Tourism to sites of war, conflict, terror and violence is hugely popular. All manner of tours and visits are organised worldwide, every day, to both current and historic conflict sites. Some are once-in-a-lifetime events, such as tours of current conflict sites in the Middle East or to the battlegrounds of World War II, some are routine family visits, such as day trips to local castles. Some visits focus on war and battles themselves, others focus on sites that were the centres (...) of conflict in a broader sense, such as notorious prisons or torture chambers. What strikes us is the absence of sustained, critical attention to conflict tourism from philosophers. This paper narrows matters into a more manageable form. We focus on the idea of tourist visits to conflict heritage sites, some of which are adapted for mass, regular, safe tourism. In this chapter we have three aims: first, to raise awareness of the phenomena and show they merit sustained philosophical interest; second, to outline some relevant philosophical questions; third, to offer some initial responses to these questions. Our overall claim, voiced at various intervals, is that one can, at most, develop general, defeasible ideas both about the phenomena and about what one should do. (shrink)

The European Union Commission’s whitepaper on Artificial Intelligence proposes shaping the emerging AI market so that it better reflects common European values. It is a master plan that builds upon the EU AI High-Level Expert Group guidelines. This article reviews the masterplan, from a culture cycle perspective, to reflect on its potential clashes with current societal, technical, and methodological constraints. We identify two main obstacles in the implementation of this plan: the lack of a coherent EU vision to drive future (...) decision-making processes at state and local levels and the lack of methods to support a sustainable diffusion of AI in our society. The lack of a coherent vision stems from not considering societal differences across the EU member states. We suggest that these differences may lead to a fractured market and an AI crisis in which different members of the EU will adopt nation-centric strategies to exploit AI, thus preventing the development of a frictionless market as envisaged by the EU. Moreover, the Commission aims at changing the AI development culture proposing a human-centred and safety-first perspective that is not supported by methodological advancements, thus taking the risks of unforeseen social and societal impacts of AI. We discuss potential societal, technical, and methodological gaps that should be filled to avoid the risks of developing AI systems at the expense of society. Our analysis results in the recommendation that the EU regulators and policymakers consider how to complement the EC programme with rules and compensatory mechanisms to avoid market fragmentation due to local and global ambitions. Moreover, regulators should go beyond the human-centred approach establishing a research agenda seeking answers to the technical and methodological open questions regarding the development and assessment of human-AI co-action aiming for a sustainable AI diffusion in the society. (shrink)

Ovo istraživanje u fokusu ima ulogu kontekstualnih čimbenika i samoefikasnosti u samoreguliranom učenju te ciljeva postignuća kao motivacijskih odrednica akademskog nepoštenja u pisanim radovima kod visokoškolskih studenata. Cilj nam je bio istražiti potencijalnu medijacijsku ulogu samoefikasnosti u samoreguliranom učenju i ciljeva postignuća u odnosu između kontekstualnih čimbenika i akademskog nepoštenja u pisanim radovima. U istraživanju je sudjelovalo 414 studenata s tri fakulteta društvenog i humanističkog usmjerenja Sveučilišta u Zagrebu. Studenti su ispunjavali upitnik koji je uključivao mjere kontekstualnih čimbenika akademskog nepoštenja, (...) samoefikasnosti u samoreguliranom učenju, ciljeva postignuća i čestine uključenosti u akademsko nepoštenje u pisanim radovima tijekom studija. Kontekstualni čimbenici predviđali su akademsko nepoštenje u pisanim radovima, kako izravno, tako i posredstvom samoefikasnosti u samoreguliranom učenju i cilja izbjegavanja rada. Nalazi istraživanja ukazuju na važnost okružja učenja i motivacijskih uvjerenja u razumijevanju akademskog nepoštenja u visokom obrazovanju. (shrink)

Contents: "Analysis of Claude Bernard's Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine," "Two Unpublished Chapters from She Came to Stay," "Pyrrhus and Cineas," "A Review of The Phenomenology of Perception by Maurice Merleau-Ponty," "Moral Idealism and Political Realism," "Existentialism and Popular Wisdom," "Jean-Paul Sartre," "An Eye for an Eye," "Literature and Metaphysics," "Introduction to an Ethics of Ambiguity," "An Existentialist Looks at Americans," and "What is Existentialism?".

How can we articulate the intimate demand of the spiritual life and the struggle for solidarity? These two issues have often been treated separately; in _Simone Weil: Attention to the Real_, however, Robert Chenavier explores the work of Simone Weil and demonstrates how she brought them together in a single movement of thought. "Our time has a unique mission, calling for the creation of a civilization based on the spirituality of work," she wrote near the end of her short (...) life. Her experience as a militant and the call of the divine nurtured in her writing an intense and unwavering defense of this new civilization, backed by her personal sense of intellectual, moral, and political responsibility. Originally published in French in 2009, _Simone Weil: __Attention to the Real_ leads the reader through her earliest writing as a perceptive social critic to her work on spirituality and materialism, and finally to her extraordinary concept of decreation, produced before her death at the age of thirty-four. "To an exceptional degree," Chenavier says, "the life of Simone Weil, her personality, her commitment, and her reflection form one single whole." Chenavier argues that Weil's vocation took on a very original form in the history of philosophical thought. He is especially concerned with Weil's philosophical writings on the concept of work, which remain relevant today, and which provide an important key to her thinking throughout her life. Bernard Doering's superb translation brings to English readers Chenavier's succinct account of Simone Weil's life and an illuminating introduction to her philosophical thought. "Bernard Doering has crafted a very fine translation of Robert Chenavier's comprehensive but brief introduction to Simone Weil's philosophical project. It provides an excellent English introduction to the social philosophy of Simone Weil, with due attention to her understanding of the importance of work in learning to attend to the real. Doering's translation will be of interest to both a religious and secular readership, both inside and outside the academy." —_Lawrence Schmidt, University of Toronto_. (shrink)

There has been an excellent series of formative articles centring on Bernard Stiegler (1952-2020) as an inspiration to pedagogical thought; this is a summative article written from the perspective of after his death. Stiegler argued that education is ontologically crucial to human development, wherein technics or the ‘not-experienced-condition(s)-necessary-for-experience’ are crucial to humanity’s ability to create its own existence. Technics make possible the technologies underpinning contemporary Anthropocentric existence. While entropy poses the cosmological threat of death to life, technics supports negentropy (...) or the collecting and marshalling of energy opposed to entropy. Education is a crucial means of social negentropy, however all human agency is characterized by the pharmakon of more entropy or increased negentropy. The tension is inevitable in the pharmakon between on the one side, care and cure; and on the other, poison and death. In this article, we ask: ‘Given his suicide, what sort of pharmakon was Stiegler for himself and for us?’1 The authorial “I,” ‘Bernard Stiegler’ is no longer a living critic of social entropy or of proletarization and ‘technoscience’; what do we now make of his oeuvre for education? We will point to his inversions and purposeful mis-interpretations of Heidegger and Derrida as crucial to his oeuvre. Stiegler’s phenomenal being has ended; what technics have been strengthened and specifically: ‘What now of education?’. (shrink)

For centuries the common and scholarly visions of the interior of the human body were dominated by humoral and anatomical representations. At the end of the nineteenth century two innovations modified these representations: Röntgen's X-rays (1895) and Claude Bernard's theory of the internal environment (milieu intérieur, 1867). This latter model became a central paradigm for thinking about the living body at the beginning of the twentieth century. This paper shows how Bernard's theory provided a new scientific, microscopic, physiological, (...) aquatic and homeostatic vision of the interior of the body. The paper then discusses the well known film Fantastic Voyage (1966) by Richard Fleisher, arguing that it marks a similar watershed in popular representations of the human body. Combining scientific transposition and various effects of mise-en-scène that mobilize classic forms of the imaginary, Fleisher's film (and the books and TV series that followed), contributed to changing the vision of the interior of the body. This image was no longer that of the cadaver cut into pieces on the dissection table. The vision was of living processes, embodied in warm functioning flesh, permitting a physiological vision of the integral body to emerge alongside the classic anatomical one. (shrink)

In December 1924 when Simone de Beauvoir almost certainly wrote her essay analyzing Claude Bernard's "Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine," a classic text in the philosophy of science, she was a 16 yr old student in a senior-level philosophy class at a private Catholic girls' school. Given the popular conception of existentialism as anti science, Beauvoir's early interest in science, reflected in her baccalaureate successes as well as her paper on Bernard, may be surprising. But (...) her enthusiasm for Bernard is unmistakable. We have identified three themes in Beauvoir's essay that reappear in her later work, including the valuing of philosophical doubt. (shrink)

The modernization of agriculture in Northern countries has led to a loss of crop diversity, as well as a loss of knowledge, know-how and rights of farmers regarding on-farm seed breeding. In France, the _Réseau Semences Paysannes_ (RSP) brings together collectives of actors (farmers, bakers, citizens, gardeners) mobilized in a quest to reclaim these aspects. Within the framework of the decentralized participatory breeding program conducted in collaboration with INRAE, farmers have co-constructed knowledge in terms of dynamic management of heterogeneous wheat (...) populations. Yet, as the RSP network grows, these actors face new types of challenges regarding collective action. To address them, we proposed to consider peasant seeds as « common unknowns » rather than « common goods » and we adapted and applied an innovative design approach drawing upon the KCP (Knowledge-Concept-Proposals) method. This approach consisted in implementing, from 2019 to 2021, five decentralized design workshops with local seed breeding collectives. The replication of design workshops in different contexts provided a framework for interaction among RSP members, allowed the sharing of both scientific and experiential knowledge. Noteworthily, it fostered the generation of many proposals for enhancing collective action, and led to the development of operational proposals with a view to implement them in the future. This methodology-oriented paper mainly describes the decentralized design approach implemented, its outputs and outcomes, as well as its interests and limits in the context of crop diversity management. It also analyses how the workshop outputs enriches previous works in the field; in particular how such a participatory design approach leads to produce original operational solutions to respond to challenges identified in the literature. (shrink)

Ethical questions are often associated with practical dilemmas: questions in morality, in other words. This volume, by contrast, asks questions about morality: what it is, and to what it owes its precarious authority over us. The focus on metaethics is sustained throughout, via a wide range of philosophical perspectives. Distinguished luminaries who include R. M. Hare and Bernard Williams address keenly debated issues such as what constitutes morality in politics; the relationship between education and ethical standards; and whether or (...) not morality can indeed be defined at all. As Nikhil Krishnan writes in his elegant Foreword, 'The plain-speaking, essayistic grace of these essays, speaks nevertheless of the possibility of moral philosophy, written with an eye to a listener, very possibly not a professional philosopher, who has the right to say, ''This is all very well, your neat little theory, but it doesn't ring true. Things are more complicated than that.'''. (shrink)

Biological evolution provides a creative fount of complex and subtle adaptations, often surprising the scientists who discover them. However, because evolution is an algorithmic process that transcends the substrate in which it occurs, evolution’s creativity is not limited to nature. Indeed, many researchers in the field of digital evolution have observed their evolving algorithms and organisms subverting their intentions, exposing unrecognized bugs in their code, producing unexpected adaptations, or exhibiting outcomes uncannily convergent with ones in nature. Such stories routinely reveal (...) creativity by evolution in these digital worlds, but they rarely fit into the standard scientific narrative. Instead they are often treated as mere obstacles to be overcome, rather than results that warrant study in their own right. The stories themselves are traded among researchers through oral tradition, but that mode of information transmission is inefficient and prone to error and outright loss. Moreover, the fact that these stories tend to be shared only among practitioners means that many natural scientists do not realize how interesting and lifelike digital organisms are and how natural their evolution can be. To our knowledge, no collection of such anecdotes has been published before. This paper is the crowd-sourced product of researchers in the fields of artificial life and evolutionary computation who have provided first-hand accounts of such cases. It thus serves as a written, fact-checked collection of scientifically important and even entertaining stories. In doing so we also present here substantial evidence that the existence and importance of evolutionary surprises extends beyond the natural world, and may indeed be a universal property of all complex evolving systems. (shrink)

Bernard de Lavinheta is commonly recognised as a seminal figure in Renaissance and early modern encyclopedism. A Spanish Franciscan and close colleague of Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, Charles de Bovelles and the Fabrist circle in Paris, he published his Practica compendiosa in 1523, marking a major milestone in the Lullist tradition. Yet the focus on Lavinheta as a pioneer of early modern method has often served to obscure his connection to a long medieval tradition of encyclopedism. Drawing out his links (...) to the Franciscan and Lullist traditions and to Nicholas of Cusa, this article seeks to reveal Lavinheta as pursuing an exemplarist encyclopedism in which logic, metaphysics and mathematics all cohere in Christ and demonstrate a pronounced Trinitarian dynamic. In doing so, it reveals an important spiritual and transformative dimension to the early modern encyclopedia, recontextualising the roots of universal reform in a long Franciscan tradition. (shrink)

State-reduction and the notion of actuality are compared to passage through time and the notion of the present; already in classical relativity the latter give rise to difficulties. The solution proposed here is to treat both tense and value-definiteness as relational properties or facts as relations; likewise the notions of change and probability. In both cases essential characteristics are absent: temporal relations are tenselessly true; probabilistic relations are deterministically true. The basic ideas go back to Everett, although the technical development (...) makes use of the decoherent histories theory of Griffiths, Omnès, and Gell-Mann and Hartle. Alternative interpretations of the decoherent histories framework are also considered. (shrink)

Tous ceux qui s’intéressent à la vie et à l’œuvre de Descartes connaissent l’épisode rapporté par Adrien Baillet dans sa Vie de monsieur Descartes et évoqué par Descartes lui-même dans une lettre à son ami Villebressieu en 1631 : vers la fin des années 1620, le jeune Descartes participa à Paris chez le nonce apostolique, le cardinal Guidi di Bagno, à une « assemblée de personnes savantes et curieuses », parmi lesquelles le cardinal de Berulle et Mersenne. L’orateur était..

Esta é a biografia de Gildo Marçal Brandão. A obra apresenta não só seus escritos, mas também informações biográficas, imagens, entrevistas e relatos de vários momentos considerados memoráveis da participação de Gildo no debate intelectual e político. Combinando trabalho meticuloso, os organizadores do presente volume têm o mérito de fazer tudo isso, uma vez que foram reunidos textos inéditos ou esparsos de Gildo, registros fotográficos, depoimentos de sua esposa - Simone Coelho - prefácios de dois de seus mais próximos (...) amigos e interlocutores, Denis Bernardes e Brasílio Sallum, e um encarte com sua última entrevista. (shrink)

In an essay on the modern idea of political equality, Bernard Williams contrasts what he calls ‘the human point of view’ with a point of view marked by what he calls a ‘technical or professional attitude’. While the latter is concerned with conspicuous structures of someone’s life that might be by occupied by another, the former concerns an attitude towards a singular person, what Wittgenstein calls ‘an attitude towards a soul’ – an attitude characteristically exemplified in the relation to (...) the other who is a friend. It is the one who is in view under such a singularising gaze that seems to be lost as soon as we start counting others, counting our friends. The paper explores the general haunting of the modern-Western idea of all people’s equality by the hazy spectre of what is disclosed by this singularising gaze, and asks how we might organise a response politically to the in each case unique and singular relation to the unique and singular other we call the friend – the one who is both altogether other and my equal. (shrink)

This article examines Nietzsche’s influence on analytic philosophy, focusing on the field of analytic ethics. It presents some key rationales motivating his re-evaluation of values and, in particular, his critique of modern morality. To demonstrate his influence on the work of Charles Taylor, Alasdair Macintyre, and Bernard Williams, the role of Nietzsche’s genealogical method in his re-evaluative project is considered. This is followed by a discussion of Nietzsche’s critique of the value of moral values and its relation to similar (...) objections developed by more recent morality critics. (shrink)

Bernard Bolzano, known in his lifetime as ‘the Bohemian Leibniz’, is best known as a logician and mathematician, but he also developed a monadology in which the monads, which he called ‘atoms’, have spatial location and physical properties. This essay summarizes and assesses his monadology.

The thought-experiment presented by Bernard Williams in 'The self and the future' continues to draw the attention of writers in the debate about personal identity. While few of them agree on what implications it has for the debate, almost all agree that those implications are significant ones. Some have even claimed that it has consequences not only for personal identity, but also concerning the viability of thought-experiment as a method. This paper surveys what these consequences might be at both (...) levels - as a substantive contribution to the debate on identity, and as to what it shows about the usefulness of thought-experiments. It argues ultimately that thought-experiments like Williams's do provide a useful philosophical tool as long as we temper our expectations of them, and that it offers some support to a view of personal identity but one which is at odds with Williams's own view. (shrink)

New philosophical essays on love by a diverse group of international scholars. Topics include contributions to the ongoing debate on whether love is arational or if there are reasons for love, and if so what kind; the kinds of love there may be ; whether love can explain the difference between nationalism and patriotism; whether love is an necessary component of truly seeing others and the world; whether love, like free will, is “fragile,” and may not survive in a deterministic (...) world; and whether or not love is actually a good thing or may instead be a force opposed to morality. Key philosophers discussed include Immanuel Kant, Iris Murdoch, Bernard Williams, Harry Frankfurt, J. David Velleman, Niko Kolodny, Thomas Hurka, Bennett Helm, Alfred Mele and Derk Pereboom. Essays also touch on the treatment of love in literature and popular culture, from Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair to Spike Jonze’s movie her. (shrink)