This volume features a collection of essays on consciousness, which has become one of the hot topics at the crossroads between neuroscience, philosophy, and religious studies. Is consciousness something the brain produces? How can we study it? Is there just one type of consciousness or are there different states that can be discriminated? Are so called "higher states of consciousness" that some people report during meditation pointing towards a new understanding of consciousness? Meditation research is a new discipline that shows (...) new inroads into the study of consciousness. If a meditative practice changes brain structure itself this is direct proof of the causal influence of consciousness onto its substrate. If different states of consciousness can be linked with properties and states of the brain this can be used to study consciousness more directly. If the sense of self is modifiable through meditative techniques and this can be objectively shown through neuro-imaging, this has profound implications for our understanding of who we are. Can consciousness, in deep states of meditative absorption, actually access some aspect of reality which we normally don't? Meditation research can potentially foster us with a new access to the phenomenological method in general. This has even been branded with a new catch-phrase: Contemplative Science. It brings together the most modern neuroscientific approach and the most advanced phenomenological methodology of studying the mind from within, through highly skilled self-observation that has gone through many thousand hours of honing the capacity to look carefully, without distraction. This book addresses these issues by bringing together some of the leading researchers and thinkers in the field. The scope of the volume reaches from first person neuroscience to Indian philosophy, from pedagogic applications to epistemological aspects and from compassion meditation to the study of brain activity. (shrink)

This paper discusses counterexamples to the thesis that the probabilities of conditionals are conditional probabilities. It is argued that the discrepancy is systematic and predictable, and that conditional probabilities are crucially involved in the apparently deviant interpretations. Furthermore, the examples suggest that such conditionals have a less prominent reading on which their probability is in fact the conditional probability, and that the two readings are related by a simple step of abductive inference. Central to the proposal is a distinction between (...) causal and purely stochastic dependence between variables. (shrink)

Part I The Unity of Value -- A hedgehog's unity of value / Joseph Raz -- Part II Political Values : Legitimacy, Authority, and Collective Responsibility -- Political resistance for hedgehogs / Candice Delmas -- Ronald Dworkin, state consent, and progressive cosmopolitanism / Thomas Christiano -- To fill or not to fill individual responsibility gaps? / Franðcois Tanguay-Renaud -- Inheritance and hypothetical insurance / Daniel Halliday -- Part III General Jurisprudence : Contesting the Unity of Law and Value -- Putting (...) law in its place / Lawrence G. Sager -- Dworkin and unjust law / David Dyzenhaus -- The grounds of law / Luâis Duarte d'Almeida -- Immodesty in Dworkin's theory : the lines dividing different kinds of conceptual theory of law / Kenneth Einar Himma -- Imperialism and importance in Dworkin's jurisprudence / Michael Giudice -- A theory of legal obligation / Christopher Essert -- Part IV Value in Law -- Originalism and constructive interpretation / David O. Brink -- Was Dworkin an originalist? / Lawrence A. Alexander -- The moral reading of constitutions / Connie S. Rosati -- Authority, intention, and interpretation / Aditi Bagchi -- Concern and respect in procedural law / Hamish Stewart. (shrink)

The central task of my reflections is to deal with the question what harming a person could mean. In the first part of the reflections, I will be critically concerned with current ways of dealing with the concept of human dignity, and why it is no longer plausible to uphold these regulations, whereby I will particularly focus on the legal dimension. It will come out that the person-object-dichotomy cannot simply be upheld in its traditional manner. Given the plausibility of these (...) reflections, the legal implication that it ought to be legally prohibited to treat another person merely as a means becomes implausible, too, as it rests on the aforementioned distinction between persons and objects. As an alternative, it will be suggested that legally we ought to separate ontological insights clearly from normative ones. In the following part, I will focus on the moral status of personhood, and develop some philosophical reflections which could be upheld on the basis of a posthuman paradigm-shift. Thereby, I will develop a gradual concept of personhood which implies several levels of personhood depending on the corresponding capacity of suffering, which needs to be established empirically. Once, the direction of an alternative concept of personhood becomes clearer, which implies that some animals become person and which provides some reasons for holding that some sufficiently developed embodied AIs could also deserve personhood, the question can be reflected upon further what it could mean to harm a person. The issue of harming, however, is so complex that I merely plan to raise some questions which need to be confronted when clarifying the concept of harming. I do not attempt to propose a definite concept of harming, but stress that the concept is closely related to cultural circumstances, so that there is a permanent need to engage with the concept, redefine it, and adapt it to the current cultural situation. Not proposing a clear concept of harm is not a shortcoming, but rather a necessity. (shrink)

This article considers the prospects of inference to the best explanation as a method of confirming causal claims vis-à-vis the medical evidence of mechanisms. I show that IBE is actually descriptive of how scientists reason when choosing among hypotheses, that it is amenable to the balance/weight distinction, a pivotal pair of concepts in the philosophy of evidence, and that it can do justice to interesting features of the interplay between mechanistic and population level assessments.

We present the first comprehensive theory of fairness that conceives of fairness as having two dimensions: a comparative and an absolute one. The comparative dimension of fairness has traditionally been the main interest of Broomean fairness theories. It has been analysed as satisfying competing individual claims in proportion to their respective strengths. And yet, many key contributors to Broomean fairness agree that ‘absolute’ fairness is important as well. We make this concern precise by introducing the Fairness formula and the absolute (...) priority rule and analyse their implications for comparative fairness. (shrink)

I argue that difference-making should be a crucial element for evaluating the quality of evidence for mechanisms, especially with respect to the robustness of mechanisms, and that it should take central stage when it comes to the general role played by mechanisms in establishing causal claims in medicine. The difference- making of mechanisms should provide additional compelling reasons to accept the gist of Russo-Williamson thesis and include mechanisms in the protocols for Evidence- Based Medicine (EBM), as the EBM+ research group (...) has been advocating. (shrink)

In the article ‘How to be absolutely fair, Part I: the Fairness formula’, we presented the first theory of comparative and absolute fairness. Here, we relate the implications of our Fairness formula to economic theories of fair division. Our analysis makes contributions to both philosophy and economics: to the philosophical literature, we add an axiomatic discussion of proportionality and fairness. To the economic literature, we add an appealing normative theory of absolute and comparative fairness that can be used to evaluate (...) axioms and division rules. Also, we provide a novel definition and characterization of the absolute priority rule. (shrink)

The academic debate why and how companies are dealing with sustainability is dominated by two main arguments—the profit-seeking and the legitimacy-seeking view. While the first argues that companies establish sustainability management measures if this helps to increase their economic success, others emphasize that companies predominantly react on societal pressure dealing with sustainability to secure legitimacy. Whereas both lines of argument have gained a lot of attention in academia, little is known about their relative importance in shaping corporate practice. This papers (...) aims to fill this gap with an empirical analysis of corporate practices of large companies in ten countries worldwide. To capture the organizations’ rationale in sustainability management practice, we systematically applied various measures related to actors and operational activities focusing on the companies’ intention to pursue sustainability management, the integration of sustainability management to the core business, and the actual implementation of related measures. Overall the findings indicate that seeking legitimacy dominates corporate sustainability management practices. (shrink)

This paper describes and discusses the phenomenon ‘predatory publishing’, in relation to both academic journals and books, and suggests a list of characteristics by which to identify predatory journals. It also raises the question whether traditional publishing houses have accompanied rogue publishers upon this path. It is noted that bioethics as a discipline does not stand unaffected by this trend. Towards the end of the paper it is discussed what can and should be done to eliminate or reduce the effects (...) of this development. The paper concludes that predatory publishing is a growing phenomenon that has the potential to greatly affect both bioethics and science at large. Publishing papers and books for profit, without any genuine concern for content, but with the pretence of applying authentic academic procedures of critical scrutiny, brings about a worrying erosion of trust in scientific publishing. (shrink)

The culture of honour hypothesis offers a compelling example of how human psychology differentially adapts to pastoral and horticultural environments. However, there is disagreement over whether this pattern is best explained by a memetic, evolutionary psychological, dual inheritance, or niche construction model. I argue that this disagreement stems from two shortcomings: lack of clarity about the theoretical commitments of these models and inadequate comparative data for testing them. To resolve the first problem, I offer a theoretical framework for deriving competing (...) predictions from each of the four models. In particular, this involves a novel interpretation of the difference between dual inheritance theory and cultural niche construction. I then illustrate a strategy for testing their predictions using data from the Human Relations Area File. Empirical results suggest that the aggressive psychological phenotype typically associated with honour culture is more common among pastoral societies than among horticultural societies. Theoretical considerations suggest that this pattern is best explained as a case of cultural niche construction. (shrink)

As conservation biology has developed as a distinct discipline from ecology, conservation guidelines based on ecological theory have been largely cast aside in favor of theory-independent decision procedures for designing conservation reserves. I argue that this transition has failed to advance the field toward its aim of preserving biodiversity. The abandonment of island biogeography theory in favor of complementarity-based algorithms is a case in point. In what follows, I consider the four central objections raised against island biogeographic conservation guidelines, arguing (...) that they fail to undermine the credibility of this framework as a conservation tool. At best, these objections call for a more careful application of this framework to conservation problems, not its wholesale abandonment. At the same time, complementarily-based algorithms are biased in favor of networks of small reserves containing non-overlapping species. These conditions threaten to promote inbreeding depression, genetic drift and other factors that increase a population’s risk of extinction. Therefore, recent developments in the field of conservation biology have arguably not contributed to its ultimate aim of preserving the maximum amount of biodiversity in the long run. (shrink)

Machine learning is used more and more in scientific contexts, from the recent breakthroughs with AlphaFold2 in protein fold prediction to the use of ML in parametrization for large climate/astronomy models. Yet it is unclear whether we can obtain scientific explanations from such models. I argue that when machine learning is used to conduct causal inference we can give a new positive answer to this question. However, these ML models are purpose-built models and there are technical results showing that standard (...) machine learning models cannot be used for the same type of causal inference. Instead, there is a pathway to causal explanations from predictive ML models through new explainability techniques; specifically, new methods to extract structural equation models from such ML models. The extracted models are likely to suffer from issues though: they will often fail to account for confounders and colliders, as well as deliver simply incorrect causal graphs due to ML models tendency to violate physical laws such as the conservation of energy. In this case, extracted graphs are a starting point for new explanations, but predictive accuracy is no guarantee for good explanations. (shrink)

Landgrebe and Smith provide an argument for the impossibility of Artificial General Intelligence based on the limits of simulating complex systems. However, their argument presupposes a very contemporary vision of artificial intelligence as a model trained on data to produce an algorithm executable in a modern digital computing system. The present contribution explores what it means to be artificial. Current artificial intelligence approaches on modern computing systems are not the only conceivable way in which artificial intelligence technology might be created. (...) If there are conceivable routes by which an artificial intelligence might be developed that are not constrained in the same way as the current generation of artificial neural networks, then these might be plausible routes towards the engineered generation of artificial general intelligence that are not precluded by the Landgrebe and Smith argument against the possibility of artificial general intelligence. (shrink)

In a recent article, Emanuel Rutten defends his Modal-Epistemic Argument (MEA) for the existence of God against various objections that I raised against it. In this article, I observe that Rutten’s defence fails for various reasons. Most notably though, the defence is self-undermining: the very claims that Rutten argues for in his defence yield novel counterexamples to the first premise of the MEA.

Wenn Klassiker in der Philosophie die Funktion haben, Medien der Diskussion zu sein, so ist Cassirers Status als philosophischer Klassiker in besonderer Weise gerechtfertigt: Seine Philosophie ist strukturell auf kritische Vermittlung ausgelegt, und zwar sowohl im Sinn eines Theoriemediums, das eine Terminologie und Methode anbietet, wie auch als Mediator im Sinne der Integration unterschiedlicher, teils widerstrebender Positionen als Problemzusammenhänge. Um diese kritisch-kommunikative Bedeutung Cassirers deutlich und zugleich nutzbar zu machen, stellen die Beiträge des Bandes jeweils Aspekte seiner Philosophie in Beziehung (...) zu anderen philosophischen und wissenschaftlichen Projekten. Hierzu gehören analytische Metaphysik, Archäologie des Wissens, neuere psychiatrische und wahrnehmungsphilosophische Ansätze, kritische Theorie, philosophische Anthropologie, Pragmatismus, Leibphänomenologie, die Pittsburgh Schule u.v.m. Der Band versteht sich dabei nicht nur als ein Beitrag zur Cassirer-Forschung, sondern will allgemeiner für die kritisch-kommunikative Haltung eintreten, die sich an Cassirer lernen lässt, um sie in die Praxis der Philosophie insgesamt zu tragen. (shrink)

We present the negative phenomena of understanding in relation to scientific explanations. We begin by formulating the distinction between genuine understanding and lack of understanding, to define the epistemic category of misunderstanding. We illustrate misunderstanding with a short meta-philosophical study on the current debates about distinctively mathematical explanations.

The number of people with dementia is increasing worldwide. At the same time, family and professional caregivers’ resources are limited. A promising approach to relieve these carers’ burden and assist people with dementia is assistive technology. In order to be useful and accepted, such technologies need to respect the values and needs of their intended users. We applied the value sensitive design approach to identify values and needs of patients with dementia and family and professional caregivers in respect to assistive (...) technologies to assist people with dementia in institutionalized care. Based on semi-structured interviews of residents/patients with cognitive impairment, relatives, and healthcare professionals (10 each), we identified 44 values summarized by 18 core values. From these values, we created a values’ network to demonstrate the interplay between the values. The core of this network was caring and empathy as most strongly interacting value. Furthermore, we found 36 needs for assistance belonging to the four action fields of activity, care, management/administration, and nursing. Based on these values and needs for assistance, we created possible use cases for assistive technologies in each of the identified four action fields. All these use cases already are technologically feasible today but are not currently being used in healthcare facilities. This underlines the need for development of value-based technologies to ensure not only technological feasibility but also acceptance and implementation of assistive technologies. Our results help balance conflicting values and provide concrete suggestions for how engineers and designers can incorporate values into assistive technologies. (shrink)

Drawing on Richard Kilminster and Ian Varcoe's article concerning the main themes of Bauman's sociology, this article emphasizes what was left aside (for example, the discontinuities of the thought under consideration, the shift from a systematic science-minded approach to hermeneutics, or the aporetic, somehow dramatic seizure of the culture-power relations which indeed are the chief pillars of Bauman's interest and scrutiny). Another characteristic quality is focusing on the Polish issues, that is, the native tradition in humanities, the specific vicissitudes of (...) sociology after 1945, Bauman's personal background, his gradual change of philosophic views through the phase of his dissident activity till the 1970s, when he transgressed the Marxist worldview. The way in which way Bauman combines many talents (scholarly and literary, of the researcher and the teacher) is also pointed out and analysed and his latest creative period, opened by the publication of Legislators and Interpreters, is brought to light. Bauman's diagnosis and weighted appreciation of the present-day cultural breakthrough, named postmodernity, were enriched and deepened with each subsequent book. There is a touch of genius in the scope and mode of dealing with this problematic. Bauman's international fame seems to be well deserved and firmly grounded. (shrink)

Este manuscrito inédito corresponde al capítulo final del libro _Latin America replies to Transhumanism. __A Symposium on Sorgner’s We have always been cyborgs _a publicarse el año 2024 por la editorial Trivent. Budapest, Hungria. Agradecemos a Stefan L. Sorgner y Teodora C. Artimon por los permisos de publicación. Las referencias a los autores mencionados corresponden a otros capítulos de este mismo libro. Traducción de Nicolás Rojas Cortés y Camilo Vergara Ramírez.

With the widespread use of artificial intelligence, it becomes crucial to provide information about these systems and how they are used. Governments aim to disclose their use of algorithms to establish legitimacy and the EU AI Act mandates forms of transparency for all high-risk and limited-risk systems. Yet, what should the standards for transparency be? What information is needed to show to a wide public that a certain system can be used legitimately and responsibly? I argue that process-based approaches fail (...) to satisfy, as knowledge about the development process is insufficient to predict the properties of the resulting system. Current outcome-based approaches [Mitchell et al., 2019; Loi et al., 2021] are also criticized for a lack of attention to the broader socio-technical system and failure to account for empirical results that show that people care about more than just the outcomes of a process [as reported by Meyerson et al. (Procedural justice and relational theory: Empirical, philosophical, and legal perspectives, Taylor & Francis, 2021)]. Instead, I propose value-based transparency, on which the information we need to provide is what values have been considered in the design and how successful these have been realized in the final system. This can handle the objections to other frameworks, matches with current best practices on the design of responsible AI and provides the public with information on the crucial aspects of a system’s design. (shrink)

Die dezentrale Technologie der Blockchains verspricht durch ihre spezifische Netzwerk- Architektur ihren Nutzern sowohl mehr Freiheit und Autonomie als auch mehr Sicherheit und Transparenz. Damit wurden Blockchains in den letzten Jahren zur Projektionsfläche demokratischer und egalitärer Utopien. Der Beitrag ist eine medienphilosophische Analyse der Idee der Blockchain und ihrer praktischen Umsetzungen und zielt auf eine kritische Prüfung der mit Blockchains verbundenen Versprechen und Erwartungen. The decentralized technology of blockchains promises its users more freedom and autonomy as well as more security (...) and transparency through its specific network architecture. In recent years, blockchains have thus become a projection screen for democratic and egalitarian utopias. The contribution is a media- philosophical analysis of the Blockchain idea and its practical implementation and aims at a critical examination of the promises and expectations associated with Blockchains. (shrink)

We present the negative phenomena of understanding in relation to scientific explanations. We begin by formulating the distinction between genuine understanding and lack of understanding, to define the epistemic category of misunderstanding. We illustrate misunderstanding with a short meta-philosophical study on the current debates about distinctively mathematical explanations.

Philosophers have studied various ways in which things can be said implicitly, and how this can be exploited in both derogatory and political speech. The present paper follows this tradition by focussing on a linguistic phenomenon which has so far received little attention from philosophers, i.e. (linguistic) false friends. In linguistics, false friends are understood as bilingual homographs or homophones which differ (significantly) in some kind of conventional linguistic meaning. We will argue that such false friends can be used for (...) (political) dogwhistling. Hence, by providing a better understanding of the linguistic phenomenon of false friends, the present paper aims to provide a better understanding of dogwhistling, possibly opening up new ways of preventing or at least containing the negative consequences of these speech acts. (shrink)

The paper examines attempts to define philosophy as a discipline in early modern Spanish Aristotelianism. Such definitions served primarily didactical goals: a definition of philosophy conveyed first impressions of what philosophy was in order to facilitate the subsequent detailed apprehension of philosophical doctrines. But even though such definitions should not be misunderstood as >metaphilosophical< in the contemporary sense, they gave rise to quite detailed debates on the nature of philosophy, its relation to wisdom, or the domain of objects philosophy is (...) concerned with. Whereas the canon of problems discussed in the texts is quite homogeneous, the answers given differ considerably. These differences concern e. g. the status of philosophical knowledge, the relation between theoretical and practical philosophy or the role of mathematics in the canon of philosophical disciplines. (shrink)