Like many ethics debates surrounding emerging technologies, neuroethics is increasingly concerned with the private sector. Here, entrepreneurial visions and claims of how neurotechnology innovation will revolutionize society—from brain-computer-interfaces to neural enhancement and cognitive phenotyping—are confronted with public and policy concerns about the risks and ethical challenges related to such innovations. But while neuroethics frameworks have a longer track record in public sector research such as the U.S. BRAIN Initiative, much less is known about how businesses—and especially start-ups—address ethics in tech (...) development. In this paper, we investigate how actors in the field frame and enact ethics as part of their innovative R&D processes and business models. Drawing on an empirical case study on direct-to-consumer (DTC) neurotechnology start-ups, we find that actors engage in careful boundary-work to anticipate and address public critique of their technologies, which allows them to delineate a manageable scope of their ethics integration. In particular, boundaries are drawn around four areas: the technology’s actual capability, purpose, safety and evidence-base. By drawing such lines of demarcation, we suggest that start-ups make their visions of ethical neurotechnology in society more acceptable, plausible and desirable, favoring their innovations while at the same time assigning discrete responsibilities for ethics. These visions establish a link from the present into the future, mobilizing the latter as promissory place where a technology’s benefits will materialize and to which certain ethical issues can be deferred. In turn, the present is constructed as a moment in which ethical engagement could be delegated to permissive regulatory standards and scientific authority. Our empirical tracing of the construction of ‘ethical realities’ in and by start-ups offers new inroads for ethics research and governance in tech industries beyond neurotechnology. (shrink)

So the philosopher's way to be is the source (Quelle) of his values and of his basic model; it is an important way of understanding thrall. It appears, now, that the thought of this paper could be simplified. The primary notion is the philosopher's "way to be." Style, locus of interest, nisus and way of thought can then be seen as growing out of this, as particular aspects or expressions of it. This entire paper then would be an attempt to (...) come to grips with the primary notion. How is a "way to be" related to what is normally called a philo sopher's views or theories (the formulable core)? Is it not irrelevant as non-implicatory fact, like biographical details or social background? I do not think so. A philosopher's way to be is not external fact to the formulable core of his thought. It is not "internal" either in the logical sense. It is what allows us to comprehend his explicit views. (shrink)

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Volume 45, Issue 1-2, Page 55-86, June 2022.

This paper argues that challenges that are grand in scope such as "lifelong health and wellbeing", "climate action", or "food security" cannot be addressed through scientific research only. Indeed scientific research could inhibit addressing such challenges if scientific analysis constrains the multiple possible understandings of these challenges into already available scientific categories and concepts without translating between these and everyday concerns. This argument builds on work in philosophy of science and race to postulate a process through which non-scientific notions become (...) part of science. My aim is to make this process available to scrutiny: what I call founding everyday ideas in science is both culturally and epistemologically conditioned. Founding transforms a common idea into one or more scientifically relevant ones, which can be articulated into descriptively thicker and evaluatively deflated terms and enable operationalisation and measurement. The risk of founding however is that it can invisibilise or exclude from realms of scientific scrutiny interpretations that are deemed irrelevant, uninteresting or nonsensical in the domain in question-but which may remain salient for addressing grand-in-scope challenges. The paper considers concepts of "wellbeing" in development economics versus in gerontology to illustrate this process. (shrink)

In this paper, my aim is to offer some comments on the study of Mu‘tazilite kalām, framed around the study of a particular episode in the Mu‘tazilite dispute about man – a question with a deceptively Aristotelian cadence that is not too difficult to dispel. Within this episode, my focus is on one of the major arguments used by the late Baṣrans to hold up their side of the dispute, and on the relationship between the mental and the physical which (...) emerges from it. The most interesting – and most surprising – aspect of this relationship is that the mental and the physical do not seem to be treated as distinct terms, thus creating the space for questions about how the two relate. The first person perspective seems to be identified with the physical body. My interest then is in the response of the reader to this surprising presentation – or rather, in a certain kind of reader response, and thus a certain kind of interpretive mode, whose value and viability it is part of my aim to help clarify. (shrink)

With its pessimistic vision and bleak message of world-denial, it has often been difficult to know how to engage with Schopenhauer's philosophy. Schopenhauer's arguments have seemed flawed and his doctrines marred by inconsistencies; his very pessimism almost too flamboyant to be believable. Yet a way of redrawing this engagement stands open, Sophia Vasalou argues, if we attend more closely to the visionary power of Schopenhauer's work. The aim of this book is to place the aesthetic character of Schopenhauer's standpoint (...) at the heart of the way we read his philosophy and the way we answer the question: why read Schopenhauer - and how? Approaching his philosophy as an enactment of the sublime with a longer history in the ancient philosophical tradition, Vasalou provides a fresh way of assessing Schopenhauer's relevance in critical terms. This book will be valuable for students and scholars with an interest in post-Kantian philosophy and ancient ethics. (shrink)

Aristotle's account of female nature has received mostly negative treatment, emphasising what he says females cannot do. Building on recent research, this book comprehensively revises such readings, setting out the complex and positive role played by the female in Aristotle's thought with a particular focus on the longest surviving treatise on reproduction in the ancient corpus, the Generation of Animals. It provides new interpretations of the nature of Aristotle's sexism, his theory of male and female interaction in generation, and his (...) account of inherited features. It also discusses a range of more general issues which can and should be re-examined in light of Aristotle's account of female animals: his methodology, hylomorphism, teleology and psychology. Aristotle on Female Animals will be valuable to all those interested in Aristotle's philosophy and the history of gender. (shrink)

I argue that T.M. Scanlon's contractualist account of morality has difficulty accommodating our intuitions about the moral relevance of the number of people affected by an action. I first consider the "Complaint Model" of reasonable rejection, which restricts the grounds for an individual's rejection of a principle to its effects upon herself. I argue that it can accommodate our intuitions about numbers only if we assume that, whenever we do not know who will be affected, each individual may appeal only (...) to the _expected effects on her. This assumption, I suggest, leads to counterintuitive results in cases where, although we do not know who will be affected, we do know that _someone will be. I then consider two proposals to supplement the complaint model with a direct appeal to aggregation. I argue that both are open to serious objections. (shrink)

ArgumentWhat does “life” become at a moment when biological inquiry proceeds by manufacturing biological artifacts and systems? In this article, I juxtapose two radically different communities, synthetic biologists and Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef crafters (HCCR). Synthetic biology is a decade-old research initiative that seeks to merge biology with engineering and experimental research with manufacture. The HCCR is a distributed venture of three thousand craftspeople who cooperatively fabricate a series of yarn and plastic coral reefs to draw attention to the menace (...) climate change poses to the Great Barrier and other reefs. Interpreting these two groups alongside one another, I suggest that for both, manufacturing biological artifacts advances their understandings of biology: in a rhetorical loop, they build new biological things in order to understand the things they are making. The resulting fabrications condense scientific and folk theories about “life” and also undo “life” as a coherent analytic object. (shrink)

Zusammenfassung In der Forschung zum politischen System des spätrepublikanischen Roms werden besonders Comitien, Contiones und Spiele als Gelegenheiten untersucht, bei denen das römische Volk seine politische Meinung äußern konnte. Die drei Gelegenheiten waren allerdings elitendominiert, was eine unabhängige politische Meinungsäußerung seitens der Nicht-Elite zwar nicht unmöglich machte, doch aber erschwerte. Im folgenden Aufsatz sollen dagegen mit circuli, Statuensetzungen und funera popularia Plattformen untersucht werden, die von der Elite nicht einfach kontrolliert werden konnten. Eine elitenunabhängige Meinung, so die These, konnte insbesondere (...) in diesen Foren ausgebildet und gezeigt werden. Zum besseren Verständnis wird der Gegenstand anhand des politologischen Konzepts der ‚unverfassten‘ Partizipationsformen untersucht. (shrink)

This paper analyses the main perceptions of capitalism and crises from a mainstream and heterodox perspective. Broadly defined within the neoclassical structure, the mainstream approaches support the idea of long-term stability of capitalism and describe crises as exogenous events. The heterodox perceptions, on the contrary, perceive crises as an internal feature of capitalism and propose to reframe the global economy within the limits of the socio-environmental systems. Despite the historical recurrence of crises, the neoclassic capitalist framework and the related mainstream (...) perceptions are still dominating the international economic debate. Most of the crises have then been addressed with reforms oriented to adjust some elements of the system without changing the overall economic structure. On the contrary, limited numbers of initiatives have been implemented to reorganise the economy according to the heterodox perspectives. Within this context, further analysis would be needed to investigate the feasibility of the proposed heterodox solutions. By discussing the main perceptions of capitalism and crises and by considering the ethical implications of the mainstream and the heterodox approaches, the present paper contributes to the existing debate around stability of capitalism and provides a starting point for analysis oriented to investigate the feasibility of alternative economic structures. (shrink)

This book defends an original and pluralist theory of when and why discrimination wrongs people, in particular, through unfair subordination, through the violation of their right to a particular deliberative freedom, or through the denial to them of access to a basic good.

Must good deeds be rewarded and wrongdoers punished? Would God be unjust if He failed to punish and reward? And what is it about good or evil actions and moral identity that might generate such necessities? These were some of the vital religious and philosophical questions that eighth- and ninth-century Mu'tazilite theologians and their sophisticated successors attempted to answer, giving rise to a distinctive ethical position and one of the most prominent and controversial intellectual trends in medieval Islam. The Mu'tazilites (...) developed a view of ethics whose distinguishing features were its austere moral objectivism and the crucial role it assigned to reason in the knowledge of moral truths. Central to this ethical vision was the notion of moral desert, and of the good and evil consequences--reward or punishment--deserved through a person's acts. Moral Agents and Their Deserts is the first book-length study of this central theme in Mu'tazilite ethics, and an attempt to grapple with the philosophical questions it raises. At the same time, it is a bid to question the ways in which modern readers, coming to medieval Islamic thought with a philosophical interest, seek to read and converse with Mu'tazilite theology. Moral Agents and Their Deserts tracks the challenges and rewards involved in the pursuit of the right conversation at the seams between modern and medieval concerns. (shrink)

Many social practices treat citizens with cognitive disabilities differently from their nondisabled peers. Does John Rawls's theory of justice imply that we have different duties of justice to citizens whenever they are labeled with cognitive disabilities? Some theorists have claimed that the needs of the cognitively disabled do not raise issues of justice for Rawls. I claim that it is premature to reject Rawlsian contractualism. Rawlsians should regard all citizens as moral persons provided they have the potential for developing the (...) two moral powers. I claim that every citizen requires specific Enabling Conditions to develop and exercise the two moral powers. Structuring basic social institutions to deny some citizens the Enabling Conditions is unjust because it blocks their developmental pathways toward becoming fully cooperating members of society. Hence, we have a duty of justice to provide citizens labeled with cognitive disabilities with the Enabling Conditions they require until they become fully cooperating members of society. (shrink)

The liberty of the woman is at stake in a sense unique to the human condition and so unique to the law. The mother who carries a child to full term is subject to anxieties, to physical constraints, to pain that only she must bear. That these sacrifices have from the beginning of the human race been endured by woman with a pride that ennobles her in the eyes of others and gives to the infant a bond of love cannot (...) alone be grounds for the State to insist that she make the sacrifice. Her suffering is too intimate and personal for the State to insist, without more, upon its own vision of the woman's role ….For years, Jehovah's Witnesses have posed a challenge to the medical profession. Bound by religious belief to refuse blood and blood products, they can frustrate physicians who, since World War II, have utilized transfusions when indicated in the course of treatment. (shrink)

We agree with Svirsky, Howard, and Berman that the US Food and Drug Administration plays various roles, only one of which is the technical review and evaluation of product safety and e...

I argue that there is an important analogy between sex selection and selective abortion of fetuses diagnosed with Down syndrome. There are surprising parallels between the social construction of Down syndrome as a disability and the deeply entrenched institutionalization of sexual difference in many societies. Prevailing concepts of gender and mental retardation exert a powerful influence in constructing the sexual identities and life plans of people with Down syndrome, and also affect their families' lives.1.

Recent applications of Freud's theory examine the social value of the lost love object as a way of understanding the suffering of non-majority groups. Rather than pathologizing the individual suffering the loss, the lens of racial melancholia pathologizes the discourse that constitutes racially marked others as alien to the majority. Through a close reading of image and text, Sophia Tatiana Sarigianides applies David Eng and Shinhee Han's theory of racial melancholia to Gene Luen Yang's graphic novel American Born Chinese. (...) Sarigianides argues that texts such as American Born Chinese provide grounds for a public language for examining the suffering that ensues from the failure of assimilation as a desired outcome for immigrants in the United States. (shrink)

This satirical book review humorously attacks two targets. The first is the formality and audacity of the book review proper; the second is the book Hating Perfection, the two copies sent to every APA member (American Philosophical Association). The book review was written for the Lighthearted Philosophers' Society and submitted for publication in their special anniversary journal.

Sophia Vasalou investigates the 'virtues of greatness' in the Islamic world. Examining the virtue of magnanimity in ancient philosophical ethics and the 'greatness of spirit' in the Arabic tradition, she traces the genealogy of these ideals, explores the influences that shaped them, and highlights the contemporary relevance of these ideals.

Business and Society Review, Volume 127, Issue S1, Page 253-282, Spring 2022.

In recent years, Philosophy Departments at universities in China and worldwide have experienced a renaissance in discussion on Confucian thought. As the country draws from indigenous traditions, rather than leaning completely on the importation of Western liberalism and Marxism, Confucianism has critical implications for politics, ethics, and law in modern China. At the same time, democracy never left the conversation. Democratic concepts cannot be ignored and must be disposed of, acknowledged, or incorporated. The relationship between Confucianism and democracy has been (...) described by various authors as one of conflict, critique, compatibility, and hybridity. In this article, we examine a compatibility model, in which compatibility between Confucianism and democracy can be divided into four types: soft, hard, coexistence, and integration. We examine compatibility by examining “what is compatible” and “how compatibility can be achieved” so as to design speculative models for what a contemporary Confucian government would look like. Our focus is mainly political philosophy in order to explain the effect of cross-pollination of Confucian and democratic thought on political society. (shrink)

The present study investigates Taiwanese graduate students’ general understanding and misunderstanding of Responsible Conduct of Research. A total of 580 graduate students responded to the self-developed Responsible Conduct of Research Reasoning Test. The results reveal that, first, students did not have sufficient knowledge to reason why a particular instance of research conduct was doable or not. Second, the statistical results show that female students, students majoring in the humanities or the social sciences, doctoral-level students, and students with RCR-related training outperformed (...) others. In addition, the misbehaviors that students judged relatively uncritically comprise the following nine categories: seeing authorship as a property or power, misinterpreting research coauthors’ responsibilities, inaccurately conducting the informed-consent process, fabricating and falsifying research data, misinterpreting the correct citation of research sources, holding vague concepts of self-plagiarism, misinterpreting the Taiwan Copyright Act, accepting duplicate-publication practices, and accepting piecemeal publication practices. The present study discusses participative students’ major misunderstandings of actual RCR-related practices. The study also presents further implications and suggestions based on the findings. (shrink)

This essay unpacks a seeming paradox: a concept used to formulate, promote, and legitimate oppressive ideologies—a concept used to formulate mistaken, because they were typological, biological theories about human diversity—is, it seems, the same concept that now promises to deliver wonderful, socially sensitized, innovative results in social and genetic epidemiology. But how could that be? How could scientists expect a concept as problematic as ordinary race to deliver useful scientific results? I propose that there is a process for retranslating Ballungen (...) race concepts in appropriate ways to make them fit and work within social scientific and bioscientific contexts. (shrink)

Elizabeth Anscombe and Mary Midgley discussed Aristotle's ethics as an alternative to modern moral philosophy. This idea is best known from Anscombe's 1958 paper ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’. The main...

_Synthesizes the most important recent work on wonder and brings a number of disciplines into conversation. _.

This article argues that Bogdanov’s ideas are relevant for analysis of contemporary theory and practice of social designing. We show that activism and empiriomonism together lead to an instrumental...

In a work entitled On the Generation of Animals, Aristotle remarks that “intellect (nous) alone enters from outside (thurathen)”. Interpretations of this passage as dualistic dominate the history of ideas and allow for a joining together of Platonic and Aristotelian doctrine on the soul. This, however, pulls against the well-known Aristotelian position that soul and body are intertwined and interdependent. The most influential interpretations thereby misrepresent Aristotle’s view on soul and lack any real engagement with his embryology. This paper seeks (...) to extract the account of intellect (nous) in Aristotelian embryology from this interpretative background and place it within the context of his mature biological thought. A clear account of the actual import of this statement in its relevant context is given before explaining how it has been misunderstood by various interpretative traditions. The paper finishes by touching on how early commentary by Christian writers, freed as it was from the imperative to synthesise Greek philosophy, differed from those that came after. While realising that Aristotle’s position would not aid them in their explanations of the soul’s survival after death, their engagement with Aristotle’s science allowed for other aspects of theology concerning the fittingness of soul to body. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Nietzsche-Studien Jahrgang: 43 Heft: 1 Seiten: 306-319.

Citizen science is touted as a means of making science more inclusive and democratic. However, when citizens are drawn from societies with significant socioeconomic and racial disparities, citizen...

EVER SINCE BALME’S GROUNDBREAKING WORK on the subject, there has been substantial progress in our understanding of the importance of biology in Aristotle’s philosophy. Despite a certain reluctance to incorporate treatises on animals into the undergraduate curriculum, it is now inadvisable to avoid any reference to Aristotle’s biological work when discussing most aspects of his thought. The new tendency of scholarship on Aristotle’s biology employs various methodologies but, in the main, argues for the importance of Aristotle’s biological treatises on the (...) basis of the assistance they might provide for understanding some of the more intractable problems in Aristotle’s thought. (shrink)

Authored by an interdisciplinary team of experts, including historians, classicists, philosophers and theologians, this original collection of essays offers the first authoritative analysis of the multifaceted reception of Greek ethics in late antiquity and Byzantium, opening up a hitherto under-explored topic in the history of Greek philosophy. The essays discuss the sophisticated ways in which moral themes and controversies from antiquity were reinvigorated and transformed by later authors to align with their philosophical and religious outlook in each period. Topics examined (...) range from ethics and politics in Neoplatonism and ethos in the context of rhetorical theory and performance to textual exegesis on Aristotelian ethics. The volume will appeal to scholars and students in philosophy, classics, patristic theology, and those working on the history of education and the development of Greek ethics. (shrink)

This paper presents a novel position in the philosophy of logic: I argue that _validity_ is a thick concept. Hence, I propose to consider _validity_ in analogy to other thick concepts, such as _honesty_, _selfishness_ or _justice_. This proposal is motivated by the debate on the normativity of logic: while logic textbooks seem simply descriptive in their presentation of logical truths, many have argued that logic has consequences for how we ought to reason, for what we ought to believe, or (...) for what we ought to infer. How can logic be normative, if it appears to be descriptive? According to the proposal of this paper, the normativity of logic can be explained because a thick concept is in play: _validity_. Thus, I argue that the debate on how to best characterize validity and the debate on logic’s normativity are more connected than we think, because _validity_ is a thick concept. (shrink)