Michel de Montaigne trug über Jahrzehnte in den historischen Kalender "Ephemeris historica" (Paris 1551) des protestantischen Gelehrten Michael Beuther handschriftliche Notizen ein. Der Kalender ist Teil der im 16. Jahrhundert florierenden Praxis der reformatorischen Memorialkultur, zu deren bedeutenden Vertretern Philipp Melanchthon und Paul Eber gehören. Solche Jahresverzeichnisse waren immer nach dem gleichen Prinzip angelegt: Der Benutzer der "Ephemeris historica" fand in der Regel auf jeder Seite des Kalenders für diesen Tag erinnerungswürdige biblische oder historische Ereignisse im Druck aufgeführt, der frei (...) gebliebene Raum lud zum Einfügen eigener Beobachtungen ein. Die in dieser Weise als Merkbüchlein verwendete "Ephemeris" mutierte so unter medialen Gesichtspunkten zu einem Mischtext zwischen Druck und Handschrift. Indem Montaigne Lebenswendepunkte aus dem privaten Umfeld und politische Geschehnisse von grosser Bedeutung notiert, wird der Kalender zu einem faszinierenden Gedächtnis-Reservoir, mit den Worten Montaignes: zu einem "magasin de la memoire. (shrink)

The progress of electronic health technologies and biobanks holds enormous promise for efficient research. Evidence shows that studies based on sharing and secondary use of data/samples have the potential to significantly advance medical knowledge. However, sharing of such resources for international collaboration is hampered by the lack of clarity about ethical and legal requirements for transfer of data and samples across international borders. Here, the International Clinical Trial Center Network reports the legal and ethical requirements governing data and sample exchange (...) across four continents. The most recurring requirement is ethical approval, whereas only in specific conditions approval of national health authorities is required. Informed consent is not required in all sharing situations. However, waiver of informed consent is only allowed in certain countries/regions and under certain circumstances. The current legal and ethical landscape appears to be very complex and under constant evolution. Regulations differ between countries/regions and are often incomplete, leading to uncertainty. With this work, ICN illuminates the unmet need for a single international collaborative framework to facilitate DSE. Harmonising requirements for global DSE will reduce inefficiency and waste in research. There are many challenges to realising this ambitious vision, including inconsistent terminology and definitions, and heterogeneous and dynamic legal constraints. Here, we identify areas of agreement and significant difference as a necessary first step towards facilitating international collaboration. We propose the establishment of a working group to continue the comparison across jurisdictions, create a standardised glossary and define a set of basic principles and fundamental requirements for DSE. (shrink)

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Precision testing of the quantum electrodynamics (QED) and the standard model provides some of the most secure knowledge in the history of physics. These tests can also be used to constrain and search for new physics going beyond the standard model. We examine the evidential structure of relationships between theoretical predictions from QED, precision measurements of these phenomena, and the indirect determination of the fine structure constant. We argue that "pure QED" is no longer sufficient to predict the electron's anomalous (...) magnetic moment, and that standard model effects are needed. The details relevant to low-energy QED are robust against future theory change. (shrink)

We study the lattice of extensions of four-valued Belnap–Dunn logic, called super-Belnap logics by analogy with superintuitionistic logics. We describe the global structure of this lattice by splitting it into several subintervals, and prove some new completeness theorems for super-Belnap logics. The crucial technical tool for this purpose will be the so-called antiaxiomatic (or explosive) part operator. The antiaxiomatic (or explosive) extensions of Belnap–Dunn logic turn out to be of particular interest owing to their connection to graph theory: the lattice (...) of finitary antiaxiomatic extensions of Belnap–Dunn logic is isomorphic to the lattice of upsets in the homomorphism order on finite graphs (with loops allowed). In particular, there is a continuum of finitary super-Belnap logics. Moreover, a non-finitary super-Belnap logic can be constructed with the help of this isomorphism. As algebraic corollaries we obtain the existence of a continuum of antivarieties of De Morgan algebras and the existence of a prevariety of De Morgan algebras which is not a quasivariety. (shrink)

In this paper I formulate Minimal Requirements for Candidate Predictions in quantum field theories, inspired by viewing the standard model as an effective field theory. I then survey standard effective field theory regularization procedures, to see if the vacuum expectation value of energy density ) is a quantity that meets these requirements. The verdict is negative, leading to the conclusion that \ is not a physically significant quantity in the standard model. Rigorous extensions of flat space quantum field theory eliminate (...) \ from their conceptual framework, indicating that it lacks physical significance in the framework of quantum field theory more broadly. This result has consequences for problems in cosmology and quantum gravity, as it suggests that the correct solution to the cosmological constant problem involves a revision of the vacuum concept within quantum field theory. (shrink)

We show that one can solve Post's Problem by constructing generic sets in the usual set theoretic framework applied to tiny universes. This method leads to a new class of recursively enumerable sets: r.e. generic sets. All r.e. generic sets are low and simple and therefore of Turing degree strictly between 0 and 0'. Further they supply the first example of a class of low recursively enumerable sets which are automorphic in the lattice E of recursively enumerable sets with inclusion. (...) We introduce the notion of a promptly simple set. This describes the essential feature of r.e. generic sets with respect to automorphism constructions. (shrink)

Wittgenstein read and admired the work of John Henry Newman. Evidence suggests that from 1946 until 1951 Newman's Grammar of Assent was probably the single most important external stimulus for Wittgenstein's thought. In important respects Wittgenstein's reactions to G. E. Moore follow hints already given by Newman.

Andy Egan has recently presented a prominent objection to causal decision theory. However, in this paper, I argue that this objection fails if CDT’s proponent accepts the plausible view that decision-theoretic options are intentions. This result both provides a defence of CDT against a prominent objection and highlights the importance of resolving the nature of decision-theoretic options.

We show that if among the tested hypotheses the number of true hypotheses is not equal to the number of false hypotheses, then Neyman-Pearson theory of testing hypotheses does not warrant minimal epistemic reliability (the feature of driving to true conclusions more often than to false ones). We also argue that N-P does not protect from the possible negative effects of the pragmatic value-laden unequal setting of error probabilities on N-P’s epistemic reliability. Most importantly, we argue that in the case (...) of a negative impact no methodological adjustment is available to neutralize it, so in such cases the discussed pragmatic-value-ladenness of N-P inevitably compromises the goal of attaining truth. (shrink)

In On the People’s Terms, Philip Pettit incorporates the Sieyèsian notion of constituent power into his constitutional theory of non-domination. In this article, I argue that Emmanuel Sieyès’s understanding of liberty precludes such an appropriation. While a republican, his conceptualisation of liberty in the face of commercial society stood apart from theories of civic vigilance, preferring instead to disentangle individuals from politics and maximise what he understood to be their non-political freedoms. Sieyès saw that liberty was heightened through relations of (...) representation and commercial dependency. This conception of liberty was pivotal to the identity of the nation, and so allowed Sieyès to assess forms of collective injustice committed by the French nobility. It also provided the normative foundation of his theory of constituent power. For Sieyès, constituent power guarded against legislative excess in a decidedly minimal sense, intending instead to separate citizens from the political sphere so they were not burdened with ongoing participation or public vigilance. (shrink)

The paper argues that Gareth Evans’ argument for transparent self-knowledge is based on a conflation of doxastic transparency with ascriptive transparency. Doxastic transparency means that belief about one’s own doxastic state, e.g., the belief that one thinks that it will rain, can be warranted by ordinary empirical observation, e.g., of the weather. In contrast, ascriptive transparency says that self-ascriptions of belief, e.g., “I believe it will rain”, can be warranted by such observation. We first show that the thesis of doxastic (...) transparency is ill-motivated and then offer a non-epistemic interpretation of ascriptive transparency by reference to the theory of explicit expressive acts: “I think it will rain” requires attendance to the weather because the utterance expresses a belief about the weather, not about ourselves. This will allow us to avoid what is often called “the puzzle of transparent self-knowledge” while remaining faithful to Evans’ linguistic observations. (shrink)

Industrial drug design methodology has undergone remarkable changes in the recent history. Up to the 1970s, the screening of large numbers of randomly selected substances in biological test system was often a crucial step in the development of novel drugs. From the early 1980s, such ‘blind’ screening was increasingly rejected by many pharmaceutical researchers and gave way to ‘rational drug design’, a method that grounds the design of new drugs on a detailed mechanistic understanding of the drug action. Surprisingly, however, (...) the chance-based method of random screening returned to center stage of industrial drug development in the 1990s in the form of ‘high-throughput screening’ (HTS). I will argue in this paper that this to-and-fro in the prominence of random screening comes with fundamental changes in the epistemic significance of chance experiments in pharmaceutical development. While up to the 1970s, random screening used to be chosen as an empirical search strategy primarily because suffi- cient knowledge of the mechanistic basis of drug action was lacking, it has turned with high-throughput screening into an experimental method that employs chance variation and testing to illuminate this mechanistic basis. As a consequence, research into the underlying mechanisms of drug action and the development of new drugs have become closely integrated. The rise of HTS therefore not only shows how chance experiments have assumed a new epistemic role in drug development. It also allows for a detailed study of the much debated emergence of a new relationship between scientific understanding and the development of technological artifacts. (shrink)

This paper is the most complete presentation of my views on deterministic causation. It develops the deterministic theory in perfect parallel to my theory of probabilistic causation and thus unites the two aspects. It also argues that the theory presented is superior to all regularity and all counterfactual theories of causation.

Answering in negative a question of M. Hrušák, we construct a Borel ideal not extendable to any \(F_\sigma \) ideal and such that it is not Katětov above the ideal \(\mathrm {conv}\).

Drones deployed to monitor endangered species often crash. These crashes teach us that using drones for conservation is a contingent practice ensnaring humans, technologies, and animals. This article advances a crash theory in which pilots, conservation drones, and endangered megafauna are relata, or related actants, that intra-act, cocreating each other and a mutually constituted phenomena. These phenomena are entangled, with either reciprocal dependencies or erosive entrapments. The crashing of conservation drones and endangered species requires an ethics of care, repair, or (...) reworlding. Diffractions, disruptions that expose difference, result from crashes and reveal the precarious manner by which technologies, laws, and discourses bring nature and culture together. To support crash theory, this article presents three ethnographic cases. A drone crash in the United Kingdom near white rhinoceroses while building machine learning training data exhibits the involvement of the electromagnetic spectrum; the threat of crashes in the Pacific Northwest near Puget Sound orcas discloses the impacts of drone laws; and drone crashes in Sri Lanka among Asian elephants presents the problems of technoliberal ideals around programming natural worlds. Throughout the article, a methodology is developed, parallelism, which attends to the material similarities in lateral phenomena. (shrink)

This article seeks to challenge the regnant liberal orthodoxy that human rights are the highest and most important of our social virtues. It questions the individualist assumptions of such universa...

ABSTRACTIs offering hazard pay ethically permissible when the pay premium is the only reason that a dangerous job is accepted? Robert C. Hughes argues that it is not. Central to his argument is the claim that in such cases, workers intend the foreseeable risks of harm as a means to the pay premium. Herein I question the plausibility of this claim and then develop a conception of the concept of means sufficient to make it plausible. By so doing, I provide (...) support for Hughes’s stringent position. (shrink)

The paper aims at an analysis of the concept of landscape, offering an ontological approach. Our claim is that such a perspective is hardly ever assumed in philosophical aesthetics, even if theories of landscape appreciation are in fact based on tacit ontological assumptions. We argue that having an explicit ontology of landscapes is important, for aesthetic theories of their appreciation are often attacked in terms of the problems caused by their tacit ontologies. Therefore, we sketch an “Experience Ontology” that serves (...) as an alternative to the ontologies implied in the two best known aesthetic approaches to landscapes. We contend that a landscape should not be conceived of as an object or view but as a way of experiencing one’s surroundings, and we argue that our theory is not only free from the shortcomings of the two dominant theories but that it also corresponds better to everyday intuitions. (shrink)

This book addresses controversies concerning the epistemological foundations of data science: Is it a genuine science? Or is data science merely some inferior practice that can at best contribute to the scientific enterprise, but cannot stand on its own? The author proposes a coherent conceptual framework with which these questions can be rigorously addressed. Readers will discover a defense of inductivism and consideration of the arguments against it: an epistemology of data science more or less by definition has to be (...) inductivist, given that data science starts with the data. As an alternative to enumerative approaches, the author endorses Federica Russo’s recent call for a variational rationale in inductive methodology. Chapters then address some of the key concepts of an inductivist methodology including causation, probability and analogy, before outlining an inductivist framework. The inductivist framework is shown to be adequate and useful for an analysis of the epistemological foundations of data science. The author points out that many aspects of the variational rationale are present in algorithms commonly used in data science. Introductions to algorithms and brief case studies of successful data science such as machine translation are included. Data science is located with reference to several crucial distinctions regarding different kinds of scientific practices, including between exploratory and theory-driven experimentation, and between phenomenological and theoretical science. Computer scientists, philosophers and data scientists of various disciplines will find this philosophical perspective and conceptual framework of great interest, especially as a starting point for further in-depth analysis of algorithms used in data science. (shrink)

Donnellan makes a convincing case for two distinct uses ofdefinite descriptions. But does the difference between the usesreflects an ambiguity in the semantics of descriptions? This paperapplies a linguistic test for ambiguity to argue that the differencebetween the uses is not semantically significant.

In his contribution to this special issue, Almaas is keen to distinguish the individual streams of consciousness from 'pure awareness'. Since the existence of the former is presumably quite uncontroversial in present-day philosophy, I wish to concentrate on the latter, in particular on Almaas's claim that pure awareness is non-individual and ultimately it is 'the true owner of all experiences of all streams'. In my contribution, I wish to make plausible, by a philosophical reflection on the puzzling nature of the (...) I, that the ultimate subject of experience is indeed not the individual but 'the pure ego of the universe'. (shrink)