Highly portable and accessible MRI technology will allow researchers to conduct field-based MRI research in community settings. Previous guidance for researchers working with fixed MRI does not address the novel ethical, legal, and societal issues (ELSI) of portable MRI (pMRI). Our interdisciplinary Working Group (WG) previously identified 15 core ELSI challenges associated with pMRI research and recommended solutions. In this article, we distill those detailed recommendations into a Portable MRI Research ELSI Checklist that offers practical operational guidance for researchers contemplating (...) using this technology. (shrink)

I argue against the claim that morally ignorant wrongdoers are open to blame only if they are culpable for their ignorance, and I argue against a version of skepticism about moral responsibility that depends on this claim being true. On the view I defend, the attitudes involved in blame are typically responses to the features of an action that make it objectionable or unjustifiable from the perspective of the one who issues the blame. One important way that an action can (...) appear objectionable to us is that it expresses a judgment with which we disagree about the significance of the interests of those affected by the action. A morally ignorant wrongdoer’s actions may express such judgments even if it is not her fault that she is unaware of the moral status of her behavior, and even if it would be unreasonable to expect her to be aware of its status. (shrink)

There are ways that ethical intuitions might be, and the various possibilities have epistemic ramifications. This paper criticizes some extant accounts of what ethical intuitions are and how they justify, and it offers an alternative account. Roughly, an ethical intuition that p is a kind of seeming state constituted by a consideration whether p, attended by positive phenomenological qualities that count as evidence for p, and so a reason to believe that p. They are distinguished from other kinds of seemings, (...) such as those which are content driven (e.g., the sensory experience that a stick in water seems bent) and those which are competence driven (e.g., the intellectual seeming that XYZ is not water, or that one of DeMorgan’s laws is true). One important conclusion is this: when crafting a positive theory of justification ethical intuitionists have fewer resources than intuitionists in other domains, not because of the subject matter of ethical intuitions, but because of the their structure. A second conclusion is that the seemings featured in substantive ethical intuitions deliver relatively weak justification as compared to other seeming states. (shrink)

Recent debates within the autism advocacy community have raised difficult questions about who can credibly act as a representative of a particular population and what responsibilities that...

Differences between human beings have long been used to justify a range of degrading, exclusionary, and murderous practices that strip people of their humanity and dignity. While considerable scholarship has been devoted to such dehumanization, Matthew S. Weinert asks how we might conceive its reverse—humanization, or what it means to “make human.” Weinert proposes an account of making human centered on five mechanisms: reflection, recognition, resistance, replication of dominant mores, and responsibility. Examining cases such as the UN Security Council’s (...) engagements with crises and the International Court of Justice’s grappling with Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence, he illustrates the distinct and contingent ways these mechanisms have been deployed. Theoretically, the cases evince a complex, evolving relationship between state-centric and human-centric views of society, ultimately revealing the normative potentialities of both. Though the case studies concern specific human relations issues on an international level, Weinert argues in favor of starting from the shared problem of being human and of living in a world in which the humanity of countless groups has been demeaned or denied. Working outward from that point, he proposes, we obtain a more pragmatically grounded understanding of the social construction of the human being. (shrink)

Having no recourse to ways of knowing about the natural world, ethical non-naturalists are in need of an epistemology that might apply to a normative breed of facts or properties, and intuitionism seems well suited to fill that bill. Here I argue that the metaphysical inspiration for ethical intuitionism undermines that very epistemology, for this pair of views generates what I call the defeater from cosmic coincidence. Unfortunately, we face not a happy union, but a difficult choice: either ethical intuitionism (...) or ethical non-naturalism, but not both. (shrink)

It often seems that what one ought to do depends on what contingent ends one has adopted and the means to pursuing them. Imagine, for example, that you are applying for jobs, and a particularly attractive one comes your way. It offers excellent colleagues in a desirable location, the pay is good, and acquiring a job like this is one of your ends. If practicing your job talk is a means to getting the job, the following seems true: (1) If (...) you want1 to get the job, then you ought to practice your job talk. Let us call conditional ought sentences that purport to express an end in the antecedent and a means to the end in the consequent end-given oughts. Some end-given oughts run into the problem of detachment; i.e., some end-given oughts seem true, and yet we do not think the consequent by itself, detached from the conditional, is true even if the antecedent is true. Consider a case where you want revenge on Bill for some slight offense. You happen to have the opportunity to poison Bill’s drink while he is away, which is the only thing that would lead to his demise. What of: (2) If you want to kill Bill, then you ought to poison his drink. (2) runs up against the problem of detachment because of the following modus ponens argument: • If you want to kill Bill, then you ought to poison his drink. • You want to kill Bill. • Therefore, you ought to poison his drink. In fact, you ought not poison Bill’s drink. You ought to avoid him and seek counseling. (shrink)

ABSTRACT After the tragedies of the twentieth century, the utopian impulse was subject to searching criticism by a host of liberal intellectuals including Karl Popper, Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, and Jacob Talmon. Looking to history and political philosophy, these thinkers impugned utopianism for so frequently destroying the freedoms it appeared to pursue. Defined by its theoretical contradictions, the utopian project, rooted in the politics of the Enlightenment, bore some responsibility for the totalitarianism and genocide that had shaped their lives. As (...) this critique became liberal orthodoxy, a heretic group of anarchist thinkers challenged these conclusions. While travelling some distance with the liberal critics, for Paul Goodman, Marie Louise Berneri, and Herbert Read, the twentieth century, rather than invalidating the utopian urge made its boldness and experimentalism all the more vital. Their act of heresy was defending utopianism as a central component of their anarchist critique of the present. (shrink)

Here I discuss the conceptual structure and core semantic commitments of reason-involving thought and discourse needed to underwrite the claim that ethical normativity is not uniquely queer. This deflates a primary source of ethical scepticism and it vindicates so-called partner in crime arguments. When it comes to queerness objections, all reason-implicating normative claims—including those concerning Humean reasons to pursue one's ends, and epistemic reasons to form true beliefs—stand or fall together.

This paper critically examines coincidence arguments and evolutionary debunking arguments against non-naturalist realism in metaethics. It advances a version of these arguments that goes roughly like this: Given a non-naturalist, realist metaethic, it would be cosmically coincidental if our first order normative beliefs were true. This coincidence undermines any prima facie justification enjoyed by those beliefs.

Scholars have failed to adequately distinguish Kant’s grades of evil: frailty (weakness of will), impurity, and depravity. I argue that the only way to distinguish them is, f irstly, to recognize that frailty is explicitly, practically irrational and not caused by any sort of self-deception. Instead, it is caused by the radical evil that Kant finds within the character of all persons. Secondly, impurity can only be understood to be self-deception either about the nature of the act itself, which results (...) in an epistemic error, or about one’s motivations for following a properly reasoned, moral conclusion, which results in a motivational error. Thirdly, depravity is self-deception about morality itself, by which the agent believes that it is morally right to follow self-love. (shrink)

Normative cognition seems rather important, even ineliminable. Communities that lack normative concepts like SHOULD, IS A REASON TO, JUSTIFIES, etc. seem cognitively handicapped and communicatively muzzled. And yet a popular metaethic, normative naturalism, has a hard time accommodating this felt ineliminability. Here, I press the argument against normative naturalism, consider some replies on behalf of normative naturalists, and suggest that a version of sophisticated subjectivism does the best job preserving the importance and ineliminability of the special, normative way of thinking.

In a recent article, Jecker and Ko propose that a capabilities approach can be useful as an ethical framework for evaluating the use of BCI applications. Jecker and Ko defend this application, in part, because a capabilities list is not necessarily unchanging, but can account for rapid enhancements in human abilities. In this commentary, I argue that, though the capabilities approach is provisional, its primary relevance for BCI emerges from the ways in which capabilities remain constant amidst changing human abilities.

Kyle Stanford’s reformulation of the problem of underdetermination has the potential to highlight the epistemic obligations of scientists. Stanford, however, presents the phenomenon of unconceived alternatives as a problem for realists, despite critics’ insistence that we have contextual explanations for scientists’ failure to conceive of their successors’ theories. I propose that responsibilist epistemology and the concept of “role oughts,” as discussed by Lorraine Code and Richard Feldman, can pacify Stanford’s critics and reveal broader relevance of the “new induction.” The possibility (...) of unconceived alternatives pushes us to question our contemporary expectation for scientists to reason outside of their historical moment. (shrink)

Given the rise of genetic etiological beliefs regarding psychiatric disorders, a growing body of research has focused on trying to elucidate the effects that such explanatory frameworks might be having on how mental disorders are perceived by patients, clinicians, and the general public. Genetic and other biomedical explanations of mental disorders have long been seen as a potential tool in the efforts to destigmatize mental disorders, given the harshness of the widespread negative attitudes about them and the important negative clinical (...) and social impacts of this stigma. The conventional wisdom has appeared to be that because the effects of genes are seen as falling outside individual control, conceiving of mental disorders as caused by genes casts patients as blameless, thereby reducing stigmatization. Indeed, the results of experimental and correlational research have now robustly linked genetic and other biomedical explanations for mental disorders with reductions in the extent to which people are blamed for their psychiatric symptoms. However, research examining the impact of genetic and other biomedical explanations of mental disorders has also suggested that they can have significant downsides. The most consistently observed negative effect of these kinds of explanations is that they can apparently lead to the assumption that mental disorders are unlikely to improve or abate. Genetic and other biomedical explanations of mental disorders can also increase people’s confidence in the effectiveness of biomedical treatments (such as pharmacotherapy) but decrease their confidence in the effectiveness of “nonbiomedical” treatments (such as psychotherapy). (shrink)

This article delineates the core concerns and motivations of the ontological work of Gilles Deleuze, and is intended as a programmatic statement for a general philosophical audience. The article consists of two main parts. In the first, two early writings by Deleuze are analysed in order to clarify his understanding of ontology broadly, and to specify the precise aim of his understanding of being in terms of difference. The second part of the article looks at the work of Heidegger and (...) Derrida in order to distinguish Deleuze's conceptions of ontology and difference from theirs. A final section clarifies Deleuze's efforts to undertake the construction of an ontology divergent from the dominant tradition and in contrast to the emphasis on the closure of metaphysics in the thought of Heidegger and Derrida. (shrink)

This commentary on Daniel Stader's recent article, “Algorithms Don't Have a Future: On the Relation of Judgement and Calculation” develops and complicates his argument by suggesting that algorithms ossify multiple kinds of prejudices, namely, the structural prejudices of the programmer and the exemplary prejudices of the dataset. This typology at once suggests that the goal of transparency may be impossible, but this impossibility enriches the possibilities for developing Stader's concept of reflected prejudiced use.

It has become increasingly difficult for individuals to exercise meaningful control over the personal data they disclose to companies or to understand and track the ways in which that data is exchanged and used. These developments have led to an emerging consensus that existing privacy and data protection laws offer individuals insufficient protections against harms stemming from current data practices. However, an effective and ethically justified way forward remains elusive. To inform policy in this area, we propose the Ethical Data (...) Practices framework. The framework outlines six principles relevant to the collection and use of personal data—minimizing harm, fairly distributing benefits and burdens, respecting autonomy, transparency, accountability, and inclusion—and translates these principles into action-guiding practical imperatives for companies that process personal data. In addition to informing policy, the practical imperatives can be voluntarily adopted by companies to promote ethical data practices. (shrink)

Either 1. the non-naturalist is in a state of mind that would treat as relevant information about the existence and patterns of non-natural properties and facts as they make up their mind about normative matters, or 2. the non-naturalist is in a state of mind that would treat as irrelevant information about the existence and patterns of non-natural properties and facts as they make up their mind about normative matters. The first state of mind is morally objectionable, for one should (...) not change one’s normative beliefs to pander to the patterns of some non-natural realm. The second state of mind is irrational, for if you think you are aiming to represent non-natural properties correctly, you should be interested to know which actions share a non-natural property and which do not, and you should be prepared to change your mind accordingly. (shrink)

Ethics Lost in Modernity: Reflections on Wittgenstein and Bioethics turns to the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein as a guide to understand the immense success--yet great danger--of bioethics. Matthew Vest traces the story of bioethics since its inception in the late 1960s as a way to uncover a number of hidden assumptions within modern ethics that relies upon scientific theorizing as the fundamental way of thinking. Autonomy and utilitarianism, in particular, are two nearly unquestioned goals of scientific theorizing that are easily (...) accessible, but at what cost? Vest argues that such an ethics enacts a thin moral calculation that runs the risk of enslaving ethics to scientism. Far from the depth of religious ethos and practices of virtue, modern ethics is lost amidst thin ethical theories, enacting a language game that instrumentalizes ethics in service of technological, bureaucratic, and professional end goals. He proposes that true moral living is far from anti-science, but rather is envisioned best when ethics and science are balanced with keen insights from ancient sacred cosmology. (shrink)

For George Woodcock, the key to appreciating Colin Ward was first to understand the importance of Peter Kropotkin’s classic work Mutual Aid (1902). While images of the French Revolution and the Par...

Patient and public involvement (PPI) has gained widespread support in health research and health policy circles, but there is little consensus on the precise meaning or justifications of PPI. We argue that an important step towards clarifying the meaning and justification for PPI is to split apart the familiar acronym and draw a distinction between patient and public involvement. Specifically, we argue that patient involvement should refer to the practice of involving individuals in health research or policy on the basis (...) of their experience with a particular condition, while public involvement should refer to the practice of involving individuals in health policy or research based on their status as members of a relevant population. Analyzing cases from the UK, Australia, and the USA, we show how our proposed distinction can deliver much needed clarity to conversations on PPI, while guiding the development and evaluation of future PPI‐based policies. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Matthew S. Santirocco JUSTICE IN SOPHOCLES' ANTIGONE Sophocles' Antigone is most often apprehended in terms of conflicts, an approach which the play does indeed invite. The personal clash of Antigone and Creon generates conflicts on many different levels— political (individual or family vs. state, aristocracy vs. democracy), theological (gods vs. men), philosophical (nature vs. law or convention), sexual (woman vs. man), even chronological (young vs. old). However, insofar (...) as no list can ever be so inclusive as the play itself, all such discussions tend by their very nature to be reductionist. And even if a balanced critique were possible at this level, a tragedy is not the sum of abstract conflicts; it is theatre, people in action. Furthermore, the conflict approach encourages us to ask the wrong questions. Although conflict need not imply resolution, critics persist in searching for it. Yet there is no resolution in the Antigone except by death. Similarly, such an approach invites us to ask who is right, Antigone or Creon. But in a very real sense this question misses Sophocles' point. Relevant, perhaps, to versions by Anouilh and Brecht, the question misleads when applied to the ancient play. It is interesting that we oversimplify, for Sophocles' sympathies are more expansive and complex than these modern interpretations of his myth. For all these reasons a valid alternative approach to the play may be to consider it not in terms of the conflicts incarnated in the personalities but rather in terms of one theme in the context of which all the conflicts are played out. The precise issue here, as so often in Greek tragedy, is a philosophical one. As the religious thought of an earlier era was yielding to judicial and political thought, and as older heroic ideals were being supplanted by a rationalistic view of man, tragedy's function in fifth-century Athens was, in part at least, to expose and explore these cultural displacements, either by affirming traditional values and concepts or else by questioning their continued validity. One such concept, perhaps the most recurrent in tragedy, 180 Matthew S. Santirocco181 is justice, dike. Originally a term used to refer to things as they are, dike came also to acquire a normative sense, things as they ought to be. At different times and in different contexts the word can signify custom or usage, law-enforcing authority, penalty, and ofcourse "justice" as a higher standard. Its precise semantic range is wide and fluctuating. Thus tragedy becomes, in a sense, a matter of vocabulary. In the Antigone the characters appeal to justice, but each defines it differently, so that the conflict is not so much between justice and injustice as between one sort of justice and another. The Oresteia of Aeschylus had earlier celebrated the transition from vendetta justice to courtroom justice. The Antigone, however, focuses not so much on the changes in dike as on a question these changes raise, namely the very possibility of dike. The establishment of the law court brought Aeschylus' trilogy to a resolved ending. Sophocles' vision in the Antigone is much more austere. Although he acknowledges the existence of an ideal of justice, he exposes the tensions and ambiguities inherent in it and thereby questions whether that ideal can ever be realized in the lives of men. II A key text concerning justice is contained in one of the choral odes. But can it be trusted? The tragic chorus is not, after all, the mouthpiece of the poet as was the comic chorus in Aristophanes' parabaseis. Nor is it always or necessarily the mouthpiece of the audience, SchlegeFs "ideal spectator." In the Antigone, as elsewhere, the chorus simply constitutes a panel of the population (here, of Thebes) and its perspective on the action is, if not omniscient, not particularly partisan either. Gordon Kirkwood has demonstrated the many dramatic functions of the Sophoclean chorus, including its ambiguities. In the Antigone no fewer than three odes are ambiguous, leaving in doubt the identity of the one who has disturbed order and right (332-75), who has violated the will of heaven (582-625), and whose mind has been perverted by love (781-816). Although the chorus may not be aware of the... (shrink)

This is a review of Eklund's book. It discusses his suggestion that "ardent realists" use the practical profiles of normative concepts to A) explain what it is for a concept to be normative, B) fix reference, and C) provide an extensional theory of normative properties. I argue that those sympathetic to ardent realism will be happier to focus on the way in which normativity presents itself to cognition, particularly that presentation of inherent, authoritative guidance, and whether that 1) explains what (...) it is for a concept to be normative, 2) fixes reference, 3) aptly characterizes the nature of normativity in the world, and perhaps 4) explains why normative thoughts have the Eklund-style normative roles—the practical profiles of things like motivation, preference, and intention—that they have. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Unmastering Speech:Irony in Plato's PhaedrusMatthew S. Linck"So, my shall suffer what it deserves."—Phaedrus 242a1It is tempting, after one has reflected closely on the words and deeds of the Phaedrus, to read the dialogue as if Socrates had the whole conversation worked out from the first words. The art of Plato is such that the intricate cohesion of word and action reveals itself through many layers. Plato writes; and as (...) a writer he has the time and the means (written letters) to compose. But what is Socrates doing? He does not have the leisure to compose "over a long period of time" (228a). He is responding to particular individuals, in particular circumstances, in the moment. He is thinking on his feet. One might claim that this is actually the first deficiency of the dialogues, that they are artificial and unrealistic in this way. If the written text reveals itself as finely crafted in the subtlety of its inner connections, how seriously can we take the apparent spontaneity of the spoken discourse? My suggestion would be that we take this not as a fault of the dialogues, but rather as the first instance of Plato's irony. This may be Plato's supreme irony—the evocation of truth through artificiality.But that is already going too fast. I want to begin by looking at the words and deeds of Socrates and Phaedrus, without considering yet what Plato might be doing as the author of the dialogue. My first interpretive principle will be to take the drama at face value, as naturalistic, temporal, and even commonplace—two friends go for a walk in the countryside to listen to speeches.Immediately, however, the commonness is disrupted. The city, the commonwealth, is left behind. This is certainly uncommon for Socrates, who never leaves the city walls.2 Furthermore, the language of the text indicates a thematization of, out-of-placeness, strangeness. Rather than being accused of already violating my one hermeneutical principle, it should be noted that this indication of strangeness comes through the words [End Page 264] and deeds of the characters, not through a retrospective recovery of the dialogue as a whole. From the beginning the reader encounters a tension between the commonplace and the unusual.3Nevertheless, the impetus to move outside of the city is commonplace enough. Phaedrus has a speech that Socrates wants to hear. Before Socrates is told what this speech is about, he indicates that nothing would please him more than "hearing how you [Phaedrus] and Lysias passed the time" (227b). After Phaedrus, in his excitement, gives away the topic of the speech—"an attempted seduction of a handsome boy—but not by a lover!" (227c)—Socrates seems even more eager to hear the speech. Does Socrates already see what is to come? Is he merely excited to hear a speech, or is he excited about challenging the beautiful Phaedrus' excitement about a speech that defends an unworthy principle—"that one should gratify the one who does not love rather than the one who does" (227c)?After leaving the city and finding a comfortable place for their speech, for, Phaedrus reads his copy of Lysias' speech for Socrates. The gist of Lysias' speech, as Phaedrus has already announced, is that a young lover should associate himself with, and gratify, a non-lover rather than one who is in love. One central theme of the speech, which will be important for thinking about irony, is that of self-mastery. The recurring motif in Lysias' speech is that the lover is not in control of himself, while the non-lover is. Therefore (the non-lover argues) associating with a lover is unpredictable, and will most likely result in harm to the beloved. The non-lover claims that his self-control will prevent and preclude unforeseen harm. This slippage, from self-mastery to mastery of the situation, is decisive. We would be wrong to interpret Socrates' two speeches as wholesale rejections of everything in Lysias' speech. Socrates cannot reject self-control outright. His consistent concern with rules out simply espousing lack of control. Yet the measuredness of Socratic practice does not entail the... (shrink)

When it comes to the meanings of normative expressions, descriptivist theories and expressivist theories have distinct explanatory virtues. Noting this, and with the hope of not compromising on explanatory resources, hybrid semantic theories refuse to choose. Here, I examine how well the strategy works for Moorean open questions and associated is‐ought gaps. Though hybrid theorists typically rely on their expressivist resources for this explanandum, there is a type of open question that unadulterated expressivist theories can handle but hybrid theories cannot (...) – reverse open questions associated with an ought‐is gap. Because of this, hybrid theories do not enjoy the best of both worlds, and Moorean considerations favour unadulterated expressivism over any partly descriptivist theory. (shrink)

Survivors of childhood brain tumors face many obstacles to living independently as adults. Causes for lack of independence are multifactorial and generally are investigated in terms of physical, cognitive, and psychosocial treatment–related sequelae. Little is known, however, about the role of expectation for survivors’ function. From a mixed–methods study including qualitative interviews and quantitative measures from 40 caregiver–survivor dyads, we compared the data within and across dyads, identifying four distinct narrative profiles: (A) convergent expectations about an optimistic future, (B) convergent (...) expectations about a less optimistic future, (C) non–convergent expectations about a less optimistic future, and (D) non–convergent expectations about an unclear future. Dyads both do well and/or struggle in systematically different manners in each profile. These profiles may inform the design of interventions to be tested in future research and help clinicians to assist families in defining, (re–)negotiating, and reaching their expectations of function and independence. (shrink)

I propose that we interpret Kant’s argument from incongruent counterparts in the 1768 article ‘Concerning the Ultimate Ground of the Differentiation of Directions in Space’ in light of a theory of dynamic absolute space that he accepted throughout the 1750s and 1760s. This force-based or material conception of space was not an unusual interpretation of the Newtonian notion of absolute space. Nevertheless, commentators have continually argued that Kant’s argument is an utter failure that shifts from the metaphysics of space to (...) its epistemology, because he has no way to connect ‘directionality’ and ‘handedness’ to absolute space. This supposed failure is based on an understanding of absolute space in purely mathematical terms and as an absolute void that lacks any qualitative or dynamic features. If we recognize that Kant held that space had an intrinsic directional asymmetry then his argument successfully connects incongruent counterparts to absolute space. The presence of this notion in Kant’s pre-Critical thought is rarely noted, and its necessity in understanding his incongruence argument is novel. (shrink)

Biomedical research funding bodies across Europe and North America increasingly encourage—and, in some cases, require—investigators to involve members of the public in funded research. Yet there remains a striking lack of clarity about what ‘good’ or ‘successful’ public involvement looks like. In an effort to provide guidance to investigators and research organisations, representatives of several key research funding bodies in the UK recently came together to develop the National Standards for Public Involvement in Research. The Standards have critical implications for (...) the future of biomedical research in the UK and in other countries as researchers and funders abroad look to the Standards as a model for their own policy development. We assess the Standards and find that despite offering useful suggestions for dealing with practical challenges associated with public involvement, the Standards fail to address fundamental questions about when, why and with whom public involvement should be undertaken in the first place. We show that presented without this justificatory context, many of the recommendations in the Standards are, at best, fragments that require substantial elaboration by those looking to apply the Standards in their own work and, at worst, subject to potentially harmful misapplication by well-meaning investigators. As funding bodies increasingly push for public involvement in research, the key lesson of our analysis is that future recommendations about how public involvement should be conducted cannot be coherently formulated without a clear sense of the underlying goals and rationales for public involvement. (shrink)

The movements by national governments, funding agencies, universities, and research communities toward “open data” face many difficult challenges. In high-level visions of open data, researchers’ data and metadata practices are expected to be robust and structured. The integration of the internet into scientific institutions amplifies these expectations. When examined critically, however, the data and metadata practices of scholarly researchers often appear incomplete or deficient. The concepts of “accountability” and “transparency” provide insight in understanding these perceived gaps. Researchers’ primary accountabilities are (...) related to meeting the expectations of research competency, not to external standards of data deposition or metadata creation. Likewise, making data open in a transparent way can involve a significant investment of time and resources with no obvious benefits. This paper uses differing notions of accountability and transparency to conceptualize “open data” as the result of ongoing achievements, not one-time acts. (shrink)

In some cases, harming another gives rise to a duty to compensate for harm done. This paper argues that the influential explanations of such duties of compensation—that they are somehow derived from rights intrusions, or breaches of duties not to harm—fail. I offer and defend an alternative explanation for why certain harms and not others give rise to compensatory duties, an explanation that seeks to derive them from wide-scope duties not to harm or to compensate for harm done.

China and Islam examines the intersection of two critical issues of the contemporary world: Islamic revival and an assertive China, questioning the assumption that Islamic law is incompatible with state law. It finds that both Hui and the Party-State invoke, interpret, and make arguments based on Islamic law, a minjian law in China, to pursue their respective visions of 'the good'. Based on fieldwork in Linxia, 'China's Little Mecca', this study follows Hui clerics, youthful translators on the 'New Silk Road', (...) female educators who reform traditional madrasas, and Party cadres as they reconcile Islamic and socialist laws in the course of the everyday. The first study of Islamic law in China and one of the first ethnographic accounts of law in postsocialist China, China and Islam unsettles unidimensional perceptions of extremist Islam and authoritarian China through Hui minjian practices of law. (shrink)

Meta­data in various forms pervades our institutions, technologies, and daily lives. Meta­data is a distinct focus of academic research and professional practice for many people within the library and information sciences (LIS). This article is an exploration of the concept of “meta­data.” It presents a high-level introduction to the topic with analysis of key research problems and practical challenges. The paper discusses varying understandings of what “meta­data” means, the origin and evolution of meta­data as an important topic within information and (...) data fields, and the central characteristics of that which gets called “meta­data.” Meta­data can be understood as both process and product and can result from both human effort and computational techniques. Given the central role meta­data have in the establishment of know­ledge, evidence, and truth, it is necessary for researchers and professionals within LIS to think critically about our meta­data practices and systems. (shrink)

Colin Ward is not necessarily a gift for the biographer. As Sophie Scott-Brown’s engaging study reminds us, one of his defining characteristics was a thoroughgoing humility, and one consequence of...

This article argues that the distinction between the sensible and the intelligible in Plato’s dialogues (here with respect to the Republic) is not a dogmaticassertion or the foundation for a set of doctrines, but is rather the very starting point of philosophical activity. This starting point will be shown to be, in its most fundamental aspect, not something chosen by the philosopher, but rather the attribute that makes the philosopher who he is. Much of my argument will turn on a (...) consideration of the divided line. In Part I, I situate the discussion of the divided line within both its global and immediate context in the Republic. As the divided line will serve as the focal point of my argument it is important to clarify its place in Socrates’ discussion with Glaucon and Adeimantus from the outset of my presentation. Part II consists of a brief analysis of the key passages devoted to the divided line. This analysis will culminate by highlighting the problematic nature of geometrical objects with respect to the schema of the line. I will argue that geometrical objects have no secure place on the line. This insecurity will call into question the apparent continuity between the sensible and the intelligible that the divided line suggests, and might call for a way to mediate or bridge the gap between the sensible and the intelligible. In Part III, I consider one such attempt in Proclus’s commentary on Euclid in order to show how such an attempt failson Platonic terms and thus cannot constitute the true core of Platonic philosophy. Part IV will argue that if rightly interpreted the divided line itself offers a solution to the problem and clarifies both the nature of philosophical activity and the status of the sensibility/intelligibility distinction within Platonic philosophy. (shrink)