I sketch here an intuitive picture of repeatable artworks as created types, which are individuated in part by historical paths (re)production. Although attractive, this view has been rejected by a number of authors on the basis of general claims about abstract objects. On consideration, however, these general claims are overgeneralizations, which whilst true of some abstracta, are not true of all abstract objects, and in particular, are not true of created types. The intuitive picture of repeatable artworks as created types (...) is, then, left in place. (shrink)

Are a material object, such as a statue, and its constituting matter, the clay, parts of one another? One wouldn't have thought so, and yet a number of philosophers have argued that they are. I review the arguments for this surprising claim showing how they all fail. I then consider two arguments against the view concluding that there are both pre-theoretical and theoretical considerations for denying that the statue and the clay are mutual parts.

Purpose The online economy has not resolved the issue of racial bias in its applications. While algorithms are procedures that facilitate automated decision-making, or a sequence of unambiguous instructions, bias is a byproduct of these computations, bringing harm to historically disadvantaged populations. This paper argues that algorithmic biases explicitly and implicitly harm racial groups and lead to forms of discrimination. Relying upon sociological and technical research, the paper offers commentary on the need for more workplace diversity within high-tech industries and (...) public policies that can detect or reduce the likelihood of racial bias in algorithmic design and execution. Design/methodology/approach The paper shares examples in the US where algorithmic biases have been reported and the strategies for explaining and addressing them. Findings The findings of the paper suggest that explicit racial bias in algorithms can be mitigated by existing laws, including those governing housing, employment, and the extension of credit. Implicit, or unconscious, biases are harder to redress without more diverse workplaces and public policies that have an approach to bias detection and mitigation. Research limitations/implications The major implication of this research is that further research needs to be done. Increasing the scholarly research in this area will be a major contribution in understanding how emerging technologies are creating disparate and unfair treatment for certain populations. Practical implications The practical implications of the work point to areas within industries and the government that can tackle the question of algorithmic bias, fairness and accountability, especially African-Americans. Social implications The social implications are that emerging technologies are not devoid of societal influences that constantly define positions of power, values, and norms. Originality/value The paper joins a scarcity of existing research, especially in the area that intersects race and algorithmic development. (shrink)

The standard semantics for counterfactuals ensures that any counterfactual with a true antecedent and true consequent is itself true. There have been many recent attempts to amend the standard semantics to avoid this result. I show that these proposals invalidate a number of further principles of the standard logic of counterfactuals. The case against the automatic truth of counterfactuals with true components does not extend to these further principles, however, so it is not clear that rejecting the latter should be (...) a consequence of rejecting the former. Instead I consider how one might defuse putative counterexamples to the truth of true-true counterfactuals. (shrink)

Michelle Maiese and Robert Hanna’s The Mind-Body Politic sets out to combine both the philosophy of essentially embodied cognition (EEM) and emancipatory political theory to put forth a “new critique of contemporary social institutions.” There remains, however, an explanatory gap between the general, normative foundations of their approach in EEM, and the particular critiques of neoliberalism and the alternative presented. This paper explores an alternative totalitarian pathway (as understood by Arendt) that such general EEM normativity might lead us, as a (...) friendly invitation for further elaboration on the normative basis of MBP’s critiques of—and proposed alternative to—neoliberal institutions. (shrink)

I present and discuss a counterexample to Kendall Walton's necessary condition for fictionality that arises from considering serial fictions. I argue that although Walton has not in fact provided a necessary condition for fictionality, a more complex version of Walton's condition is immune from the counterexample.

I reply to Ahmed’s rejection (2011) of my argument (Walters 2009) that all counterfactuals with true antecedents and consequents are themselves true.

In a recent set of publications Ballantyne :485–503, 2011, Synthese 185:319–334, 2012, Synthese 91:1391–1407, 2013) argues that luck does not have a significant role in understanding the concept of knowledge. The problem, Ballantyne argues, lies in what is commonly thought to be a necessary condition for luck—a significance or value condition :385–398, 2007; Lackey, in Austral J Philos 86:255–267, 2008, Ballantyne, in Can J Philos 41:485–503, 2011). For an event, like forming a true belief, to be lucky then it must (...) be of some significance or value to an agent. Yet, if significance, as it has also been commonly thought, plays a role in determining the degree of luck :485–503, 2011), then this leads to a result similar to an absurd form of pragmatic encroachment. If this problem cannot be avoided, then anti-luck epistemology should be abandoned. However, this paper will argue that with proper considerations about the nature of luck according to at least one theory, no such problem arises. (shrink)

Andrew McGonigal presents some interesting data concerning truth in serial fictions.1 Such data has been taken by McGonigal, Cameron and Caplan to motivate some form of contextualism or relativism. I argue, however, that many of these approaches are problematic, and that all are under-motivated as the data can be explained in a standard invariantist semantic framework given some independently plausible principles.

Recommender systems assist users in receiving preferred or relevant services and information. Using such technology could be instrumental in addressing the lack of relevance digital mental health apps have to the user, a leading cause of low engagement. However, the use of recommender systems for digital mental health apps, particularly those driven by personal data and artificial intelligence, presents a range of ethical considerations. This paper focuses on considerations particular to the juncture of recommender systems and digital mental health technologies. (...) While separate bodies of work have focused on these two areas, to our knowledge, the intersection presented in this paper has not yet been examined. This paper identifies and discusses a set of advantages and ethical concerns related to incorporating recommender systems into the digital mental health ecosystem. Advantages of incorporating recommender systems into DMH apps are identified as a reduction in choice overload, improvement to the digital therapeutic alliance, and increased access to personal data & self-management. Ethical challenges identified are lack of explainability, complexities pertaining to the privacy/personalization trade-off and recommendation quality, and the control of app usage history data. These novel considerations will provide a greater understanding of how DMH apps can effectively and ethically implement recommender systems. (shrink)

This paper focuses on an early Chinese conception of genealogical argumentation in the late Warring States text Han Feizi and a possible response it has to the problem of genealogical self-defeat as identified by Amia Srinivasan —i.e., the genealogist cannot seem to support their argument with premises their interlocutor or they themselves can accept, given their own argument. The paper offers a reading of Han Fei’s genealogical method that traces back to the meditative practice of an earlier Daoist text the (...) Zhuangzi and its communicative strategy, providing a conception of genealogy aimed at undoing fixations on political systems in order to bring about a more adaptive state—specifically, genealogy that does not require epistemological commitment to its premises. (shrink)

Social philosophers often invoke the concept of false consciousness in their analyses, referring to a set of evidence-resistant, ignorant attitudes held by otherwise sound epistemic agents, systematically occurring in virtue of, and motivating them to perpetuate, structural oppression. But there is a worry that appealing to the notion in questions of responsibility for the harm suffered by members of oppressed groups is victim-blaming. Individuals under false consciousness allegedly systematically fail the relevant rationality and epistemic conditions due to structural distortions of (...) reasoning or knowledge practices, undermining their status as responsible moral agents. But attending to the constitutive mechanisms and heterogeneity of false consciousness allows us to see how having it does not eo ipso render someone an inappropriate target of blame. I focus here on the 1889 anti-suffragist manifesto “An Appeal Against Female Suffrage,” arguing that its signatories, despite false consciousness, satisfy both conditions for ordinary blameworthiness. I consider three prominent signatories, observing that the irrationality characterisation is unsustainable beyond group-level diagnoses, and that their capacity to respond appropriately to reasons was not compromised. Following recent work on epistemic injustice, I also argue that culpable mechanisms constituted their false consciousness, rendering them blameworthy for the Appeal. (shrink)

Han Feizi’s criticisms of Confucian and Mohist political recommendations are often thought to involve materialist or historicist arguments, independently of their epistemological features. Drawing largely on Amia Srinivasan’s recent taxonomy of genealogical arguments, this paper proposes a genealogical reading of passages in “The Five Vermin [五蠹 wudu]” and “Eminence in Learning [顯學 xianxue].” This reveals Han Feizi’s arguments to be more comprehensively appreciated as problematizing Confucian and Mohist political judgments as arising from undermining contingencies, rendering them irrelevant, if not detrimental, (...) to any lasting excellence of a state. In doing this, it is also suggested that there is a ‘master argument’ underlying Han Feizi’s criticisms, according to which the epistemology of the Confucians and Mohists are fundamentally unreliable. (shrink)

Shun Kwong-loi argues that the distinction between first- and third-person points of view does not play as explanatory a role in our moral psychology as has been supposed by contemporary philosophical discussions. He draws insightfully from the Confucian tradition to better elucidate our everyday experiences of moral emotions, arguing that it offers an alternative and more faithful perspective on our experiences of anger and compassion. However, unlike the distinction between first- and third-person points of view, Shun’s descriptions of anger and (...) compassion leave unarticulated what would be necessary to differentiate these responses from non-moral responses. Here, I make a friendly suggestion on how this explanatory gap might be filled, providing complementary grounding for Shun’s observations by way of K. C. Bhattacharyya’s phenomenological analysis of feeling. It fills the gap by means of a gradation in the possible depth of emotional responses found in the a priori structure of a feeling experience for any subject. The payoff of such a comparison between Shun’s explication of Confucian moral psychology and Bhattacharyya’s explication of rasa theory is not only a possible phenomenological grounding for the former but also a potential way to articulate a missing ethics in Bhattacharyya’s thought. (shrink)

What are the prospects for a linguistic approach to ontology? Given that it seems that there are true subject-predicate sentences containing empty names, traditional linguistic approaches to ontology appear to be flawed. I argue that in order to determine what there is, we need to determine which sentences ascribe properties (and relations) to objects, and that there does not appear to be any formal criterion for this. This view is then committed to giving an account of what predicates do in (...) sentences when they do not ascribe properties. I sketch an approach to the varieties of predication. (shrink)

Dorothy Edgington’s work has been at the centre of a range of ongoing debates in philosophical logic, philosophy of mind and language, metaphysics, and epistemology. This work has focused, although by no means exclusively, on the overlapping areas of conditionals, probability, and paradox. In what follows, I briefly sketch some themes from these three areas relevant to Dorothy’s work, highlighting how some of Dorothy’s work and some of the contributions of this volume fit in to these debates.

Recovers a sense of John Locke's central role in the making of the modern world. It demonstrates that his vision of modern life was constructed on a philosophy of human freedom that is the intellectual nerve connecting the various strands of his thought. By revealing the depth and originality of Locke's critique of the metaphysical assumptions and authoritative institutions of pre-modern life, this book rejects the notion of Locke as an intellectual anachronism. Indeed, the radical core of Locke's modern project (...) was the 'democratization of mind', according to which he challenged practically every previous mode of philosophical analysis by making the autonomous individual the sole determinant of truth. It was on the basis of this new philosophical dispensation that Locke crafted a modern vision not only of government but also of the churches, the family, education, and the conduct of international relations"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

In Plato’s Apology of Socrates, Socrates claims that any just person who becomes involved in politics will be destroyed by the “multitude” and that the philosopher must therefore lead a private life. I argue that Socrates’ elaboration of his relation to the political community, especially in the trial of the generals of Arginusae and the arrest of Leon, raises more questions than a cursory reading can answer both with respect to the logical structure of the argument in the Apology and (...) in comparison with other Socratic formulationsof the relation of philosophy and the city. Far from demonstrating the incompatibility of philosophy and politics, Socrates in the Apology and other dialogues limns the features of a conception of political life that incorporates philosophical principles of moderation anddialectical examination into an understanding of politics directed towards the moral and intellectual development of the citizens. (shrink)

Nuclear waste is ethically contentious, concerning institutional trust, community engagement and the role nuclear plays in different sociotechnical configurations of energy futures. Using Q-methodology with a diverse UK-based stakeholder group, we find three emergent discourses: a) ‘Managing a distrustful public’, b) ‘Fair and democratic nuclear waste decision-making’, and c) ‘Putting the experts in control’. Although multi-stakeholder support is expressed for geological disposal of wastes, disagreements arise toward the ethics of nuclear-powered energy futures and for community decision-making roles. We recommend that (...) policy authorities must first strengthen community withdrawal rights, and second, renew deliberative democratic decision-making mechanisms within energy policy strategy. (shrink)

Cet article analyse l’effet du retour au nom juif (perdu/changé) de la troisième génération après la Shoah, rendu possible par la décision du ministère de la Justice en 2011 suite à l’action du collectif « La force du nom ». Il s’appuie sur le témoignage d’un homme revendiquant le retour au nom du grand-père (son propre père lui, n’ayant pas souhaité revenir au nom effacé). Cet exemple révèle la complexité du nom patronymique dans ce qu’il engage psychiquement dans la filiation, (...) le poids des secrets et de la dissimulation dans l’histoire familiale, la portée de l’acte symbolique du retour au nom juif pour redonner aux ascendants leur place dans le psychisme des membres de la famille. (shrink)

Frederic Lee sets out the foundations of a post-Keynesian price theory through developing an empirically grounded production schema. The administered, normal cost and mark-up price doctrines are explained in parts I-III of the book, as many of their theoretical arguments are important for developing the foundations. This involves discussing the work of Gardiner Means, Philip Andrews, and Michal Kalecki as well as the developers of the doctrines, such as Edwin Nourse, Paolo Sylos Labini, Harry Edwards, Josef Steindl and Alfred Eisner. (...) Drawing upon the arguments and formal modelling offered by the doctrines, in conjunction with empirical evidence from one hundred studies on pricing and production, Dr Lee develops an empirically grounded pricing model and production schema. He argues that the model and the schema together constitute the foundations for post-Keynesian price theory. (shrink)

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This issue of Contemporary Chinese Thought features seven articles, all from the April 1999 issue of Dushu [Reading]. That month marked the 20th birthday of the review. No special "anniversary number" was published on that occasion, but the April 1999 issue ran two commemorative articles filled with reminiscences of people and events representative of the history of the publication. Besides, a number of the remaining articles were by regular contributors, and the topics they addressed were quite typical of the magazine.