Nudges have been criticized for working ‘in the dark’, influencing people without their full awareness. To assess whether this property renders nudging an illegitimate policy tool in liberal democracies, we argue that in scrutinizing nudge transparency, we should adequately divide our focus between nudging techniques, the nudgers employing them, and the nudgees subjected to them. We develop an account of what it means for nudgees to be ‘watchful’, a disposition that enables them to resist and circumvent nudges. We argue that (...) such ‘watchfulness’ should be cultivated if we want to implement nudges in legitimate, accountable, and democratic ways. (shrink)

Interview of Illia Davidenko, Kateryna Kruhlyk, Daria Popil with Viktor Kozlovskyi.

Interview of Illia Davidenko, Kateryna Kruhlyk, Daria Popil with Viktor Kozlovskyi.

Available for the first time in English, this work explores a range of mental disorders in the context of Frankl's theory of human motivation. Skillfully translated and featuring extensive annotation, this English language edition remains true to the original while updating assessment and treatment protocols to be compatible with 21st century medicine. As the title suggests, On the Theory and Therapy of Mental Disorders applies a theoretical treatise to the practical treatment of variety of disorders. This long-awaited addition to the (...) body of English language literature introduces Viktor Frankl's clinical insights to a new generation of mental health professionals, and has much to offer to practitioners of all levels of experience. (shrink)

Interview of Illia Davidenko, Kateryna Kruhlyk, Daria Popil with Viktor Kozlovskyi.

In this article, we distinguish between three approaches to ethics in school, each giving an interpretation of the expression ‘ethics in school’: the descriptive facts about ethics approach, roughly consisting of teaching empirical facts about moral matters to students; the moral fostering approach, consisting of mediating a set of given values to students; and the philosophical ethics (PE) approach, consisting of critically discussing and evaluating moral issues with students. Thereafter, three influential arguments for why there ought to be ethics in (...) school are discussed, and each argument is interpreted given each approach to ethics in school, respectively. Thereby, we evaluate which interpretation of ‘ethics in school’ produces the strongest arguments, and thus, which approach is best supported by these arguments. The conclusion is that there ought to be PE in school. (shrink)

The paper points to gaps in the conceptualization of bullshit as offered by Harry Frankfurt and Jerry Cohen. I argue that one type of bullshit, obscurantism, the deliberate exercise of making one’s text opaque for the purposes of deceiving the readership in various ways, escapes Frankfurt’s radar in tracking those judgments that are unconcerned with truth, and is not given distinct status in Cohen’s framework, which pays more attention to the product of bullshit than its producers and their techniques. First, (...) I offer on overview of the expanding literature on bullshit, with special attention given to accounts by Frankfurt and Cohen. I claim that Frankfurt’s essentialism and Cohen’s product-oriented account are not successful in exhausting our common understanding of what bullshit entails, neither separately, nor in conjunction. In particular, I claim that obscurantist bullshit pushes the envelope of the current conceptual frameworks. Second, following Boudry’s and Buekens’s work on obscurantism, I discuss the usual mechanisms utilized by obscurantists. Third, I reflect on an objection to my argument based on tweaking the permissibility for producing obscurantism by placing the production of obscurities into different contexts of writing style. I argue that there is an important normative difference between being an obscurantist and someone who merely writes obscurely, and that the distinction should bear weight regardless of constraining our capacities to tell between the two. I finish by discussing whether our understanding of obscurantist bullshit aids us in following a principle of clarity. (shrink)

Behavioural techniques or ‘nudges’ can be used for various purposes. In this paper, we shift the focus from government nudges to nudges used by for-profit market agents. We argue that potential worries about nudges circumventing the deliberative capacities or diminishing the control of targeted agents are greater when it comes to market nudges, given that these (1) are not constrained by the principles that regulate government nudges (mildness, sensitivity to people’s interests and public justifiability) and (2) are often ‘stacked’ – (...) they come in great numbers that overwhelm agents. In addition, we respond to possible objections and derive several policy suggestions. (shrink)

We present results from a single case study based on semi-structured interviews with a student (a boy in school year 3) diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder and his school staff after participating in a short and small-scale intervention carried out in a socio-economically disadvantaged Swedish elementary school in 2019. The student participated in a seven week long intervention with a total of 12 philosophical dialogues (ranging from 45 to 60 minutes). Two facilitators, both with years of facilitation experience and teacher (...) degree and at least BA in philosophy, facilitated the majority of the dialogues and mainly followed a ”routine” procedure. The student was interviewed in direct connection to the end of the intervention about his experiences from the dialogues and his perceptions about whether and how the dialogues had influenced him. The student’s two teachers, who had participated in the dialogues as participants, were interviewed as a pair, also in direct connection to the end of the intervention, while the school principal was interviewed two years after the study. These staff interviews concerned the staff’s experiences of the influence of the dialogues on the students within the intervention as well as transfer effects to other contexts in school. The data from the study include detailed elaborations from a student perspective of different effects on the student’s communicative and cognitive development, which are in several respects supported also by staff reports. The results show that the student was able, interested, and willing to participate in philosophical dialogues, and our data point to several positive outcomes for the student in the communicative and cognitive domains. (shrink)

Dr. Viktor Dörfler combines his background in developing and implementing AI with scholarly research on knowledge and cultivating talent to address misconceptions about AI. The Element explains what AI can and cannot do, carefully delineating facts from beliefs or wishful thinking. Filled with examples, this practical Element is thought-provoking. The purpose is to help CEOs figure out how to make the best use of AI, suggesting how to extract AI’s greatest value through appropriate task allocation between human experts and (...) AI. The author challenges the attribution of characteristics like understanding, thinking, and creativity to AI, supporting his argument with the ideas of the finest AI philosophers. He also discusses in depth one of the most sensitive AI-related topics: ethics. The readers are encouraged to make up their own minds about AI and draw their own conclusions rather than accepting opinions from people with vested interests or an agenda. (shrink)

Ethics is of vital importance to the Swedish educational system, as in many other educational systems around the world.Yet, it is unclear how ethics should be dealt with in school, and prior research and evaluations have found serious problems regarding ethics in education.The field of moral education lacks clear and widely accepted definitions of key concepts, and these ambiguities negatively impact both research and educational practice. This thesis draws a distinction between three approaches to ethics in school – the descriptive (...) ethics approach, the value transmission approach, and the inquiry ethics approach – and studies in what way (if at all) they are prescribed by the national curriculum for the Swedish compulsory school, how they relate to students’ moral reasoning about technology choices and online behaviour, and what pedagogical merits and disadvantages they have. Hopefully, this both contributes to reducing the ambiguities of the field, and to answering the question of how ethics should be dealt with in education. The descriptive ethics approach asserts that school should teach students empirical facts about ethics, such as what views and opinions people have. The value transmission approach holds that school should mediate some set of predefined values to the students and make sure the students come to accept these values.The inquiry ethics approach is the view that school should teach students to reason and think critically about ethics and to engage in ethical inquiry. The role of ethics in the curriculum has not been studied in light of the above distinction, in prior research,and such an investigation is undertaken here.The results suggest that ethics has a prominent, but complicated, role in the Swedish national curriculum. Although no explicit distinction is drawn or acknowledged in the curriculum, all three approaches are prescribed throughout the curriculum, albeit to different degrees. In the general section of the curriculum, the value transmission and inquiry ethics approaches are more extensively prescribed than the descriptive ethics approach. It was found that most of the syllabi contained explicit references to ethics, while some only contained implicit references to ethics, and two syllabi lacked references to ethics altogether. In the syllabi, the inquiry ethics approach is the most dominant, both in the sense of being present in the most syllabi, and in the sense of being more strongly prescribed in many of the syllabi where several approaches occur.The value transmission approach has the weakest role in the syllabi. In total, the inquiry ethics approach is the approach most strongly prescribed by the curriculum. But prior research has shown that inquiry ethics is very rarely implemented in the classroom. In this thesis, it is found that the inquiry ethics and the value transmission approaches are incompatible, given certain reasonable interpretations, which makes the finding that inquiry ethics is rarely implemented less surprising, since value transmission is practiced in schools. Some possible causes, and some consequences, of this is discussed. The students, in their moral reasoning about technology choices, reasoned in accordance with several classical normative theories – including consequentialism, deontological ethics and virtue ethics – and in doing so, they expressed reasoning that in the discussion is found to be in conflict with the values of the value foundation in the curriculum. These findings complement earlier findings, for example that students in their actions contradict the value foundation, by adding that such conflicts also exist in their reasoning. The existence of these conflicts is found to be problematic for a value transmission approach. Many of the students defended very restrictive views on disclosing personal information online, and prior research as well as the present data has shown that adults typically hold views that are very similar to these, concerning how they think that young people ought to act online. On the other hand, youths’ actual online behaviour, as reported in earlier studies, differs considerably from this. In line with this, the students also seemed to endorse a form of private morals view, according to which moral choices are simply up to one’s own taste, which would yield an escape exit from the restrictive views mentioned above, and permit any behaviour. In the discussion, it is argued that this is the result of an attempt at value transmission from the grown-up community, probably including teachers, which might seem to work, since the students claim to hold certain views, but which likely instead constitutes a false security, since these values are not actually accepted, but only paid lip service to, and the adults are therefore wrong in their belief that the students are protected by a certain set of values (that they think the students are upholding), since the students in fact do not uphold, and therefore do not act based upon, these values. This situation risks making the students more vulnerable than had no value transmission attempt been taken in the first place. Hence, the attempted value transmission runs the risk of counteracting its purpose of helping the students acquire a safe online behaviour. Throughout the moral reasoning mentioned above, extensive variations in the students’ reasoning were found, both interpersonally and intrapersonally, both in the decision method and in the rightness criterion dimensions, as well as in between the dimensions.The existence of such variations is a novel finding, and while possible applications in future research are discussed, it is also noted that this existence constitutes a reason to question the successfulness of both the value transmission and the inquiry ethics endeavours of the educational system. The results and discussions described above highlight the importance of investigating the merits of the different approaches. Several arguments that arise from the material of this thesis are presented, evaluated and discussed. The ability of each approach to fulfil some alleged key aims of ethics education is scrutinised; their abilities to educate for good citizenship, to educate for quality of life of the individual, and to facilitate better educational results in other subjects are all investigated, as well as the ability of each approach to help counteract the influence from online extremist propaganda aimed at young people and to promote safe online behaviour in general. It is concluded that the inquiry ethics approach has the strongest support from the material of this thesis. Some consequences for school practice are discussed, and it is concluded that changing the role of ethics in the curriculum would be beneficial, downplaying the role of value transmission and further increasing, and making more explicit and clear, the role of inquiry ethics. It is also shown that there are strong reasons for the inclusion of a new subject in the Swedish compulsory education with special focus on ethics. (shrink)

Sociological theories of space have so far not provided an in-depth analysis of online spaces. The paper addresses this issue by means of Löw’s relational theory of space. As this theory mainly focuses on material spaces, it is necessary to embrace the phenomenological perspective in order to apply it to the virtual realm. More recent phenomenological research has highlighted the ongoing mediatization or virtualization of the life-world. These theories, and presence research more generally, are useful for examining the layers of (...) virtual presence. This paper focuses on two emblematic types of spaces: multiplayer online role-playing games and Skype video chats. The first represents an online version of a Schutzian finite province of meaning, while Skyping is an example of how the paramount reality of everyday life expands into the virtual realm. Albeit differently, actors in both cases constitute hybrid, virtual-material spaces with various forms and degrees of virtual presence. User experiences in these spaces are in line with contemporary sociological diagnoses indicating the vanishing experience of living in space and the general tendency of late modernity to question previous social forms of modernity. (shrink)

Education for participation – Philosophizing back a "new" life after acquired brain injury.

У статті зроблена спроба привернути увагу фахівців до такого напряму економіки й розваг, як гральний бізнес. Описано розвиток i стан цього бізнесу в США, Росiйськiй Федерацiї й Українi. Наголошено на перспективності розвитку грального бізнесу в Україні.

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

Journal Name: Apeiron Issue: Ahead of print.

Seyla Benhabib vermag es mithilfe ihres Konzepts der „demokratischen Iteration“ das Prinzip der Volkssouveränität mit den moralischen Ansprüchen von Migrierenden auf Augenhöhe zu vermitteln. Dies gelingt ihr, weil sie „demokratische Iterationen“ als diskursive Aushandlungsprozesse unter Bedingungen der Öffentlichkeit versteht. Der Begriff der Öffentlichkeit bezeichnet, wohl verstanden, nämlich einen konstitutiv offenen Kommunikationsraum, in dem sich die diskursive Klärung des demokratischen „Wir“ immer schon unter prinzipiellem Einbezug „des Anderen“ vollzieht. Bereits John Dewey, Hannah Arendt und Jürgen Habermas haben diese konstitutive Offenheit der (...) Öffentlichkeit herausgestellt und damit die migrationsgesellschaftliche Struktur des Begriffs der Öffentlichkeit theoretisch entfaltet. Angesichts gegenwärtiger Abschottungsversuche westlicher Demokratien gegenüber Migrationsbewegungen stellt sich allerdings die Frage, ob der Begriff der Öffentlichkeit mehr darstellt, als ein normatives Ideal, das realen Tendenzen einer anti-migrantischen Abschließung politischer Kommunikationsräume bloß ohnmächtig gegenübersteht. Dieser Aufsatz argumentiert, dass dem nicht so ist: Dem Begriff der Öffentlichkeit lässt sich auch als einer Idee im Sinne Hegels habhaft werden. Er lässt sich als eine Logik der Öffnung rekonstruieren, die sich aufgrund einer immanenten Nötigung der Praxis selbst aufdrängt und nur durch eine destruktive Spirale aus Widerstand, Repression, Regression und Nihilismus unterdrückt werden kann. Ich werde auf dem Wege einer sozialphilosophischen Integration kommunikationstheoretischer und radikaldemokratischer Erkenntnisse abschließend zeigen, dass migrantische oder postmigrantische „Gegenöffentlichkeiten“ diese immanente Nötigung hervorrufen. Die Nötigung objektiviert sich wiederum daran, dass der fortgesetzte Ausschluss von „Gegenöffentlichkeiten“ zu einer krisenhaften Struktur „systematisch verzerrter Kommunikation“ führt. (shrink)

The geometrical algebra hypothesis was once the received interpretation of Greek mathematics. In recent decades, however, it has become anathema to many. I give a critical review of all arguments against it and offer a consistent rebuttal case against the modern consensus. Consequently, I find that the geometrical algebra interpretation should be reinstated as a viable historical hypothesis.

First published in 1984. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.