While often presented as promising assistive technologies for motor-impaired users, electroencephalography (EEG)-based Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) remain barely used outside laboratories due to low reliability in real-life conditions. There is thus a need to design long-term reliable BCIs that can be used outside-of-the-lab by end-users, e.g., severely motor-impaired ones. Therefore, we propose and evaluate the design of a multi-class Mental Task (MT)-based BCI for longitudinal training (20 sessions over 3 months) of a tetraplegic user for the CYBATHLON BCI series 2019. In (...) this BCI championship, tetraplegic pilots are mentally driving a virtual car in a racing video game. We aimed at combining a progressive user MT-BCI training with a newly designed machine learning pipeline based on adaptive Riemannian classifiers shown to be promising for real-life applications. We followed a two step training process: the first 11 sessions served to train the user to control a 2-class MT-BCI by performing either two cognitive tasks (REST and MENTAL SUBTRACTION) or two motor-imagery tasks (LEFT-HAND and RIGHT-HAND). The second training step (9 remaining sessions) applied an adaptive, session-independent Riemannian classifier that combined all 4 MT classes used before. Moreover, as our Riemannian classifier was incrementally updated in an unsupervised way it would capture both within and between-session non-stationarity. Experimental evidences confirm the effectiveness of this approach. Namely, the classification accuracy improved by about 30% at the end of the training compared to initial sessions. We also studied the neural correlates of this performance improvement. Using a newly proposed BCI user learning metric, we could show our user learned to improve his BCI control by producing EEG signals matching increasingly more the BCI classifier training data distribution, rather than by improving his EEG class discrimination. However, the resulting improvement was effective only on synchronous (cue-based) BCI and it did not translate into improved CYBATHLON BCI game performances. For the sake of overcoming this in the future, we unveil possible reasons for these limited gaming performances and identify a number of promising future research directions. Importantly, we also report on the evolution of the user's neurophysiological patterns and user experience throughout the BCI training and competition. (shrink)

A critical, philosophical engagement of the psychological structures that propagate the continued oppression of women. In this book, the Italian feminist thinker Lea Melandri argues that systemic violence against women has deep psychoanalytic roots. Drawing inspiration from the work of Freud and the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Elvio Fachinelli, along with feminist practices of consciousness-raising, Melandri demonstrates how male dominance and female subservience are established by society through a binary and oppositional understanding of sex and gender. This understanding—and the oppression and (...) violence against women that results—is inscribed in the psyches of both men and women, and is replicated anew from generation to generation. Melandri analyzes women in media, politics, philosophy, and literature to show how this plays out, and calls for awareness of these deep psychic structures and expectations formed within the dynamics of society and primary family relations. Lea Melandri is one of Italy’s best-known feminist thinkers and activists. She is the author of many books and continues to write and advocate for women’s rights. In 2012, she was awarded by the city of Milan the Ambrogino d’oro, one of the city’s highest honors. Antonio Calcagno is Professor of Philosophy at King’s University College at Western University, Canada. He the editor of Contemporary Italian Political Philosophy and the coeditor (with Inna Viriasova) of Roberto Esposito: Biopolitics and Philosophy, both also published by SUNY Press. (shrink)

Ainsi s’exprime Gilles Deleuze dans les premières pages de Différence et Répétition. Le cinéma est en effet l’un des domaines étudiés par Deleuze, apportant un renouvellement considérable à la philosophie. Il y consacre deux ouvrages : L’image-mouvement et L’image-temps. C’est ce deuxième texte que nous étudierons, et plus précisément le concept même d’image-temps. Car si on peut imaginer sans trop de mal le cinéma comme image-mouvement, image en mouvement, on comprend moins aisément comment...

This book focuses on a question issued from The Architectonic of Pure Reason, one of the most important sections of Kant's first Critique: what is the human being? It suggests that the answer to this question is tied to a particular account of the unity of reason - one that stresses its purposive character.

Esta coletânea é uma homenagem aos 70 anos do professor Emmanuel Carneiro Leão. Reúne artigos de seus alunos, amigos e admiradores que foram atraídos pela abrangência e rigor de seu pensamento. A diversidade de temáticas, abordagens e premissas destes ensaios refletem bem a generosidade do espírito de Emmanuel Carneiro.

In this paper, I specifically consider the issue of corporate governance and normative stakeholder theory. In doing so, I arguethat stakeholder theory and responsibilities to non-shareholder constituencies can be made more intelligible by reference to Kant’sconception of perfect and imperfect duties. I draw upon Onora O’Neill’s (1996) work, Towards Justice and Virtue: A Constructivist Account of Practical Reasoning. In her text O’Neill underlines a number of relevant issues including: the integration of particularist and universalist accounts of morality; the priority of (...) obligations over rights; the importance of the distinction between imperfect and perfect duties; and the relation between the virtues and imperfect duties. On the basis of the foregoing analysis, the paper argues that business ethicists should avoid recommending the institutionalising of stakeholder responsibilities in terms of legally defined sets of stakeholder rights. Instead, we should regard stakeholder responsibilities as uniformalised imperfect duties. Conceiving responsibilities to all stakeholder groups in this manner, allows the firm the freedom to perfect these duties in ways appropriate to cultural and societal setting, and in accordance with the capacity to do so. (shrink)

A well-known debate in normative ethics is that between proponents of Act Consequentialism and Rule Consequentialism. Given the structural similarities between Rule Consequentialism and existing forms of Contractualism, one might expect a similar debate to arise among contractualists. However, this is not the case. Some, following T. M. Scanlon, even argue that this question is “misconceived” – that there is something deeply mistaken about considering the possibility of an act-based form of contractualism. In this paper, I challenge this claim.

Este artigo corresponde a fala integral que foi apresentada na Mesa “Três olhares sobre o Tempo do Espírito”, no 29º Congresso Internacional da Sociedade de Teologia e Ciências da Religião - Tempos do espírito: inspiração e discernimento, que teve lugar em 13 julho de 2016, na PUC-Minas. Nele teço algumas observações mais ou menos intempestivas sobre as relações entre tempo do espírito e espírito do tempo, com vistas a pensar a religiosidade na contemporaneidade mais imediata. A partir de uma rápida (...) visada no vocabulário técnico do tropo espírito a partir do modo como ele é tratado por Lalande em seu Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie, o texto dialoga,sobretudo a partir de Otávio Velho, notadamente com seu livro Mais realistas do que o rei: ocidentalismo, religião e modernidades alternativas, com algumas facetas da religiosidade na contemporaneidade visando pensar as relações da religião com a cultura de consumo e a função comunicativa da religião em tempos de globalização, também tempos de comunicação generalizada, entre outras. (shrink)

Global Justice and Avant-Garde Political Agency offers a fresh, nuanced example of political theory in an activist mode. Setting the debate on global justice in the context of recent methodological disputes on the relationship between ideal and nonideal theorizing, Ypi's dialectical account shows how principles and agency really can interact.

This article explores the justification of states' territorial rights. It starts by introducing three questions that all current theories of territorial rights attempt to answer: how to justify the right to settle, the right to exclude, and the right to settle and exclude with reference to a particular territory. It proposes a ‘permissive’ theory of territorial rights, arguing that the citizens of each state are entitled to the particular territory they collectively occupy, if and only if they are also politically (...) committed to the establishment of a global political authority realizing just reciprocal relations. The article is developed by introducing some key features of the permissive theory and by explaining how such an account addresses the questions of settlement, exclusion and particularity in ways that significantly improve on existing rival accounts (most prominently: acquisition theories, legitimacy-based theories and nationalist theories). (shrink)

Scholars have long been aware of striking similarities between a crucial passage in Book II of Plato’s Republic and the longest papyrus fragment surviving from Antiphon’s On Truth. Previous scholarship has identified some views common to both texts but has not explained how these views hang together in a unified and coherent ethical outlook. A deeper investigation into these two texts turns up a blueprint for Greek immoralist arguments, a finding which should be of considerable interest to scholars of ancient (...) Greek ethics and political philosophy. The paper argues that both texts include an argument whose demonstrandum is that it is by nature good or advantageous to commit injustice when one can do so undetected; that this argument in each case involves a set of background premises that constitute a blueprint for immoralist arguments in Classical Athens; and that the immoralist ethical theory of Republic II is an outline distilled from several more detailed theories, including the one belonging to On Truth. (shrink)

Why are people interested in money? Specifically, what could be the biological basis for the extraordinary incentive and reinforcing power of money, which seems to be unique to the human species? We identify two ways in which a commodity which is of no biological significance in itself can become a strong motivator. The first is if it is used as a tool, and by a metaphorical extension this is often applied to money: it is used instrumentally, in order to obtain (...) biologically relevant incentives. Second, substances can be strong motivators because they imitate the action of natural incentives but do not produce the fitness gains for which those incentives are instinctively sought. The classic examples of this process are psychoactive drugs, but we argue that the drug concept can also be extended metaphorically to provide an account of money motivation. From a review of theoretical and empirical literature about money, we conclude that (i) there are a number of phenomena that cannot be accounted for by a pure Tool Theory of money motivation; (ii) supplementing Tool Theory with a Drug Theory enables the anomalous phenomena to be explained; and (iii) the human instincts that, according to a Drug Theory, money parasitizes include trading (derived from reciprocal altruism) and object play. (Published Online April 5 2006) Key Words: economic behaviour; evolutionary psychology; giving; incentive; money; motivation; play; reciprocal altruism. (shrink)

Kamm’s sore throat case gives us a choice: save one life, or save a distinct life and cure a sore throat. We defend the fairness explanation of the judgement that one should flip a coin to decide whom to save: it is disrespectful to let a sore throat act as a tie-breaker, because an individual would be forced to forgo a 50% fair chance of living (given to them by a coin flip), which cannot be outweighed by any number of (...) sore throats. We show that this explanation of when and why claims can permissibly break ties generates new problem cases for theories of aggregation, including theories that have been thought to accommodate the judgement that one should flip a coin in Kamm’s sore throat case. We then generalise the fairness explanation to cases involving multiple groups. (shrink)

This paper brings into focus the idea that just as no third-personal way of thinking could capture the self-consciousness of first-person thought, no first- or third- personal way of thinking could capture the especially intimate way we have of relating to each other canonically expressed with our uses of ‘you’. It proposes, motivates and defends the view that second-person speech is canonically expressive of a distinctive way we have of thinking of each other, under a concept that refers de jure (...) to its addressee and whose availability depends on standing in a relation of interpersonal self-consciousness with another. (shrink)

Whilst Rahimzadeh et al. (2023) apply a critical lens to the pedagogical use of LLM bioethics assistants, we outline here further reason for skepticism. Two features of LLM chatbots are of signific...

Libertarians often invoke the principle of self-ownership to discredit distributive interventions authorized by the more-than-minimal state. But if one takes a democratic approach to the justification of ownership claims, including claims of ownership over oneself, the validity of the self-ownership principle is theoretically inseparable from the normative justification of the state. Since the idea of the state is essential to the very assertion (not just the positive enforcement) of the principle of self-ownership, invoking the principle to discredit a distribution of (...) ownership authorized by the state commits libertarians also to weakening that principle's validity. Put differently, appealing to the self-ownership principle to circumscribe the state's power to distribute property is problematic when the state is necessary to assert the validity of that principle. This is because anytime the self-ownership principle is used to undermine a state-based distribution of property it is also implicitly eroding the ground for asserting its own validity.1. (shrink)

High levels of threat and uncertainty characterize the onset of societal crises. Here, people are exposed to conflicting information in the media, including disinformation. Because individuals often base their news selection on pre-existing attitudes, the present study aims to examine selective exposure effects in the face of a crisis, and identify right-wing ideological, trust-, and science-related beliefs that might influence the selection and sharing of disinformation. A representative survey of German internet users (N = 1101) at the time of the (...) COVID-19 pandemic outbreak showed a confirmation bias in crisis-related news selection and sharing. It revealed right-wing authoritarianism and political mistrust as significant predictors of disinformation selection. The influence of social dominance orientation, mistrust in politics, and perceived certainty of knowledge were significant for sharing disinformation. The present results extend previous knowledge about people’s (dis)information behavior in times of crisis, and shed light on groups particularly vulnerable to disinformation. (shrink)

A surprising feature of the White Rose anti-Nazi resistance pamphlets is their appeal to a foundational classical Chinese text, the Laozi (otherwise known as the Daodejing), to buttress their critique of fascism and authoritarianism. I argue that from the perspective of a 1942 educated readership, the act of quoting the Laozi functioned as a subtle and pointed nod to anti-fascist intellectuals in pre-war Germany, many of whom had interpreted the Laozi as an anti-authoritarian and pacifist text. To a sympathetic reader, (...) the Laozi therefore constituted an apt reference point for critiquing National Socialism. I then introduce a complication for this wartime reading of the Laozi from the perspective of its ambiguous reception in ancient Chinese political thought. I more specifically discuss an ancient line of interpretation of the Laozi that points in the direction of authoritarianism — in stark tension with the White Rose message of passive resistance and popular revolt. (shrink)

In this essay David Lea approaches the decline in the study and teaching of the humanities within the university context from a financial perspective. As humanities departments are either closed down or have their curriculum attenuated, it is obvious that the revenue previously available to support such programs has not been forthcoming. This change is often explained as the result of cost cutting necessary during periods of financial crisis, but this justification is belied by the fact that while the humanities (...) have suffered during recent “financial crises,” other areas within the university have grown. Resources that could have supported the humanities have instead been applied elsewhere: first, to increasing the administration and ancillary support staff; and second, in support of subjects oriented toward technology and the market. Ultimately, Lea links the decline of the humanities to the growing financialization of the economy, the ideology of managerialism, and a contemporary tradition that accords with the “procedures of the realms of the market and of liberal individualist politics.”. (shrink)

CYBATHLON is an international championship where people with severe physical disabilities compete with the aid of state-of-the-art assistive technology. In one of the disciplines, the BCI Race, tetraplegic pilots compete in a computer game race by controlling an avatar with a brain-computer interface. This competition offers a perfect opportunity for BCI researchers to study long-term training effects in potential end-users, and to evaluate BCI performance in a realistic environment. In this work, we describe the BCI system designed by the team (...) Mirage91 for participation in the CYBATHLON BCI Series 2019, as well as in the CYBATHLON 2020 Global Edition. Furthermore, we present the BCI’s interface with the game and the main methodological strategies, along with a detailed evaluation of its performance over the course of the training period, which lasted 14 months. The developed system was a 4-class BCI relying on task-specific modulations of brain rhythms. We implemented inter-session transfer learning to reduce calibration time, and to reinforce the stability of the brain patterns. Additionally, in order to compensate for potential intra-session shifts in the features’ distribution, normalization parameters were continuously adapted in an unsupervised fashion. Across the aforementioned 14 months, we recorded 26 game-based training sessions. Between the first eight sessions, and the final eight sessions leading up to the CYBATHLON 2020 Global Edition, the runtimes significantly improved from 255 ± 23 s to 225 ± 22 s, respectively. Moreover, we observed a significant increase in the classifier’s accuracy from 46 to 53%, driven by more distinguishable brain patterns. Compared to conventional single session, non-adaptive BCIs, the inter-session transfer learning and unsupervised intra-session adaptation techniques significantly improved the performance. This long-term study demonstrates that regular training helped the pilot to significantly increase the distance between task-specific patterns, which resulted in an improvement of performance, both with respect to class separability in the calibration data, and with respect to the game. Furthermore, it shows that our methodological approaches were beneficial in transferring the performance across sessions, and most importantly to the CYBATHLON competitions. (shrink)

The “happy fish” passage concluding the “Autumn Floods” chapter of the Classical Chinese text known as the Zhuangzi has traditionally been seen to advance a form of relativism which precludes objectivity. My aim in this paper is to question this view with close reference to the passage itself. I further argue that the central concern of the two philosophical personae in the passage – Zhuangzi and Huizi – is not with the epistemic standards of human judgements (the established view since (...) Hansen, “The Relatively Happy Fish”), but with the more basic problem of species-specific perspectives. On my reading, Zhuangzi’s emphatic positionality in the passage – on the dam, accompanied by his friend Huizi – plausibly suggests a circumspect reflection on the limitedness of human knowledge. It is significant that Zhuangzi’s knowledge of fish happiness is avowedly from a certain place, and not absolute. But there is still a sense in which this view is objective: namely, insofar as it adequately accounts for an inherently human perspective on the world. I call this modest form of relativism ‘Species Relativism’, which, crucially, leaves room for objectivity, even though a fully objective (i.e. absolute) view of the world is not accessible to humans. (shrink)

It is often argued that multinational companies and other foreign developers have a responsibility to improve the material conditions of the people in whose territories they operate. As a matter of distributive justice it is thought that these companies should be sharing the acquired wealth with these people through the creation of ‘collective goods’ , infrastructure development and compensation disbursements aimed at their benefit. Recently “stakeholder theory” and even legislative changes in the first world have sought to impress on the (...) corporate world the necessity to share the profits with affected “non‐shareholder” groups. Many see these developments as possible advancements for indigenous peoples, indigenous rights and the cause of distributive justice for aboriginal groups. However, it can be shown that the attribution of such ‘imperfect’ duties to corporations results in the generation of excessive costs and of unrealistic expectations on the part of stakeholders. Distributive justice is more efficiently achieved by public sector involvement at the level of policy and project management. (shrink)

Is it possible to justify territorial rights? Provided a justification for territorial rights can be found, does it ground claims toparticularterritories? And provided a claim to particular territories can be justified, what kind of claim is it? Is it a claim to jurisdiction? A claim to control resources? A claim to control the movement of people across borders? In this paper I review some prominent accounts seeking to answer these questions. After outlining their main features, I focus on some difficulties (...) they encounter, in particular with regard to the justification of exclusion. (shrink)

We seek to advance place-sensitive theory on cross-sector partnerships (CSPs) by investigating how partners cope with difficult place characteristics that affect their collaboration. To this end, we conduct an in-depth case study of a disaster relief CSP in which the partners had to cope with what we label _place intensity_ of disasters, as well as with what emerged as _place diversity_ of pre-/post-disaster contexts. Our findings illustrate the collaborative effects of these different place contexts and reveal two practices of _CSP (...) place work_ by which the partners sought to leverage their cross-fertilizing potential: They used the pre-/post-disaster contexts to anticipate and prepare for the place intensity and conveyed such intensity to pre-/post-disaster contexts to manage the place diversity and sustain the collaborative commitment. These insights advance CSP research, first, by outlining places’ agentic forces and exposing their different collaborative effects. Second, by introducing practices of cognitive and emotional CSP place work, we show how partners may integrate places into their CSP management to better handle their adverse effects. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungLokale, religionsbezogene Ereignisse werden vermehrt global diskutiert – auch die „Handschlag-Affäre“. Bauend auf Forschung zu Öffentlichkeit, zusammenfallenden Kontexten und islamfeindlichen Online-Diskursen argumentiert der Beitrag, dass in der medialen Verbreitung der Affäre geografische, zeitliche und soziale Räume zusammenfielen, was die negativen Folgen für die involvierten Akteure miterklärt. Das geografische und zeitliche Zusammenfallen wird anhand von Metadaten von 279 Nachrichten- und 152 Webseiten-/blog-artikeln (dt. und engl.; veröffentlicht 2015–2017) veranschaulicht. Das soziale Zusammenfallen wird durch eine thematische Analyse von 45 Webseiten-/blog-artikeln der islamfeindlichen Online-Öffentlichkeit (...) illustriert. Ergebnisse zeigen eine mediale Ausbreitung von lokal zu global (geografische Räume), eine Zeitverzögerung zwischen Ereignis und Skandalisierung (zeitliche Räume) und eine ideologische Rekontextualisierung in der islamfeindlichen Öffentlichkeit (soziale Räume). (shrink)

En partant d’un passage précisément circonscrit, et souvent cité, des « Réflexions sur Kafka » d’Adorno (« Kafka, c’est l’Enfer, vu depuis la perspective de la rédemption »), nous tentons d’en scruter les différents sens, et les multiples enjeux – à la fois pour ce qui est de l’interprétation adornienne, et de ce qu’elle nous dit, ou nous cache, du texte kafkaïen lui-même. Nous y isolons pour cela une double thématique : celle de la photographie, et celle du négatif. Que (...) recouvre cette perspective kafkaïenne selon laquelle le monde semble être renversé ; et en quoi cela nous permet-il de regarder le pays de Kafka comme une photographie? L’article tente de montrer que le négatif, à partir de cette signification photographique et en tant qu’il la dépasse, permet à Adorno de tenir ensemble les différents champs de son interprétation (le négatif étant tantôt compris dans sa dimension philosophique, religieuse, esthétique, ou encore historique). (shrink)

Nespolo’s artworks of the late 60s are conceivable as heritage of Dada. Objects and materials are combined in accordance with a specific logical direction also based on philosophical and literary suggestions. The simple materials are present also as a declaration of a Dadaist negation.

This essay compares the thoughts of Kant and Marx on revolution. It focuses in particular on two issues: the contribution of revolutionary enthusiasm to the cause of emancipatory political agents and its educative role in illustrating the possibility of progress for future generations. In both cases, it is argued, the defence of revolution is offered in the context of illustrating the possibility of moral progress for the species, even if not for individual human beings, and brings out the centrality of (...) collective agency in moving toward universal moral goals. Discussing the implications of these points is of significant historical interest: it allows us to defend an interpretation of Kant’s political thought which is sensitive to the material conditions of historical development and to rescue Marx from an amoral reading of his philosophy of history. Reflecting on the role and preconditions of transformative collective agency is also of normative interest: it allows us to better evaluate the significance of political events that, firstly, re-shape the boundaries of political feasibility and, secondly, play a crucial educative role in motivating future progressive initiatives. (shrink)