fundamental level. The metaphysical consequences of this disappearance are profound, as is illustrated with David Lewis's analysis of modality. As Lewis's possible worlds are unified by the spatiotemporal relations among their parts, the non-fundamentality of spacetime---if borne out---suggests a serious problem for his analysis: his pluriverse, for all its ontological abundance, does not contain our world. Although the mere existence---as opposed to the fundamentality---of spacetime must be (...) recovered from the fundamental structure in order to guarantee the empirical coherence of the non-spatiotemporal fundamental theory, it does not suffice to salvage Lewis's theory of modality from the charge of rendering our actual world impossible. (shrink)

Does the need to find a quantum theory of gravity imply that the gravitational field must be quantized? Physicists working in quantum gravity routinely assume an affirmative answer, often without being aware of the metaphysical commitments that tend to underlie this assumption. The ambition of this article is to probe these commitments and to analyze some recently adduced arguments pertinent to the issue of quantization. While there exist good reasons to quantize gravity, as this analysis will show, alternative approaches to (...) gravity challenge the received wisdom. These renegade approaches do not regard gravity as a fundamental force, but rather as effective, i.e. as merely supervening on fundamental physics. I will urge that these alternative accounts at least prove the tenability of an opposition to quantization. (shrink)

Recent advancements in AI have prompted a large number of AI ethics guidelines published by governments and nonprofits. While many of these papers propose concrete or seemingly applicable ideas, few philosophically sound proposals are made. In particular, we observe that the line of questioning has often not been examined critically and underlying conceptual problems not always dealt with at the root. In this paper, we investigate the nature of ethical AI systems and what their moral status might be by first (...) turning to the notions of moral agency and patience. We find that their explication would come at a too high cost which is why we, second, articulate a different approach that avoids vague and ambiguous concepts or the problem of other minds. Third, we explore the impact of our philosophical and conceptual analysis on the regulatory landscape, make this link explicit, and finally propose a set of promising policy steps. (shrink)

Is the overall value of a world just the sum of values contributed by each value-bearing entity in that world? Additively separable axiologies (like total utilitarianism, prioritarianism, and critical level views) say 'yes', but non-additive axiologies (like average utilitarianism, rank-discounted utilitarianism, and variable value views) say 'no'. This distinction appears to be practically important: among other things, additive axiologies generally assign great importance to large changes in population size, and therefore tend to strongly prioritize the long-term survival of humanity over (...) the interests of the present generation. Non-additive axiologies, on the other hand, need not assign great importance to large changes in population size. We show, however, that when there is a large enough `background population' unaffected by our choices, a wide range of non-additive axiologies converge in their implications with additive axiologies—for instance, average utilitarianism converges with critical-level utilitarianism and various egalitarian theories converge with prioritarianism. We further argue that real-world background populations may be large enough to make these limit results practically significant. This means that arguments from the scale of potential future populations for the astronomical importance of avoiding existential catastrophe, and other arguments in practical ethics that seem to presuppose additive separability, may succeed in practice whether or not we accept additive separability as a basic axiological principle. (shrink)

Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) represents a key area of neuromodulation that has gained wide adoption for the treatment of neurological and experimental testing for psychiatric disorders. It is associated with specific therapeutic effects based on the precision of an evolving mechanistic neuroscientific understanding. At the same time, there are obstacles to achieving symptom relief because of the incompleteness of such an understanding. These obstacles are at least in part based on the complexity of neuropsychiatric disorders and the incompleteness of DBS (...) devices to represent prosthetics that modulate the breadth of pathological processes implicated in these disorders. Neuroprostheses, such as an implanted DBS system, can have vast effects on subjects in addition to the specific neuropsychiatric changes they are intended to produce. These effects largely represent blind spots in the current debate on neuromodulation. Anthropological accounts can illustrate the broad existential dimensions of patients’ illness and responses to neural implants. In combination with current neuroscientific understanding, neuropsychiatric anthropology may illuminate the possibilities and limits of neurodevices as technical “world enablers”. (shrink)

Globalization arguably generated a governance gap that is being filled by transnational rule-making involving private actors among others. The democratic legitimacy of such new forms of governance beyond nation states is sometimes questioned. Apart from nation-centered democracies, such governance cannot build, for example, on representation and voting procedures to convey legitimacy to the generated rules. Instead, alternative elements of democracy such as deliberation and inclusion require discussion to assess new instruments of governance. The recently published standard ISO 26000 is an (...) interesting example of transnational governance. ISO 26000 was developed in a lengthy multiorganizational process for the purpose of giving guidance on the social responsibility of organizations. By assessing the specific case of ISO 26000, this study sheds light on the question of how legitimacy beyond nation-state democracy is ensured or constricted. Centering on the idea of deliberate democracy and democratic legitimacy, the study offers in-depth insights on the normative legitimacy of the development process of ISO 26000. Positioned on the interface of business studies and public policy, this article contributes to the academic literature on transnational governance and on the role of multistakeholder processes in shaping the role of business in society. (shrink)

Rodger et al have interestingly argued that xenotransplantation should, if possible, entail the use of genetic pain disenhancement to prevent otherwise unavoidable pain in ‘donor’ animals.1 Their argument relies on the empirical assumption that xenotransplantation offers a realistic solution to organ shortage, and that, due to the recent clinical developments and the lack of human donors, it will thus continue for the foreseeable future. We argue below that other options should be prioritised over xenotransplantation, and that so-called ‘non-sentientist’ harms are (...) undervalued in discussions on disenhancement. We do not challenge the empirical claim made by the authors. That is, xenotransplantation research might continue for the foreseeable future since organ demand is increasing. However, we disagree with the priority given to xenotransplantation over other solutions that are more morally desirable. We argue that, if we comply with the 3R principles (Replacement, Reduction, and Refinement of the use of animals in research) and follow a minimal welfarist reasoning (to which the authors seem to adhere), then (1) the principle of replacement demands the use of non-animal alternatives if possible and (2) there are alternative solutions that lead to morally better consequences. Schematically, there are …. (shrink)

Based on a qualitative survey among 203 US workers active on the microwork platform Amazon Mechanical Turk, we analyze potential biases embedded in the institutional setting provided by on-demand crowdworking platforms and their effect on perceived workplace fairness. We explore the triadic relationship between employers, workers, and platform providers, focusing on the power of platform providers to design settings and processes that affect workers’ fairness perceptions. Our focus is on workers’ awareness of the new institutional setting, frames applied to the (...) mediating platform, and a differentiated analysis of distinct fairness dimensions. (shrink)

While promoting population health has been the classic goal of public health practice and policy, in recent decades, new objectives in terms of autonomy and equality have been introduced. These different goals are analysed, and it is demonstrated how they may conflict severly in several ways, leaving serious unclarities both regarding the normative issue of what goal should be pursued by public health, what that implies in practical terms, and the descriptive issue of what goal that actually is pursued in (...) different contexts. A basic conflict of perspective is handled by integrating the ideas of public health striving for health-related autonomy and equality, resulting in a prioritarian oriented population approach to health-related autonomy. This integrated goal is demonstrated to constrain itself in several ways attractive from the point of view of the classic goal, but several serious problems remain. For this reason, a model where all of the three goals are integrated into one coherent structure where they can be assigned varying degrees of importance relative to the level of population health is described. It is argued that this model avoids the problems set out earlier, and is actually normatively preferable to the classic goal alone. It is furthermore argued that the model may be employed as a useful tool for descriptive ethics, as well as a vehicle for international harmonisation of public health policies. A number of practical implications regarding, e.g., the importance of respecting autonomy and the allocation of public health resources are noted, as are a battery of questions for further research. (shrink)

The importance of communicating corporate social responsibility (CSR) not only to socially responsible investors but also to the mainstream of the financial community is gaining importance in a more competitive capital market environment. This article looks at how equity analysts at the German stock exchange in Frankfurt – individuals who are not particularly involved in socially responsible investment (SRI) research – perceive economic, legal, ethical and philanthropic responsibility strategies. The evidence obtained in our interviews suggests that responsibility issues are increasingly (...) becoming part of mainstream investment analysis. However, for them to play a larger part in the future, investor relations personnel must frame responsibility strategies in a way that is more consistent with the financial community's perspective. In particular, the impact of CSR measures on strategic development, competitive anticipation and creating trust with stakeholders are key in leveraging CSR in financial communications. (shrink)

This article examines the methodology of a core branch of contemporary political theory or philosophy: “analytic” political theory. After distinguishing political theory from related fields, such as political science, moral philosophy, and legal theory, the article discusses the analysis of political concepts. It then turns to the notions of principles and theories, as distinct from concepts, and reviews the methods of assessing such principles and theories, for the purpose of justifying or criticizing them. Finally, it looks at a recent debate (...) on how abstract and idealized political theory should be, and assesses the significance of disagreement in political theory. The discussion is carried out from an angle inspired by the philosophy of science. (shrink)

This book presents an analysis of the institutional development of selected social science and humanities disciplines in Argentina, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden and the United Kingdom. Where most narratives of a scholarly past are presented as a succession of ‘ideas,’ research results and theories, this collection highlights the structural shifts in the systems of higher education, as well as institutions of research and innovation within which these disciplines have developed. This institutional perspective will facilitate systematic comparisons between (...) developments in various disciplines and countries. Across eight country studies the book reveals remarkably different dynamics of disciplinary growth between countries, as well as important interdisciplinary differences within countries. In addition, instances of institutional contractions and downturns and veritable breaks of continuity under authoritarian political regimes can be observed, which are almost totally absent from narratives of individual disciplinary histories. This important work will provide a valuable resource to scholars of disciplinary history, the history of ideas, the sociology of education and of scientific knowledge. (shrink)

In response to Koplin and Wilkinson, I argue, first, that the uncertain clinical prospects of human-pig chimera based transplantation makes the reason to spend resources for clarifying whether such practice might imply serious ethical breach due to enhanced cognitive capacities of the chimeras rather weak. T he benefits of further pursuing this avenue of research is so uncertain, so that taking even very unclear risks of serious ethical breach (thus in need of clarification for justification of the research) is not (...) worth the price in terms of spent resources, and therefore only limited resources should be spent to clarify such risk before the project is abandoned due to unacceptable risks. Second, I argue that as there are some reason to pursue this avenue further (and thus investigate the risk in question), the analogy to the notion of halting all farming of larger animals for food does not hold up. The reason is that we do not need to probe any further any comparable risk to know that such farming practices should be halted. A fundamental underlying issue to the question discussed by Koplin and Wilkinson1 in this paper is formulated when they write: > We should therefore be confident that human-pig chimeras would lack morally relevant cognitive capacities before setting out to use them as a source of transplantable human organs. This leaves open the question of how confident …. (shrink)

One cannot scrutinize mediality in a pre-media age without referring to the complex issue of Christology. The idea of Christ as medium and mediator concerns not only particular theological questions but also general issues of translation and transference, as well as models of word and image. This paper sketches first the notion of Christ′s mediality up to early Scholasticism and then highlights the new conceptual patterns developed by Bonaventure (Collationes in Hexaemeron) and Nicolas of Cusa (De visione dei).

Volume 20, Issue 6, June 2020, Page 40-42.

The ideal of scientific openness — i.e. the idea that scientific information should be freely accessible to interested parties — is strongly supported throughout the scientific community. At the same time, however, this ideal does not appear to be absolute in the everyday practice of science. In order to get the credit for new scientific advances, scientists often keep information to themselves. Also, it is common practice to withhold information obtained in commissioned research when the scientist has agreed with his (...) or her employer to do so. The secrecy may be intended for ever, as in the military area, but also temporarily until a patent application has been made. The paper explores to what extent such secrecy is undesirable, as seems to be suggested by the ideal of scientific openness. Should this ideal be interpreted as having certain exceptions which make the above-mentioned practices acceptable? Are there, on closer inspection, good arguments for the ideal of scientific openness, and for officially upholding it? Possible versions of the ideal of scientific openness are explored and the issue is found to be rather complex, allowing for wide variations depending on the acting parties, beneficiaries, types of information and moral requirements involved. We conclude that the arguments usually given in favour of this ideal are weaker than what seems to be generally believed, and that, on closer inspection, they leave plenty of room for exceptions to it. These exceptions only partly cover the actual practice of withholding scientific information, and there may still be good reason to advocate, teach and enforce the ideal of scientific openness within the scientific community. (shrink)

Resumo: Esse ensaio buscará sondar as relações entre filosofia e literatura, no pensamento de Gilles Deleuze, a despeito de sua parceria conjunta com Félix Guattari, atentando tanto para as concepções de escrita expressas ao longo de sua obra quanto para o modo como essas concepções teriam influenciado o estilo de seus escritos filosóficos. Partindo da premissa deleuziana de que a escrita possui um acentuado lastro clínico, sendo a responsável pela elaboração de um diagnóstico das forças capazes de aprisionar ou calar (...) a vida, procurar-se-á esmiuçar as ressonâncias desse lastro clínico, na concepção de filosofia como ato criativo, elaborada pelo autor. Como hipótese a ser aqui trabalhada, defende-se que a escrita deleuziana - compreendida como portadora de uma literalidade, conforme sustenta François Zourabchivili, ou como encrustada de uma poética imanentista, tal qual sugere Anita Costa Malufe - procuraria produzir uma zona de vizinhança ou indiscernibilidade entre a escrita filosófica, de caráter mais exegético, e a escrita literária, mais afectiva, de modo a produzir um deslocamento na relação do leitor com o ato de pensar.: In this essay we pretend to study the relationship between philosophy and literature in Gilles Deleuze’s thought, despite of his partnership with Félix Guattari, mapping the conceptions of writing throughout his work and considering the influence of these conceptions to forge a certain style in his philosophical texts. Starting from the deleuzian premise that writing has a strong clinical backing - being responsible for the elaboration of a diagnosis of the forces liable to imprison or silence life -, we will examine the resonances of this clinical backing in his conception of philosophy as a creative act. Our hypothesis is that the deleuzian writing - having a certain literality, as François Zourabchivili argues, or encrusted with an immanentism poetics, as Anita Costa Malufe suggests - would produce a so-called neighborhood zone or zone of indiscernibility between philosophical writing, with a more exegetical character, and literary writing, which is more affective, in order to produce a shift in the reader’s relationship with the act of thinking. (shrink)

With the emergence of participative social media, the ways in which stakeholders may interact with companies are changing. Social media and Web 2.0 technologies change gatekeeping mechanisms and the distribution of information. In consequence, organizations must realize that they are structurally embedded in online networks of interconnected and equitable actors. In this paper, we analyze how this change in today’s information and communication technologies may affect Corporate Social Responsibility action. We utilize social network analysis to investigate the CSR blogs of (...) three IT firms: Google, Hewlett-Packard, and Intel. The analysis reveals that their Internet-enabled social networks exhibit patterns of power law distribution and an uneven distribution of structural social capital among the actors involved, especially on the corporate side, which fails to fully engage with the network. We conclude by indicating the research implications of shifting social capital dynamics and by deriving implications for management and practice. (shrink)

If there is a specifically rhetorical approach to argumentation, I believe it is one that studies argumentation that is specifically rhetorical. So if we want to ask, “What is the rhetorical approach to argumentation?” we should first ask, “What is rhetorical argumentation?” It is worthwhile focusing on this question because various misleading definitions of rhetorical argumentation have been in circulation for almost as long as rhetoric has existed. Some misleading definitions see the defining property of rhetorical argumentation in the arguer’s (...) aim. And that aim, which is often assumed to override all the arguer’s other considerations, is strategic: to persuade his hearer(s) by any available means and .. (shrink)

We investigate Kerr–Newman black holes in which a rotating charged ring-shaped singularity induces a region which contains closed timelike curves (CTCs). Contrary to popular belief, it turns out that the time orientation of the CTC is oppo- site to the direction in which the singularity or the ergosphere rotates. In this sense, CTCs “counter-rotate” against the rotating black hole. We have similar results for all spacetimes sufficiently familiar to us in which rotation induces CTCs. This motivates our conjecture that perhaps (...) this counter-rotation is not an accidental oddity particular to Kerr–Newman spacetimes, but instead there may be a general and intuitively comprehensible reason for this. (shrink)

In this paper I examine the relationship between interpreting a fiction and specifying its content. The former plays a major role in literary studies; the latter is of central concern in the philosophical debate on truth in fiction. After elucidating these activities, I argue that they do not coincide but have interesting interdependencies. In particular, I argue that correct interpretations are metaphysically grounded in fictional content. I discuss this claim in detail and show why it is not in tension with (...) the evidential claim that correct interpretations give us epistemic access to fictional content, which I also endorse. (shrink)

A central problem of democracy is the aggregation of divergent individual inputs into overall collective decisions. Social-choice-theoretic impossibility results famously demonstrate the intractability of a large class of such aggregation problems. This paper develops a taxonomy of two concepts of agreement, agreement at a substantive level and agreement at a meta-level, and discusses the escape-routes these concepts open up from the impossibility problems of social choice. Specifically, two contexts of democratic aggregation are addressed: first, the familiar context of preferences, and (...) second, the largely unexplored context of sets of judgments over multiple interconnected propositions. Drawing on some recent developments in social choice theory and democratic theory, I will defend the view that, when agreement is conceptualized in democratic theory and when it is sought in democratic practice, more emphasis should be placed on agreement at a meta-level than is commonly done. Finally, I will address the more general question to what extent it is acceptable for the stability of institutions for democratic aggregation to be dependent on specific empirical contingencies. (shrink)

In den Paragraphen 1–78 seiner "Ontologia", die dieser Band enthält, entwickelt Wolff die grundlegenden Prinzipien seiner Metaphysik. Die Ausgabe bietet den Text erstmals in deutscher Übersetzung.

Within child and adolescent psychiatry, there are a number of potential dilemmas pertaining to diagnosis, treatment, the protection of the child, as well as the child's own developing intelligence and moral judgement. Diagnostic Dilemmas in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry is the first in the IPPP series to explore this highly complex topic.

Distributed cognition refers to processes which are (i) cognitive and (ii) distributed across multiple agents or devices rather than performed by a single agent. Distributed cognition has attracted interest in several fields ranging from sociology and law to computer science and the philosophy of science. In this paper, I discuss distributed cognition from a social-choice-theoretic perspective. Drawing on models of judgment aggregation, I address two questions. First, how can we model a group of individuals as a distributed cognitive system? Second, (...) can a group acting as a distributed cognitive system be ‘rational’ and ‘track the truth’ in the outputs it produces? I argue that a group’s performance as a distributed cognitive system depends on its ‘aggregation procedure’ – its mechanism for aggregating the group members’ inputs into collective outputs – and I investigate the properties of an aggregation procedure that matter. (shrink)

In our present early Twenty-First Century epoch, in bold contradistinction with the 1989-91 end of the Cold War and subsequent reassurances of the 90s, that ‘The End of History’ had arrived, the past decade has seen the rise of populism and authoritarian would-be leaders worldwide. Similarly, both nationalism and outright fascism have once again become credible threats, whilst ‘the left’ has largely failed to respond or offer feasible answers to multiplying social problems. This belated and misfiring reaction to capitalism in (...) crisis, simply the year: 2008 will give all that is needed to explain what is being referred to. What has occupied the energies of substantial sections of populations angry at elites seemingly operating as usual and the same limited and fatally flawed system continuing as before. Those individuals and institutions who helped it teeter on the brink of terminal failure, were able to profit from this whilst populations suffered as states socialized debt making society pay with austerity measures. This left a power vacuum to which any adequate response was noticeably lacking. From 2016, and the date bookends the year in which populism and authoritarian leaders ‘first appeared’, the wave of similar populist reaction has continued globally. Part of this has been the contention over what constitutes ‘the truth’ and facts themselves and misinformation, disinformation and ‘fake news’ continue to persist as serious problems. The bigger issue it might be argued is the implication that these methods can be used to attain power, either political or in any other sphere: a secondary and no less alarming problem also covered by this essay. Explicating a materialist analysis of what exactly the problem and threats populism and authoritarianism embody, and ‘where they came from’, the essay is most heavily influenced by the dissident and unorthodox Marxism of the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research). This paper takes as its subject the weapons of Marx and the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory to critically analyze the concept of Ideology Critique, and how Marx and Marxism remain the ‘bad conscience of philosophy’. It also applies takes as its subject the concept of ideology critique to the unnerving predominance of right-wing and authoritarian narratives, still very much vying for political power in 2024. (shrink)