Dualism argues that the mind is more than just the brain. It holds that there exists two very different realms, one mental and the other physical. Both are fundamental and one cannot be reduced to the other - there are minds and there is a physical world. This book examines and defends the most famous dualist account of the mind, the cartesian, which attributes the immaterial contents of the mind to an immaterial self. John Foster's new book exposes the (...) inadequacies of the dominant materialist and reductionist accounts of the mind. In doing so he is in radical conflict with the current philosophical establishment. Ambitious and controversial, _The Immaterial Self_ is the most powerful and effective defence of Cartesian dualism since Descartes' own. (shrink)

Sir John Eccles, a distinguished scientist and Nobel Prize winner who has devoted his scientific life to the study of the mammalian brain, tells the story of how we came to be, not only as animals at the end of the hominid evolutionary line, but also as human persons possessed of reflective consciousness.

Natural selection comes in degrees. Some biological traits are subjected to stronger selective force than others, selection on particular traits waxes and wanes over time, and some groups can only undergo an attenuated kind of selective process. This has downstream consequences for any notions that are standardly treated as binary but depend on natural selection. For instance, the proper function of a biological structure can be defined as what caused that structure to be retained by natural selection in the past. (...) We usually think of proper functions in binary terms: storing bile is a function of the gall bladder, but making stones is not. However, if functions arise through natural selection, and natural selection comes in degrees, then a binary approach to proper functions is in tension with the biological facts. In order to resolve this tension, we need to revise our standard accounts of proper function. In particular, we may have to seriously consider the possibility that functions themselves come in degrees, in spite of the ramifications this will have for the way we speak about functions and related concepts such as dysfunction, disease, and teleosemantic content. (shrink)

[Editor's introduction: The following are excerpts from three talks given at the conference "Policies and Publics for Science and Technology, " London, April 1990. They introduce a British research initiative in public understanding of science and point to early results. The program was developed and coordinated by the Science Policy Support Group. At the meeting, a new journal for specialists in this area was launched: Public Understanding of Science, to be edited by John Durant, Science Museum, London SW7 2DD, (...) UK. The first issue of the journal is expected to appear in April 1991. Science, Technology, & Human Values reaffirms its long commitment to publishing research on public attitudes toward science and particularly welcomes articles on this topic of general interest to the field of science and technology studies.]. (shrink)

We review the literature on how perceiving an AI making mistakes violates trust and how such violations might be repaired. In doing so, we discuss the role played by various forms of algorithmic transparency in the process of trust repair, including explanations of algorithms, uncertainty estimates, and performance metrics.

The Heirs of Plato is the first full study of the various directions in philosophy taken by Plato's followers in the first seventy years after his death in 347 BC - the period generally known as 'The Old Academy', unjustly neglected by historians of philosophy. Lucid and accessible, John Dillon's book provides an introductory chapter on the school itself, and a summary of Plato's philosophical heritage, before looking at each of the school heads and other chief characters, exploring both (...) what holds them together and what sets them apart. (shrink)

Genetic testing has historically been performed in the context of chronic disease and cancer diagnostics. The timelines for these tests are typically measured in days or weeks, rather than in minutes. As such, the concept that genetic information might be generated and then used to alter management in the acute setting has, thus far, not been feasible. However, recent advances in genetic technologies have the potential to allow genetic information to be generated significantly quicker. The m.1555A>G genetic variant is present (...) in one in 500 individuals and predisposes to profound hearing loss following the administration of aminoglycoside antibiotics. These antibiotics are used frequently in cases of neonatal sepsis and it is estimated that approximately 180 neonates in the UK are at risk of antibiotic induced hearing loss each year because of this genetic change. Knowledge of this variant in the acute setting would allow clinicians to prescribe alternative antibiotics. The Pharmacogenetics to Avoid Loss of Hearing study will implement a genetic point of care test (POCT) for the m.1555A>G variant within two major UK based neonatal intensive care units. This represents the first trial of a genetic POCT aimed at altering management in the acute setting. This round table discussion outlines the novel ethical issues faced in the development of this trial and the legal barriers to implementation. We ask five stakeholders to provide their opinions on this trial and their perspectives on the concept of genetic testing in the acute setting.Trial registration numberISRCTN-13704894. (shrink)

The danger of human operators devolving responsibility to machines and failing to detect cases where they fail has been recognised for many years by industrial psychologists and engineers studying the human operators of complex machines. We call it “the control problem”, understood as the tendency of the human within a human–machine control loop to become complacent, over-reliant or unduly diffident when faced with the outputs of a reliable autonomous system. While the control problem has been investigated for some time, up (...) to this point its manifestation in machine learning contexts has not received serious attention. This paper aims to fill that gap. We argue that, except in certain special circumstances, algorithmic decision tools should not be used in high-stakes or safety-critical decisions unless the systems concerned are significantly “better than human” in the relevant domain or subdomain of decision-making. More concretely, we recommend three strategies to address the control problem, the most promising of which involves a complementary coupling between highly proficient algorithmic tools and human agents working alongside one another. We also identify six key principles which all such human–machine systems should reflect in their design. These can serve as a framework both for assessing the viability of any such human–machine system as well as guiding the design and implementation of such systems generally. (shrink)

Kant’s philosophy of science takes on sharp contour in terms of his interaction with the practicing life scientists of his day, particularly Johann Blumenbach and the latter’s student, Christoph Girtanner, who in 1796 attempted to synthesize the ideas of Kant and Blumenbach. Indeed, Kant’s engagement with the life sciences played a far more substantial role in his transcendental philosophy than has been recognized hitherto. The theory of epigenesis, especially in light of Kant’s famous analogy in the first Critique, posed crucial (...) questions regarding the ‘looseness of fit’ between the constitutive and the regulative in Kant’s theory of empirical law. A detailed examination of Kant’s struggle with epigenesis between 1784 and 1790 demonstrates his grave reservations about its hylozoist implications, leading to his even stronger insistence on the discrimination of constitutive from regulative uses of reason. The continuing relevance of these issues for Kant’s philosophy of science is clear from the work of Buchdahl and its contemporary reception. (shrink)

In a wide-ranging, provocative anatomy of modern society and its origins, novelist and historian John Ralston Saul explores the reason for our deepening sense of crisis and confusion. Throughout the Western world we talk endlessly of individual freedom, yet Saul shows that there has never before been such pressure for conformity. Our business leaders describe themselves as capitalists, yet most are corporate employees and financial speculators. We are obsessed with competition, yet the single largest item of international trade is (...) a subsidized market in armaments. We call our governments democracies, yet few of us participate in politics. We complain about "invasive government," yet our legal, educational, financial, social, cultural and legislative systems are breaking down. While most observers view these problems separately, Saul demonstrates that they are largely manifestations of our blind faith in the value of reason. Over the last 400 years, our "rational elites" have gradually instituted reforms in every phase of social life. But Saul shows that they have also been responsible for most of the difficulties and violence of the same period. This paradox arises from a simple truth which our elites deny: far from being a moral force, reason is no more than an administrative method. Their denial has helped to turn the modern West into a vast, incomprehensible, directionless machine, run by process-minded experts - "Voltaire's bastards"--Whose cult of scientific management is bereft of both sense and morality. Whether in politics, art, business, the military, entertainment, science, finance, academia or journalism, these experts share the same outlook and methods. The result, Saul maintains, is a civilization of immense technological power whose peoples increasingly dwell in a world of illusion. Already known to millions of readers as the author of novels which portray the overwhelming effects of this power on the modern individual by weaving together international finance, the oil and arms business, guerrilla warfare, drug traffic, and the world of art, here Saul lays aside the mask of fiction to speak in his own voice. Only by withdrawing from our addiction to "solutions," he argues, reclaiming the citizens' right to question and participate in public life, and recovering a common sense capacity for intelligent panic, can we find a way out of our permanent crisis. (shrink)

In a fair, infinite lottery, it is possible to conclude that drawing a number divisible by four is strictly less likely than drawing an even number; and, with apparently equal cogency, that drawing a number divisible by four is equally as likely as drawing an even number.

'This book is a model of philosophical and Heideggerian scholarship.

John Keller presents a set of new essays on ontology, time, freedom, God, and philosophical method. Our understanding of these subjects has been greatly advanced, since the 1970s, by the work of Peter van Inwagen. The contributions, from some of the most prominent living philosophers, engage with van Inwagen's work and offer new insights in metaphysics, philosophy of religion, and the philosophy of philosophy. Van Inwagen himself gives selective responses. In metaphysics, the volume will particularly interest philosophers working on (...) free will, relational vs constituent ontologies, and time travel; in philosophy of religion, notable topics include the ontological argument, the compatibility of theism and evolution, the problem of evil, and the doctrine of atonements. And there are three papers on the hot topic of philosophical success, with responses from van Inwagen. (shrink)

This paper begins from the context of virtue ethics theory as applied to business ethics. We note that the concept of a practice therein lacks the full richness of the Aristotelian concept of virtue. In essence, when applied to business in the virtue ethics literature, the practice loses its reflective quality. It becomes beholden to, and irredeemably interdependent with, the economic institution (i.e., the for-profit firm) that houses the practice. Furthermore, the conventional practice of virtue ethics lacks the self-reflective ability (...) to challenge and overcome this interdependence. As a solution to this problem, we suggest tapping into a relatively recent stream in the business ethics literature, namely the application of aesthetics. We integrate aesthetics into virtue ethics in the form of a reflective practice. This reflective practice can be defined as one which embraces the firm as pure phenomenon. It opens a space or clearing that enables business practitioners to reflect and act within a broadened perceptual and conceptual understanding of the ‘true’ nature and purpose of business. (shrink)

No word in English is shorter than the word I.' And yet no word is more important in philosophy. When Descartes said I think therefore I am' he produced something that was both about himself and a universal formula. The word I' is called an indexical' because its meaning always depends on who says it. Other examples of indexicals are you,' here,' this' and now.' John Perry discusses how these kinds of words work, and why they express important philosophical (...) thoughts. He shows that indexicals pose a challenge to traditional assumptions about language and thought. Over the years a number of these papers, now included in this book, have sparked lively debates and have been influential in philosophy, linguistics and other areas of cognitive science. With seven new papers, including the previously unpublished What Are Indexicals?,' the present volume expands on an earlier version of this book published in the early nineties. Also included are the well-known papers Frege on Demonstratives,' Cognitive Significance and New Theories of Reference,' Evading the Slingshot,' The Prince and the Phone booth', Fodor on Psychological Explanations', and related papers on situation semantics, direct reference, and the structure of belief. This book also includes afterwords written by the author that discuss responses to his work by Gareth Evans, Robert Stalnaker, Barbara Partee, Howard Wettstein and others. (shrink)

I want to discuss a doctrine and a concept in theory of knowledge which has various manifestations from at least the seventeenth to the early twentieth century. The concept is that of direct or immediate cognition, the doctrine says that only what is like mind can be directly or immediately present to mind. This doctrine raises the question of how we can know things other than ourselves and our experiences: the concept of direct presence most usually had the consequence of (...) making our knowledge of the world indirect, uncertain, or impossible. The directly present must in some way inform us about the indirectly present. (shrink)

This thesis investigates how children ought to be influenced with respect to religion. To answer this question, I develop a theory of cognitive curriculum content and apply it to the teaching of religious beliefs and beliefs about religions. By ‘a theory of cognitive curriculum content,’ I mean a theory that determines which truth-claims belong on the curriculum, and whether or not teachers ought to promote students’ belief of those claims. I extend this theory to help educators to decide which attitudes (...) address on the curriculum and whether or not to promote them. I then apply this to the case of religious attitudes and attitudes about religions. I argue that where having or failing to have a certain attitude makes a significant difference to students’ lives, it ought to be addressed by curricula. Where failing to have the attitude is irrational, this failure ought to be remedied; where having the attitude is irrational, that attitude ought to be discouraged; and where neither having nor failing to have the attitude is irrational, that attitude ought to be introduced and discussed without encouragement or discouragement. In so far as is practicable, educators should aim to acquaint students with arguments for and against having these attitudes and initiate them into the practice of assessing their soundness. The implications of this theory for extra-curricular influence, such as upbringing in the home, are also explored. (shrink)

From the "New York Times" bestselling author of "If I Stay" Allyson Healeys life is exactly like her suitcase--packed, planned, ordered. Then on the last day of her three-week post-graduation European tour, she meets Willem. A free-spirited, roving actor, Willem is everything shes not, and when he invites her to abandon her plans and come to Paris with him, Allyson says yes. This uncharacteristic decision leads to a day of risk and romance, liberation and intimacy: 24 hours that will transform (...) Allysons life. A book about love, heartbreak, travel, identity, and the "accidents" of fate, "Just One Day" shows us how sometimes in order to get found, you first have to get lost... and how often the people we are seeking are much closer than we know. The first in a sweepingly romantic duet of novels. Willems story--"Just One Year"--is coming soon. (shrink)

The theory of evolution by natural selection did not spring fully formed and unprecedented from the brain of Charles Darwin. The idea of evolution had been around, in various guises, since the time of Ancient Greece. And nor did theorizing about evolution stop with what Daniel Dennett called "Darwin's dangerous idea." In this riveting new book, bestselling science writers John and Mary Gribbin explore the history of the idea of evolution, showing how Darwin's theory built on what went before (...) and how it was developed in the twentieth century, through an understanding of genetics and the biochemical basis of evolution, into the so-called "modern synthesis" and beyond. Darwin deserves his recognition as the primary proponent of the idea of natural selection, but as the authors show, his contribution was one link in a chain that extends back into antiquity and is still being forged today. (shrink)

Pursuing Jacques Derrida's reflections on the possibility of "religion without religion," John Llewelyn makes room for a sense of the religious that does not depend on the religions or traditional notions of God or gods. Beginning with Derrida's statement that it was Kierkegaard to whom he remained most faithful, Llewelyn reads Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Feuerbach, Heidegger, Sartre, Levinas, Deleuze, Marion, as well as Kierkegaard and Derrida, in original and compelling ways. Llewelyn puts religiousness in vital touch with the struggles (...) of the human condition, finding religious space in the margins between the secular and the religions, transcendence and immanence, faith and knowledge, affirmation and despair, lucidity and madness. This provocative and philosophically rich account shows why and where the religious matters. (shrink)

A comprehensive exploration of pragmatic themes emerging from neuroscientific research,illustrating why neurophilosophy should take this advancing pragmatist direction seriously.

In this provocative book, John Keane calls for a fresh understanding of the vexed relationship between democracy and violence. Taking issue with the common sense view that 'human nature' is violent, Keane shows why mature democracies do not wage war upon each other, and why they are unusually sensitive to violence. He argues that we need to think more discriminatingly about the origins of violence, its consequences, its uses and remedies. He probes the disputed meanings of the term violence, (...) and asks why violence is the greatest enemy of democracy, and why today's global 'triangle of violence' is tempting politicians to invoke undemocratic emergency powers. Throughout, Keane gives prominence to ethical questions, such as the circumstances in which violence can be justified, and argues that violent behaviour and means of violence can and should be 'democratised' - made publicly accountable to others, so encouraging efforts to erase surplus violence from the world. (shrink)

In Historical Representation Frank Ankersmit seeks a juste milieu between postmodern theory and historical practice. But he still insists that the meaning of a historical representation “is not found, but made in and by [the] text.” Thus “there will be nothing, outside the text itself, that can govern or check [the conceptualization].” Accordingly, “a representation itself cannot be interpreted as one large description. I would not hesitate to say that this—and nothing else—is the central problem in the philosophy of history.” (...) On the other hand, he affirms that “a historical representation ‘is about’ a certain part of the past,” that historical debate is a “semantic quarrel not about the exact meaning of words, but about the past.” Everything hinges on how to grasp this idea of “aboutness.” I propose an alternative reading of post-positivist philosophy of science in hopes of reaching the juste milieu. The issue is whether colligatory concepts in history have a more radically constructed character than theoretical terms in natural-scientific theory, and whether, as with the latter, they can make intersubjective claims to warrant. My view is that colligatory concepts in historical representations can be conceived to refer in roughly the same way that theoretical terms do in natural-scientific theories. All the problems I find in Ankersmit’s approach come to the fore in his fruitful analogy to portrait painting. First, the personality the portrait evokes is not restricted to the representation, but is of the sitter. We are offered insight not into painting but into an actual character. That is, there is a cognitive, not simply an aesthetic, dimension to representation. Historical terms pick out something intersubjectively affirmable in reality, and discrimination is possible among rival versions. The question is how to regard—to explain and to evaluate—these underdetermined objects of consideration, not to preclude them by stipulation. (shrink)

We introduce the computable FS-jump, an analog of the classical Friedman–Stanley jump in the context of equivalence relations on the natural numbers. We prove that the computable FS-jump is proper with respect to computable reducibility. We then study the effect of the computable FS-jump on computably enumerable equivalence relations (ceers).

The presence of a kinship link between nuclear families is the strongest predictor of interhousehold sharing in an indigenous, predominantly Dolgan food-sharing network in northern Russia. Attributes such as the summed number of hunters in paired households also account for much of the variation in sharing between nuclear families. Differences in the number of hunters in partner households, as well as proximity and producer/consumer ratios of households, were investigated with regard to cost-benefit models. The subset of households involved in reciprocal (...) meal sharing is 26 of 84 household host-guest pairs. The frequency of reciprocal meal sharing between families in this subset is positively correlated with average household relatedness. The evolution of cooperation through clustering may illuminate the relationship between kinship and reciprocity at this most intimate level of food sharing. (shrink)

Elizabeth Anscombe was one of the most gifted and productive philosophers of the decades following the Second World War. Her writings present challenges to readers: some of them are very difficult to comprehend while others seem philosophically-minded yet situated outside of philosophy as such. There are also the issues of whether she had a philosophical method and of the influence of Wittgenstein on the manner of her approach. A summary and estimate of Anscombe’s enduring contributions is presented before exploring the (...) style and aims of her philosophical work. Then two of her writings on religion are examined and their implications for her attitude to philosophy considered. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

John Maynard Smith, one of the world's leading evolutionary biologists, recently summarized in the NYRB the sharply conflicting assessments of Stephen Jay Gould: "Because of the excellence of his essays, he has come to be seen by non-biologists as the preeminent evolutionary theorist. In contrast, the evolutionary biologists with whom I have discussed his work tend to see him as a man whose ideas are so confused as to be hardly worth bothering with, but as one who should not (...) be publicly criticized because he is at least on our side against the creationists.". No one can take any pleasure in the evident pain Gould is experiencing now that his actual standing within the community of professional evolutionary biologists is finally becoming more widely known. If what was a stake was solely one man's self-regard, common decency would preclude comment. (shrink)

According to most contemporary philosophers, the Indiscernibility of Identicals is obviously true. We might therefore expect earlier philosophers to endorse it. But I will use a puzzle about identity over time to argue that Descartes would reject it.

"Being and Freedom is an account of ethics in Europe from the French Revolution: a phase of philosophical ethics whose influence ran far beyond philosophy, eventually dominating politics and religion in the West. Developments came from France, Germany, and Britain. This book is currently the only study that treats them together as a Europe-wide phenomenon. The first chapter covers the philosophical conflict at the heart of the French Revolution, between the individualism of the Enlightenment and two very different forms of (...) holistic ethics: the old regime's ethic of service and the radical-democracy of the Rousseauian left. Responses analysing modern freedom and democracy came from a series of French liberal thinkers. In Germany the reaction was to two revolutions seen as inaugurating modernity--the political revolution in France and the philosophical revolution of Kant. Here the fate of religion was critical; with it the metaphysics of being and freedom. The story is traced from Kant to Hegel's idealist version of ethical holism. In Britain, Enlightenment naturalism remained the prevailing framework. It took different forms: 'common sense' and the theory of the sentiments in Scotland, utilitarianism in England. From these elements came a synthesis of European themes by John Stuart Mill--comparable in range but opposed to that of Hegel. This period's ethical ideas remain the core of late modern ethics and the contested ground on which ethical disagreements take place today. The final chapter is a retrospective and assessment"--Publisher's description. (shrink)

We introduce a new family of jump operators on Borel equivalence relations; specifically, for each countable group [Formula: see text] we introduce the [Formula: see text]-jump. We study the elementary properties of the [Formula: see text]-jumps and compare them with other previously studied jump operators. One of our main results is to establish that for many groups [Formula: see text], the [Formula: see text]-jump is proper in the sense that for any Borel equivalence relation [Formula: see text] the [Formula: see (...) text]-jump of [Formula: see text] is strictly higher than [Formula: see text] in the Borel reducibility hierarchy. On the other hand, there are examples of groups [Formula: see text] for which the [Formula: see text]-jump is not proper. To establish properness, we produce an analysis of Borel equivalence relations induced by continuous actions of the automorphism group of what we denote the full [Formula: see text]-tree, and relate these to iterates of the [Formula: see text]-jump. We also produce several new examples of equivalence relations that arise from applying the [Formula: see text]-jump to classically studied equivalence relations and derive generic ergodicity results related to these. We apply our results to show that the complexity of the isomorphism problem for countable scattered linear orders properly increases with the rank. (shrink)

Hastings Center Report, Volume 52, Issue 2, Page 14-20, March‐April 2022.

Sawai et al. (2022) provide a good summary of the bioethical debate about brain organoids with an eye toward future directions. Like many contemporary texts in bioethics, they call for engagement w...

Philosophy as a separate discipline is a rather new phenomenon. This presents problems for our understanding of what constitutes the history of philosophy. Past writers often approached their concerns from a multi-disciplinary perspective; thus to understand them we have to do more than answer a contemporary set of issues. To that end, I suggest we attend to Locke's advice on how to read a text. Following this advice may permit us to avoid several puzzles which result from misreading a text.

This article offers a critique of Ronald Dworkin’s article “A New Philosophy for International Law”, (Philos Public Aff 41: 1–30, 2013). It begins by showing that Dworkin’s moralised theory of law is built on two highly questionable background assumptions. On the one hand, a descriptively implausible characterisation of a positivist-voluntarist view of international law as the reigning “orthodoxy”. On the other hand, the methodologically questionable assumption that a theory of international law must discharge the dual function of explaining the validity (...) of international law in a manner that underwrites its presumptive legitimacy. In its core part, the article then offers a sustained criticism of Dworkin’s moralised account of the validity and legitimacy of international law. Various problems are identified with the “principle of salience” that Dworkin offers in place of consent as a ground for international law. A key concern is the difficulties that stem from Dworkin’s willingness to proceed on the “fantasy” assumption that his theory needs to get off the ground, i.e. that there is an international court with compulsory jurisdiction and reliable mechanisms for enforcing its judgements. Finally, the article concludes with some thoughts on how Dworkin’s “fantasy-based” approach led him to over-estimate the degree to which international law can be a vehicle for the global spread of liberal democratic values. More minimalist ambitions for international legal order, along the lines suggested by John Rawls inThe Law of Peoples, seem more realistic. (shrink)

In Why It Is Good to be Good, John H. Riker shows how modernity's reigning concept of the self undermines moral life and lays the basis for the epidemic of cheating that is devastating social and economic institutions. He argues that by accepting Kohut's brilliant and original psychoanalytic concept of the self, modernity can have a naturalist account for showing why it is personally good to be a morally good person.