The subject of this monograph lies at the intersection of metaphysics, epistemology and the philosophy of action of the late Platonist Proclus and his Georgian commentator from the 11th/12th century, Ioane Petrizi. With Proclus, the theme of the 'One in us' is closely connected both with his metaphysics of the One as the transcendent principle of everything and with his epistemology, which underlines different modes of cognition and their limits parallel to different types of cognitive objects. Finally, it is also (...) connected with his theory of action, which deals with the practical implementation of the gradual ascent of the soul to the transcendent One, or the unification of the soul with the One operating within itself. (shrink)

Abstrakt Proklos gilt als ein bedeutender Systematiker des Neuplatonismus und als ein Bewahrer der platonischen Philosophie. Proklos’ erste Quelle seiner Philosophie ist Platon. Aber seine Philosophie ist nicht nur von Platon beeinflusst. Er versucht die unterschiedlichen Lehren der philosophischen Tradition in Einklang zu bringen, um die Wirkungskraft des platonischen Denkens herauszustellen im Streben nach dem transzendenten Einen. Das Ziel dieses Artikels ist es, die Bedeutung des Chaldäischen Orakels in der Philosophie des Proklos zu erforschen. Die chaldäischen Ausdrücke in Proklos’ Philosophie (...) beziehen sich auf den seelischen Aufstieg bis zum transzendenten Einen. Eine Analyse der chaldäischen Begriffe im Werk des Proklos lässt eine spezifische Hierarchie erkennen. Die Seele verfolgt einen langen Weg der Rückwendung, bis sie den Kern ihres Wesens erreicht. Im einheitlichen Kern ihres Wesens wird sie mit dem Einen identisch. (shrink)

On one standard reading, Plato's works contain at least two distinct views about the structure of the human soul. According to the first, there is a crucial unity to human psychology: there is a dominant faculty that is capable of controlling attention and behaviour in a way that not only produces right action, but also ‘silences’ inclinations to the contrary—at least in idealized circumstances. According to the second, the human soul contains multiple autonomous parts, and although one of them, reason, (...) normatively dominates the others, it may fail to do so descriptively: even in the face of full, explicit, well‐reasoned, conscious awareness of the truth of a claim, a person may continue to feel residual inclinations towards disavowed, inappropriate and misguided experiences and courses of action. In this paper, I will argue that even the second of these views does not fully capture the ways in which reflective commitment fails to guide human action. Whereas the traditional multi‐part soul view is well suited to explaining phenomena that involve a cognitive conflict between our reflective attitudes and our non‐reflective endorsements, it falls short when we turn to the full array of human patterns of response, because it neglects a further source of challenge to reason's rule, namely, the mediation of associative and heuristic processes. These processes introduce complications for which the simple faculty psychology view cannot adequately account. Because they produce challenges to reason's rule that are phenomenologically invisible, traditional strategies for self‐regulation cannot be straightforwardly applied to their management. (shrink)

Expanding the Palace of Torah offers a broad philosophical overview of the challenges the women’s revolution poses to Orthodox Judaism, as well as Orthodox Judaism’s response to those challenges. Writing as an insider—herself an Orthodox Jew—Tamar Ross confronts the radical feminist critique of Judaism as a religion deeply entrenched in patriarchy. Surprisingly, very little work has been done in this area, beyond exploring the leeway for ad hoc solutions to practical problems as they arise on the halakhic plane. In (...) exposing the largely male-focused thrust of the rabbinic tradition and its biblical grounding, she sees this critique as posing a potential threat to the theological heart of traditional Judaism—the belief in divine revelation. This new edition brings this acclaimed and classic text back into print with a new essay by Tamar Ross which examines new developments in feminist thought since the book was first published in 2004. (shrink)

By carefully examining one of the most famous thought experiments in the history of science—that by which Galileo is said to have refuted the Aristotelian theory that heavier bodies fall faster than lighter ones—I attempt to show that thought experiments play a distinctive role in scientific inquiry. Reasoning about particular entities within the context of an imaginary scenario can lead to rationally justified concluusions that—given the same initial information—would not be rationally justifiable on the basis of a straightforward argument.

New biotechnologies have propelled the question of what it means to be human - or posthuman - to the forefront of societal and scientific consideration. This volume provides an accessible, critical overview of the main approaches in the debate on posthumanism, and argues that they do not adequately address the question of what it means to be human in an age of biotechnology. Not because they belong to rival political camps, but because they are grounded in a humanist ontology that (...) presupposes a radical separation between human subjects and technological objects. The volume offers a comprehensive mapping of posthumanist discourse divided into four broad approaches-two humanist-based approaches: dystopic and liberal posthumanism, and two non-humanist approaches: radical and methodological posthumanism. The author compares and contrasts these models via an exploration of key issues, from human enhancement, to eugenics, to new configurations of biopower, questioning what role technology plays in defining the boundaries of the human, the subject and nature for each. Building on the contributions and limitations of radical and methodological posthumanism, the author develops a novel perspective, mediated posthumanism, that brings together insights in the philosophy of technology, the sociology of biomedicine, and Michel Foucault's work on ethical subject constitution. In this framework, technology is neither a neutral tool nor a force that alienates humanity from itself, but something that is always already part of the experience of being human, and subjectivity is viewed as an emergent property that is constantly being shaped and transformed by its engagements with biotechnologies. Mediated posthumanism becomes a tool for identifying novel ethical modes of human experience that are richer and more multifaceted than current posthumanist perspectives allow for. The book will be essential reading for students and scholars working on ethics and technology, philosophy of technology, poststructuralism, technology and the body, and medical ethics. (shrink)

The capacity to represent things to ourselves as possible plays a crucial role both in everyday thinking and in philosophical reasoning; this volume offers much-needed philosophical illumination of conceivability, possibility, and the relations between them.

By the age of two, children are able to engage in highly elaborate games of symbolic pretense, in which objects and actions in the actual world are taken to stand for objects and actions in a realm of make-believe. These games of pretense are marked by the presence of two central features, which I will call quarantining and mirroring (see also Leslie 1987; Perner 1991). Quarantining is manifest to the extent that events within the pretense-episode are taken to have effects (...) only within that pretense-episode (e.g. the child does not expect that ‘spilling’ ( pretend) ‘tea’1 will result in the table really being wet), or more generally, to the extent that proto-beliefs and proto-attitudes concerning the pretended state of affairs are not treated as beliefs and attitudes relevant to guiding action in the actual world. Mirroring is manifest to the extent that features of the imaginary situation that have not been explicitly stipulated are derivable via features of their real-world analogues (e.g. the child does expect that if she up-ends the teapot above the table, then the table will become wet in the pretense), or, more generally to the extent that imaginative content is taken to be governed by the same sorts of restrictions that govern believed content. (shrink)

Since the outbreak of COVID-19, governments have turned their attention to digital contact tracing. In many countries, public debate has focused on the risks this technology poses to privacy, with advocates and experts sounding alarm bells about surveillance and mission creep reminiscent of the post 9/11 era. Yet, when Apple and Google launched their contact tracing API in April 2020, some of the world’s leading privacy experts applauded this initiative for its privacy-preserving technical specifications. In an interesting twist, the tech (...) giants came to be portrayed as greater champions of privacy than some democratic governments. This article proposes to view the Apple/Google API in terms of a broader phenomenon whereby tech corporations are encroaching into ever new spheres of social life. From this perspective, the advantage these actors have accrued in the sphere of the production of digital goods provides them with access to the spheres of health and medicine, and more worrisome, to the sphere of politics. These sphere transgressions raise numerous risks that are not captured by the focus on privacy harms. Namely, a crowding out of essential spherical expertise, new dependencies on corporate actors for the delivery of essential, public goods, the shaping of public policy by non-representative, private actors and ultimately, the accumulation of decision-making power across multiple spheres. While privacy is certainly an important value, its centrality in the debate on digital contact tracing may blind us to these broader societal harms and unwittingly pave the way for ever more sphere transgressions. (shrink)

I propose that paradigmatic cases of self-deception satisfy the following conditions: (a) the person who is self-deceived about not-P pretends (in the sense of makes-believe or imagines or fantasizes) that not-P is the case, often while believing that P is the case and not believing that not-P is the case; (b) the pretense that not-P largely plays the role normally played by belief in terms of (i) introspective vivacity and (ii) motivation of action in a wide range of circumstances. Understanding (...) self-deception in this way is highly natural. And it provides a non-paradoxical characterization of the phenomenon that explains both its distinctive patterns of instability and its ordinary association with irrationality. Why, then, has this diagnosis been overlooked? I suggest that the oversight is due to a failure to recognize the philosophical significance of a crucial fact about the human mind, namely, the degree to which attitudes other than belief often play a central role in our mental and practical lives, both by "influenc[ing our]... passions and imagination," and by "governing.. .our actions.". (shrink)

The utilitarian conception, which I call “action as production,” holds that action is a way of making use of the world, conceived as a causal mechanism. According to the rational intuitionist conception, which I call “action as assertion,” action is a way of acknowledging the value in the world, conceived as a realm of status. On the Kantian constructivist conception, which I call “action as participation,” action is a way of making the world, qua causal mechanism, come to count as (...) a realm of status. My rather limited aim in this paper is to identify three substantively different answers the question of how action relates an agent to the world, regarded as a context of action. (shrink)

Self-tracking devices point to a future in which individuals will be more involved in the management of their health and will generate data that will benefit clinical decision making and research. They have thus attracted enthusiasm from medical and public health professionals as key players in the move toward participatory and personalized healthcare. Critics, however, have begun to articulate a number of broader societal and ethical concerns regarding self-tracking, foregrounding their disciplining, and disempowering effects. This paper has two aims: first, (...) to analyze some of the key promises and concerns that inform this polarized debate. I argue that far from being solely about health outcomes, this debate is very much about fundamental values that are at stake in the move toward personalized healthcare, namely, the values of autonomy, solidarity, and authenticity. The second aim is to provide a framework within which an alternative approach to self-tracking for health can be developed. I suggest that a practice-based approach, which studies how values are enacted in specific practices, can open the way for a new set of theoretical questions. In the last part of the paper, I sketch out how this can work by describing various enactments of autonomy, solidarity, and authenticity among self-trackers in the Quantified Self community. These examples show that shifting attention to practices can render visible alternative and sometimes unexpected enactments of values. Insofar as these may challenge both the promises and concerns in the debate on self-tracking for health, they can lay the groundwork for new conceptual interventions in future research. (shrink)

Antibiotic resistance poses an urgent public health risk. High rates of ABR have been noted in all regions of the globe by the World Health Organization. ABR develops when bacteria are exposed to antibiotics either during treatments in humans or animals or through environmental sources contaminated with antibiotic residues. Spread beyond those administered antibiotics occurs through direct contact with the infected or colonized person or animal, through contact or ingestion of retail meat or agricultural products contaminated with ABR organisms, or (...) through the environment. ABR bacteria spread from individuals to populations and across countries. (shrink)

The “paradox of fictional emotions” involves a trio of claims that are jointly inconsistent but individually plausible. Resolution of the paradox thus requires that we deny at least one of these plausible claims. The paradox has been formulated in various ways, but for the purposes of this chapter, we will focus on the following three claims, which we will refer to respectively as the Response Condition, the Belief Condition and the Coordination Condition.

A task of any moral theory is to account for both the rigidity and the flexibility of moral rules. Utilitarianism faces the problem of building rigidity into a framework that tends towards objectionable flexibility. Kantianism faces the problem of building flexibility into a framework that tends towards objectionable rigidity. I offer an argument on this front on behalf of Kantians. I show how Kantians can maintain that actions are right and wrong "in themselves," while still maintaining that such actions can (...) be corrupted under certain "nonideal" circumstances. (shrink)

In this paper I defend Kant’s Incorporation Thesis, which holds that we must “incorporate” our incentives into our maxims if we are to act on them. I see this as a thesis about what is necessary for a human being to make the transition from ‘having a desire’ to ‘acting on it’. As such, I consider the widely held view that ‘having a desire’ involves being focused on the world, and not on ourselves or on the desire. I try to (...) show how this view is connected with a denial of any deep distinction between reason and inclination. I then argue for an alternative view of what ‘having a desire’ involves, one according to which it involves being focused both on the world and on ourselves. I show how this view fits naturally with the Kantian distinction between reason and inclination, accounts for independent intuitions about ‘having a desire’, and supports the Incorporation Thesis. I then make some further suggestions about how we might conceive of the object of incorporation. (shrink)

This essay looks at the contemporary just war theory literature on preventive war that has emerged largely in reaction to the US invasion of Iraq. Recent sanctions on Iran and the debate over its nuclear program now suggest the usefulness of a forward looking perspective on preventive strikes, rather than the retroactive analyses offered thus far primarily with reference to Iraq. With Iran closely in mind, I address the various arguments for and against preventive war indicating throughout that the various (...) principled objections to early military action can be overcome in this case. Many of the crucial concrete questions regarding costs and benefits need to be settled in practice, rather than in the realm of political theory. Ultimately, the discussion suggests that Iran is a legitimate candidate for early military action aimed to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons. I argue that in principle, subject to credible intelligence information and requirements of proportionality, a unilateral Israeli strike against Iran will be justifiable, both morally and legally, as self-defense. (shrink)

Taking the case of H. pylori and ulcer, Lynch et al., demonstrate how framing Koch’s postulate by an interventionist account clarifies the latter’s explanatory strength in proportionality with the weaknesses in specificity and stability due to the influence of background conditions. They suggest this approach as an efficient way to bypass the enigma of background conditions and microbial activity in the microbiome’s causal relations. However, it is the background conditions and the microbial interactions in the stomach that determine whether the (...) presence of H. pylori results in an ulcer. I agree with their analysis of the problems and challenges with the microbiome causal explanation but argue that their suggested framework is insufficient without a proper understanding and inclusion of the background conditions and microbial interactions. The reductionist approach fits well within the model of causal explanation that centers on one causal entity. However, such a model is weak in specificity and is too broad because it does not address the factors of microbial activity and background conditions. I argue that for a better causal explanation with explanatory strength in specificity, it is essential to include the background conditions and microbial interactions. Furthermore, I argue that this inclusion changes the framework of the causal relations from looking for the causal entity to looking at the causal process. (shrink)

I introduce and argue for the importance of a cognitive state that I call alief. An alief is, to a reasonable approximation, an innate or habitual propensity to respond to an apparent stimulus in a particular way. Recognizing the role that alief plays in our cognitive repertoire provides a framework for understanding reactions that are governed by nonconscious or automatic mechanisms, which in turn brings into proper relief the role played by reactions that are subject to conscious regulation and deliberate (...) control. (shrink)

Feeling like doing something is not the same as deciding to do it. When you feel like doing something, you are still free to decide to do it or not. You are having an inclination to do it, but you are not thereby determined to do it. I call this the moment of drama. This book is about what you are faced with, in this moment. How should you relate to the inclinations you “have,” given that you are free to (...) “act on” them or not? To answer this question, we need an account of what sort of thing we are relating to, in this moment. But here we find a genuine philosophical problem. Our inclinations are forms of motivation, with respect to which we are distinctively passive. To be motivated is to be self-moved. But how can we be passive in relation to our own self-movement? Is our relation to our inclinations like that of rider to horse? Or is it like our relation to our own, spontaneous judgments or perceptions? I lay out three constraints on any theory of inclination, and I argue that familiar theories fail to meet them, because they make being inclined to φ‎ too similar or dissimilar to φ‎-ing. I then put forward the “inner animal” view, which holds that when you are merely inclined to act, the instinctive part of yourself is already active, while the rest of you is not. In this moment, your will is “at a crossroads.” You can humanize your inclination, or dehumanize yourself. (shrink)

Over the last decade, iterated learning studies have provided compelling evidence for the claim that linguistic structure can emerge from non‐structured input, through the process of transmission. However, it is unclear whether individuals differ in their tendency to add structure, an issue with implications for understanding who are the agents of change. Here, we identify and test two contrasting predictions: The first sees learning as a pre‐requisite for structure addition, and predicts a positive correlation between learning accuracy and structure addition, (...) whereas the second maintains that it is those learners who struggle with learning and reproducing their input who add structure to it. This prediction is hard to test in standard iterated learning paradigms since each learner is exposed to a different input, and since structure and accuracy are computed using the same test items. Here, we test these contrasting predictions in two experiments using a one‐generation artificial language learning paradigm designed to provide independent measures of learning accuracy and structure addition. Adults (N = 48 in each study) were exposed to a semi‐regular language (with probabilistic structure) and had to learn it: Learning was assessed using seen items, whereas structure addition was calculated over unseen items. In both studies, we find a strong positive correlation between individuals' ability to learn the language and their tendency to add structure to it: Better learners also produced more structured languages. These findings suggest a strong link between learning and generalization. We discuss the implications of these findings for iterated language models and theories of language change more generally. (shrink)

The datafication and digitalization of health and medicine has engendered a proliferation of new collaborations between public health institutions and data corporations like Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon. Critical perspectives on these new partnerships tend to frame them as an instance of market transgressions by tech giants into the sphere of health and medicine, in line with a “hostile worlds” doctrine that upholds that the borders between market and non-market spheres should be carefully policed. This article seeks to outline the (...) limitations of this common framing for critically understanding the phenomenon of the Googlization of health. In particular, the mobilization of a diversity of non-market value statements in the justification work carried out by actors involved in the Googlization of health indicates the co-presence of additional worlds or spheres in this context, which are not captured by the market vs. non-market dichotomy. It then advances an alternative framework, based on a multiple-sphere ontology that draws on Boltanski and Thevenot’s orders of worth and Michael Walzer’s theory of justice, which I call a normative pragmatics of justice. This framework addresses both the normative deficit in Boltanski and Thevenot’s work and provides an important emphasis on the empirical workings of justice. Finally, I discuss why this framework is better equipped to identify and to address the many risks raised by the Googlization of health and possibly other dimensions of the digitalization and datafication of society. (shrink)

We used a new method to assess how people can infer unobserved causal structure from patterns of observed events. Participants were taught to draw causal graphs, and then shown a pattern of associations and interventions on a novel causal system. Given minimal training and no feedback, participants in Experiment 1 used causal graph notation to spontaneously draw structures containing one observed cause, one unobserved common cause, and two unobserved independent causes, depending on the pattern of associations and interventions they saw. (...) We replicated these findings with less‐informative training (Experiments 2 and 3) and a new apparatus (Experiment 3) to show that the pattern of data leads to hidden causal inferences across a range of prior constraints on causal knowledge. (shrink)

Societies evolve practices that reflect social norms of appropriateness in social interaction, for example when and to what extent one should respect the boundaries of another person’s private sphere. One such practice is what the sociologist Erving Goffman called civil inattention—the social norm of showing a proper amount of indifference to others—which functions as an almost unnoticed yet highly potent privacy-preserving mechanism. These practices can be disrupted by technologies that afford new forms of intrusions. In this paper, we show how (...) new networked technologies, such as facial recognition, challenge our ability to practice civil inattention. We argue for the need to revitalise, in academic and policy debates, the role of civil inattention and related practices in regulating behaviour in public space. Our analysis highlights the relational nature of privacy and the importance of social norms in accomplishing and preserving it. While our analysis goes some way in supporting current calls to ban FR technology, we also suggest that, pending a ban and in light of the power of norms to limit what is otherwise technically possible, cultivating new practices of civil inattention may help address the challenges raised by FR and other forms of digital surveillance in public. (shrink)

Christine M. Korsgaard has had a profound influence on moral philosophy over the past forty years. Through her writing and teaching she has developed a distinctive, rigorous, and historically informed way of thinking about ethics, agency, and the normative dimension of human life more generally. The twelve original essays in this volume are written in her honor on the occasion of her retirement from teaching. They engage questions that recur in her work: Why are we obligated to do what morality (...) demands? What features of our nature make us subject to moral obligation? What does it mean to be autonomous and responsible for what we do? What do we owe to nonhuman animals? Contributors include Stephen Darwall, Kyla Ebels-Duggan, Barbara Herman, Richard Moran, Japa Pallikkathayil, Faviola Rivera-Castro, T.M. Scanlon, Tamar Schapiro, Sharon Street, David Sussman, Sigrún Svavarsdóttir, and David Velleman. These essays shed light on Korsgaard's own views while staking out provocative new positions on the topics that feature centrally in her own work. (shrink)

This book offers a novel analysis of the widely-used but ill-understood technique of thought experiment. The author argues that the powers and limits of this methodology can be traced to the fact that when the contemplation of an imaginary scenario brings us to new knowledge, it does so by forcing us to make sense of exceptional cases.

The Human Animal is an extended defense of what its author calls the Biological Approach to personal identity: that you and I are human animals, and that the identity conditions under which we endure are those which apply to us as biological organisms. The somewhat surprising corollary of this view is that no sort of psychological continuity is either necessary or sufficient for a human animal—and thus for us—to persist through time. In challenging the hegemony of Psychological Approaches to personal (...) identity, Olson offers a number of inventive and original arguments which are certain to evoke discussion and debate. (shrink)

Both concepts of the holobiont and the immune system are at the heart of an ongoing scientific and philosophical examination concerning questions of the organism’s individuality and identity as well as the relations between organisms and their environment. Examining the holobiont, the question of boundaries and individuality is challenging because it is both an assemblage of organisms with physiological cohesive aspects. I discuss the concept of immunity and the immune system function from the holobiont perspective. Because of the host-microbial close (...) relations of codependence and interdependence, the holobiont is more often than not confused with the host, as the host is the domain in which this entity exists. I discuss the holobiont unique ecological characteristics of microbial assemblages connected to a host in a network of interactions in which the host is one of the organisms in the community but also its landscape. Therefore, I suggest viewing the holobiont as a host-ecosystem and discuss the implication of such a view on the concept of immunity and the meaning of protection. Furthermore, I show that viewing the holobiont as a host ecosystem opens the possibility of using the same ecological definition of boundaries and immunity dealing with an ecological system. Thus, the holobiont’s boundaries and immunity are defined by the persistence of its complex system of interactions integrating existing and new interactions. This way of thinking presents a notion of immunity that materializes as the result of the complex interdependence relations between the different organisms composing the holobiont similar to that of an ecosystem. Taking this view further, I discuss the notion of immunogenicity that is ontologically heterogeneous with various causal explanations of the processes of tolerance and targeted immune response. Finally, I discuss the possible conceptualization of already existing and new biomedical practices. (shrink)

The dual role of microbial communities as either beneficial/functional or harmful/pathogenic involves two issues concerning causality in physiology and medicine, etiology of disease, and the notion of function in biology. Causal explanation formulated by the germ theory of disease and the Koch postulates connects the existence of a specifically identified microbe to disease by the isolation and identification of a pathogen from an organism with the disease and the successful infection of a healthy individual. Similarly, microbiome research in medicine centers (...) on taxonomic composition in correlation with physiological conditions and germ-free mice experimentations to establish causal connections. However, because the microbiome is an ecological community, it lacks the specificity of identification assumed in the germ theory. Furthermore, the ecological aspects within and between microbiomes such as background conditions, microbial interactions, and interdependence, are treated as confounding. Looking at ecological studies, the causal explanations are less specific regarding complex systems with their processes of interactions. This article makes the following two points: One is that microbiome causality in the host should be understood similarly to the microbiome causality in an ecosystem. The second is that if considering a microbiome’s causality in the host as an ecosystem, its etiological explanation needs to be revisited to include a heterogeneous and mutual notion of interactions. Finally, according to the second point, the notion of function in ecology with its relevant notion of causality should be considered accordingly. (shrink)