We estimate that 208,000 deep brain stimulation (DBS) devices have been implanted to address neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders worldwide. DBS Think Tank presenters pooled data and determined that DBS expanded in its scope and has been applied to multiple brain disorders in an effort to modulate neural circuitry. The DBS Think Tank was founded in 2012 providing a space where clinicians, engineers, researchers from industry and academia discuss current and emerging DBS technologies and logistical and ethical issues facing the field. (...) The emphasis is on cutting edge research and collaboration aimed to advance the DBS field. The Eighth Annual DBS Think Tank was held virtually on September 1 and 2, 2020 (Zoom Video Communications) due to restrictions related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The meeting focused on advances in: (1) optogenetics as a tool for comprehending neurobiology of diseases and on optogenetically-inspired DBS, (2) cutting edge of emerging DBS technologies, (3) ethical issues affecting DBS research and access to care, (4) neuromodulatory approaches for depression, (5) advancing novel hardware, software and imaging methodologies, (6) use of neurophysiological signals in adaptive neurostimulation, and (7) use of more advanced technologies to improve DBS clinical outcomes. There were 178 attendees who participated in a DBS Think Tank survey, which revealed the expansion of DBS into several indications such as obesity, post-traumatic stress disorder, addiction and Alzheimer’s disease. This proceedings summarizes the advances discussed at the Eighth Annual DBS Think Tank. (shrink)

James D. Wallace treats moral considerations as beliefs about the right and wrong ways of doing things - beliefs whose source and authority are the same as any ...

An artificial general intelligence (AGI) might have an instrumental drive to modify its utility function to improve its ability to cooperate, bargain, promise, threaten, and resist and engage in blackmail. Such an AGI would necessarily have a utility function that was at least partially observable and that was influenced by how other agents chose to interact with it. This instrumental drive would conflict with the strong orthogonality thesis since the modifications would be influenced by the AGI’s intelligence. AGIs in highly (...) competitive environments might converge to having nearly the same utility function, one optimized to favorably influencing other agents through game theory. Nothing in our analysis weakens arguments concerning the risks of AGI. (shrink)

McCawley supplements his earlier book—which covers such topics as presuppositional logic, the logic of mass terms and nonstandard quantifiers, and fuzzy ...

"Cornell Paperback." Includes index. Bibliography: p. 163-165.

Challenging the paradigm in ethics -- The spirit of the enterprise -- Social artifacts and ethical criticism -- General and particular in practical knowledge -- Virtues of benevolence and justice.

The orthodox characterization of spontaneous symmetry breaking in statistical mechanics appeals to novel properties of systems with infinite degrees of freedom, namely, the existence of multiple equilibrium states. This raises the same puzzles about the status of the thermodynamic limit fueling recent debates about phase transitions. I argue that there are prospects of explaining the success of the standard approach to SSB in terms of the properties of large finite systems. Consequently, despite initial appearances, the need to account for SSB (...) phenomena does not offer decisive support to claims about the explanatory and representational indispensability of the thermodynamic limit. (shrink)

While supporting the cosmopolitan pursuit of a world that respects all rights and interests, James D. Ingram believes political theorists have, in their approach to this project, compromised its egalitarian and emancipatory principles. Focusing on recent debates without losing sight of cosmopolitanism's ancient and Enlightenment roots, Ingram confronts the philosophical difficulties of defending universal ideals and the implications for ethics and political theory. In morality as in politics, theorists have generally focused first on discovering universal values and second on (...) their implementation. Ingram argues that only by prioritizing the development and articulation of universal values through political action in the fight for freedom and equality can theorists do justice to these efforts and cosmopolitanism's universal vocation. Only by proceeding from the local to the global, from the bottom up rather than from the top down, on the basis of political practice rather than moral ideals, can we salvage moral and political universalism. In this book, Ingram provides the clearest, most systematic account yet of this schematic reversal and its radical possibilities. (shrink)

In this book James D. G. Dunn explores the nature of the religious experiences that were at the forefront of emerging Christianity.

Despite their popularity, dual process accounts of human reasoning and decision-making have come under intense scrutiny in recent years. Cognitive scientists and philosophers alike have come to question the theoretical foundations of the ‘standard view’ of dual process theory and have challenged the validity and relevance of evidence in support of it. Moreover, attempts to modify and refine dual process theory in light of these challenges have generated additional concerns about its applicability and refutability as a scientific theory. With these (...) concerns in mind, this paper provides a critical review of dual process theory in economics, focusing on its role as a psychological framework for decision modeling in behavioral economics and neuroeconomics. I argue that the influx of criticisms against dual process theory challenge the descriptive accuracy of dualistic decision models in economics. In fact, the case can be made that the popularity of dual process theory in economics has less to do with the empirical success of dualistic decision models, and more to do with the convenience that the dual process narrative provides economists looking to explain-away decision anomalies. This leaves behavioral economists and neuroeconomists with something of a dilemma: either they stick to their purported ambitions to give a realistic description of human decision-making and give up the narrative, or they revise and restate their scientific ambitions. (shrink)

How do we establish the relevance of a moral consideration when doing so is problematic? How are conflicts among relevant considerations properly resolved? James D. Wallace maintains that a successful ethical theory should be able to answer these important questions. Nevertheless, he argues, the leading contemporary moral theories do not satisfactorily address them. In this book, Wallace criticizes the standard philosophical accounts of how we should resolve problems of moral relevance and moral conflict. He proceeds by looking at such (...) accounts as utilitarianism, Kantian moral theory, and intuitionism, and by providing an extended evaluation of Henry Sidgwick's moral epistemology. According to Wallace, these approaches pose difficulties because they all assume that there exist fixed, unchanging standards, rules, or methods that give us explicit directions for the solution of such problems. He then goes on to develop his own, "contextualist," approach, which combines elements of both Aristotelian and pragmatic views. To solve new problems, he asserts, we must adapt what we have learned from past problems to novel circumstances, sometimes appreciably changing our ways of dealing with certain kinds of issues. In adapting our ways of dealing with these issues to unprecedented problems, and in dealing with the conflicts that arise from unprecedented juxtapositions of considerations, we alter and even reform morality. (shrink)

Through an ambitious and critical revision of Michel Foucault's investigation of ethics, James Faubion develops an original program of empirical inquiry into the ethical domain. From an anthropological perspective, Faubion argues that Foucault's specification of the analytical parameters of this domain is the most productive point of departure in conceptualizing its distinctive features. He further argues that Foucault's framework is in need of substantial revision to be of genuinely anthropological scope. In making this revision, Faubion illustrates his program with (...) two extended case studies: one of a Portuguese marquis and the other of a dual subject made up of the author and a millenarian prophetess. The result is a conceptual apparatus that is able to accommodate ethical pluralism and yield an account of the limits of ethical variation, providing a novel resolution of the problem of relativism that has haunted anthropological inquiry into ethics since its inception. (shrink)

Despite being an established and accepted scientific theory for 150 years, repeated public polls show that evolution is not believed by large numbers of people. This essay examines why people do not accept evolution and argues that its poor representation in some science textbooks allows misconceptions, established and reinforced in early childhood, to take hold. There is also a lack of up‐to‐date examples of evidence for evolution in school textbooks. Poor understanding by science graduates and teachers of the nature of (...) science and incorrect definitions by them of key terminology, serve only to undermine efforts to improve public understanding of evolution. This paper has several recommendations, including the introduction of evolution to primary age children and a call to bring evolution back as the central tenet of biology. (shrink)

Some scholars have argued that CEOs may have excessive influence on their foundation's trustees to give away a portion of company profits to charitable causes in order to gain access to elite circles or support the CEO's personal causes. This may result in charitable contributions that ultimately serve the personal interests of the CEOs without regard to corporate interests or social needs. We examine the extent that CEOs appear to direct charitable giving to be compatible with their own personal interests, (...) and if CEO participation on the foundation board affects the relationship between CEO personal interests and charitable giving. Using a sample of 160 corporate foundations, our results showed that CEOs' interests, as measured by membership in different non-profit organizations, was associated with foundation charitable giving. This association decreased, but was not eliminated, when CEOs were absent from the foundation board. Implications of these findings for researchers and managers are discussed in regards to both agency theory and stewardship theory. (shrink)

Physicists use different theories to describe the world on different scales. In particular, they use the standard model of particle physics at very high energies, but move to various effective field theories, such as quantum electrodynamics, when modelling lower energy scattering processes. One way to explain this methodological fact is pragmatic in spirit. According to this view, physicists move to an effective field theory at lower energies in order to extract predictions and qualitative understanding which would be difficult or impossible (...) to extract directly from a more fundamental theory. By contrast, another way of accounting for the methodological data is metaphysical in spirit. On this view, the reason that physicists use different theories at different scales is that the world actually exhibits different nomic structure on different scales. These two positions have recently been thrown into sharp relief in a debate between Woodward (2016) and Batterman (2021), with Woodward taking the pragmatist line and Batterman the metaphysical line. One difficulty with the metaphysical answer is that its content is unclear: in what sense exactly could an effective field theory provide a better representation of the nomic structure of the world in its domain of applicability than our world’s fundamental theory? This talk attempts to provide an answer to this question by developing a simple metaphysical model. I start by assuming a set of possible worlds which are nomically possible according to some fundamental theory (I suggest that one is free to adopt either a Humean or Non-Humean view of these fundamental nomic necessities). I then introduce an equivalence relation between possible worlds: two worlds are scale-E equivalent if they assign the same values to physical quantities below energy scale E (up to some finite level of precision P). The key question now is whether this relation induces equivalence classes on the set of nomically possible worlds. I argue that in the case of current quantum field theories this does indeed occur, as evidenced by the possibility of “integrating out” high energy degrees of freedom in the renormalisation group framework. The formation of equivalence classes in the fundamental theory's possibility space indicates that some of its high energy features do not make a difference to its low energy dynamical behaviour. This suggests the following reading of the claim that an effective field theory provides a better representation of the nomic structure of the world in its domain of applicability: the solutions of the effective field theory stand in one-to-one correspondence with equivalence classes induced by the scale-E equivalence relation, whereas the fundamental theory overcounts the physical possibilities which are relevant at scale E. In this sense, the effective field theory provides a more natural representation of low energy physics than the fundamental theory. I conclude by explaining how this metaphysical model offers a reduction compatible understanding of multiple realisability, once again pointing to renormalisation group results in quantum field theory to support this. (shrink)

In his Farewell to Reason, Paul Feyerabend advocates radical pluralism in all intellectual endeavors and disputes the widely held belief that all issues can and should be resolved rationally. For Feyerabend, it is desirable that mutually incompatible approaches to scientific and scholarly research proliferate. Even an approach that one's favored school of thought dismisses as loony is likely to yield ideas and factual observations that its derogators will find of value and would otherwise have missed. To derive intellectual benefit from (...) an alternative tradition, one need not accept its premises and values; likewise, to ignore uncongenial ideas, one is not obliged to construct a refutation of than, which is just as well, since such a refutation usually can be constructed only by stacking the cards against adversaries about whom one is grossly ignorant. (shrink)

Dr. Stewart identifies nausea as the central metaphor of Zarathustra, a nausea that accompanies a contempt for mediocrity, for democratic systems, indeed for bourgeois existence in general; but it is a nausea that more centrally accompanies Nietzsche's perspectivism. Thus, it is the nausea that occurs in the face of the chaotic and indeterminate character of the universe and of human existence.

In this paper I wish to comment upon the use of polemical argument in philosophy of education and education. Like Foucault, I believe that a whole morality is at stake because polemical argument obfuscates the search for truth at the expense of truth and the other’s veracity, integrity and dignity. The use of polemics is illustrated by two arguments. The first general argument is taken from an attack upon Albert Camus by the British writer Colin Wilson. The second more particular (...) example is taken from attacks in New Zealand by the State Department of Education upon the educational ideas of the novelist and educator Sylvia Ashton-Warner. Finally I discuss how polemics might be countered in education. (shrink)

James D Marshall; Wittgenstein on Rules: implications for authority and discipline in education, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 19, Issue 1, 30 May.

Geography and Ethics examines the place of geography in ethics and of ethics in geography by drawing together specially commissioned contributors from distinguished scholars from around the world.

James Connelly and Giuseppina D'Oro present a new edition of R. G. Collingwood's classic work of 1933, supplementing the original text with important related writings from Collingwood's manuscripts which appear here for the first time. The editors also contribute a substantial new introduction. The volume will be welcomed by all historians of twentieth-century philosophy.

Despite on-going debates in philosophy and cognitive science, dual process theory (DPT) remains a popular framework for theorizing about human cognition. Its central hypothesis is that cognitive processing can be subsumed under two generic types. In this paper, we argue that the putative success and popularity of this framework remains overstated and gives rise to certain misunderstandings. If DPT has predictive and/or explanatory power, it is through offering descriptions of cognitive phenomena via functional analysis. But functional descriptions require an individuation (...) strategy. To date, there has been no systematic exploration of how Type 1 and Type 2 are functionally individuated. Following recent debates in philosophy of cognitive science, we consider three individuation strategies (i.e., abstraction, reification, fictionalization) and assess the legitimacy of each in relation to DPT. This leads us to the verdict that the most viable route for justifying DPT is to construe Type 1 and Type 2 processes as reifications. We conclude that, construed as reifications, the common rationales offered by proponents of DPT for demarcating Type 1 and Type 2 processes do not escape criticism and require further theoretical justification. (shrink)

James D Marshall, Michael Peters, Miles Shepheard; Brent's Transcendental Arguments for the Forms of Knowledge, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 15, I.

(2000). The Boundaries of Belief: territories of encounter between indigenous peoples and Western philosophies. Educational Philosophy and Theory: Vol. 32, No. 1, pp. 15-24.

Let ΩΩ be the semigroup of all mappings of a countably infinite set Ω. If U and V are subsemigroups of ΩΩ, then we write U≈V if there exists a finite subset F of ΩΩ such that the subsemigroup generated by U and F equals that generated by V and F. The relative rank of U in ΩΩ is the least cardinality of a subset A of ΩΩ such that the union of U and A generates ΩΩ. In this paper (...) we study the notions of relative rank and the equivalence ≈ for semigroups of endomorphisms of binary relations on Ω.The semigroups of endomorphisms of preorders, bipartite graphs, and tolerances on Ω are shown to lie in two equivalence classes under ≈. Moreover such semigroups have relative rank 0, 1, 2, or in ΩΩ where is the minimum cardinality of a dominating family for . We give examples of preorders, bipartite graphs, and tolerances on Ω where the relative ranks of their endomorphism semigroups in ΩΩ are 0, 1, 2, and .We show that the endomorphism semigroups of graphs, in general, fall into at least four classes under ≈ and that there exist graphs where the relative rank of the endomorphism semigroup is 20. (shrink)