This article demonstrates the ways in which Goldenberg raises questions of the body, transcendence and epistemology and shows how they are all ultimately questions to do with authority. The author examines the source of authority, asks how it is ascertained and what it promises. The article outlines how these become complex questions when a female figure is projected as paradigmatic for example, Fatimah.

In this research work a novel two-step system for anomaly detection is presented and tested over several real datasets. In the first step the novel Exploratory Projection Pursuit, Beta Hebbian Learning algorithm, is applied over each dataset, either to reduce the dimensionality of the original dataset or to face nonlinear datasets by generating a new subspace of the original dataset with lower, or even higher, dimensionality selecting the right activation function. Finally, in the second step Principal Component Analysis anomaly detection (...) is applied to the new subspace to detect the anomalies and improve its classification capabilities. This new approach has been tested over several different real datasets, in terms of number of variables, number of samples and number of anomalies. In almost all cases, the novel approach obtained better results in terms of area under the curve with similar standard deviation values. In case of computational cost, this improvement is only remarkable when complexity of the dataset in terms of number of variables is high. (shrink)

This article outlines what a formal theory of truth should be like, at least at first glance. As not all of the stated constraints can be satisfied at the same time, in view of notorious semantic paradoxes such as the Liar paradox, we consider the maximal consistent combinations of these desiderata and compare their relative advantages and disadvantages.

In discussions about whether the Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles is compatible with structuralist ontologies of mathematics, it is usually assumed that individual objects are subject to criteria of identity which somehow account for the identity of the individuals. Much of this debate concerns structures that admit of non-trivial automorphisms. We consider cases from graph theory that violate even weak formulations of PII. We argue that (i) the identity or difference of places in a structure is not to be (...) accounted for by anything other than the structure itself and that (ii) mathematical practice provides evidence for this view. We want to thank Leon Horsten, Jeff Ketland, Øystein Linnebo, John Mayberry, Richard Pettigrew, and Philip Welch for valuable comments on drafts of this paper. We are especially grateful to Fraser MacBride for correcting our interpretation of two of his papers and for other helpful comments. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

BackgroundThe COVID-19 pandemic introduced new challenges to provide care and educate junior doctors (resident physicians). We sought to understand the positive and negative experiences of first-year resident physicians and describe potential ethical issues from their stories.MethodWe used narrative inquiry (NI) methodology and applied a semistructured interview guide with questions pertaining to ethical principles and both positive and negative aspects of the pandemic. Sampling was purposive. Interviews were audio recorded and transcribed. Three members of the research team coded transcripts in duplicate (...) to elicit themes. Discrepancies were resolved through discussion to attain consensus. A composite story with threads was constructed.Results11 residents participated across several programmes. Three main themes emerged from the participants’ stories: (1) complexities in navigating intersecting healthcare and medical education systems, (2) balancing public health and the public good versus the individual and (3) fair health systems planning/healthcare delivery. Within these themes, participants’ journeys through the first wave were elicited through the threads of (1) engage us, (2) because we see the need for the duty to treat and (3) we are all in this together.DiscussionCases of the ethical issues that took place during the COVID-19 pandemic may serve as a foundation on which ethics teaching and future pandemic planning can take place. Principles of clinical ethics and their limitations, when applied to public health issues, could help in contrasting clinical ethics with public health ethics.ConclusionEfforts to understand how resident physicians can navigate public health emergencies along with the ethical issues that arise could benefit both residency education and healthcare systems. (shrink)

This paper contributes to debates over algorithmic discrimination with particular attention to structural theories of racism and the problem of “proxy discrimination”—discriminatory effects that arise even when an algorithm has no information about socially sensitive characteristics such as race. Structural theories emphasize the ways that unequal power structures contribute to the subordination of marginalized groups: these theories thus understand racism in ways that go beyond individual choices and bad intentions. Our question is, how should a structural understanding of racism and (...) oppression inform our understanding of algorithmic discrimination and its associated norms? Some responses to the problem of proxy discrimination focus on fairness as a form of “parity,” aiming to equalize metrics between individuals or groups—looking, for example, for equal rates of accurate and inaccurate predictions between one group and another. We argue that from the perspective of structural theories, fairness-as-parity is inapt in the algorithmic context; instead, we should be considering social impact—whether a use of an algorithm perpetuates or mitigates existing social stratification. Our contribution thus offers a new understanding of what algorithmic racial discrimination is. (shrink)

Bankers have a reputation for deviating from standard morals. It is an open question, though, if this claim can be substantiated. Here, it is tested directly if bankers respond differently to moral dilemmas. Evaluations of the moral acceptableness of behavioural options in two trolley cases by bankers (n = 23) are compared to those of ordinary people (n = 274). An apparent difference in response behaviour between the groups can be fully explained by a difference in the response behaviour of (...) men and women. When controlling for gender, no differences between bankers and other people remain. (shrink)

Brain Organoids in their current state of development are patentable. Future brain organoids may face some challenges in this regard, which I address in this contribution. Brain organoids unproblematically fulfil the general prerequisites of patentability set forth in Art. 3 (1) EU-Directive 98/44/ec (invention, novelty, inventive step and susceptibility of industrial application). Patentability is excluded if an invention makes use of human embryos or constitutes a stage of the human body in the individual phases of its formation and development. Both (...) do not apply to brain organoids, unless ES-cells are used. Art. 6 (1) EU-Directive 98/44/ec excludes patentability for inventions “the commercial exploitation of which would be contrary to ordre public or morality”. While there is no conceivable scenario, in which the commercial application of current brain organoids violates the ordre public, the same is not necessarily true for future brain organoids. Keeping in mind that a development of consciousness-like abilities in future brain organoids cannot be excluded and that an ability for both physical and psychological suffering has been theorized, both of which are aspects of the ordre public, certain applications of future brain organoids may constitute a violation of the ordre public and therefore lead to an exclusion of patentability. (shrink)

It is a commonly raised argument against the family resemblance account of concepts that there is no limit to a concept's extension. An account of family resemblance which attempts to provide a solution to this problem by including both similarity among instances and dissimilarity to non-instances has been developed by the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn. Similar solutions have been hinted at in the literature on family resemblance concepts, but the solution has never received a detailed investigation. I shall provide (...) a reconstruction of Kuhn's theory and argue that his solution necessitates a developmental perspective wchich builds on both the transmission of taxonomies between generations and a progressive development through history. (shrink)

This papers deals with the class of axiomatic theories of truth for semantically closed languages, where the theories do not allow for standard models; i.e., those theories cannot be interpreted as referring to the natural number codes of sentences only (for an overview of axiomatic theories of truth in general, see Halbach[6]). We are going to give new proofs for two well-known results in this area, and we also prove a new theorem on the nonstandardness of a certain theory of (...) truth. The results indicate that the proof strategies for all the theorems on the nonstandardness of such theories are "essentially" of the same kind of structure. (shrink)

El debate en torno a Aristipo de Cirene, cuya concepción de la felicidad coloca en el centro de la escena al placer, pone en tela de juicio las afirmaciones propias de aquellas éticas nucleadas bajo el epíteto de eudemonistas. Con el desplazamiento de la felicidad del sitial del fin, Aristipo reformula la dimensión ética tradicional: a través del ejercicio de la enkráteia, y lejos de caer en un relativismo subjetivista, intenta construir una ética que tenga como base un objetivismo gnoseológico. (...) Demostraremos, además, que al ejercicio de la enkráteia cirenaica subyace la noción de autosuficiencia (autárkeia) -entendida en términos aristotélicos- del individuo. Esto nos enfrentará, irremediablemente, a la noción aristotélica de felicidad (en estrecho vínculo con la noción de enkráteia), la cual no comporta una noción de autosuficiencia individual sino que restringe la posibilidad de la autárkeia a la autosuficiencia de la pólis. The debates on Aristippus of Cyrene, whose happiness' conception puts pleasure in the center of the scene, questions the claims of those ethical nucleated under the epithet "eudemonists". Through the shift of happiness from the shrine of the goal, Aristippus reformulates the traditional ethical dimension: by the enkráteia's exercising -and far from falling into a subjective relativism- he tries to build an ethic based on an epistemological objectivity. We are going to demonstrate also that the self-sufficiency concept (autárkeia) -speaking in Aristotelian terms- of individual underlies the exercise of Cyrenaic enkráteia. It will face us inevitably to the Aristotelian concept of happiness (in close connection with the enkráteia's concept), which doesn't involve a notion of individual self-sufficiency, but rather it restricts the possibility of autárkeia to the pólis' self-sufficiency. (shrink)

In this autobiographical essay, I reflect on my practice as an anthropologist through the medium of a dream experience. This dream occurred shortly before I was due to attend a ritual among the Booran Oromo in northern Kenya. In my discussion, I draw on analytical materialfrom anthropology, psychology, literature and philosophy. Using these different, but complementary approaches, I give three interpretations of the dream. The first two were provided to me by members of the culture, and are based on the (...) indigenous Oromo knowledge system. The third proposes a self‐analysis of the dream in terms of its structure and function. The entire exegesis is underpinned by an essay on dreams and dreaming by Foucault (1984). The analysis of the dream serves to situate my work in both theoretical and existential terms. The classic in this genre of writing is, of course, Lévi‐Strauss's (1973) Tristes Tropiques. (shrink)

According to socio-relational theory, men and women encountered different ecologies in their evolutionary past, and, as a result of different ancestral selection pressures, they developed different patterns of emotional expressivity that have persisted across cultures and large human evolutionary time scales. We question these assumptions, and propose that social-cognitive models of individual differences more parsimoniously account for sex differences in emotional expressivity.

The concept of autarkeia present in the Aristotelian Politics is conceived as inseparable from the end of the city-State, insofar as it is not only constituted for mere living but for living well. This implies a moralization of the state order that allows us to think about the conformation of an economic dimension based on the concept of autarkeia. Taking as a methodological starting point the “dialogical tension zones” device, we will affirm that exists an Aristotelian economic thinking based on (...) three significant concepts of his political philosophy: “self-sufficiency”, “city-State”, “justice”. Finally, we will affirm that the concept of “natural slavery” aims to guarantee the constitution of an autonomous productive economic order that delegitimizes the federated states’ model of organization. (shrink)

El debate en torno a Aristipo de Cirene, cuya concepción de la felicidad coloca en el centro de la escena al placer, pone en tela de juicio las afirmaciones propias de aquellas éticas nucleadas bajo el epíteto de eudemonistas. Con el desplazamiento de la felicidad del sitial del fin, Aristipo reformula la dimensión ética tradicional: a través del ejercicio de la enkráteia, y lejos de caer en un relativismo subjetivista, intenta construir una ética que tenga como base un objetivismo gnoseológico. (...) Demostraremos, además, que al ejercicio de la enkráteia cirenaica subyace la noción de autosuficiencia ( autárkeia ) –entendida en términos aristotélicos– del individuo . Esto nos enfrentará, irremediablemente, a la noción aristotélica de felicidad (en estrecho vínculo con la noción de enkráteia ), la cual no comporta una noción de autosuficiencia individual sino que restringe la posibilidad de la autárkeia a la autosuficiencia de la pólis. (shrink)

Este trabajo quedó segundo en la IV Olimpiada de filosofía que organiza FICUM en la modalidad de secundaria y bachillerato para promocionar la filosofía entre los jóvenes.

Del Giudice proposes that short-term mating strategies are adaptive for attachment-avoidant men. We argue that this model (1) does not apply to the majority of avoidant men (fearful-avoidants); (2) is based on limited evidence that the remaining subset of avoidant men (dismissing-avoidants) engage in short-term mating strategies; and (3) disregards the importance of pair bonding even for dismissing-avoidants.

In this article we try to give a philosophically reflected introductory overview of the current theoretical developments in the field of evolutionary aesthetics. Our aim is not completeness. Rather, we try to depict some of the central assumptions and explanatory tools frequently used in evolutionary accounts of human aesthetical preferences and address a number of currently debated, open research questions.

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing stands out among the thinkers of the 18th century for his refusal to synthesize theology and philosophy. But due to his notorious ambivalence about religious questions, even Lessing’s contemporaries remained uncertain whether he ultimately sided with the former or the latter. The short dialogue Hercules and Omphale is, to the detriment of research on this topic, largely unknown. I show that the dialogue offers in a nutshell Lessing’s comprehensive analysis of the intellectual and religious situation of his (...) time. By calling on the mythical travesty of the Asian queen and the Greek hero, Lessing illustrates the mutual attraction that has led astray both Enlightenment philosophy and contemporary Lutheran orthodoxy. Implicitly, his diagnosis of the aberrations of philosophy and theology sheds light on Lessing’s own position. The twofold criticism is an attempt to restore theology as well as philosophy in their genuine forms and to reestablish their proper relationship. Through his twofold restitutio in integrum, Lessing is able to reopen the quarrel between orthodoxy and the Enlightenment and, thus, to radically renew the all but forgotten theologico-philosophical antagonism. (shrink)

The growing use of automated decision-making (ADM) systems in the public sector and the need to control these has raised many legal questions in academic research and in policymaking. One of the timely means of legal control is accountability, which traditionally includes the ability to impose sanctions on the violator as one dimension. Even though many risks regarding the use of ADM have been noted and there is a common will to promote the safety of these systems, the relevance of (...) the safety research has been discussed little in this context. In this article, I evaluate regulating accountability over the use of ADM in the public sector in relation to the findings of safety research. I conducted the study by focusing on ongoing regulatory projects regarding ADM, the Finnish ADM legislation draft and the EU proposal for the AI Act. The critical question raised in the article is what the role of sanctions is. I ask if official accountability could mean more of an opportunity to learn from mistakes, share knowledge and compensate for harm instead of control via sanctions. (shrink)

We argue that giving up on the closure of rational belief under conjunction comes with a substantial price. Either rational belief is closed under conjunction, or else the epistemology of belief has a serious diachronic deficit over and above the synchronic failures of conjunctive closure. The argument for this, which can be viewed as a sequel to the preface paradox, is called the ‘review paradox'; it is presented in four distinct, but closely related versions.

Significant claims about science education form an integral part of Thomas Kuhn's philosophy. Since the late 1950s, when Kuhn started wrestling with the ideas of ‘normal research’ and ‘convergent thought’, the nature of science education has played an important role in his argument. Hence, the nature of science education is an essential aspect of the phase-model of scientific development developed in his famous The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, just as his later work on categories and conceptual structures takes its starting (...) point in the transmission rather than the creation of concepts and categories. (shrink)

This is a personal, incomplete, and very informal take on the role of logic in general philosophy of science, which is aimed at a broader audience. We defend and advertise the application of logical methods in philosophy of science, starting with the beginnings in the Vienna Circle and ending with some more recent logical developments.

This is Part A of an article that defends non-eliminative structuralism about mathematics by means of a concrete case study: a theory of unlabeled graphs. Part A summarizes the general attractions of non-eliminative structuralism. Afterwards, it motivates an understanding of unlabeled graphs as structures sui generis and develops a corresponding axiomatic theory of unlabeled graphs. As the theory demonstrates, graph theory can be developed consistently without eliminating unlabeled graphs in favour of sets; and the usual structuralist criterion of identity can (...) be applied successfully in graph-theoretic proofs. Part B will turn to the philosophical interpretation and assessment of the theory. (shrink)

We investigate the research programme of dynamic doxastic logic (DDL) and analyze its underlying methodology. The Ramsey test for conditionals is used to characterize the logical and philosophical differences between two paradigmatic systems, AGM and KGM, which we develop and compare axiomatically and semantically. The importance of Gärdenfors’s impossibility result on the Ramsey test is highlighted by a comparison with Arrow’s impossibility result on social choice. We end with an outlook on the prospects and the future of DDL.

The literatures on both authentic leadership and behavioral integrity have argued that leader integrity drives follower performance. Yet, despite overlap in conceptualization and mechanisms, no research has investigated how authentic leadership and behavioral integrity relate to one another in driving follower performance. In this study, we propose and test the notion that authentic leadership behavior is an antecedent to perceptions of leader behavioral integrity, which in turn affects follower affective organizational commitment and follower work role performance. Analysis of a survey (...) of 49 teams in the service industry supports the proposition that authentic leadership is related to follower affective organizational commitment, fully mediated through leader behavioral integrity. Next, we found that authentic leadership and leader behavioral integrity are related to follower work role performance, fully mediated through follower affective organizational commitment. These relationships hold when controlling for ethical organizational culture. (shrink)

A "figure of reversible exchange" can be discerned in the fragments of Heraclitus. Again and again we encounter this rhetorical pattern: in the first part of a fragment multiplicity is framed and contained within unity, only for this movement subsequently to be inverted. This inversion, a chiasmus, is not merely a discursive tool of emphasis through contrast; its usage in forming watery and unstable contrasts between the Many and the One, and between Becoming and Being, suggests that the figure operates (...) in Heraclitus with metaphysical stakes. An invitation to an analysis of the philosophical stakes of the language of the Heraclitus fragments has long been open: whereas in the Rhetoric Aristotle criticizes... (shrink)

In this study, a hybrid model based on intelligent techniques is developed to predict the active power generated in a bioclimatic house by a low power wind turbine. Contrary to other researches that predict the generated power taking into account the speed and the direction of the wind, the model developed in this paper only uses the speed of the wind, measured mainly in a weather station from the government meteorological agency (MeteoGalicia). The wind speed is measured at different heights, (...) against the usual measurements in others researches, which uses the wind speed and the direction measured in a weather station on the wind turbine nacelle. The prediction is performed 30 minutes ahead, what ensures that the Building Management System knows the energy generated by the low power wind turbine 30 minutes before, and it can adapt the consumption of different equipment in the house to optimize the power use. The main objective is to allow the Building Management System to optimize the uses of energy, taking into account the predicted amount of energy that will be produced and the energy consumed in the house. The developed model uses a hybrid topology with four clusters to improve the prediction, achieving an error lower than 6.5% for Mean Absolute Error measured in a final test. To perform this test, part of the original dataset was isolated from the beginning of the training process to check the model with a dataset that is not used before, simulating the model as it is receiving new data. (shrink)

ABSTRACTRemote interpreting, where the interpreter communicates with the interlocutors via technological solutions across geographical distance, enhances the availability of trained interpreters in the public sector and institutional discourse in general. In refugee crises, where new unexpected language needs may arise, access to skilled interpreters presents a particular challenge. RI is an apt solution in such cases. Yet, although the professionals who are in need of interpreting services within the legal and health systems embrace the option of RI, the interpreters themselves (...) seem less enthusiastic. They report to experience more challenges and stress in RI than in onsite interpreting. Research suggests that for RI to succeed, the interpreters’ working conditions require special attention and caution. Lending ears to the interpreters is therefore worthwhile in trying to identify what aspects should receive special attention during RI.Approaching RI in an action research mode, this article reports on interpreting students’ reflections on their experiences with RI via Skype in an online classroom setting, as well as their reflections on their real-life experiences with RI in legal and healthcare settings. The qualitative analysis draws on logs from text-only chat sessions, in which the students describe challenges with feedback signals, turn-taking and information overflow, leading to increased stress during RI. However, they also offer suggestions as to what can be done by those in charge of institutional encounters to address these challenges and improve the quality of the Remote interpreting. (shrink)

This article suggests that scientific philosophy, especially mathematical philosophy, might be one important way of doing philosophy in the future. Along the way, the article distinguishes between different types of scientific philosophy; it mentions some of the scientific methods that can serve philosophers; it aims to undermine some worries about mathematical philosophy; and it tries to make clear why in certain cases the application of mathematical methods is necessary for philosophical progress.

In everyday life we either express our beliefs in all-or-nothing terms or we resort to numerical probabilities: I believe it's going to rain or my chance of winning is one in a million. The Stability of Belief develops a theory of rational belief that allows us to reason with all-or-nothing belief and numerical belief simultaneously.

This brief text assists students in understanding Kuhn's philosophy and thinking so they can more fully engage in useful, intelligent class dialogue and improve their understanding of course content. Part of the Wadsworth Notes Series, (which will eventually consist of approximately 100 titles, each focusing on a single "thinker" from ancient times to the present), ON KUHN is written by a philosopher deeply versed in the philosophy of this key thinker. Like other books in the series, this concise book offers (...) sufficient insight into the thinking of a notable philosopher, better enabling students to engage in reading and to discuss the material in class and on paper. (shrink)

Noting a lack of consensus in the recent literature on the Anthropocene, this article considers how social anthropologists might contribute to its theorizing and dating. Empirically it draws on the author’s long-term fieldwork in Hungary. It is argued that ethnographic methods are essential for grasping subjectivities, including temporal orientations and perceptions of epochal transformation. When it comes to historical periodization, however, ethnography is obviously insufficient and proposals privileging the last half-century, or just the last quarter of a century, seem inadequate. (...) Influential theories, which define ‘modernity’ in terms of developments emanating from the countries of the North Atlantic in the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries (Gellner, Polanyi, Wolf), remain partial and Eurocentric. To comprehend the social preconditions of the Anthropocene in a holistic fashion (the crucial contribution of comparative anthropology), it is necessary to follow Jack Goody and trace how the urban revolutions of the Bronze Age united Eurasia through the diffusion of new forms of economy, polity and cosmology. (shrink)

One of the fundamental problems of epistemology is to say when the evidence in an agent’s possession justifies the beliefs she holds. In this paper and its prequel, we defend the Bayesian solution to this problem by appealing to the following fundamental norm: Accuracy An epistemic agent ought to minimize the inaccuracy of her partial beliefs. In the prequel, we made this norm mathematically precise; in this paper, we derive its consequences. We show that the two core tenets of Bayesianism (...) follow from the norm, while the characteristic claim of the Objectivist Bayesian follows from the norm along with an extra assumption. Finally, we consider Richard Jeffrey’s proposed generalization of conditionalization. We show not only that his rule cannot be derived from the norm, unless the requirement of Rigidity is imposed from the start, but further that the norm reveals it to be illegitimate. We end by deriving an alternative updating rule for those cases in which Jeffrey’s is usually supposed to apply. (shrink)

In this book, Hannes Charen presents an alternative examination of kinship structures in political theory. Employing a radically transdisciplinary approach, On the Politics of Kinship is structured in a series of six theoretical vignettes or frames. Each chapter frames a figure, aspect, or relational context of the family or kinship. Some chapters are focused on a critique of the family as a state-sanctioned institution, while others cautiously attempt to recast kinship in a way to reimagine mutual obligation through the generation (...) of kinship practices understood as a perpetually evolving set of relational responses to finitude. In doing so, Charen considers the ways in which kinship is a plastic social response to embodied exposure, both concealed and made more evident in the bloated, feeble, and broken individualities and nationalities that seem to dominate our social and political landscape today. On the Politics of Kinship will be of interest to political theorists, feminists, anthropologists, and social scientists in general. (shrink)

Pure mathematical truths are commonly thought to be metaphysically necessary. Assuming the truth of pure mathematics as currently pursued, and presupposing that set theory serves as a foundation of pure mathematics, this article aims to provide a metaphysical explanation of why pure mathematics is metaphysically necessary.