Anders s’est toujours intéressé à Nietzsche. Devenu philosophe, c’est à travers la question des valeurs qu’il le croise lorsqu’il entreprend d’écrire une Kulturphilosophie. S’il le fascine tant, c’est pour avoir osé dénoncer l’absence de fondement de la morale. Mais, même fasciné, Anders n’est pas homme à suspendre la tendance fondamentalement critique de sa pensée : l’idéal d’une surhumanité que Nietzsche a proposé pour dépasser l’humanité bricoleuse de morales lui semble s’engager sur un terrain politiquement irrecevable. Déterminant la décadence du monde (...) comme son entrée dans un état technique du monde, Anders donne des accents nietzschéens à sa propre critique de la culture : c’est l’humanité tout entière qui doit devenir une surhumanité capable de révolutionner le monde pour le conserver…. (shrink)

C’est en présence de Karl Mannheim et Paul Tillich, entre autres, que Günther Anders a présenté son anthropologie philosophique de l’homme utopique à la fin des années 1920. De ces auteurs, il a tiré une conception chiliastique ou millénariste de l’utopie impliquant un certain rapport à l’Histoire et à la politique. Celle-ci est morte en lui après s’être inversée dans la réalité pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Replacer Anders dans ce contexte permet de montrer d’où proviennent certains schémas religieux que (...) l’on retrouve sécularisés dans son œuvre et de donner un sens au tour « religieux » que prend parfois sa pensée. (shrink)

« Cet article se propose de revenir, en s’appuyant sur des documents d’archives inédits, même en Allemagne, sur le chapitre que Günther Anders consacre au jazz dans le tome 1 de L’Obsolescence de l’homme. Voyant dans le jazz l’ analogon d’une machine destinée à dresser les corps, il ne le confie ni à une philosophie de la musique ni à une sociologie de la musique, mais à une critique de la technique. Si ce texte de 1956 repose sur une analyse (...) de la machine-jazz du swing qui peut parfois sembler injuste, les notes inédites révèlent en revanche un véritable intérêt pour le be-bop.». (shrink)

Philosophers and historians of science have tended to denigrate the status and usefulness of the practice of natural history. The development of biology in this century is seen as the replacement of an older, descriptive and speculative method with a quantitative, experimental and well-founded science. This account embodies a philosophical view about the nature of science, which deems certain kinds of evidence and certain ways of producing knowledge appropriate. Natural history is seen as inadequate, providing insufficient support for establishing theory. (...) ;I develop a case study which shows this account to be incorrect. The case study concerns the debate over the role of geographical isolation in speciation between 1905 and 1907. After some preliminary historical background to the debate, I present a detailed discussion of the arguments made by naturalist David Starr Jordan . The debate that ensued centered on the kinds of evidence one should use in doing science--fieldwork versus experiments. Thus, this case study offers excellent subject matter for understanding natural history. ;After examining the debate and its participants in some detail, we can see that at the heart of this debate is an epistemological issue over what virtues are central to science. In particular, while natural historians like Jordan were advocating an approach which emphasized the consilience of inductions--and hence a variety of kinds of evidence--a more experimentally oriented group of biologists were advocating the centrality of replication and hence argued that all non-experimental forms of evidence should be abandoned. Contrary to expectations, the naturalists had the better theory. (shrink)

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to transform many aspects of scholarly publishing. Authors, peer reviewers, and editors might use AI in a variety of ways, and those uses might augment their existing work or might instead be intended to replace it. We are editors of bioethics and humanities journals who have been contemplating the implications of this ongoing transformation. We believe that generative AI may pose a threat to the goals that animate our work but could also be (...) valuable for achieving those goals. In the interests of fostering a wider conversation about how generative AI may be used, we have developed a preliminary set of recommendations for its use in scholarly publishing. We hope that the recommendations and rationales set out here will help the scholarly community navigate toward a deeper understanding of the strengths, limits, and challenges of AI for responsible scholarly work. (shrink)

In this highly original of realism, David Kelley argues that perception is the discrimination of objects as entities, that the awareness of these objects is direct, and that perception is a reliable foundation for empirical knowledge. His argument relies on the basic principle of the 'primacy of existence, ' in opposition to Cartesian representationalism and Kantian idealism.

In a postscript to the second edition, Kelley reviews the growth in Objectivist scholarship and the influence of Rand's ideas over the past decade." "The Contested Legacy of Ayn Rand is an engaging introduction to the Objectivist movement, its core ideas, and its central fissures. At the same time, it offers a case study in the sociology of intellectual movements and a frank discussion of the issues that arise whenever thinkers leave their studies to promote their ideas in the (...) public realm."--BOOK JACKET. (shrink)

David Kelley discusses the relationship between philosophy and sense of life and explains why he and William Thomas do not consider sense of life essential to the explanation of why art is a major human value, though it is essential to explaining how people create and experience art. Kelley also challenges the claim by Kamhi and Torres (in their article, "Critical Neglect of Ayn Rand's Theory of Art? Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, Fall 2000) that aesthetics, as (...) a branch of philosophy, is logically prior to ethics and on a par with epistemology in fundamentality. (shrink)

What ontology does realism about the quantum state suggest? The main extant view in contemporary philosophy of physics is wave-function realism . We elaborate the sense in which wave-function realism does provide an ontological picture, and defend it from certain objections that have been raised against it. However, there are good reasons to be dissatisfied with wave-function realism, as we go on to elaborate. This motivates the development of an opposing picture: what we call spacetime state realism , a view (...) which takes the states associated to spacetime regions as fundamental. This approach enjoys a number of beneficial features, although, unlike wave-function realism, it involves non-separability at the level of fundamental ontology. We investigate the pros and cons of this non-separability, arguing that it is a quite acceptable feature, even one which proves fruitful in the context of relativistic covariance. A companion paper discusses the prospects for combining a spacetime-based ontology with separability, along lines suggested by Deutsch and Hayden. (shrink)

An inviting alternative to traditional texts in introductory logic, The Art of Reasoning is widely acclaimed for its conversational tone and accessible exposition of rigorous logical concepts.

This paper considers challenges resulting from the use of advanced artificial judicial intelligence (AAJI). We argue that these challenges should be considered through the lens of value alignment. Instead of discussing why specific goals and values, such as fairness and nondiscrimination, ought to be implemented, we consider the question of how AAJI can be aligned with goals and values more generally, in order to be reliably integrated into legal and judicial systems. This value alignment framing draws on AI safety and (...) alignment literature to introduce two otherwise neglected considerations for AAJI safety: specification and assurance. We outline diverse research directions and suggest the adoption of assurance and specification mechanisms as the use of AI in the judiciary progresses. While we focus on specification and assurance to illustrate the value of the AI safety and alignment literature, we encourage researchers in law and philosophy to consider what other lessons may be drawn. (shrink)

In this paper, I introduce the notion of ‘philosophy moves’: prominent tropes featured in contemporary academic philosophy. Moves are more than patterns—they are tools for advancing and enriching philosophical debates. By recognizing these patterns in the philosophical literature, we collect an ensemble of moves for deployment in novel contexts, each with the potential to forge new paths of philosophical investigation through a given topic. The moves featured in this paper are constructive and progressive, with the potential to push past stalemates (...) and open a wider conceptual landscape. Following a presentation of five exemplars taken from the philosophy of biology literature, I show how different moves could be made within a current interdisciplinary debate. Overall, I aim to demonstrate that recognizing these patterns is insightful pedagogically and potentially useful when used as part of one’s philosophical methodology. (shrink)

This paper is an essay based on many years of reviewing journal submissions and discussions with business ethics scholars on a range of themes regarding methods. To some extent, it contains condensed thoughts from two experienced scholars in the field, which we hope will be useful, especially to emerging scholars who, to some extent, may still be wrestling with some of the issues raised in the paper. The validity and reliability of research methods in business ethics research is discussed in (...) terms of legitimate methods to employ in the discipline, the epistemic challenges in the discipline, the debate between qualitative and quantitative methods, and some considered comments on ‘researching well’ in this discipline. Within each theme, we attempt to convey our distilled thoughts in the hope that methods employed in future studies will avoid some of the failures we have observed in the past. (shrink)

Ayn Rand and Friedrich Hayek were notable 20th century advocates of libertarianism, and both of them based their political views, in part, on theories in epistemology. This paper discusses the radical difference in their views on a core epistemological issue, the nature of abstractions. Rand held that we form abstractions from the observation of particular, concrete things. Hayek held the opposite view that abstractions are primary; some are innate, some acquired from our cultural environment, but neither can be independently supported (...) by observation of concretes. Kelley will show why Hayek’s view is both false and inconsistent with a fully individualist moral and political theory. (shrink)

An ambitious ethical theory ---Alan Gewirth's "Principle of Generic Consistency"--- is encoded and analysed in Isabelle/HOL. Gewirth's theory has stirred much attention in philosophy and ethics and has been proposed as a potential means to bound the impact of artificial general intelligence.

In the remainder of this article, we will disarm an important motivation for epistemic contextualism and interest-relative invariantism. We will accomplish this by presenting a stringent test of whether there is a stakes effect on ordinary knowledge ascription. Having shown that, even on a stringent way of testing, stakes fail to impact ordinary knowledge ascription, we will conclude that we should take another look at classical invariantism. Here is how we will proceed. Section 1 lays out some limitations of previous (...) research on stakes. Section 2 presents our study and concludes that there is little evidence for a substantial stakes effect. Section 3 responds to objections. The conclusion clears the way for classical invariantism. (shrink)

David Kelley presents empirical evidence of the welfare state’s effects on behavior, historical research on the origins of the welfare state, and philosophical clarification of such core ideas as freedom and rights. After a careful examination of the various arguments made on behalf of welfare rights, Kelley concludes that “the concept of welfare rights is invalid.”.

In this short article, we articulate a position that organ recovery from uncontrolled DCD — primarily patients who have suffered a cardiac arrest — is unlikely to result in a significant number of organs, and this small gain must be balanced against significant risk of unduly influencing resuscitation provider decision-making, and jeopardizing public trust in the propriety of organ donation and transplantation.

This paper is focused on the Sapient and Sentient Intelligence Value Argument or SSIVA and the ethics of how that applies to autonomous systems and how such systems might be governed by the extension of current regulation, as well as providing a computable model of ethics for AGI research. SSIVA is based on some static core definitions of "Intelligence" as defined by the measured ability to understand, use, and generate knowledge or information independently, all of which are a function of (...) sapience and sentience. The SSIVA logic places the value of any individual human and their potential for Intelligence, and the value of other systems to the degree that they are self-aware or "intelligent", as a priority. Further, the paper lays out the case for how the current legal framework could be extended to address issues with autonomous systems to varying degrees depending on the SSIVA threshold as applied to autonomous systems. Further, from a research standpoint it is important to have a descreet model to measure against without ambiguity, which the SSIVA theory provides. (shrink)

Philosophers sometimes refer to ‘moves’ made in the context of a philosophical debate. Once familiar with these recognizable tropes, we then possess them as tools – a suite of possible moves to make in novel contexts. In this paper, I outline three such philosophy moves, then demonstrate how moves can be combined. Examples of moves and some combinations feature throughout the paper.

In temporal binding, the temporal interval between one event and another, occurring some time later, is subjectively compressed. We discuss two ways in which temporal binding has been conceptualized. In studies showing temporal binding between a voluntary action and its causal consequences, such binding is typically interpreted as providing a measure of an implicit or pre-reflective “sense of agency”. However, temporal binding has also been observed in contexts not involving voluntary action, but only the passive observation of a cause-effect sequence. (...) In those contexts, it has been interpreted as a top-down effect on perception reflecting a belief in causality. These two views need not be in conflict with one another, if one thinks of them as concerning two separate mechanisms through which temporal binding can occur. In this paper, we explore an alternative possibility: that there is a unitary way of explaining temporal binding both within and outside the context of voluntary action as a top-down effect on perception reflecting a belief in causality. Any such explanation needs to account for ways in which agency, and factors connected with agency, have been shown to affect the strength of temporal binding. We show that principles of causal inference and causal selection already familiar from the literature on causal learning have the potential to explain why the strength of people’s causal beliefs can be affected by the extent to which they are themselves actively involved in bringing about events, thus in turn affecting binding. (shrink)

This chapter defends the view that Arthur Schopenhauer and Siddhattha Gotama were unquestionably pessimistic philosophers, insofar as they converged in locating the source of life’s suffering within the person rather than the external world. However, in the process of outlining the significant continuities between their respective phenomenological analyses of life’s suffering, this chapter detects an important divergence between them. This stems from their contrasting metaphysical positions and ultimately impacts upon their respective interpretations of the significance of life’s suffering, as well (...) as their proposed solutions to it. (shrink)

Mistake-making is a common feature of life; it can be given a rigorous theoretical framework. The theory, though, faces a challenge from the ‘functions debate’. Perhaps mistakes are merely malfunctions, so a theory of mistakes requires a stance on functions. However, mistake theory views mistakes as distinct phenomena, not just malfunctions. The functions debate is largely separate from the concept of biological mistakes. While the selected effects theory, for instance, may retain its place within a pluralistic view of function, embracing (...) a robust concept of normativity that goes beyond a relatively narrow conception of function can drive future experimental research. (shrink)

Research on the implementation of corporate social responsibility (CSR) has revealed the critical role of CSR departments vis-à-vis functional departments. While both CSR and functional departments influence CSR implementation, the question of how they work together remains underexamined. We address this question by mobilizing and merging two complementary yet separate perspectives on CSR implementation: “coordination” and “enactment.” Building on a comparative case study involving seven large Swiss financial institutions that have established CSR departments and implemented CSR to varying extents, we (...) inductively derive six courses of actions conducing to CSR implementation, involving both coordination and enactment. We distinguish between four courses of actions in the CSR departments ( centralizing, coalescing, orchestrating, and consulting) and two courses of actions in the functional departments ( decentralizing and tailoring). As our data suggest that coordination and enactment work in tandem, we capture these insights in a model of CSR implementation as coordinated enactment. Our research contributes to the literature by explaining how CSR departments and functional departments enact and simultaneously coordinate CSR at a particular implementation stage, thus illuminating how and why the variance in CSR implementation occurs. (shrink)

Autism Spectrum Disorder is a diagnosis applicable to a vast range of presentations. However, there are disadvantages to theorizing and communicating about autism as a single spectrum. This paper suggests an alternative or supplementary multi-dimensional approach for diagnosticians and educators – an approach that more accurately reflects our understanding of autism.

Machine learning algorithms may radically improve our ability to diagnose and treat disease. For moral, legal, and scientific reasons, it is essential that doctors and patients be able to understand and explain the predictions of these models. Scalable, customisable, and ethical solutions can be achieved by working together with relevant stakeholders, including patients, data scientists, and policy makers.