Automated Influence is the use of Artificial Intelligence to collect, integrate, and analyse people’s data in order to deliver targeted interventions that shape their behaviour. We consider three central objections against Automated Influence, focusing on privacy, exploitation, and manipulation, showing in each case how a structural version of that objection has more purchase than its interactional counterpart. By rejecting the interactional focus of “AI Ethics” in favour of a more structural, political philosophy of AI, we show that the real problem (...) with Automated Influence is the crisis of legitimacy that it precipitates. (shrink)

A familiar part of debates about supererogatory actions concerns the role that cost should play. Two camps have emerged: one claiming that extreme cost is a necessary condition for when an action is supererogatory, while the other denies that it should be part of our definition of supererogation. In this paper, I propose an alternative position. I argue that it is comparative cost that is central to the supererogatory and that it is needed to explain a feature that all accounts (...) agree is central to the very notion of supererogation: optionality. Perhaps because of this agreement on its importance, few attempts have been made to clarify and explain the notion of optionality. I argue that giving an account of the optionality of supererogatory requires drawing a line between doing the bare minimum permissible and going beyond the bare minimum and that this line ought to be drawn based on comparative cost of alternative permissible acts. Having outlined my account and motivated it, I discuss and reject two concerns that might be raised: firstly, that it is extreme cost, not comparative cost, that matters and, secondly, that in fact no cost is needed for an act to be supererogatory. (shrink)

Standing in San Marco Cathedral in Venice, you immediately notice the exquisitely decorated spandrels: the triangular spaces bounded on either side by adjoining arches and by the dome above. You would be forgiven for seeing them as the starting point from which to understand the surrounding architecture. To do so would, however, be a mistake. It is a similar mistaken inference that evolutionary biologists have been accused of making in assuming a special adaptive purpose for such biological features as fingerprints (...) and chins. I argue that a mistake of just this sort is being made by ethicists who appeal to the intrinsic value of supererogatory acts in their efforts to make space for supererogation in ethical theory. Many cases of supererogatory action are simply spandrels: by-products of uncontroversial commitments elsewhere in our moral thought. This is not to downplay their value but rather to show that their value need not be the justification for making room for the supererogatory. I demonstrate this by examining two areas: rights and the distribution of burdens among a group. My argument has significance for those who take themselves to be defends of the possibility of supererogatory actions, as well as those who are committed to the contrary and those who believe themselves to be indifferent on the matter. (shrink)

For different reasons, Husserl's original, thought-provoking ideas on the philosophy of logic and mathematics have been ignored, misunderstood, even despised, by analytic philosophers and phenomenologists alike, who have been content to barricade themselves behind walls of ideological prejudices. Yet, for several decades, Husserl was almost continuously in close professional and personal contact with those who created, reshaped and revolutionized 20th century philosophy of mathematics, logic, science and language in both the analytic and phenomenological schools, people whom those other makers of (...) 20th century philosophy, Russell, Frege, Wittgenstein and their followers, rarely, if ever, met. Independently of them, Husserl offered alternatives to the well-trodden paths of logicism, nominalism, formalism and intuitionism. He presented a well-articulated, thoroughly argued case for logic as an objective science, but was not philosophically naive to the point of not seeing the role of subjectivity in shaping the sense of the reality facing objective science. Given the preeminent role that philosophy of logic and philosophy of mathematics have played in transforming the way philosophy has been done since Husserl's time, and given the depth of his insights and his obvious expertise in those fields, his ideas need to be integrated into present-day, mainstream philosophy. Here, philosopher Claire Ortiz Hill and mathematician-philosopher Jairo da Silva offer a wealth of interesting insights intended to subvert the many mistaken idees recues about the development of Husserl's thought and reestablish broken ties between it and philosophy now. (shrink)

We can imagine a world in which ectogenesis provides a safe gestating space that eliminates maternal morbidity and mortality while maximising healthy outcomes for babies. In this world, women, no longer physically—and visibly—pregnant, are no longer economically, socially or physically disadvantaged due to the potential for pregnancy and birth. Because everyone can access the same technology, women are able to work without fear of pregnancy-related discrimination or restrictions, and health disparities among individuals in gestation and birth based on socioeconomic status (...) are eliminated. This imagining allows us to explore the ethical and social underpinnings of such a world, and consider how to achieve it in our current paradigm. Having explored the freedom and equality that is possible in an ideal hypothetical where all have equal access to such technologies, we can now imagine that same world without ectogenesis: women, no longer economically, socially or physically disadvantaged due to pregnancy and birth, despite still becoming pregnant. Such is the potential political perspective and provocation that can be spurred on by discussion of ectogenesis. As Cavaliere argues, the technological reality of ectogenesis may not achieve the freedom and equality that …. (shrink)

Social justice is put forth as a core professional nursing value, although conceptualizations within foundational documents and among nurse educators remain inconsistent and contradictory. The purpose of this study was to explore how faculty teach social justice in theory courses in Baccalaureate programs. This qualitative study utilized constructivist grounded theory methods to examine processes informing participants' teaching. Participants utilize four overarching approaches: fostering engaging classroom climates, utilizing various naming strategies, framing diversity and culture as social justice, and role modeling a (...) critical stance. They deploy specific strategies, varying largely by race, educational background, and nursing specialty. A background in social sciences supports pedagogy that interrogates health inequities rather than merely raising awareness about disparities. Findings also reveal that faculty of color navigate institutional structures predicated upon colorblind racism and problematic views of culture, which many white faculty teaching non‐Community Health Nursing courses described doing. To enact social justice and be answerable to our communities, concerted anti‐oppression efforts are needed across education, research, practice, and policy. This includes sustained commitment to address colonialism and whiteness in every institution that defines, promotes, and claims to advance nursing so that we can fulfill our responsibility to address unjust systems and structures to serve our communities. (shrink)

Contrasting the work of Genevieve Lloyd, Elizabeth Grosz, and Moira Gatens with the poststrueturalist philosophy of Judith Butler, this paper identifies a distinctive “Australian” feminism. It argues that while Butler remains trapped by the matter/representation binary, the Spinozist turn in Lloyd and Gatens, and Grosz's work on Bergson and Deleuze, are attempts to think corporeality.

Amy saves a man from drowning despite the risk to herself, because she is moved by his plight. This is a quintessentially supererogatory act: an act that goes above and beyond the call of duty. Beth, on the other hand, saves a man from drowning because she wants to get her name in the paper. On this second example, opinions differ. One view of supererogation holds that, despite being optional and good, Beth’s act is not supererogatory because she is not (...) praiseworthy; the other agrees that Beth is not praiseworthy but holds that her act is nevertheless supererogatory because, while supererogatory actions are generally performed by praiseworthy agents, an individual need not be praiseworthy for their act to be supererogatory. In this paper, I raise a problem for this latter position, which I shall call the Anti-Motivation View of supererogation. While the Anti-Motivation View rejects the claim that the agent’s motivations are important, it accepts that the agent’s intentions are. Thus, this view assumes that a clear, coherent distinction can be drawn between intentions and motivations in the context of supererogation. This distinction is often attributed to Mill; however, his original discussion reveals an inconsistency. Consider Clara, who saves a man from drowning because she wants to torture him later. According to Mill, Clara’s act is not morally good; those who follow Mill will have to accept that it is therefore not supererogatory. Mill asserts that Clara’s act differs from Amy’s and Beth’s not just in motivation but also in intention. I question this explanation and demonstrate that the distinction between motivation and intention is not as clear as the Anti-Motivation View has supposed and that the gap between the Anti-Motivation View and the alternative Praise-Based View is either much greater or much smaller than previously thought. (shrink)

Indeterminate Bodies organizes a number of theoretical and empirical studies around the concept and actuality of indeterminacy, as it relates to body and society. Located within the struggle to apprehend different categories of ‘body’ in the volatile flows of late-capital, indeterminacy is considered through such multiple incarnations as economy, contingency, inheritance, question, force, uncertainty, materiality and affective resistance to determination. While indeterminacy is often positioned as the ‘trouble’ or friction in subject/object knowledge-formation (framed as ontological or empirical challenge), it also (...) engenders affects such that some subjects are both in and out of recognition. Questions of indeterminacy overlap with work on imperceptibility, giving rise to interlocked questions about the modes of representation, categorization, inclusion, exclusion and sensibility in the production of bodies. We address the hesitancies, difficulties and necessities of working with and through indeterminacy in order open up new descriptions, visions and modes of political work. (shrink)

I define 'skim semantics' to be a Davidson-style truth-conditional semantics combined with a variety of deflationism about truth. The expressive role of truth in truth-conditional semantics precludes at least some kinds of skim semantics; thus I reject the idea that the challenge to skim semantics derives solely from Davidson's explanatory ambitions, and in particular from the 'truth doctrine', the view that the concept of truth plays a central explanatory role in Davidsonian theories of meaning for a language. The fate of (...) skim semantics is not determined by the fate of the truth doctrine, so rejecting the truth doctrine does not in itself open the way to skim semantics. I establish my thesis by showing that some recently proposed versions of skim semantics fail because of truth's expressive role. I also discuss the conditions that might permit skim semantics. (shrink)

Both in his earliest debates with thinkers such as Foucault and Levinas, and in later critiques of political immediacy, Derrida invoked the inescapable burden of a necessary but impossible universalism. By raising the stakes so high it would seem that deconstruction generates hyperbolic conceptions of ethics and justice, but also precludes any form of day to day political positivity. In this essay I pursue the seemingly less ‘ethical’ conception of play in Derrida's work to argue for a multiple universalism.

Enth.: De quoi faut-il s'étonner / par René Thom. Du point de vue du tiers... / par Claire Lejeune. Géométriser la signification / par Jean-Pierre Duport.

En 1797, un article du Journal des Luxus und der Moden fustige une nouvelle pratique de danse, « bacchanale » prisée par les habitantes de Breslau qui pivotent « comme une figure androgyne déformée » où les pieds « suppriment toute beauté » avec leur « enthousiasme ivre ». Quelques années plus tard, dans ses « Lettres d’un médecin », le rédacteur en chef de la Gazette de santé déplore une forme de lutte entre les sexes qui touche à l’« (...) envie des femmes » (leurs désirs et leurs passions) et nu... (shrink)

Little and colleagues’ paper describing a key aspect of cancer patients’ experience, that of “liminality,” is remarkable for giving articulation to a very common and yet mostly overlooked aspect of patient experience. Little et. al. offered a formulation of liminality that deliberately set aside the concept’s more common use in analysing social rituals, in order to grasp at the interior experience that arises when failing bodily function and awareness of mortality are forced into someone’s consciousness, as occurs with a diagnosis (...) of cancer. We set out the reasons as to why this analysis was so significant in 1998—but we also consider how the “liminality” described by Little and colleagues was a feature of modernity, founded on what we term “the mirage of settlement.” We argue that this mirage is impossible to sustain in 2022 amid the many forms of un-settling that have characterized late modernity, including climate change and COVID-19. We argue that many people in developed nations now experience liminality as a result of the being forced into the consciousness of living in a continued state of coloniality. We thus rejoin the social aspects of liminality to the interior, Existential form described by Little et. al. (shrink)

Philosophy Camps for Youth is an indispensable guide for anyone interested in hosting their own philosophy camp.

The development of a `theory of mind' may not only be important for understanding the minds of others but also for using one's own mind. To investigate this supposition, forty children between the ages of three and four were given false-belief and creativity tasks. The numbers of appropriate and of original responses in the creativity test were found to correlate positively with performance on false-belief tasks. This association was robust, as it continued to be strong and significant even when age (...) and verbal intelligence were partialled out. The results support the hypothesis that the metarepresentational skills involved in theory of mind also affect the way children can access and scan their own mental repertoire beyond the areas of currently activated content (i.e. divergent thinking). With the advent of theory of mind a basic cognitive shift takes place in human development, and possibly took place in cognitive evolution. (shrink)

A unique new study which extends Deleuze's already radical philosophy into ideas of the post-human, truth, reading, sexual difference and gender politics.

Irigaray demonstrates that metaphysics depends upon the specific negation and exclusion of the female body. Readings of Irigaray's Speculum of the Other Woman tend to highlight the status of this excluded materiality: is there an essential female body which precedes negation or is the feminine only an effect of exclusion? I approach Irigaray's work by way of another question: is it possible to move beyond a feminist critique of metaphysics and towards a feminist philosophy?

1. This paper contributes to the broader debate about how elite school institutions manage to remain alert and responsive to changing education market conditions, locally and globally, by explicitl...

Growing Up With Philosophy Camp brings together essays by the directors of philosophy summer camps, perhaps the newest venture for teaching philosophy to pre-college students.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Levinas—Between Philosophy and Rhetoric:The “Teaching” of Levinas’s Scriptural ReferencesClaire Elise KatzIn an interview titled "On Jewish Philosophy," Emmanuel Levinas illuminates the connection that he sees between philosophical discourse and the role of midrash in interpreting the Hebrew scriptures. His interviewer immediately expresses surprise at Levinas's comments that suggested he saw the traditions of philosophy and biblical theology as in some sense harmonious (quoted in Robbins 2001, 239). Levinas responds (...) by elaborating on this connection he sees. For him, the lived experience of Judaism is above all a sense of belonging to humanity and, in turn, to a supreme order of responsibility (240). Although his intellectual life focused on the sacred texts of Judaism, this life included non-Jewish books, which he believed expressed a similar concern or a similar responsibility—a concern for the meaning of life. This list of such books includes Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, The Miser, and The Misanthrope, in addition to the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.In Levinas's view, these novels are not exercises of philosophyper se; as mentioned above, they express the same concerns that occupy philosophy, but they express these concerns in a different idiom. They do not offer a philosophical argument; instead, they use figurative language and literary narrative to convey their messages. By drawing this distinction between philosophy and literature, Levinas appears to have divided the written word into two categories: philosophy, on the one hand, and literary texts, on the other. Yet readers of his philosophical work cannot help but notice his frequent references to literary sources, including the numerous citations taken from the Jewish holy texts. His use of these citations encourages us to ask how we are to classify these books in general and how to classify, in particular, the Scriptures and the holy texts in Judaism. With regard to the holy texts in Judaism, should we classify them as simply a [End Page 159] literary device? Or, do they constitute a third category that falls somewhere in between philosophy and rhetoric? If the latter, then what is their status relative to these larger categories?Although Levinas insists on separating his two bodies of work—his philosophical writings and his Jewish writings—the distinction between them becomes increasingly blurred with his frequent introduction of citations from the Hebrew texts into his philosophy and by inflecting his Jewish writings with philosophical interpretations.1 In what follows, I examine the unique and significant role of Scriptural references within Levinas's philosophical work. My claim is that the Scriptural references are in fact rhetorical, but not "simply" rhetorical; they do pedagogical work for Levinas that other literary devices cannot accomplish. They engage his readers such that they are invited to grapple with the Scriptures in a manner potentially unfamiliar to them, and this invitation, in turn, has the pedagogical effect of attuning his readers to his texts and to his ethical project—even, one might say, to the other—and inviting them into an experience of transcendence.In the interview mentioned above, Levinas tells his interlocutor that for the Jews the Scriptures do not exist apart from the interpretations that accompany them. These interpretations are found in the collections of midrashim and the Talmud. One need know only a little bit about Hebrew and the construction of the Hebrew texts in order to see why these interpretations are significant. There are three grammatical concerns with the Hebrew language: first, biblical Hebrew does not contain vowels, though it does employ vowel aspirations; second, it is a language based on root letter combinations, and the meaning of these combinations alters, depending on the vowel aspirations that are inserted. For example, "Kiddish," the Hebrew blessing over wine, is based on a combination of Hebrew letters that are transliterated into English as KDSH. The blessing changes if we insert different vowel aspirations: "Kaddish" is the blessing said for those who have died. Third, biblical Hebrew lacks punctuation. Owing to the absence of vowels and punctuation, interpretation difficulties immediately emerge. The rabbinic model of midrash addresses these problems by offering multiple explanations and interpretations.Levinas, however, is not concerned with this aspect of the written language. Rather, he emphasizes... (shrink)

Francis Bacon on Motion and Power gathers twelve contributions by the best specialists of Baconian thought in Europe, the United States, and South America in a very unified manner. Since Graham Rees founded The Oxford Francis Bacon Project in 1995, research on Francis Bacon's work has made significant progress. Romanian researchers have offered translations of major works, such as Novum Organum and Sylva Sylvarum. An important project of translation of Bacon's works into French is also underway. A new generation of (...) researchers has emerged, editors of this volume included, offering new insights into Bacon's thought, and fighting against "idols of Baconian scholarship" and "blind spots" in... (shrink)

Based on a sociological survey carried out in a camp for asylum seekers in Belgium, the article questions the modes of existence in this “out of place” and “out of time” that is the camp. Behind the apparent emptiness of waiting in a decelerated present, the investigation highlights three temporalities that together shape the breathing of the camp and the living conditions of asylum seekers: the rhythm of the framework that holds together daily life, the cycle and the passage that (...) gives a sense of the ordeal and finally the singular time of the articulations between present, past and future which characterize the “being in time” of asylum seekers. After exploring these three temporalities, the author proposes a concept that allows them to hold together in order to understand the texture of time that unfolds in these “out of place”, “out of time” that are the camps. (shrink)

Due to a simplistic interpretation of the Holly Scriptures, the Christian world has for a long time largely rejected the Darwinian theory. It was therefore, even in the twenties of the post century, difficult to reconcile the idea of the common origin of all species and a superficial reading of the Book of Genesis. In this context, two catholic priests who were also scientist - Teilhard de Chardin and Henry de Dorlodot - tried to reconcile their scientific adhesion to Darwin's (...) theory and their faith to God. They held o similar scientific opinion but by different ways. In fact, they gat iota two opposite situations due to the very different receptions given to their claim: Teilhard de Chardin, severely repressed, was sent to China in order to prevent the diffusion of his ideas whereas de Dorlodat's book was published and acclaimed. This was probably due to the use mode by the second of times of on essentially theological argumentation in order to present the underlining scientific theory. Teilhard de Chardin developed his argumentation trough a scientific analysis ending up in philosophical and religious conclusions. On the other hand, some believing scientists were able to find in the de Dorlodot's argumentation the theological support for their knowledge that they needed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:IntroductionAnthropocene Feminisms: Rethinking the UnthinkableClaire Colebrook and Jami WeinsteinIn her recent lecture on the Anthropocene (to which she adds the Capitalocene and the Chthulucene), Donna Haraway expresses some alarm that after two major insights into what counts as thinkable, it was “anthropos” that became the term for the post-Holocene (Haraway 2014). Haraway declares, with emphasis, that it is “literally unthinkable” to work with the individual unit of “man” if (...) one is to do good intellectual work. For Haraway, the two knowledge events that ought to have precluded the use of the figure of the “anthropos” are: first, the acceptance that any seeming individual is the outcome of a series of complex relations and must be studied as such (so there would be no epoch with anything, let alone “man,” as its first cause), and, second, intellectual inquiry has acknowledged a general becoming-with, such that in order to be anything at all, “one” must be in a dynamic relation. Haraway’s work is exemplary of post-liberal feminist resistance to the figure of man—as subject, agent, and center of knowing. Terms like “Woman” or “the feminine” do not extend the field occupied by man; they instead create a different intensity. So when Haraway questions the “anthropos” of the Anthropocene she neither asks that women, too, be included in those who have scarred the planet, nor does she claim that “Woman” would occupy some innocent outside. Instead, she proposes that one think of the “anthropos” as untimely, as out of sync with an intellectual milieu that theorizes the death of the subject and the eclipse of the human, and has even begun to renounce the notion of life in itself. It is odd that in the face of this destruction of any possibility of thinking by [End Page 167] way of individualism, the epic gesture of the present deploys the figure of the “anthropos,” as it should be unthinkable today to return to the figure of man.When Haraway invokes what is literally unthinkable, and then gestures to the Anthropocene, she suggests that perhaps the figure of the Anthropocene is a form of unthinking, and that it is precisely when complexities, timescales, predictions, manageability, and any form of sustainability ought to disturb and trouble our logics that we cease to think and ask for a single cause for an entire epoch. If this is so, and the “anthropos” of the Anthropocene is a reaction formation, then we might see the skirmishes and turf wars that surround the golden spike1 as diversions. If we spend our time disputing just when it was that man started to change the planet, then we allow a contested point in time to pass itself off as thinking, all the while allowing the intensive multiplicity of what has come to be known as the Anthropocene to remain unthought. By asking when the Anthropocene began, we revive a modified version of the time of man; once again, man is placed as the agent of history, albeit unwittingly, and he can look back upon and assess the past of his own making. Haraway is not alone in suggesting that such conceptions of a single line of time, and a conception of first cause, are highly gendered and racialized. The figure of “man” who creates his own history and recognizes himself as having come into being through a time that is readable is bound up with hegemonic conceptions of modernity, and has long been the target of feminist, poststructuralist, and postcolonial critique (e.g., Foucault 1970; Amin 1989; Grosz 2004). If it is literally unthinkable to do good work from the premises of a methodological individualism, then asking who or what caused the Anthropocene, or when it began, would amount to a form of un-thinking or not-thinking. At the same time, perhaps the Anthropocene is literally unthinkable in a sense that marks a more positive and profound absurdity. Let us accept, following Haraway, that all “good work” both acknowledges the impossibility of accounting for the complexity of life by way of bounded, individual singularity, and dispenses with the exceptional man of reason as its foundation. If we do, what the Anthropocene... (shrink)

Just as becoming-woman is a divided concept, looking back to a seemingly redemptive figure of the feminine beyond rigid being, but also forward to a positive annihilation of fixed genders, so modernism was also a doubled movement. But modernism was a pulverisation of ‘the’ subject for the sake of a plural and multiplying point of view, and like ‘becoming-woman’, should be read as a defiant and affirmative refusal.

In On Touching Derrida locates Jean-Luc Nancy (and, briefly, Gilles Deleuze) within a tradition of haptic ethics and aesthetics that runs from Aristotle to the present. In his early work on Husserl, Derrida had already claimed that phenomenology's commitment to the genesis of sense and the sensible is at one and the same time a commitment to pure and rigorous philosophy at the same time as it threatens to over-turn the primacy of conceptuality and cognition.Whereas Nancy (and those other figures (...) whom Derrida cites, such as Merleau-Ponty) express a faith in a return to the sensibility of flesh, Derrida presents his own work as manifestly more cognisant of the necessary distance between flesh and sense. Another ‘approach’ to the haptic is suggested by Gilles Deleuze, whose work Derrida locates within phenomenological presence, despite Deleuze and Guattari's trenchant rejection of ‘the lived’ and the human organism that inevitably subtends any discussion of the relation between sensibility and sense. Rather than decide for or against this border between flesh and cognition, between post-deconstruction and deconstructive rigour, this essay examines this curious border of touch between philosophy and sensibility, and does so by referring to William Blake's problem of returning the signs of sense to the sensibility of the hand. (shrink)