The contributions in this volume map out how technologies are used and designed to plan, maintain, govern, demolish, and destroy the city. The chapters demonstrate how urban technologies shape, and are shaped, by fundamental concepts and principles such as citizenship, publicness, democracy, and nature. The many authors herein explore how to think of technologically mediated urban space as part of the human condition. The volume will thus contribute to the much-needed discussion on technology-enabled urban futures from the perspective of the (...) philosophy of technology. This perspective also contributes to the discussion and process of making cities ‘smart’ and just. This collection appeals to students, researchers, and professionals within the fields of philosophy of technology, urban planning, and engineering. (shrink)

Technology is no stranger to the city. Cities are planned, built, maintained, governed, demolished, and destroyed by technical means. Yet, the city has yet to receive much attention within the philosophy of technology. This volume addresses this gap, and in doing so contributes to the much-needed discussion on technology-enabled urban futures from the perspective of the philosophy of technology. In this introductory chapter, the larger volume is introduced by reflecting on the rationale and need for such a collection, sketching the (...) main themes analyzed throughout, and providing an overview of the contributions. (shrink)

Explicitly dismantling or decommissioning existing sociotechnical systems seems to be unimaginable both within dominant public imaginaries and in academic thought. Indeed, ‘gee whiz’ journalistic narratives regarding emerging technoscience abound as many members of the public appear to eagerly await any new innovation coming out of Silicon Valley. At the same time, most science and technology studies (STS) research focuses on the creation of new technoscience, not its destruction or temporary decommissioning. Yet, lay citizens clearly engage in forms of Luddism: schoolchildren (...) and overworked professionals take digital ‘detoxes’, a number of cities have dismantled their urban highways, and a growing movement of parents have opted their children out of their state’s standardized testing requirements. While all such efforts are rooted in the rejection of a technology, they vary in terms of their resemblance to 19th century English Luddism as well as with respect to Langdon Winner’s concept of epistemological Luddism. How might STS scholars better make sense of 21st century Luddism? This article conceptualizes a number of contemporary examples of technological dismantling with regard to their epistemological and political characteristics. We end with a call for research to better understand lay technological refusal, especially in comparison to elite-driven forms of disruption. (shrink)

This paper reports on an ongoing ARC Discovery Project that is conducting design research into learning in collaborative virtual worlds (CVW).The paper will describe three design components of the project: (a) pedagogical design, (b)technical and graphics design, and (c) learning research design. The perspectives of each design team will be discussed and how the three teams worked together to produce the CVW. The development of productive failure learning activities for the CVW will be discussed and there will be an interactive (...) demonstration of the project's CVW. (shrink)

The essays in Rose Lore are a rendering of global cultural history, literature, and metaphysics, woven together in a collection that will be valuable to several disciplines. The essays present numerous qualities of the rose as a symbol with broad cultural, social, and historical meanings: from astrology, to the history of Catholicism, to the new anti-female genital mutilation global movement.

Online and blended learning (OBL) overemphasize the process of creating artifacts, producing strategies, or otherwise utilizing a “making” orientation in education. As an alternative to this making-orientation, we offer a model for relational course design founded in the philosophies of Emmanuel Levinas and Martin Buber. We examine an OBL course design focused on interfaith leadership and ethics that lends itself to the need for relational pedagogy. The focus on asymmetrical and symmetrical relationships that separate Levinas and Buber’s philosophies enable rich (...) ways of designing relational pedagogies and for resisting the making orientation. By focusing on human relationships, we demonstrate design principles through “philosophies of difference” that can be used in OBL. (shrink)

Written for anyone working in the field of early years education and care, this book encourages students and practitioners to consider their own practice and to examine practice in a wide range of early years settings.

David Hume and James Madison believed that a republic can secure domestic tranquility by discouraging the development of factions. Modern computer technology shatters these hopes, which rest on the idea that factions will not grow because great distance makes it difficult for individuals to discover that others share their interests or grievances. Today, technology renders geographical distance increasingly irrelevant to communication with others. If Madison and Hume were right about the effects of distance prior to the current development of computer (...) technology, then we may experience the growth of factions and associated violence that Hume and Madison feared. Increased domestic terrorism made more effective by technologically developed weapons of mass death could be the way of the future. I contend that education can modify such developments by giving priority to Jane Roland Martin's suggestion that we adopt an educational aim intent on securing domestic tranquility. I revise the content of her proposal to include features of communicative rationality as an indispensable element of political dialogue. This provides resources by which factional elements can access and influence political discussion. If we are to enjoy a decent degree of domestic tranquility in the future, we must integrate potentially factious elements into the political process. To marginalize such elements, no matter how repugnant their political views, will merely serve to legitimate their use of terror as the only option available to them for political expression. (shrink)

This 1987 book offers a critique of the liberal theory of the state, focusing on a detailed study of cooperation in the absence of the state and of other kinds of coercion. The discussion includes an analysis of collective action and of the Prisoners' Dilemma supergame. It is a revised and expanded edition of the author's classic work of rational choice theory Anarchy and Cooperation, originally published with John Wiley in 1976. The analysis has been recast and developed here to (...) make it more accessible to non-mathematical readers and to provide a more comprehensive and self-contained treatment of the theory of collective action. The book will be of interest to a range of readers in political and social philosophy and in economics. (shrink)

A new edition of the highly acclaimed book Multiculturalism and "The Politics of Recognition," this paperback brings together an even wider range of leading philosophers and social scientists to probe the political controversy surrounding ...

Will the ecological crises of our time be resolved using the same form of thought that has brought them about? Are technological prowess and political power the proper tools to address them? Is there not a deeper connection between our ecological crises and our human, social, political, economic, and ethical crises? This book argues that the popular approaches to ecological, bioethical, and other human crises are not working because they fail to examine the problem in its full depth. This depth (...) escapes us because we have abandoned true metaphysical reflection on the whole and substituted it unknowingly for a series of inadequate alternatives. Both the technocratic paradigm that views all of nature mechanistically and its antagonists--the eco-philosophies that argue for the realities of intrinsic value, relationality, and beauty--carry partial truths but are insufficient. This book presents a more radical alternative, rooted in the classical tradition yet fresh and vibrant. The metaphysics of gift, based in the giftedness of existence shared by all, offers a deeper and more satisfying vision of all things that can transform our relationship with nature and touches every aspect of human life: social, political, economic, technical, and ethical"-- Back cover. (shrink)

A powerful and provocative critique of the foundations of Rational Choice theory and the economic way of thinking about the world, written by a former leading practitioner. The target is a dehumanizing ideology that cannot properly recognize that normal people have attachments and commitments to other people and to practices, projects, principles, and places, which provide them with desire-independent reasons for action, and that they are reflective creatures who think about what they are and what they should be, with ideals (...) that can shape and structure the way they see their choices. The author's views are brought to bear on the economic way of thinking about the natural environment and on how and when the norm of fair reciprocity motivates us to do our part in cooperative endeavors. Throughout, the argument is adorned by thought-provoking examples that keep what is at stake clearly before the reader's mind. (shrink)

A central aim of Elster's Making Sense of Marx is to recover Marx for methodological individualism, to show that Marx, unlike many of his followers, sought to provide his explanations of macro?phenomena with micro?foundations. Though I largely share Elster's methodological commitments and his view that Marx also (intermittently) adhered to them, I question whether this makes Marx a methodological individualist. In my view, Marx practised in his best work both individualist and structuralist explanation simultaneously. In three briefer remarks I also (...) comment on Marx's and Elster's treatment of the differences between workers? and peasants? propensities for collective action; the primacy in Marx's theories of dynamics internal to a society and his failure to recognize the importance for domestic developments of interactions with other societies and states; and finally Marx's ?progressive? values, which Elster seems to share. (shrink)

Contains a representative sample of writings by the Individualists and their critics, and also by some leading Victorian politicians who attempted to translate political theories into practical politics. The debates between these thinkers raise some fundamental issues about the nature of liberty and the role and limits of the State which remain with us still. Many present-day concerns, including the issues at stake between liberals and communitarians, are to be found prefigured in the pages of this collection.

Many enzymes are inhibited by their own substrates, leading to velocity curves that rise to a maximum and then descend as the substrate concentration increases. Substrate inhibition is often regarded as a biochemical oddity and experimental annoyance. We show, using several case studies, that substrate inhibition often has important biological functions. In each case we discuss, the biological significance is different. Substrate inhibition of tyrosine hydroxylase results in a steady synthesis of dopamine despite large fluctuations in tyrosine due to meals. (...) Substrate inhibition of acetylcholinesterase enhances the neural signal and allows rapid signal termination. Substrate inhibition of phosphofructokinase ensures that resources are not devoted to manufacturing ATP when it is plentiful. In folate metabolism, substrate inhibition maintains reactions rates in the face of substantial folate deprivation. Substrate inhibition of DNA methyltransferase serves to faithfully copy DNA methylation patterns when cells divide while preventing de novo methylation of methyl‐free promoter regions. (shrink)

Recently we proposed a theory of consciousness, the attention schema theory, based on findings in cognitive psychology and systems neuroscience. In that theory, consciousness is an internal model o...

To commemorate 40 years since the founding of the Journal of Business Ethics, the editors in chief of the journal have invited the editors to provide commentaries on the future of business ethics. This essay comprises a selection of commentaries aimed at creating dialogue around the theme The Ethics and Politics of Academic Knowledge Production. Questions of who produces knowledge about what, and how that knowledge is produced, are inherent to editing and publishing academic journals. At the Journal of Business (...) Ethics, we understand the ethical responsibility of academic knowledge production as going far beyond conventions around the integrity of the research content and research processes. We are deeply aware that access to resources, knowledge of the rules of the game, and being able to set those rules, are systematically and unequally distributed. One could ask the question “for whom is knowledge now ethical’”? (See the Burrell commentary.) We have a responsibility to address these inequalities and open up our journal to lesser heard voices, ideas, and ways of being. Our six commentators pursue this through various aspects of the ethics and politics of academic knowledge production. Working with MacIntyre’s scheme of practices and institutions, Andrew West provides commentary on the internal good of business ethics learning and education. Inviting us to step out of the cave, Christopher Michaelson urges a clear-eyed, unblinking focus on the purposes and audiences of business ethics scholarship. As developmental editor, Scott Taylor uncovers some of the politics of peer review with the aim of nurturing of unconventional research. Mike Hyman presents his idiosyncratic view of marketing ethics. In the penultimate commentary, Julie Nelson attributes difficulties in the academic positioning of the Business Ethics field to the hegemony of a masculine-centric model of the firm. And finally, Gibson Burrell provides a powerful provocation to go undercover as researcher-investigators in a parallel ethics of the research process. (shrink)

Book review: David Alcalde, Cosmology Without God?: The Problematic Theology Inherent in Modern Cosmology, Cascade, Eugene 2019, pp.226.

Legal reasoning requires identification through search of authoritative legal texts (such as statutes, constitutions, or prior judicial opinions) that apply to a given legal question. In this paper, using a network representation of US Supreme Court opinions that integrates citation connectivity and topical similarity, we model the activity of law search as an organizing principle in the evolution of the corpus of legal texts. The network model and (parametrized) probabilistic search behavior generates a Pagerank-style ranking of the texts that in (...) turn gives rise to a natural geometry of the opinion corpus. This enables us to then measure the ways in which new judicial opinions affect the topography of the network and its future evolution. While we deploy it here on the US Supreme Court opinion corpus, there are obvious extensions to large evolving bodies of legal text (or text corpora in general). The model is a proxy for the way in which new opinions influence the search behavior of litigants and judges and thus affect the law. This type of “legal search effect” is a new legal consequence of research practice that has not been previously identified in jurisprudential thought and has never before been subject to empirical analysis. We quantitatively estimate the extent of this effect and find significant relationships between search-related network structures and propensity of future citation. This finding indicates that “search influence” is a pathway through which judicial opinions can affect future legal development. (shrink)

Merleau-Ponty's views are the fruit of the method of "phenomenological description," in part taken over from Husserl. This consists of describing our "original" experience of the world without assuming the truth or validity of any statements we may know about it. Unlike the Cartesian method it does not mean that we should suppose false those statements we know are true, but rather that we should "put these in brackets," or "suspend" their rel- evance, consider them as void of ontological implications. (...) For only if we succeed in doing so, the theory runs, will our description be "pure" or "presuppositionless," free of prejudice with respect to the nature of that which we are trying to describe. In doing the phenomenology of perception, then, we must deliberately discount all that we may chance to know about the "how" or the "why" of perception. In describing our "original" experience of the world, we must not let ourselves be influenced by any empirical or philosophical theory of perception, any hypotheses concerning its nature, causes, or physiological or other underlying processes involved. To cite a concrete example, in describing our perception of some visible scene we must discount anything we may chance to know about light rays impinging upon the retina, etc. Failure to do so might lead to a description not of that which we do see, but that which, given the retinal image, we ought to see, i.e., that portion of the visual scene, light rays from which, impinge upon our retina, and not the visual scene itself. Here, then, is one of the reasons for which we must go through a process of "phenomenological reduction" with respect to our knowledge of the world. But it is not the only reason. In fact the interdict goes further. We are not even entitled to use the usual categories of everyday or scientific descriptive discourse. Nor should we use the language of sense data, or that of the introspectionists. For both of these "presuppose" the validity of some at any rate of its categories. Both rest in the last resort on some theory regarding the nature of the "objective" world, or of our experience of it. (shrink)