It is one thing to hold that merely statistical evidence is _sometimes_ insufficient for rational belief, as in typical lottery and profiling cases. It is another thing to hold that merely statistical evidence is _always_ insufficient for rational belief. Indeed, there are cases where statistical evidence plainly does justify belief. This project develops a dispositional account of the normativity of statistical evidence, where the dispositions that ground justifying statistical evidence are connected to the goals (= proper function) of objects. There (...) are strong intuitive motivations for doing this. For we can turn almost any case of _non-justifying_ merely statistical evidence into a case of _justifying_ merely statistical evidence by adding information about the dispositions and goals of the objects involved. The resulting view not only helps us understand when and why merely statistical evidence is normatively significant, but it also helps us understand how statistical evidence relates to more standard forms of evidence (perceptual, testimonial). The emerging view also has surprising applications, as it imposes limitations on the epistemic value of fine-tuning arguments for theism as well as undermines a standard class of case-based arguments for moral encroachment. (shrink)

Noam Chomsky and Frances Egan argue that David Marr’s computational theory of vision is not intentional, claiming that the formal scientific theory does not include description of visual content. They also argue that the theory is internalist in the sense of not describing things physically external to the perceiver. They argue that these claims hold for computational theories of vision in general. Beyond theories of vision, they argue that representational content does not figure as a topic within formal computational theories (...) in cognitive science. I demonstrate that Chomsky’s and Egan’s claims about Marr’s theory are false. Marr’s computational theory contains a mathematical theory of visual content, based on empirical psychophysical evidence. It also contains mathematical descriptions of distal physical surfaces and objects, and of their optic projection to the perceiver. Much computational research on vision contains these types of intentional and externalist components within the formal, mathematical, theories. Chomsky’s and Egan’s claims demonstrate inadequate study and understanding of Marr’s work and other research in this area. Computational theories of vision, by containing empirically based mathematical theories of visual content, to this extent present naturalizations of semantics. (shrink)

This article contends that the evolution toward interdisciplinary collaboration that we are witnessing in the sciences must also occur in the humanities to ensure their very survival. That is, humanists must be open to working with scientists and social scientists interested in similar research questions and vice versa. Digital humanities is a positive first step. Complexity science should be the next step. Even though much of the ground-breaking work in complexity science has been done in the natural sciences and mathematics, (...) it can, if critically adapted, provide the needed metaphor for a broad integration of disciplines, humanistic and otherwise. Given its almost a-disciplinary nature, a complexity approach to the research problems in the humanities necessarily breaks down silos. Moreover, it can restore and reframe the seamless intellectual fabric sought by researchers before the atomization of the various disciplines in the nineteenthcentury academy. (shrink)

The Archaeology of Prehistoric Arabia: Adaptation and Social Formation from the Neolithic to the Iron Age. By Peter Magee. Cambridge World Archaeology. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Pp. xv + 309, illus. $99.

D’Aden à Zafar: Villes d’Arabie du sud préislamique. By Jérémie Schiettecatte. Orient & Méditeranée, Archéologie, vol. 6. Paris: De Boccard, 2011. Pp. 372, illus. €64.

[ Philosophy against the natural sciences: “Dogmatism” in the dispute about “scientific monism” after 1900].

The ethical issues raised by cybersecurity practices and technologies are of critical importance. However, there is disagreement about what is the best ethical framework for understanding those issues. In this paper we seek to address this shortcoming through the introduction of a principlist ethical framework for cybersecurity that builds on existing work in adjacent fields of applied ethics, bioethics, and AI ethics. By redeploying the AI4People framework, we develop a domain-relevant specification of five ethical principles in cybersecurity: beneficence, non-maleficence, autonomy, (...) justice, and explicability. We then illustrate the advantages of this principlist framework by examining the ethical issues raised by four common cybersecurity contexts: penetration testing, distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS), ransomware, and system administration. These case analyses demonstrate the utility of this principlist framework as a basis for understanding cybersecurity ethics and for cultivating the ethical expertise and ethical sensitivity of cybersecurity professionals and other stakeholders. (shrink)

Supporters of G.W.F. Hegel's philosophy have largely shied away from relating his logic to modern symbolic or mathematical approaches. While it has predominantly been the non-Greek discipline of algebra that has informed modern mathematical logic, philosopher Paul Redding argues that the approaches of Plato and Aristotle to logic were deeply shaped by the arithmetic and geometry of classical Greek culture. And by ignoring the fact that Hegel's logic also has this deep mathematical dimension, conventional Hegelians have missed some of (...) Hegel's greatest insights. In Conceptual Harmonies, Redding develops an account of Hegel's logic against a classical and modern historical background that is rarely considered. He stresses Hegel's attention to the Platonic background of Aristotle's original syllogistic and beyond. He then links these Platonic elements to Leibniz's modern revitalization of the logical tradition and then to new forms of algebraic geometry emerging in Hegel's lifetime. Redding thereby reestablishes aspects of Hegel's philosophy that are essential if Hegel is to be taken as a thinker relevant not only to contemporary philosophy, but also to current philosophical conceptions of logic. (shrink)

Mark Schroeder’s Reasons First is admirable in its scope and execution, deftly demonstrating the theoretical promise of extending the reasons-first approach from ethics to epistemology. In what follows we explore how (not) to account for the evidence-that relation within the reasons-first program, we explain how factive content views of evidence can be resilient in the face of Schroeder’s criticisms, and we explain how knowledge from falsehood threatens Schroeder’s view of knowledge. Along the way we sketch a reliabilist account of the (...) reasons-for relation (inspired by Alston) and show how it limits the applicability of Schroeder’s arguments. (shrink)

In their highly topical paper, Grahamet alargued that Trusted Research Environments (TREs) are not actually about trust because they reduce or remove ‘…the need for trust in the use and sharing of patient health data’. We believe this is fundamentally mistaken. TREs mitigate or remove some risks, but they do not address all public concerns. In this regard, TREs provide evidence for people to decide whether the bodies holding and using their data can be trusted. TREs may make it easier (...) for people to trust but there is still a need for that trust. (shrink)

The renowned Nobel Prize-winning scientist's elegant and concise explanation of the fundamental ideas in biology and their uses today. Hailed by Philip Pullman as "a great communicator" who is also "as distinguished a scientist as there could be," Paul Nurse writes with delight at life's richness and a sense of the urgent role of biology in our time. With What Is Life? he delivers a brief but powerful work of popular science in the vein of Carlo Rovelli's Seven Brief (...) Lessons in Physics. Nurse takes readers on a wondrous journey through five fundamental biological ideas-the Cell, the Gene, Evolution by Natural Selection, Life as Chemistry, and Life as Information-introducing the scientists who made the most important advances and taking us into his own lab to give us a sense of the thrill of scientific discovery. In a final chapter, Nurse addresses biology's most pressing ethical issues (including gene-editing, genetic testing, and genetically modified crops), and he concludes with a stirring encomium to biology's role in tackling infectious disease. (shrink)

Dans cet essai inédit regroupant trois textes issus d'une conférence donnée en 1967 (sous le titre "Sens et fonction d'une communauté ecclésiale"), Paul Ricoeur s'intéresse en philosophe à l'idée d'Eglise. Il s'interroge d'abord sur la société, son obsession technique, son incapacité à produire du sens et sur la manière dont cette "communauté" pourrait être un contrepoint d'utopie en son sein. Il cherche ensuite un langage capable d'intégrer en même temps les critiques externes de la religion (Marx, Nietzsche, Freud), et, (...) d'une manière interne à la foi, une "déconstruction" des pseudo-rationalisations qui masquent la vivacité des textes bibliques, déconstruction inspirée par la "démythologisation" du théologien Rudolf Bultmann. Il propose ainsi une parole porteuse de sens pour l'ensemble de la société. Jamais publiés jusqu'ici, ces textes de Paul Ricoeur offrent une réflexion philosophique rare sur le rôle d'une communauté confessante au coeur d'une société désenchantée et qui reste d'une troublante actualité. (shrink)

Zoos and aquariums have an enormous global reach and hence an ability to craft meaningful conservation action for threatened species, implement educational strategies to encourage human engagement, development and behavior change, and conduct scientific research to enhance the husbandry, roles and impacts of the living collection. The recreational role of the zoo is also vast- people enjoy visiting the zoo and this is often a shared experience amongst family and friends. Evaluating how the zoo influences this “captive audience” and extending (...) its reach to include a compassionate approach to animals and people can further enhance the mission, value, and relevance of their work. The modern zoo’s current aims—Conservation, Education, Research and Recreation—provide useful foundations for the activities that zoos conduct at a local and national level. However, to improve sustainability of their actions and outcomes, we feel that Wellbeing should become the fifth aim of the modern zoo for the future- both from an animal perspective and from a human perspective. This paper provides discussion and review of how Wellbeing is already a substantial part of what zoos work on as well as posing the idea of altering the Recreation aim of the zoo to one of Engagement, which potentially is more measurable and therefore can allow zoo researchers and managers further options for the collection of evidence on the local and global reach of their zoo’s aims. Education, Engagement, Conservation, Research and Wellbeing provide a more complete picture of the roles of the modern zoo for the animals, human visitors and workforce, and to society more widely. (shrink)

Life is all around us, abundant and diverse, it is extraordinary. But what does it actually mean to be alive? Nobel prize-winner Paul Nurse has spent his career revealing how living cells work. In this book, he takes up the challenge of defining life in a way that every reader can understand. It is a shared journey of discovery; step by step he illuminates five great ideas that underpin biology. He traces the roots of his own curiosity and knowledge (...) to reveal how science works, both now and in the past. Using his personal experiences, in and out of the lab, he shares with us the challenges, the lucky breaks, and the thrilling eureka moments of discovery. To survive the challenges that face the human race today - from climate change, to pandemics, loss of biodiversity and food security - it is vital that we all understand what life is. (shrink)

In his paper, ‘What moral work can Nussbaum’s account of human dignity do in the context of dementia care?’, Soofi seeks to modify Nussbaum’s conception of dignity to deal with four key objections that arise when appeals to dignity are made in the context of dementia care. We will not discuss the first of these, the redundancy of dignity talk, since this issue has already been much discussed in the literature. Instead, we will focus on the remaining three issues raised, (...) that of the exclusion of persons with advanced dementia from having dignity, unjustified speciesism as a ground of human dignity, and the unclear practical implications that follow from having dignity. (shrink)

Ce volume reunit trois textes du celebre historien francais de la philosophie medievale Paul Vignaux (1904-1987), deux textes de nature plutot autobiographique qui retracent son itineraire intellectuel et Philosophie au Moyen Age, une introduction a la philosophie medievale qui compte toujours parmi les plus stimulantes presentations de la philosophie de cette epoque. Cet ensemble de textes est complete par d'amples notices bibliographiques et une presentation de la figure intellectuelle de Paul Vignaux qui fut egalement une des personnalites marquantes (...) du syndicalisme francais. (shrink)

A lean hylomorphism stands as a metaphysical holy grail. An embarrassing feature of traditional hylomorphic ontologies is prime matter. Prime matter is both so basic that it cannot be examined (in principle) and its engagement with the other hylomorphic elements is far from clear. One particular problem posed by prime matter is how it is to be understood both as a principle of individuation for material substances and as pure potency. I present Thomas Aquinas’s way of squeezing some intelligibility out (...) of prime matter by modeling it on the idea of logical genus. Such a modeling provides insight into understanding prime matter as substratum, as maximally indeterminate, and as ontologically vague. One of the unusual but exciting things that fall out from this analysis of prime matter is the Entirety Thesis: “For any substance x, if x has prime matter then the prime matter of x is the same* as x,” where ‘same*’ is understood as “indeterminately identical.”. (shrink)

Professor Clark's splendid essay represents a step forward from which there should be no retreat. Ourde factomoral cognition involves a complex and evolving interplay between, on the one hand, thenondiscursive cognitive mechanisms of the biological brain, and, on the other, the often highly discursive extra-personal “scaffolding” that structures the social world in which our brains are normally situated, a world that has been, to a large extent, created by our own moral and political activity. That interplay extends the reach and (...) elevates the quality of the original nondiscursive cognition, and thus any adequate account of moral cognition must address both of these contributing dimensions. An account that focuses only on brain mechanisms will be missing something vital. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Some Suggestions about the Moral Philosophy of George Berkeley* PAUL J. OLSCAMP WHILE TRAVELLINGIN ITALYin 1716, Berkeley lost the second part of his Principles of Human Knowledge. Much later he wrote to Dr. Johnson in America, saying that he did not have the energy to do something so disagreeable as writing the same thing twice? This manuscript contained Berkeley's ethics and metaphysics, but in spite of its loss, (...) there is much to be learned about Berkeley's moral philosophy from his extant writings. Surprisingly, very little has been written about Berkeley's ethics, and what has been written usually concentrates on Passive Obedience and virtually ignores the rest of his worksY Most of the terminology now used to classify and criticize ethical theories was, of course, unknown to Berkeley. In spite of this, much of what he says may be fruitfully compared with some of the claims of modern ethicists. I shall try to show that many of his claims might have been strikingly modern, a In this paper however, I can only deal with what would now be called the normative part of Berkeley's theory, so, perhaps, it would be of some use to give a general *All references to Berkeley's writings are to the Jessop and Luee edition, The Works o] George Berkeley, Bishop o] Cloyne (9 vols.; London: Nelson and Sons Ltd., 1948). I shall abbreviate the titles of the works in this collection as follows: A/c. for A/~phron, or the Minute Ptdlosopher; DraJt for The First Dra]~ o] the Introduction to the Priuciple8 o] Human Knowledge; Principles for The Principles o] Human Knowledge; P.O. for Passive Obedience; Disc. for A Discourse to the Macistrates; T.V. for An Essay Towards a New Theory o] Vision; T.V~E. for The Theory o] Vision Vindicated and Explained; P.C. for philosophical Commentaries; Corr ]or Philosophical Correspondence; DHP for Three Dialooucs Between Hylas and Philonous. I am deeply indebted to Professor Richard T. Garner for his help in the preparation of thispaper. 1Corr., II, 282. 'The other references are: C. D. Broad, "Berkeley's Theory of Morals," Revue Internationale de Philosophie (1953); Graham P. Conroy, "Berkeley on Moral Demonstration, Journal o] the HisLory o] Ideas, XXII (1961), and Conroy's doctoral dissertation, Language and Morals in Berkeley's Philosophy (Berkeley, 1957); H. D. Aiken, "The Fate of Philosophy in the Twentieth Century," The Kenyon Review (Spring, 1962); kvrum Stroll, The Emotive Theory o] Ethics (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1954); Ernest Albee, A History o] English Utilitarianism (London: Alien & Unwin, 1901), chap. xv; I. A. Richards and C. K. Ogden, The Meaning o] Meaning (New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1923), p. 42; P. J. Olscamp, A Berlceleyan Analysis o] the Uses o] Language in Ethics, (doctoral dissertation, University of Rochester, 1962); W. V. Denard, "Berkeley's Theological Utilitarianism," Acres de XI" eongr~s internationale de philosophic, XIII (1953), 87-93; G. A. Johnston, "The Development of Berkeley's Ethical Theory," Philosophical Review, XXIV, 419-430; H. W. Orange, "Berkeley as a Moral Philosopher," Mind, XV (old series), 514-523. =The definitions of any technical terms I may use will be found in William K. Frankena, Ethies, (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall Foundations of Philosophy Series, 1963). [147] 148 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY outline of the main features of what I think his entire system would have been, before examining part of it in more detail. Berkeley was first and last a Christian clergyman, and he therefore believed in the existence of a personal, wise, and benevolent God whose being was relevant to our daily lives. He was convinced that the natural world provides evidence for this belief, evidence as sound as that which we have for the existence of other minds. Given that the esse of objects consists in their being perceived, that only minds are active, and that no human perceiver perceives all things at all times, it follows that a cosmic mind maintains the universe it created. Moreover, the system of nature is not random, but regular; it is, in fact, a divine language in which God makes his intentions known to us, and demonstrates his wisdom... (shrink)

Artificial Social Agents (ASAs), which are AI software driven entities programmed with rules and preferences to act autonomously and socially with humans, are increasingly playing roles in society. As their sophistication grows, humans will share greater amounts of personal information, thoughts, and feelings with ASAs, which has significant ethical implications. We conducted a study to investigate what ethical principles are of relative importance when people engage with ASAs and whether there is a relationship between people’s values and the ethical principles (...) they prioritise. The study uses scenarios, embedded with the five AI4People ethical principles (Beneficence, Non-maleficence, Autonomy, Justice, and Explicability), involving ASAs taking on roles traditionally played by humans to understand whether these roles and behaviours (including dialogues) are seen as acceptable or unacceptable. Results from 268 participants reveal the greatest sensitivity to ASA behaviours that relate to Autonomy, Justice, Explicability, and the privacy of their personal data. Models were created using Schwartz’s Refined Values as a possible indicator of how stakeholders discern and prioritise the different AI4People ethical principles when interacting with ASAs. Our findings raise issues around the ethical acceptability of ASAs for nudging and changing behaviour due to participants’ desire for autonomy and their concerns over deceptive ASA behaviours such as pretending to have memories and emotions. (shrink)

This book is about you. How does your brain work and where do your thoughts and dreams come from? How can you harness their creative power? Ableman posits a crucial relationship between language and memory and thus between language and self-awareness. Most startlingly he maintains that the human 'person' is essentially the language component of a large-brained animal. Ableman has researched his theory using existing data derived from the malfunctioning mind as manifested in schizophrenia, sleepwalking, autism, 'out of body' experiences (...) and nightmares. His revolutionary claims constitute an exciting and persuasive theory of mind which orthodox science could - and should - test. (shrink)

Ever since, while continuing to develop his liguistic theories, he has been the most prominent US critic both of his country's foreign policy and of the intellectuals and media that give it overwhelming consensual support. "The Responsibility of Intellectuals" was followed by a series of ever more devastating attacks on American policy in Vietnam (collected in American Power and the New Mandarins and At War With Asia ): by 1970, he was far and away the best known intellectual opponent of (...) the US war effort. (shrink)

Cette édition numérique a été réalisée à partir d'un support physique, parfois ancien, conservé au sein du dépôt légal de la Bibliothèque nationale de France, conformément à la loi n° 2012-287 du 1er mars 2012 relative à l'exploitation des Livres indisponibles du XXe siècle. En s'appuyant sur des textes de Kierkegaard, cette étude entend montrer en quoi et comment l'autorité de l'auteur se trouve liée à toute forme de création, et pourquoi il convient de porter l'accent de l'analyse sur le (...) devenir-auteur, c'est-à-dire sur la manière subjective dont un auteur parvient, au travers de sa création, à prendre position au nom de soi. « Copyright Electre » Pages de début Exorde Prémisses 1 - Le don à l'origine 2 - Le Présent de la vie 3 - Créer 4 - Prendre position5 - Au nom de soi Conclusion Note complémentaire Index nominum Pages de fin. (shrink)