This book provides a fresh and bold look at how archaeologists and heritage managers may enhance their capacity to interpret and understand material culture and heritage values. Drawing on the founding principles of anthropology, Archaeologies of Listening demonstrates the value of cultural apprenticeship, an almost forgotten part of archaeological practice.

sirThe recent article by Evans in the journal on the single blind placebo in drug research is timely and its conclusions were persuasive. The basic premiss that single blind placebo “washout” periods are ethically specious was well argued and I agree that from a scientific point of view they have no valid justification. The real reasons ….

Making good decisions in extremely complex and difficult processes and situations has always been both a key task as well as a challenge in the clinic and has led to a large amount of clinical, legal and ethical routines, protocols and reflections in order to guarantee fair, participatory and up-to-date pathways for clinical decision-making. Nevertheless, the complexity of processes and physical phenomena, time as well as economic constraints and not least further endeavours as well as achievements in medicine and healthcare (...) continuously raise the need to evaluate and to improve clinical decision-making. This article scrutinises if and how clinical decision-making processes are challenged by the rise of so-called artificial intelligence-driven decision support systems (AI-DSS). In a first step, this article analyses how the rise of AI-DSS will affect and transform the modes of interaction between different agents in the clinic. In a second step, we point out how these changing modes of interaction also imply shifts in the conditions of trustworthiness, epistemic challenges regarding transparency, the underlying normative concepts of agency and its embedding into concrete contexts of deployment and, finally, the consequences for (possible) ascriptions of responsibility. Third, we draw first conclusions for further steps regarding a ‘meaningful human control’ of clinical AI-DSS. (shrink)

From an ethical point of view, there is an important distinction between two types of prenatal screening. The first of these targets maternal or foetal conditions (e.g., infectious diseases, blood group sensitization) where early detection allows for interventions that improve the chances of a healthy pregnancy outcome. The second screens for foetal conditions such as Down syndrome, where a timely diagnosis in most cases only allows for a choice between preparation for a child with special needs or termination of the (...) pregnancy. Whereas the former makes an easy fit with the prevention aim of most other population screening programmes, the latter does not. In order to steer clear from a possible eugenic reading of its aim, a wide international consensus has emerged for the view that prenatal screening of this type should have the atypical aim of helping women (couples) to make autonomous reproductive choices, rather than reducing the birth prevalence of the relevant disorders. However, keeping these types of prenatal screening apart may become increasingly difficult given the development of tests, such as the Non‐Invasive Prenatal Test, which cannot only be used for both types of screening but may also lead to interconnected findings on both sides of the divide. This makes it an urgent question: What the aim or aims of this new hybrid screening should be? As neither ‘prevention’ nor ‘autonomy’ will do, we argue for a normative framework that gives both aims their due, while recognizing the tensions between them. (shrink)

In 1856, Peter Andreas Hansen, one of the leading mathematical astronomers on the Continent, proposed a theory of the moon which included the possibility of an atmosphere and even of life on the far side. The theory was quickly endorsed by many in the scientific community, allowing in its brief life speculation about life on the far side to flourish. It attracted the attention of such notables as Sir John Herschel and was exciting enough to play a large role (...) in Jules Verne's fiction about the moon. The hypothesis met its end around 1870 when assumptions behind it were questioned by Simon Newcomb and others. (shrink)

Relationalism is the view in philosophy of mind that particulars in our environment are constituents of conscious perception. It is an important theory of perceptual experience, offering explanations of perception's phenomenal character and its epistemic and semantic role. However, it is has also been criticised for a lack of empirical grounding. In this outstanding collection an international team of contributors examine relationalism and consider its role in philosophy of mind and perception across four key areas: The significance of empirical evidence (...) to the theory of relationalism Dependence of experience on the subject's internal makeup Hallucinations and the unity of perceptual experience Relationalism and empirical knowledge. The Relational View of Perception: New Philosophical Essays will be of great interest to advanced students and scholars in philosophy of mind. Contributors: Rami Ali, Dominic Alford-Duguid, Ori Beck, Alex Byrne, Elijah Chudnoff, Peter Epstein, Craig French, E. J. Green, Roberta Locatelli, Heather Logue, Farid Masrour, Alva Noë, Adam Pautz, Ian Phillips, Thomas Raleigh, Susanna Schellenberg, Umrao Sethi, Matthew Soteriou, and Lisa Titus. (shrink)

This paper is a defence of a psychological view of personal identity against the attack Peter Unger launches against it in his Identity, Consciousness and Value. Unger attempts to undermine the traditional support which a psychological criterion of identity has drawn from thought-experiments, and to show that such a criterion has totally unacceptable implications -- in particular, that it allows that persons can go out of and come back into existence. I respond to both aspects of this criticism, arguing (...) that the relevant thought-experiments (and the support they appear to offer) survive Unger's attack intact, and that he does not establish his case against intermittent existence. (shrink)

Sociology was born as an attempt to delimit an object of investigation offered by society as a social reality. The ambition was that of "treating the social facts as things" (Durkheim) or of understanding and explaining the social relations by respecting an "axiological neutrality" (Max Weber). Today, however, we are in the presence of a new kind of sociologists, and they are by no means the less popular ones, who are not trying to avoid assessments in their analysis of the (...) present social world. I have in mind especially two sociologists, Ulrich Beck (Munich) and David Held (London). I will discuss in particular the view of sociology presented in a recent book of Ulrich Beck ( Macht und Gegenmacht im globalen Zeitalter , 2002, translated into French under the title Pouvoir et contre-pouvoir à l'ère de la mondialisation , 2003), and I will show some analogies between Beck and Held. Finally, I will try to identify the points that make the present sociological epistemology different from that of the great founders of this science. (shrink)

In the time at my disposal I limit myself to tenets distinctive of a system of idealism founded by Borden P. Bowne. Two years before his death, in 1908, Bowne wrote Personalism, a condensed epitome of works that in themselves are worthy of a distinctive place in late nineteenth and early twentieth century philosophy. Bowne’s system was to be powerfully elaborated by Edgar S. Brightman, the first holder of the Borden Parker Bowne Chair in Philosophy in Boston University, which I (...) was to hold from 1953 to 1975, and followed by John N. Findlay since 1978. Professor J. Cook Wilson of Oxford, writing four years after Bowne’s death, said that he “always urged ‘the study of Bowne as the most important of the modern American philosophers.’” This is not the place to record the admiration of William James and of William E. Hocking, among other admirers in America and abroad, or to identify contemporaries and recent scholars as well as pupils of Bowne and Brightman. But Bowne’s disciple, Ralph Tyler Flewelling, who founded The Personalist, and Robert N. Beck, Brightman’s pupil, who established Idealistic Studies, cannot go unmentioned. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.1 (2001) 101-134 [Access article in PDF] Getting Maimon's Goad:Discursivity, Skepticism, and Fichte's Idealism Peter Thielke The image of J. G. Fichte has of late displayed a rather substantial, and even remarkable, transformation. Where before Fichte was viewed—and most often dismissed—as advancing an unpalatable type of metaphysical idealism, in recent years several new perspectives on Fichte have emerged, each claiming to improve (...) on the old, standard picture. 1 The transformation of Fichte's image has been accompanied—or, more precisely, has been made possible—by a renewed interest in the relatively forgotten figures in the interregnum between Kant and Hegel. Fichte's thought is now understood in the context not only of Kant's transcendental idealism, but of, among others, Reinhold's Elementarphilosophie, Aenesidemus-Schulze's skepticism, Jacobi's intuitionism, and Beck's Standpunktslehre. By casting Fichte in this light, a more nuanced understanding of his project has been developed, one that does not simply follow the [End Page 101] traditional view of the Wissenschaftslehre as a full-blown metaphysical idealism in which the world of objects is understood as the product of an Absolute I.But while this 'contextual' approach has led to a renewed appreciation of the Wissenschaftslehre, I will suggest that the new focus on Fichte's historical milieu is incomplete. A lacuna in the current understanding of Fichte can be traced to a neglect of Salomon Maimon, an idiosyncratic and rather obscure critic of Kant. In this paper, I will argue that taking Maimon's skepticism into account when interpreting Fichte's idealism requires a rethinking of Fichte's project. In particular, in order to respond to Maimon's skepticism—an avowed project of the Wissenschaftslehre—Fichte's position must advance an idealist metaphysics, one in which the content of cognition is taken to be constituted by an act of the absolute I. This claim, of course, might seem rash, since it threatens to saddle Fichte with a gratuitous form of absolute idealism. It thus seems to run counter to recent attempts to make Fichte into a figure appealing to modern eyes. Such a concern, however, is I think misplaced. Instead, I will argue that Fichte's idealism, although perhaps ultimately unsuccessful, nevertheless should be of great interest precisely because it stands as an important attempt to provide an answer to a question—the nature of 'givenness'—that remains central to epistemology. 2The paper is divided into five parts. The first presents the historical evidence for Maimon's influence on Fichte. Part 2 offers a discussion of what I call 'Maimon's challenge' to the Kantian notion of 'discursive' cognition, as well as the ways in which this served as a goad to the development of the Wissenschaftslehre. In Part 3 I turn to a close reading of §1 of the Grundlage of 1794, where I try to show how a recognition of Maimon's challenge can help make sense of the foundations of the Wissenschaftslehre's project, and in particular the 'category of reality,' an otherwise highly obscure step in Fichte's argument. Part 4 offers a short discussion of the ways in which a Maimonian-minded account of §1 contributes to the understanding of the Grundlage as a whole. Finally, I conclude in Part 5 with some brief remarks about the broader philosophical implications of Fichte's response to Maimon's challenge: Fichte, I will argue, offers the first (but not the last) attempt at answering a type of Maimonian skepticism that remains viable even today. [End Page 102] 1. The Skeptical Goad Salomon Maimon, perhaps more than any other figure in German philosophy, embodied the Enlightenment notion of a Selbstdenker. He was born in Lithuania in 1753, to a rural Jewish family. 3 After marrying at eleven and becoming a father at fourteen, in his early twenties he fled from his family, after which he wandered the German countryside, until he was finally was able to establish himself in Berlin in 1779. Here he was taken in by Moses... (shrink)

The literature on deep brain stimulation (DBS) and adaptive DBS (aDBS) raises concerns that these technologies may affect personality, mood, and behavior. We conducted semi-structured interviews with researchers (n = 23) involved in developing next-generation DBS systems, exploring their perspectives on ethics and policy topics including whether DBS/aDBS can cause such changes. The majority of researchers reported being aware of personality, mood, or behavioral (PMB) changes in recipients of DBS/aDBS. Researchers offered varying estimates of the frequency of PMB changes. A (...) smaller majority reported changes in personality specifically. Some expressed reservations about the scientific status of the term ‘personality,’ while others used it freely. Most researchers discussed negative PMB changes, but a majority said that DBS/aDBS can also result in positive changes. Several researchers viewed positive PMB changes as part of the therapeutic goal in psychiatric applications of DBS/aDBS. Finally, several discussed potential causes of PMB changes other than the device itself. (shrink)

Experiences that are self-generated and independent of sensory stimulations permeate our whole life. This theme issue examines their similarities and differences, systematizes the literature from an integrative perspective, critically discusses state-of-the-art empirical findings and proposes new theoretical approaches. The aim of the theme issue is to foster interaction between the different disciplines and research directions involved and to explore the prospects of a unificatory account of offline perception in general.

This article proposes a conceptual mapping to outline salient properties and relations that allow for a knowledge transfer from the well-established greenwashing phenomenon to the more recent machinewashing. We account for relevant dissimilarities, indicating where conceptual boundaries may be drawn. Guided by a “reasoning by analogy” approach, the article addresses the structural analogy and machinewashing idiosyncrasies leading to a novel and theoretically informed model of machinewashing. Consequently, machinewashing is defined as a strategy that organizations adopt to engage in misleading behavior (...) about ethical Artificial Intelligence /algorithmic systems. Machinewashing involves misleading information about ethical AI communicated or omitted via words, visuals, or the underlying algorithm of AI itself. Furthermore, and going beyond greenwashing, machinewashing may be used for symbolic actions such as lobbying and prevention of stricter regulation. By outlining diverse theoretical foundations of the established greenwashing domain and their relation to specific research questions, the article proposes a machinewashing model and a set of theory-related research questions on the macro, meso, and micro-level for future machinewashing research. We conclude by stressing limitations and by outlining practical implications for organizations and policymakers. (shrink)

Human social life is uniquely complex and diverse. Much of that complexity consists of culturally transmitted ideas and skills that underpin the operation of institutions that structure our social life. Considerable theoretical and empirical work has been devoted to the role of cultural evolutionary processes in the evolution of institutions. The most persistent controversy has been over the role of cultural group selection and gene-culture coevolution in early human populations the Pleistocene. We argue that cultural group selection and related cultural (...) evolutionary processes had an important role in shaping the innate components of our social psychology. By the Upper Paleolithic humans seem to have lived in societies structured by institutions, as do modern populations living in simple societies. The most ambitious attempts to test these ideas have been the use of experimental games in field settings to document human similarities and differences on theoretically interesting dimensions. These studies have documented a huge range of behavior cross-culturally, although no societies so far examined follow the expectations of selfish rationality. These data are at least consistent with operation of cultural group selection and gene-culture coevolution operating in the deep tribal past and with the contemporary importance of cultural evolution in the evolution of institutions and institutional diversity. (shrink)

Progress Unchained reinterprets the history of the idea of progress using parallels between evolutionary biology and changing views of human history. Early concepts of progress in both areas saw it as the ascent of a linear scale of development toward a final goal. The 'chain of being' defined a hierarchy of living things with humans at the head, while social thinkers interpreted history as a development toward a final paradise or utopia. Darwinism reconfigured biological progress as a 'tree of life' (...) with multiple lines of advance not necessarily leading to humans, each driven by the rare innovations that generate entirely new functions. Popular writers such as H. G. Wells used a similar model to depict human progress, with competing technological innovations producing ever-more rapid changes in society. Bowler shows that as the idea of progress has become open-ended and unpredictable, a variety of alternative futures have been imagined. (shrink)

I reply to commentaries by Justin Bruner, Robert Sugden and Gerald Gaus. My response to Bruner focuses on conventions of bargaining problems and arguments for characterizing the just conventions of these problems as monotone path solutions. My response to Sugden focuses on how the laws of humanity present in Hume’s discussion of vulnerable individuals might be incorporated into my own proposed account of justice as mutual advantage. My response to Gaus focuses on whether or not my account of justice as (...) mutual advantage can incorporate deep differences in values across subgroups of a larger society. (shrink)

Al-Kindi was the first philosopher of the Islamic world. He lived in Iraq and studied in Baghdad, where he became attached to the caliphal court. In due course he would become an important figure at court: a tutor to the caliph's son, and a central figure in the translation movement of the ninth century, which rendered much of Greek philosophy, science, and medicine into Arabic. Al-Kindi's wide-ranging intellectual interests included not only philosophy but also music, astronomy, mathematics, and medicine. Through (...) deep engagement with Greek tradition al-Kindi developed original theories on key issues in the philosophy of religion, metaphysics, physical science, and ethics. He is especially known for his arguments against the world's eternity, and his innovative use of Greek ideas to explore the idea of God's unity and transcendence. Despite al-Kindi's historical and philosophical importance no book has presented a complete, in-depth look at his thought until now. In this accessible introduction to al-Kindi's works, Peter Adamson surveys what is known of his life and examines his method and his attitude towards the Greek tradition, as well as his subtle relationship with the Muslim intellectual culture of his day. Above all the book focuses on explaining and evaluating the ideas found in al-Kindi's wide-ranging philosophical corpus, including works devoted to science and mathematics. Throughout, Adamson writes in language that is both serious and engaging, academic and approachable. This book will be of interest to experts in the field, but it requires no knowledge of Greek or Arabic, and is also aimed at non-experts who are simply interested in one of the greatest of Islamic philosophers. (shrink)

This paper applies Emmanuel Levinas’ philosophy to the management practice of leadership. Specifically, it focuses on servant leadership, which is considered the most dyadic other-oriented style. While often viewed altruistically, servant leadership can still be egological if it totalizes followers to a leader’s interests and to organizational ends. This paper conceptualises an enriched version of servant leadership using key ideas taken from Levinas’ understanding of the infinite Other and then describes this style using relevant examples. This novel approach, Servant-Leadership-for-the-Other, offers (...) a theoretical lens by which to enrich existing leadership practices as well as providing a style of leadership better suited for the twenty-first century. (shrink)

Realists and supporters of ‘democratic underlabouring’ have recently challenged the traditional separation between political theory and practice. Although both attack Jürgen Habermas for being an idealist whose philosophy is too removed from politics, I argue that this interpretation is inaccurate. While Habermas’s social and political theory is indeed oriented to truth and understanding, he has sought realize his communicative conception of democracy by increasing the quality of political debate as a public intellectual. Building on his approach, I argue that giving (...) the theorist a direct role in public policy undermines theory as an enterprise oriented towards truth while overlooking the contingency, participatory nature and complicated internal logics of social and political practice. My basic thesis is that Habermas’s understanding of the relationship between theory and practice overcomes these difficulties by providing an account of theory that is independent but simultaneously also allows philosophers to participate in politics as public intellectuals. (shrink)

The ongoing project to issue the Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, which will make all of her writings available in English translation, provides a critical lens to re-evaluate aspects of Luxemburg’s theoretical contribution that has often been passed over in much of the secondary literature on her. Of foremost importance in this regard is the distinctive contribution that she made to the understanding of how to achieve a transition to socialism in a developing society that remains surrounded by the capitalist (...) world market and imperialist powers. This paper aims to show that her reflections during and after the 1905 Revolution, especially as reflected in a series of rarely studied articles and essays in the Polish revolutionary press, provides an important corrective to how the transition to socialism was understood by other Marxist currents. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungWährend Thomas Nisters eine Parallele zwischen Dankbarkeit und Ärger zu ziehen versucht, könnte die Pointe der Geschichte in einer mehrfachen Verdoppelung zu sehen sein: der schenkenden Handlung, der Gabe, der beschenkten Person, des Schenkenden. Der Umschlag von Dankbarkeit zu Ärger ist weniger verwunderlich, wenn wir uns an die Lehre von Thomas von Aquin erinnern, dass „die Vergeltung einer Gunst mehr vom affectus des Gebenden als vom effectus [der Gabe] abhängt.“.

Die Globalisierung stellt die Ethik vor ganz neue Herausforderungen: Einerseits sind alle Menschen in bestimmten Hinsichten gleich und zunehmend voneinander abhängig; andererseits fühlen sie sich aber verschiedenen politischen und kulturellen Gemeinschaften zugehörig. Aber wie sollen wir dann auf gerechte Art und Weise das Zusammenleben der Menschen auf unserem Planeten gestalten? Die Idee eines kosmopolitischen Suffizientarismus kann darauf eine Antwort geben, die kein Mensch mit guten Gründen zurückweisen kann: Alle Menschen – welcher Gemeinschaft oder Generation sie auch immer angehören – sollen (...) mindestens genug für ihr Leben haben. Die globale und intergenerationelle Gerechtigkeit macht also nicht an den Grenzen von Gemeinschaften halt, denn alle Menschen teilen bestimmte Grundbedürfnisse. Sie verlangt aber keine vollständige Gleichstellung aller Menschen, denn damit würde man sowohl die politische Selbstbestimmung von Gemeinschaften als auch die globale Diversität von Kulturen in Frage stellen. (shrink)

Volker Kessler argues two points to Rudolf Bohren’s list of four areas where God becomes beautiful should be extended with a fifth one: mathematics and mathematics can be argued as a place where God becomes beautiful. In this response, we would like to argue that the extension of Bohren’s list that Kessler argues in favour of is superfluous and that Kessler makes a number of questionable assumptions about mathematics. By arguing against Kessler, we intend to make an interdisciplinary contribution to (...) the discussion about the relationship between mathematics and theology by pushing the debate into direction of a more careful consideration of mathematics as an area in which God’s beauty may become apparent.Contribution: Contributing to the interdisciplinary exploration of theology in HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies, this article further develops the consideration of the fundamental theological topic of God, the beautiful and mathematics as it was proposed in this journal by Volker Kessler, by discussing it from a systematic theological and mathematical perspective. (shrink)

In 1936, G. Birkhoff and J. v. Neumann published an article with the title The logic of quantum mechanics'. In this paper, the authors demonstrated that in quantum mechanics the most simple observables which correspond to yes-no propositions about a quantum physical system constitute an algebraic structure, the most important proper ties of which are given by an orthocomplemented and quasimodular lattice Lq. Furthermore, this lattice of quantum mechanical proposi tions has, from a formal point of view, many similarities with (...) a Boolean lattice L8 which is known to be the lattice of classical propositional logic. Therefore, one could conjecture that due to the algebraic structure of quantum mechanical observables a logical calculus Q of quantum mechanical propositions is established, which is slightly different from the calculus L of classical propositional logic but which is applicable to all quantum mechanical propositions. This calculus has sometimes been called 'quan tum logic'. However, the statement that propositions about quantum physical systems are governed by the laws of quantum logic, which differ from ordinary classical logic and which are based on the empirically well-established quantum theory, is exposed to two serious objec tions: Logic is a theory which deals with those relationships between various propositions that are valid independent of the content of the respective propositions. Thus, the validity of logical relationships is not restricted to a special type of proposition, e. g. to propositions about classical physical systems. (shrink)

Peter Spader has written a magisterial study on Max Scheler, one of phenomenology’s earliest and greatest figures, whose theory of ethical personalism has become a major voice in the formulation of phenomenological ethics today. Spader follows Scheler’s use of the classic phenomenological approach, by means of which he presented a fresh view of values, feelings, and the person, and thereby staked out a new approach in ethics. Spader recreates the logic of Scheler’s quest, revealing the basis of his thought (...) and the reasons for his dramatic changes of direction. This remarkable study provides a framework that allows us to understand Scheler’s insights in the context of their dynamic evolution of his thought. It corrects imbalances in the presentation of his ideas and defends Scheler against key misunderstandings and criticisms. In short, Spader’s work continues the process of developing Scheler’s pioneering theory of ethical personalism. (shrink)