In an empirical study, we compared how lay people judge motivation enhancement as opposed to cognitive enhancement. We found alienation is not seen as a danger associated with either form of enhancement. Cognitive enhancement is seen as more morally wrong than motivation enhancement, and users of cognitive enhancement tend to be judged as less deserving of praise and success than users of motivation enhancement. These more negative judgments of cognitive enhancement may be driven by differences in perceived fairness rather than (...) differences in effort exerted by the user, although lay people generally see effort as necessary to deservingness of praise and success. (shrink)

Niels de Haan (2023) defends the possibility of holding collectives morally responsible against a challenge posed by the problem of self-induced moral incapacity. Self-induced moral incapacity seems to introduce a responsibility gap that corporate agents might exploit to avoid responsibility. De Haan argues that the problem does not introduce responsibility gaps because collective moral agents become responsible for actions they committed while they were incapacitated once they reacquire moral capacity. I argue that de Haan’s argument is incomplete. Simply because a (...) group reacquires moral capacity does not also necessarily mean that the group retains attributability for the wrongs in question. This means we must supplement de Haan’s argument with an Attributability Proviso: To overcome the problem of self-induced moral incapacity it must be the case that the group reacquires moral capacity and that we can still attribute the earlier actions to the group despite the changes that it has gone through. (shrink)

This contribution examines the relevance of the concept “limit situation” in relation to aging and old age in a geriatric psychotherapy setting. The idea is to bring together concepts from phenomenology and the philosophy of age with methods from the field of qualitative social research. Experiences of groundlessness are viewed through the lens of Karl Jaspers’ terminology, leading to conceptualizing a dynamic of stabilizing beliefs yielding in the context of aging and old age. The results promise to contribute to psychotherapy (...) research and explore new ways for employing phenomenological ideas in clinical practice and research. (shrink)

While most contemporary proposals of ethics for machines draw upon principle-based ethics, a number of recent studies attempt to build machines capable of acting virtuously. This paper discusses the promises and limitations of building virtue-ethical machines. Taking inspiration from various philosophical traditions—including Greek philosophy (Aristotle), Chinese philosophy (Zhuangzi), phenomenology (Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus) and contemporary virtue theory (Julia Annas)—we argue for a novel model of machine ethics we call the “skillful-expert model.” This model sharply distinguishes human virtues and their machine (...) analogues and rejects the direct transposition of human virtues to machines, as suggested by most proposals for machine virtues. Instead, we propose that human skills are better candidates for machine virtues. (shrink)

La familia Murcia de la Llana desarrolló a lo largo de casi un siglo una de las tareas más significativas y a su vez más desconocidas dentro del complicado proceso por el que un manuscrito debía transcurrir hasta abandonar la imprenta: la corrección de libros. Por sus manos pasaron la mayor parte de los escritos del siglo XVII, muchos de los cuales alcanzarían posteriormente un éxito sin precedentes, caso del Quijote de Miguel de Cervantes. Este estudio se articula en base (...) a una serie de noticias documentales, muchas inéditas, que intentan esclarecer la compleja relación de parentescos, así como interesantes datos sobre el oficio de corrector general de libros. (shrink)

The overall concern of this issue is not really to question whether there is such a thing as “African philosophy.” Any question concerning “African philosophy,” i.e. a specifically pan-African discipline with its own methods and forms, is partly different from that of “African thought” in general, for the latter includes not only processes of consciousness that reflect on the natural and human fields, but also practices whose very nature is to create or express specific cultural textures. The choice of “African (...) Thought” – rather than “African Philosophy” – in this series of essays is a way of leaving the door open to thought-practices that would be considered as foreign or simply borderline to what is usually considered as philosophy by the Western establishment, that is, by those who have come to believe and persuade the rest of the world that the love of wisdom is the love of logos. (shrink)

Social science research, whether observational or interventional, is confronted with situations where the dignity of participants and respect for cultural practices can be seriously affected. The aim of this article is twofold. Firstly, we will reflect on the ethical challenges facing social science research with special consideration of research in contexts of vulnerability. Secondly, we will propose the Kantian sense of respect as a normative framework to guide social science research.

Hermeneutics originates in the mediation of meaningful utterances understood as arising from a suprahuman, divine domain. The religious origin of hermeneutics is centrally connected with the history of Christianity both in the Patristic period, ending with St. Augustine, and in the modern era of Reformation and Counter‐Reformation. Schleiermacher outlines a general theory of interpretation, while resisting any claims to special status of biblical hermeneutics. This chapter charts both facets of hermeneutics before ending with the relation of hermeneutics to the phenomenology (...) of the sacred. The masters of suspicion, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, understood religion as a cultural phenomenon, and one which masks a deeper reality. The hermeneutics of religion continues to be a fundamental philosophical and theological concern. Hermeneutics and religious phenomena inform each other in the development of a hermeneutics of religion and an exploration of the religious origins of hermeneutics. (shrink)

Building on previous work by Mints, Buchholz and Schwichtenberg, a simplified version of continuous normalization for the untyped λ-calculus and Gödel’s is presented and analysed in the coalgebraic framework of non-wellfounded terms with so-called repetition constructors.The primitive recursive normalization function is uniformly continuous w.r.t. the natural metric on non-wellfounded terms. Furthermore, the number of necessary repetition constructors is locally related to the number of reduction steps needed to reach the normal form and its size.It is also shown how continuous normal (...) forms relate to derivations of strong normalizability in the typed λ-calculus and how this leads to new bounds for the sum of the height of the reduction tree and the size of the normal form.Finally, the methods are extended to an infinitary λ-calculus with ω-rule and permutative conversions and this is used to derive a strong form of normalization for an iterative version of Gödel’s system , leading to a value table semantics for number-theoretic functions. (shrink)

Heise discusses the pedagogical effects of philosophical enquiry on young people, their cognitive and behavioral abilities (both strengths and weaknesses), and gaining intelligence through an open mind and tests.

Heise delves into the ethical issues behind Cheating for High School students from a conference for ethicists, in addition to a discussion with students and moderators towards the subject.

The Cambridge Journal of Economics witnessed an important debate between Mark Pernecky and Paul Wojick on the one side and Rod Thomas on the other about the usefulness of Thomas Kuhn's sociology and philosophy of science in explaining why Keynes's revolutionary ideas exposed in the General Theory have been 'lost in translation'. This brief note is an attempt to reconcile Pernecky and Wojick's claim that Keynes's new economics of the General Theory and Walrasian General Equilibrium are incommensurable paradigms in a (...) Kuhnian understanding and Thomas's critique that – if they were incommensurable – Pernecki and Wojick's appraisal of Keynes's paradigm as a better approximation to the 'real world' than Walsrasian General Equilibrium is inconsistent within that very Kuhnian framework. (shrink)

Affect Control Theory was developed to address some issues in role theory. However, a mathematical formulation allowed the theory to expand rapidly to a variety of substantive issues, such as labeling, attributions, emotions, and the impact of settings on social interaction. Formalization raised theoretical issues that might have been neglected otherwise, and helped in defining the boundaries of the theory. A reasonable lesson to draw from development of affect control theory is that even modest mathematical analyses can expand theoretical productivity.

Both the sound and the sea are characterized by a constant fluidity and transformation, which has been considered as a creative foundation for expanded sonic practices that identify, capture and experiment with natural elements. The text aims to explore how the idea of sonification as a process of translating qualities and data into sound constitutes the departure point towards contemporary sound practices that encourage deeper listening and immersive experiences. Taking the sea-responsive sound installations of French artist Félix Blume, Rumors from (...) the Sea and Suspiros as a foundation, the article presents a reflective conversation between Félix Blume and Bill Psarras on aspects of such artworks that highlight ideas of sea and limens, listening experience, sound ecology and sonic instruments through performative, inventive and participatory lenses. (shrink)

Sebastian Grève interviews Felix Mühlhölzer on his work on the philosophy of mathematics.

La psicología y los psicólogos han dedicado bastante esfuerzo para conseguir una comprensión mejor y más profundea de las emociones y los sentimientos. Roberto Colom con sus respuestas nos ofrece una visión de primera mano de todas esas aportaciones así como el punto de vista de un psicólogo sobre el valos y la importancia de las emociones, los sntimientos y la vida afectiva en general para la personalidad humana.

This collection of original essays on political and legal theory concentrates on themes dealt with in the work of Felix Oppenheim, including fundamental political and legal concepts and their implications for the scope of morality in politics and international relations. Among the issues addressed are the relationship between empirical and normative definitions of "freedom", "power", and "interests", whether governments are free to act against the national interest, and whether they can ever be morally obliged to do so.

Who should be recognized as a refugee? This article seeks to uncover the normative arguments at the core of legal and philosophical conceptions of refugeehood. It identifies three analytically dist...

In moral and political philosophy, collective obligations are promising “gap-stoppers” when we find that we need to assert some obligation, but can not plausibly ascribe this obligation to individual agents. Most notably, Bill Wringe and Jesse Tomalty discuss whether the obligations that correspond to socio-economic human rights are held by states or even by humankind at large. The present paper aims to provide a missing piece for these discussions, namely an account of the conditions under which obligations can apply to (...) loose collections of agents that do not qualify as collective agents in their own right. I first explain the notion of joint obligations of loose collections of agents as opposed to collective obligations of collections of agents that are collective agents in their own right, and argue that the conditions under which agents can jointly have obligations are the conditions under which they are jointly able to do what is required. I then build on Virginia Held’s seminal work on the moral responsibility of “random collections” to develop such conditions for joint ability. My discussion shows that collections of individuals can more easily be subject to moral obligations than previously assumed. It also shows that putative joint obligations need to be carefully time-indexed, and that it is largely an empirical question whether a given collection can be subject to a moral obligation to perform a given joint action at a particular time. (shrink)