Legal liabilities pertaining to the identification and selection of domain experts is an issue that could adversely impact expert systems developers. Problems pertaining to flawed knowledge, improperly defined expertise, and behavioural and psychological impediments are just some of the issues. This paper examines the torts of strict products liability and negligence that system developers could incur as a result of expert-related difficulties. Parallels from legal scholars and federal and state court decisions are discussed relevant to expert system projects and developers. (...) The paper concludes with a presentation of steps that systems developers can take to minimize potential legal liability. (shrink)

My short history of alternative teleology traditions should help us recognize that biological goal-directedness is not dependent on mind, that is, on divine design or occult prescient forces. Following Kant’s ‘instrumental’ teleology, I have shown that one can be anti-reductionist about biology without nesting holism in mind. The order of both knowledge and the process is incorrectly reversed in such mind-dependent philosophy. So against the philosophers who think mind precedes biology, I submit that biological teleology actually precedes the sophisticated purposiveness (...) of human consciousness. That is to say, the conscious mind emerges out of more primitive forms of biological conatus or seeking, not the other way around. And the biological goal-driven aspect of life is not a form of vitalism, but an accidental marriage of rudimentary nervous system, sensory-motor system, homeostasic systems in the organism, and ecologies of limited resource. Nor are these factors working to render the universe susceptible to the birth of consciousness, whatever that means. Therefore there are perfectly legitimate forms of biological teleology that do not have conscious mind lurking behind them. (shrink)

We review the argument that latent image formation is a measurement in which the state vector collapses, requiring an enhanced noise parameter in objective reduction models. Tentative observation of a residual noise at this level, plus several experimental bounds, imply that the noise must be colored, and hence frame dependent and non-relativistic. Thus a relativistic objective reduction model, even if achievable in principle, would be incompatible with experiment; the best one can do is the non-relativistic CSL model. This negative conclusion (...) has a positive aspect, in that the non-relativistic CSL reduction model evades the argument leading to the Conway–Kochen “Free Will Theorem”. (shrink)

An overview of Zhu Xi's moral psychology, with a special focus on the metaphysical underpinnings and the relations between heartmind (xin), emotions (qing), and nature (xing). The authors explain how Zhu uses his account to balance the demand for independent standards of assessment with his commitment to ethical norms that virtuous agents can embrace wholeheartedly.

In exploring the nature of excess relative to a phenomenology of the limit, _Testing the Limit _ claims that phenomenology itself is an exploration of excess. What does it mean that "the self" is "given"? Should we see it as originary; or rather, in what way is the self engendered from textual practices that transgress—or hover around and therefore within—the threshold of phenomenologial discourse? This is the first book to include Michel Henry in a triangulation with Derrida and Levinas and (...) the first to critique Levinas on the basis of his interpolation of philosophy and religion. Sebbah claims that the textual origins of phenomenology determine, in their temporal rhythms, the nature of the subjectivation on which they focus. He situates these considerations within the broader picture of the state of contemporary French phenomenology, in order to show that these three thinkers share a certain "family resemblance," the identification of which reveals something about the traces of other phenomenological families. It is by testing the limit within the context of traditional phenomenological concerns about the appearance of subjectivity and ipseity that Derrida, Henry, and Levinas radically reconsider phenomenology and that French phenomenology assumes its present form. (shrink)

_Living Skepticism_ challenges the philosophical orthodoxy that dismisses skepticism as an intellectual embarrassment or overreaction. In this original collection of adventurous and engaging papers, skepticism is demonstrated to be true or insightful enough to form the core of an enlightened philosophy.

‘A property’, according to the author of De Rerum Natura in 1.451–4, ‘is that which can never be sundered and separated without fatal dissolution, as weight is to stone, heat to fire, liquidity to water, touch to all bodies, intangibility to void’, seiungi seque gregari. As elsewhere Lucretius, that most committed practitioner of word-play, makes his verb mirror the very separation which it describes.

The desire to voice the artistic revelation of the truth of a precarious, multi-faceted, yet integrated self lies behind much of Szymanowski's work. This self is projected through the voices of deities who speak languages of love. The unifying figure is Eros, who may be embodied as Dionysus, Christ, Narcissus or Orpheus, and the gospel he proclaims tells of the resurrection and freedom of the desiring subject. This book examines Szymanowski's exploration of the relationship between the authorial voice, mythology and (...) eroticism within the context of the crisis of the modern subject in Western culture. Stephen Downes analyses mythological and erotic aspects of selected songs from the composer's early career, moving to an interpretation of the voice of the homoerotic lover, embodied as a mad muezzin, in terms of heroic notions of Orphic elegy. Discussing the encounters of King Roger with the voices of Narcissus, the Siren and Dionysus, Downes shows how the composer uses the unifying Christ/Eros figure as a means of indicating that the King might be transformed from anguished despot to loving expressive subject. The book ends with an examination of Szymanowski's desire to fuse Slavonic and Middle-Eastern mythological inspirations in an attempt to fulfil a utopian vision of a pan-European culture bound together by the spirit of Eros. (shrink)

When composing “Echoes” I set out to express in an artistic form the cognitive dissonance we sometimes feel between the depth of divine Presence in our experience and the often perplexing shallowness of the various “presences” we experience in our daily life. By starting out with a reference to “every time” and “every space”, the first stanza highlights the contrast between these mundane presences and what religious believers might call “God’s Voice”. If the poem has a “primary” message, it is (...) that God is in all these perplexing presences, though not always (or ever?) in a way that enables us to explain or fully comprehend that Presence with neat rational formulae. (shrink)

This note examines the mereological component of Geoffrey Hellman's most recent version of modal structuralism. There are plausible forms of agnosticism that benefit only a little from Hellman's mereological turn.

In this essay the author relates bioethics to Anglo-Saxon moral philosophy in the early twentieth century. According to him the direct engagement of moral philosophers with concrete cases and issues in medicine and biomedical research helped to rescue ethics from the abstract irrelevance into which much of the field had fallen.

In recent years, a number of groups have begun to argue that pension funds have an obligation to invest their capital in socially responsible ways. The concept of social investing of pension funds is examined with regard to legal requirements, determination of social objectives, measurement of perfornance, and financial effects. This analysis concludes that, while the problems of social investing are relatively well-defined, the benefits are nebulous. A social-oriented investment strategy should be adopted only after a careful review of all (...) factors. (shrink)