How are data science systems made to work? It may seem that whether a system works is a function of its technical design, but it is also accomplished through ongoing forms of discretionary work by many actors. Based on six months of ethnographic fieldwork with a corporate data science team, we describe how actors involved in a corporate project negotiated what work the system should do, how it should work, and how to assess whether it works. These negotiations laid the (...) foundation for how, why, and to what extent the system ultimately worked. We describe three main findings. First, how already-existing technologies are essential reference points to determine how and whether systems work. Second, how the situated resolution of development challenges continually reshapes the understanding of how and whether systems work. Third, how business goals, and especially their negotiated balance with data science imperatives, affect a system’s working. We conclude with takeaways for critical data studies, orienting researchers to focus on the organizational and cultural aspects of data science, the third-party platforms underlying data science systems, and ways to engage with practitioners’ imagination of how systems can and should work. (shrink)

This is a conversation that took place at Dr. Vladimir Safatle’s São Paulo home on 16 February, 2019, during Dr. Samir Gandesha’s time as a Visiting Professor at the Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas -FFLCH-USP. It addresses the South American roots of the authoritarian Neoliberalism that has now become a truly global phenomenon.

Covering some of science's most divisive topics, such as philosophical issues in genetics and evolution, the philosophy of biology also encompasses more traditional philosophical questions, such as free will, essentialism, and nature vs nurture. Here, Samir Okasha outlines the core issues with which contemporary philosophy of biology is engaged.

This paper overviews the role of tradition in the structure, processes and behaviour of Chinese work organ izations. The traditional value frameworks combining Confucian, Taoist and Buddhist principles and prac tices had long been the surrogate of a well-defined legal structure in China. Social interaction based on the strong guanxi bonds dominates the managerial culture and such vehicles of social capital development are prerequisites of any substantive partnership building with China. The analysis presented in this overview attempts to explore the (...) reasons for relative underdevelopment of managerial autonomy and innovation, and the predominance of collective face and networking. It is suggested that there are a number of strengths in the Chinese traditions that may be helpful in the emerging managerial transitions, while pointing out areas where breaking with the past may be necessary. This paper signals the importance of more research in Asian management to alleviate the ethnocentric basis of Western-oriented mainstream management. (shrink)

Nosso trabalho procura descrever a escola cinica atraves de seu fundador; Antistenes de Atenas (444-355) , analisando o comportamento do homem cinico e suas contradiçõess, sua busca pela virtude e pelo agir correto. Mostramos o caminho que o homem cinico deve percorrer para chegar a seu objetivo : a autarquia. Ao mesmo tempo, revelamos seu repúdio a toda cultura estabelecida e a sua relaçáo com o corpo e o prazer. O cínico deve distanciarse da cidade, das atividades mundanas e da (...) politica. (shrink)

En este artículo se aborda el estudio de un fragmento manuscrito andalusí que con-tiene una crítica dirigida a la doctrina záltirí de Ibn Hazm. En primer lugar, se intenta determinar el título de la obra y la identidad del autor. Posteriormente, se ofrece una esti-mación aproximada de la fecha y el lugar de composición del libro. Por último, se pro-porciona información relevante en torno a la figura de Ibn Hazm, sus obras, sus adver-sarios, sus protectores, al igual que sobre el (...) autor del fragmento. El valor histórico del manuscrito es realmente considerable, por lo que aprovecho estas lineas para expresar mi deseo de que en el futuro otros investigadores puedan loca-lizar otro ejemplar de este fragmento que, de algún modo, permita completar la informa-ción proporcionada por el deteriorado manuscrito, actualmente preservado en la Biblioteca de al-Qarawiyyin de Fez, y cuyo microfilm se halla en la Biblioteca General de Rabat. ABSTRACT This article presents an unpublished fragment of an Andalusí manuscript of a text criticizing Ibn Hazm. Identifications are offered of the title of the work and its author, as well as suggestions as to where it was composed. The text also provides valuable information about Ibn Hazm, his writings, his opponents and those who protected him as well as about the author of the text itself. The historical value of the manuscript is great, but the manuscript is incomplete. It is to be hoped that this article will make it possible to discover another manuscript whose contents complement and perhaps complete those of this manuscript, in poor condition, preserved in Fez and, in microfilm, in the Bibliothéque Genérale de Rabat. (shrink)

Architectural theory arises from building, when the mind considers its symbolic relations to its own constructions. The intent of this essay is to discuss the intellectual causes that precede building and precede theory. It considers certain fundamental dualities in our thinking about architecture—such as image and word; type and model; imitation and invention—and the role they play in its making, its perfection as an art, and the eventual elaboration of its tenets into a theory. At a time when theories of (...) architecture proliferate as expressions of ‘personal philosophies,’ a careful and incisive philosophical approach to if, how, and when does theory become formative of building, may ensure that architecture remain faithful to its intrinsic purposes. (shrink)

This essay assesses the opposition of pluralism and monism with respect to politics and architecture, developing the argument within three general areas: the spurious association between political intentions and architectural character, the distinctions and commonalties between political freedom and artistic freedom, and the adverse effect of inappropriate associations between political content and artistic form in general and, in particular, the perceptual impairment of the processes by which buildings come to be endowed with their suitable character.

This paper develops a new theory of the morality of promissory obligations. T. M. Scanlon notoriously argued that promising consists in assuring the promisee that we will do something. I disagree. I argue that it is true that promising consists in assuring the promisee, but what the promisor gives to the promisee is not an assurance that they will do something, but that the normative situation is in a certain way.

Derrida and the Inheritance of Democracy provides a theoretically rich and accessible account of Derrida's political philosophy. Demonstrating the key role inheritance plays in Derrida’s thinking, Samir Haddad develops a general theory of inheritance and shows how it is essential to democratic action. He transforms Derrida’s well-known idea of "democracy to come" into active engagement with democratic traditions. Haddad focuses on issues such as hospitality, justice, normativity, violence, friendship, birth, and the nature of democracy as he reads these deeply (...) political writings. (shrink)

Hox proteins are part of the conserved superfamily of homeodomain‐containing transcription factors and play fundamental roles in shaping animal body plans in development and evolution. However, molecular mechanisms underlying their diverse and specific biological functions remain largely enigmatic. Here, we have analyzed Hox sequences from the main evolutionary branches of the Bilateria group. We have found that four classes of Hox protein signatures exist, which together provide sufficient support to explain how different Hox proteins differ in their control and function. (...) The homeodomain and its surrounding sequences accumulate nearly all signatures, constituting an extended module where most of the information distinguishing Hox proteins is concentrated. Only a small fraction of these signatures has been investigated at the functional level, but these show that approaches relying on Hox protein alterations still have a large potential for deciphering molecular mechanisms of Hox differential control. (shrink)

Does natural selection act primarily on individual organisms, on groups, on genes, or on whole species? The question of levels of selection - on which biologists and philosophers have long disagreed - is central to evolutionary theory and to the philosophy of biology. Samir Okasha's comprehensive analysis gives a clear account of the philosophical issues at stake in the current debate.

Several authors have recently suggested that classic psychedelics might be safe and effective agents of moral enhancement. This raises the question: can we learn anything interesting about the nature of moral experience from a close examination of transformative psychedelic experiences? The interdisciplinary enterprise of philosophical psychopathology attempts to learn about the structure and function of the “ordinary” mind by studying the radically altered mind. By analogy, in this chapter we argue that we can gain knowledge about the everyday moral life (...) by studying extraordinary experiences of altered moral cognition and experience. We focus on a specific class of cases: experiences of forgiveness induced by psychedelics. We argue that close attention to such experiences reveals the importance of thought/emotion coherence and dissonance in the moral life and vindicates some heterodox ideas about moral phenomenology and psychology. (shrink)

Samir Okasha offers a critical study of agential thinking in biology, where evolved organisms are seen as agents pursuing a goal. He examines the justification for transposing concepts from rational humans to the biological world, and considers whether agential thinking is mere anthropomorphism or plays a more intellectual role in the science.

Resilience may be referred to as the capacity for positive adaptation and to quickly recover from difficulties and significant adversity. After examining operational definitions of related concepts, the article discusses resilience building exercises for functional fitness at the individual soldier level, to include among others, self-monitoring, self-evaluation, self-reinforcement, emotional regulation exercises, mindfulness training, relaxation and grounding exercises and importance of maintaining discipline and routine in the military. Using an acronym CARRIES, the article examines efforts to enhance resilience building through empirically (...) validated cognitive, behavioural and intrapersonal skills originating from best practices learned in the military. (shrink)

Waldenfels’ phenomenological understanding of modernity is based on the understanding of “the foreign” as an essential definition of modernity. “The foreign” here is the characteristic of thinking explicated in cultural and social relationships, which should therefore be interpreted precisely in its phenomenal reality. Culture and politics in this context are more then a mere names for a collection of meanings and justifications of action. They become the expression of a meaningful context from which one can read-off the relation to “the (...) foreign” as the reference point for understanding the very meaning of modernity, its inner differentiation, the streams that determine it and the characteristics that are established in the individual determinants that denote its history. “The foreign” as a whole is grounded in corporality as the reality of its existence. Waldenfels maintains that modernity, taken as a whole, is understood in its orientation towards the foreign, in its relationship with the foreign that, eventually, results in the entire modernity being oriented towards the foreign. Modernity as such did not go astray, but it became oriented towards the foreign, it decided itself to accept some sort of “the foreign” as its identity, in which the philosophical discourse is established for its defence. The relationship towards corporality, postulated in this sense in modern theory, is a consequence of the relationship towards “the foreign”. That is why the problem of transformation of philosophy is not found in the new understanding of the mind, but in the discourse of new rationality, of phenomenological thinking of the particularity oriented towards the critique of the encompassing metaphysics of subjectivity and towards all sorts of rational assumptions bout the reality. Waldenfels’ interpretation of the modernity follows from the integrative insight into continuity of the thinking that determines it, and it is expressed by his summarisation of the crucial problems that determine its paths. It is in this sense that the phenomenological discourse is established, signifying the starting point of philosophical thinking at the turn of the century. (shrink)

The “free” in “free software” refers to a cluster of four specific freedoms identified by the Free Software Definition. The first freedom, termed “Freedom Zero,” intends to protect the right of the user to deploy software in whatever fashion, towards whatever end, he or she sees fit. But software may be used to achieve ethically questionable ends. This highlights a tension in the provision of software freedoms: while the definition explicitly forbids direct restrictions on users’ freedoms, it does not address (...) other means by which software may indirectly restrict freedoms. In particular, ethically-inflected debate has featured prominently in the discussion of restrictions on digital rights management and privacy-violating code in version 3 of the GPL (GPLv3). The discussion of this proposed language revealed the spectrum of ethical positions and valuations held by members of the free software community. In our analysis, we will provide arguments for upholding Freedom Zero; we embed the problem of possible uses of software in the broader context of the uses of scientific knowledge, and go on to argue that the provision of Freedom Zero mitigates against too great a moral burden—of anticipating possible uses of software—being placed on the programmer and that, most importantly, it facilitates deliberative discourse in the free software community. (shrink)

This work seeks to problematize the relations between philosophy, education, school and teaching. We will divide our approach in three questions: the relations between philosophy with the city, a teacher's activities and philosophy and philosophy as a subject in the school system, questions which crisscross, overlap and get confused. We believe that these reflections will show the ways for our future reflection.

This chapter contains section titled: Introduction Historical Remarks The Gene's Eye View of Evolution Group Selection and Kin Selection Species Selection and Macroevolution Multilevel Selection Theory and the Major Transitions in Evolution Conclusion References Further Reading.

Today, anxiety is usually thought of as a pathology, the most diagnosed and medicated of all psychological disorders. But anxiety isn't always or only a medical condition. Indeed, many philosophers argue that anxiety is a normal, even essential, part of being human, and that coming to terms with this fact is potentially transformative, allowing us to live more meaningful lives by giving us a richer understanding of ourselves. In Anxiety, Samir Chopra explores valuable insights about anxiety offered by ancient (...) and modern philosophies-Buddhism, existentialism, psychoanalysis, and critical theory. Blending memoir and philosophy, he also tells how serious anxiety has affected his own life-and how philosophy has helped him cope with it. Chopra shows that many philosophers-including the Buddha, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger-view anxiety as an inevitable human response to existence: to be is to be anxious. Drawing on Karl Marx and Herbert Marcuse, Chopra examines how poverty and other material conditions can make anxiety worse, but he emphasizes that not even the rich can escape it. Nor can the medicated. Inseparable from the human condition, anxiety is indispensable for grasping it. Philosophy may not be able to cure anxiety but, by leading us to greater self-knowledge and self-acceptance, it may be able to make us less anxious about being anxious. Personal, poignant, and hopeful, Anxiety is a book for anyone who is curious about rethinking anxiety and learning why it might be a source not only of suffering but of insight. (shrink)

Thinking about how the law might decide whether to extend legal personhood to artificial agents provides a valuable testbed for philosophical theories of mind. Further, philosophical and legal theorising about personhood for artificial agents can be mutually informing. We investigate two case studies, drawing on legal discussions of the status of artificial agents. The first looks at the doctrinal difficulties presented by the contracts entered into by artificial agents. We conclude that it is not necessary or desirable to postulate artificial (...) agents as legal persons in order to account for such contracts. The second looks at the potential for according sophisticated artificial agents with legal personality with attendant constitutional protections similar to those accorded to humans. We investigate the validity of attributes that have been suggested as pointers of personhood, and conclude that they will take their place within a broader matrix of pragmatic, philosophical and extra-legal concepts. (shrink)

Here, for the first time, development studies encounters the set of ideas popularly known as 'Chaos Theory'. Samir Rihani applies to the processes of economic development, ideas from complex adaptive systems like uncertainty, complexity, and unpredictability. Rihani examines various aspects of the development process - including the World Bank, debt, and the struggle against poverty - and demonstrates the limitations of fundamentally linear thinking in an essentially non-linear world.

We consider the question: under what circumstances can the concept of adaptation be applied to groups, rather than individuals? Gardner and Grafen (2009, J. Evol. Biol.22: 659–671) develop a novel approach to this question, building on Grafen's ‘formal Darwinism’ project, which defines adaptation in terms of links between evolutionary dynamics and optimization. They conclude that only clonal groups, and to a lesser extent groups in which reproductive competition is repressed, can be considered as adaptive units. We re-examine the conditions under (...) which the selection–optimization links hold at the group level. We focus on an important distinction between two ways of understanding the links, which have different implications regarding group adaptationism. We show how the formal Darwinism approach can be reconciled with G.C. Williams’ famous analysis of group adaptation, and we consider the relationships between group adaptation, the Price equation approach to multi-level selection, and the alternative approach based on contextual analysis. (shrink)

This book explores the tradition, impact, and contemporary relevance of two key ideas from Western Marxism: Georg Lukács's concept of reification, in which social aspects of humanity are viewed in objectified terms, and Guy Debord's concept of the spectacle, where the world is packaged and presented to consumers in uniquely mediated ways. Bringing the original, yet now often forgotten, theoretical contexts for these terms back to the fore, Johan Hartle and Samir Gandesha offer a new look at the importance (...) of Western Marxism from its early days to the present moment-and reveal why Marxist cultural critique must continue to play a vital role in any serious sociological analysis of contemporary society. (shrink)

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY NC ND 4.0 International license. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. In Contentious Minds, Florence Passy and Gian-Andrea Monsch explain how cognitive and relational processes allow activists participate in and sustain their commitment to activism. Based on a wide array of survey and interview data with activists engaged in protest, (...) volunteering and unions, they highlight how a commitment community develop shared values, identities, and meanings through interaction. (shrink)

Traditional accounts of belief change have been criticized for placing undue emphasis on the new belief provided as input. A recent proposal to address such issues is a framework for non-prioritized belief change based on default theories (Ghose and Goebel, 1998). A novel feature of this approach is the introduction of disbeliefs alongside beliefs which allows for a view of belief contraction as independently useful, instead of just being seen as an intermediate step in the process of belief revision. This (...) approach is, however, restrictive in assuming a linear ordering of reliability on the received inputs. In this paper, we replace the linear ordering with a preference ranking on inputs from which a total preorder on inputs can be induced. This extension brings along with it the problem of dealing with inputs of equal rank. We provide a semantic solution to this problem which contains, as a special case, AGM belief change on closed theories. (shrink)

Editor's suggested further reading in BioEssays ftz Evolution: Findings, hypotheses and speculations (response to DOI 10.1002/bies.201100019) AbstractOn the border of the homeotic function: Re‐evaluating the controversial role of cofactor‐recruiting motifs AbstractControl of DNA replication: A new facet of Hox proteins? AbstractClassification of sequence signatures: a guide to Hox protein function Abstract.