W. H. Hudson tuvo un contacto muy temprano con El origen de las especies; probablemente haya leído el libro el mismo año de su aparición . Esta lectura lo acercó a una filosofía naturalista que, a la vez, lo alejó de la formación materna en cuestión religiosa, y lo condujo a asumir una posición evolucionista crítica. De hecho, contradijo observaciones de Darwin que éste revisó, además de mencionarlo en la segunda edición de El origen de las especies . Asimismo, son (...) numerosas las citas que Hudson hace de Darwin en sus textos. Aunque pueden marcarse diferencias, ciertos tópicos generales del evolucionismo, son fácilmente reconocibles a lo largo de su producción. El trabajo pretende avanzar sobre estos aspectos para identificar cuán profundamente caló en su concepción del mundo la perspectiva evolucionista.W. H. Hudson had an early contact with The Origin of Species. He may have read it in the same year of its publication . This reading brought him close to a naturalist philosophy that, in turn, took him away from an education in religious practice, fostered by his mother, and made him adopt a critical evolutionist position. In fact, he contradicted Darwin's observations, which he latter reviewed, in addition to mentioning him in the second edition of The Origin of Species . Also, there are numerous quotations of Darwin in Hudson's works. Even though differences can be noted, certain general topics on evolutionism may be easily recognized throughout his production. This paper attempts to move forward in these aspects in order to identify how deeply the evolutionist perspective influenced Hudson's conception of the world. (shrink)

This paper addresses a neglected question in republican political philosophy: what are the conditions for a set of arguments to be considered republican? While republicanism traditionally confers a fundamental role to the democratic ideal of participation in decision-making, recent contributions argue that freedom could be promoted by facilitating exit where possible. The strong version of the latter argument states that when exit is possible, it constitutes the most important contribution to republican freedom, and it preserves the goal of isolating individual (...) choices, i.e. it precludes collective decision-making from interfering with them, and so it intends to limit the scope of public concern considered legitimate. I examine this argument to discuss the boundaries and varieties of republicanism: (i) the boundaries establish that an argument should be couched and substantively articulated in distinctively republican terms; (ii) the strong version of the exit argument does not fall within the boundaries because it is in tension with core republican commitments to self-government and civic virtues; (iii) once we abide by the boundaries we may encounter a diversity of proposals differing on the more concrete level of institutional design and empirical assumptions – these are the varieties of republicanism. (shrink)

How can one ‘see’ the operationalization of contemporary visual culture, given the imperceptibility and apparent automation of so many processes and dimensions of visuality? Seeing – as a position from a singular mode of observation – has become problematic since many visual elements, techniques, and forms of observing are highly distributed through data practices of collection, analysis and prediction. Such practices are subtended by visual cultural techniques that are grounded in the development of image collections, image formatting and hardware design. (...) In this article, we analyze recent transformations in forms of prediction and data analytics associated with spectacular performances of computation. We analyze how transformations in the collection and accumulation of images as ensembles by platforms have a qualitative and material effect on the emergent sociotechnicality of platform ‘life’ and ‘perception’. Reconstructing the visual transformations that allow artificial intelligence assemblages to operate allows some sense of their heteronomous materiality and contingency. (shrink)

Bioethics has received important criticisms for its perceived privileging of biomedical authority with longstanding calls for greater recognition of the social, political, economic, historical, and...

Jennifer Hornsby's account of human action frees us from the temptation to think of the person who acts as 'doing' the events that are her actions, and thereby removes much of the allure of 'agent causation'. But her account is spoiled by the claim that physical actions are 'tryings' that cause bodily movements. It would be better to think of physical actions and bodily movements as identical; but Hornsby refuses to do this, seemingly because she thinks that to do so (...) would be to endorse the so-called 'standard causal story'. But Hornsby misses a possibility here, for we can insist on this identity claim without endorsing the standard story if we embrace an account which parallels the disjunctive account in the philosophy of perception. This will leave us with a picture of physical action that saves the insights of Hornsby's account without succumbing to its distortions. (shrink)

We explored the neural mechanisms allowing humans to report the subjective onset times of conscious events. Magnetoencephalographic recordings of neural oscillations were obtained while human subjects introspected the timing of sensory, intentional, and motor events during a forced choice task. Brain activity was reconstructed with high spatio-temporal resolution. Event-time introspection was associated with specific neural activity at the time of subjective event onset which was spatially distinct from activity induced by the event itself. Different brain regions were selectively recruited for (...) introspection of different event types, e.g., the bilateral angular gyrus for introspection of intention. Our results suggest that event-time introspection engages specific neural networks to assess the contents of consciousness. Subjective event times should therefore be interpreted as the result of complex interactions between introspection and experience networks, rather than as direct reproduction of the individual’s conscious state or as a mere post hoc interpretation. (shrink)

‘Social auditing’ is everywhere. An increasing number of companies – and also public and voluntary sector organisations – are trying to assess their social performance systematically. Shell, BP and General Motors are among them. How are they doing it? What impact do NGOs and civil society organisations have on this process? Do they have a privileged place in social audits? This article looks at these questions, and sets out a framework for understanding social audits and civil society. Examples are drawn (...) particularly from the recent Camelot social audit . Camelot plc is the operator of the UK national lottery. (shrink)

There has been considerable discussion in the literature of one kind of identity problem that mathematical structuralism faces: the automorphism problem, in which the structure is unable to individuate the mathematical entities in its domain. Shapiro (Philos Math 16(3):285–309, 2008) has partly responded to these concerns. But I argue here that the theory faces an even more serious kind of identity problem, which the theory can’t overcome staying within its remit. I give two examples to make the point.

This paper develops a way of understanding G. E. M. Anscombe's essay “The First Person” at the heart of which are the following two ideas: first, that the point of her essay is to show that it is not possible for anyone to understand what they express with “I” as an Art des Gegebenseins—a way of thinking of an object that constitutes identifying knowledge of which object is being thought of; and second, that the argument through which her essay seeks (...) to show this is itself first personal in character. Understanding Anscombe's essay in this light has the merit of showing much of what it says to be correct. But it sets us the task of saying what it is that we understand ourselves to express with “I” if not an Art des Gegebenseins, and in particular what it is that we understand ourselves to express with sentences with “I” as subject that might seem to express identity judgments, such as “I am NN”, and “I am this body”. (shrink)

This article analyses a specific piece of computer code, the Linux operating system kernel, as an example of how technical operationality figures in contemporary culture. The analysis works at two levels. First of all, it attempts to account for the increasing visibility and significance of code or software-related events. Second, it seeks to extend familiar concepts of performativity to include cultural processes in which the creation of meaning is not central, and in which processes of circulation play a primary role. (...) The analysis concentrates on the practices and patterns of circulation of Linux through versions, distributions, clones and reconfigurations. It argues that technical ‘culture-objects’ such as Linux take on a social existence within contemporary technological cultures because of the authorizing contexts in which the reading, writing and execution of code occur. The ‘force’ or performance of certain technical objects, their operationality, can be understood more as the stabilized nexus of diverse social practices, rules and personae than as a formal property of the objects themselves. (shrink)

When someone thanks someone for something, or advises him against something, or refuses something from him, his action is directed not merely at but to the other. He addresses the other. But is it only actions that exemplify this mode of directedness? This essay argues that it is not.

Research risks have to meet minimal risk requirements in order for the research to qualify for expedited ethics review, to be exempted from ethics review, or to be granted consent waivers. The definition of “minimal risk” in the Common Rule (45 CFR 46) relies on the risks-of-daily-life and risks-of-routine-tests as comparators against which research activities are assessed to meet minimal risk requirements. While either or both comparators have been adopted by major ethics codes, they have also been criticized. In response (...) to criticisms, elaborations, and alternative comparators have been proposed. In this paper, I approach the search for workable comparators from the point of view that ethical reasoning about minimal risk involves analogical reasoning using comparators. In this regard, I develop two necessary conditions for an adequate minimal risk conception, which I use to assess three comparators. I conclude that the risks-of-routine-tests best fits the analogical reasoning operating in minimal risk assessments. (shrink)

_ Thinking and Being _, by KimhiIrad. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. Pp. xx + 166.

The indistinguishability of bosons and fermions has been an essential part of our ideas of quantum mechanics since the 1920s. But what is the mathematical basis for this indistinguishability? An answer was provided in the group representation theory that developed alongside quantum theory and quickly became a major part of its mathematical structure. In the 1930s such a complex and seemingly abstract theory came to be rejected by physicists as the standard functional analysis picture presented by John von Neumann took (...) hold. The purpose of the present account is to show how indistinguishability is explained within representation theory. (shrink)

John McDowell espouses a certain conception of the thinking subject: as an embodied, living, finite being, with a capacity for experience that can take in the world, and stand in relations of warrant to subjects' beliefs. McDowell presents this conception of the subject as requiring a related conception of the world: as not located outside the conceptual sphere. In this latter conception, idealism and common-sense realism are supposed to coincide. But I suggest that McDowell's conception of the subject scuppers this (...) intended coincidence. The upshot is a dilemma: McDowell can retain his conception of the subject, but lose the coincidence; or he can keep the coincidence, but abandon his conception of the subject. (shrink)

The significance of Max Black’s indistinguishable spheres for the nature of particles in quantum mechanics is discussed, focusing in particular on the use of the idea of weak indiscernibility. It is argued that there can be four such Black spheres but that five are impossible. It follows from this that Black’s example cannot serve as a model for indistinguishability in physics. But Black’s discussion of his spheres gave rise to the idea of weak discernibility and it is argued that such (...) predicates are unsatisfiable in the way intended. The underlying problem with weak discernibility spreads out to also undermine the whole notion that indistinguishability rests on a notion of the permutation invariance of particles. A better foundation is indicated. (shrink)

This article responds to two problems confronting social and human sciences: how to relate to digital data, inasmuch as it challenges established social science methods; and how to relate to life sciences, insofar as they produce knowledge that impinges on our own ways of knowing. In a case study of proteomics, we explore how digital devices grapple with large-scale multiples – of molecules, databases, machines and people. We analyse one particular visual device, a cluster-heatmap, produced by scientists by mining data (...) from a large number of experiments on human blood plasma proteins. These proteins make up a myriad multiple whose identity shifts in many ways. Rather than displaying data about proteins, the heatmap constructs a view of the differences and similarities between experiments. We find this attempt to construct a view on many things at once instructive in thinking about multiples more generally. Instead of flattening molecular ‘life itself’, this visual device superimposes layers of digital devices and techniques from a wide variety of disciplines. This layering suggests a different way of relating to the life sciences more generally: rather than what they know, how they know might be of use to social and human sciences when attending to multiplicities. (shrink)

Commentary on: Olaf Blanke, Thomas Metzinger, Full-body illusions and minimal phenomenal selfhood, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Volume 13, Issue 1, January 2009, Pages 7-13, ISSN 1364-6613, DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2008.10.003.

George McGhee’s book “Convergent Evolution: limited forms most beautiful” provides an extensive survey of biological convergence. This paper has two main aims. First, it examines the theoretical claims McGhee makes about convergent evolution—specifically criticizing his use of a total morphospace to understand contingency and his assumption that functional constraints are non-contingent. Second, it sketches a group of important conceptual challenges facing researchers interested in convergence.

In March of 1980, just a month before Sartre's death, _Le Nouvel Observateur_ published a series of interviews, the last ever given, between the blind and debilitated philosopher and his young assistant, Benny Levy. Readers were scandalized and denounced the interviews as distorted, inauthentic, even fraudulent. They seemed to portray a Sartre who had abandoned his leftist convictions and rejected his most intimate friends, including Simone de Beauvoir. This man had cast aside his own fundamental beliefs in the primacy of (...) individual consciousness, the inevitability of violence, and Marxism, embracing instead a messianic Judaism. No, Sartre's supporters argued, it was his interlocutor, the ex-radical, the orthodox, ultra-right-wing activist who had twisted the words and thought of an ailing Sartre to his own ends. Or had he? Shortly before his death, Sartre confirmed the authenticity of the interviews and their puzzling content. Over the past fifteen years, it has become the task of Sartre scholars to unravel and understand them. Presented in this fresh, meticulous translation, the interviews are framed by two provocative essays from Benny Levy himself, accompanied by a comprehensive introduction from noted Sartre authority Ronald Aronson. Placing the interviews in proper biographical and philosophical perspective, Aronson demonstrates that the thought of both Sartre and Levy reveals multiple intentions that taken together nevertheless confirm and add to Sartre's overall philosophy. This absorbing volume at last contextualizes and elucidates the final thoughts of a brilliant and influential mind. Jean-Paul Sartre was offered, but declined, the Nobel Prize for literature in 1964. His many works of fiction, drama, and philosophy include the monumental study of Flaubert, _The Family Idiot_, and _The Freud Scenario_, both published in translation by the University of Chicago Press. (shrink)

A proof is presented that a form of incompleteness in Quantum Mechanics follows directly from the use of unbounded operators. It is then shown that the problems that arise for such operators are not connected to the non- commutativity of many pairs of operators in Quantum Mechanics and hence are an additional source of incompleteness to that which allegedly flows from the..

Accounts of big data practices often assume that they target individuals. Personalization, with all the risks of discrimination and bias it entails, has been the critical focus in accounts of consumption, government, social media, and health. This paper argues that personalization through models using large-scale data is part of a more expansive change in probabilization that, in principle, is not reducible to individual or ‘personal’ attributes and actions. It describes the ‘personalization’ of an online grocery shopping recommender system to list (...) a small number of grocery items of personal relevance for each of the millions of online grocery shoppers at a major UK supermarket chain. Drawing on a theory of probability proposed by the philosopher of science Karl Popper and anthropological work on shopping, it suggests that the attempt to generate personalized predictions necessarily incorporates impersonal relations to others and things. Using a mixture of discourse analysis and code-based reconstruction of key elements of the recommender system, it suggests that personalization is one facet of an open-ended weave of propensities associated with people and things in contemporary big data configurations. The paper explores how, in the context of recommender systems, the constitutive incompleteness of shopping lists, their propensity to expand or change, might be more important than their capacity to be personalized. (shrink)

The Received View of particles in quantum mechanics is that they are indistinguishable entities within their kinds and that, as a consequence, they are not individuals in the metaphysical sense and self-identity does not meaningfully apply to them. Nevertheless cardinality does apply, in that one can have n> 1 such particles. A number of authors have recently argued that this cluster of claims is internally contradictory: roughly, that having more than one such particle requires that the concepts of distinctness and (...) identity must apply after all. A common thread here is that the notion of identity is too fundamental to forego in any metaphysical account. I argue that this argument fails. I then argue that the failure of individuality and identity applies also to macroscopic physical objects, that the problems cannot be constrained to apply only within the microscopic realm. (shrink)

Anscombe raises a difficulty for the very idea of quotation. Davidson seeks to dissolve this difficulty. But the difficulty is real. And its lesson is that, in quotation, language takes itself as its topic in a non-objectifying manner. The idea of a non-objectifying manner of being a topic is crucial, not merely for understanding quotation, but for understanding the distinctive form of sensory consciousness in which language is perceived.

Precarious work is a growing and alarming phenomenon. This paper analyses two of its distinctive normative features. First, precarity increases the risks workers face, blurring their capacity for prospection and lessening their security in accessing the opportunities associated with their jobs. Second, precarious work challenges workers’ collective action capacity. I will argue that both features threaten workers’ republican freedom. I develop the second point by presenting a conception of solidarity between workers and then showing how precarious work erodes it. On (...) the one hand, when the labour market is dualised, precarity is distributed unevenly and the risks undergone by groups of workers are different. Thus, dual labour markets create a potential conflict of interest between the preferences of different groups, insiders and outsiders. On the other hand, various economic changes hinder workers from acting based on shared purposes due to increased coordination costs. To the extent that workers’ power depends on their bonds and collective action, primarily through unions, the eclipse of their solidarity leaves them powerless and thus increases their domination. Finally, I consider various scenarios that could boost workers’ collective power. (shrink)

En este artículo propongo una justificación de la democracia, y de la autoridad política derivada de ella, a partir del ideal republicano de libertad como no-dominación. Argumento que los procedimientos democráticos tienen valor por sí mismos porque son mecanismos de decisión donde hay libertad de forma recíproca. Después muestro que la autoridad debe ser adecuadamente controlada para evitar que exista dominación, razón por la cual tiene que concebirse como una relación fiduciaria, en la que los gobernantes actúan como agentes de (...) la ciudadanía. Finalmente, establezco la necesidad de que los gobernantes cumplan con deberes fiduciarios y que los ciudadanos desarrollen virtudes cívicas. In this article I propose a justification of democracy, and of the political authority derived from it, based on the republican ideal of freedom as non-domination. I argue that democratic procedures have value in themselves because they are decision-making mechanisms where there is freedom on a reciprocal basis. I then show that political authority must be adequately controlled in order to avoid the existence of domination. This is why it must be conceived as a fiduciary relationship, in which the rulers act as agents of the citizenry. Finally, I establish the need for rulers to comply with fiduciary duties and for citizens to develop civic virtues. (shrink)

Anscombe seems to think that, even though “the knowledge that a man has of his intentional actions” is not “knowledge by observation”, it can be aided by observation. My aim in this essay is to explain how I think we should understand this thought. I suggest that, in a central class of cases, knowledge of one's intentional action is knowledge whose canonical linguistic expression is an utterance of the form “I am doing something to that G": knowledge in which the (...) subject, at once, knows himself “as self" (and so, not by observation), and knows an outer object “as other” (and so, by observation). To characterise this knowledge either as knowledge by observation, or as knowledge not by observation, is to characterise it in a manner that abstracts away from its fundamental unity. (shrink)

In this paper, we extend Michel Foucault’s final works on the ‘care of the self’ to an empirical examination of research practice in community-based research (CBR). We use Foucault’s ‘morality of behaviors’ to analyze interview data from a national sample of Canadian CBR practitioners working with communities affected by HIV. Despite claims in the literature that ethics review is overly burdensome for non-traditional forms of research, our findings suggest that many researchers using CBR have an ambivalent but ultimately productive relationship (...) with institutional research ethics review requirements. They understand and use prescribed codes, but adapt them in practice to account for the needs of participating community members, members of their research teams and the larger communities with whom they work. Complying with ethics protocols was seen as only the beginning, a minimum standard; our research suggests that the real ethical work happens in the field, where CBR practitioners encounter community members in diverse public roles and must forge ethical consensus across communities. CBR represents an ethical terrain in which practitioners challenge themselves to work differently, and as a result they care for themselves—and others—in ways that often resist the propensity for domination through public health research.‘…there are different ways to “conduct oneself” morally, different ways for the acting individual to operate, not just as an agent, but as an ethical subject of action.’ (Foucault, 1985: 26). (shrink)

It is argued that the part-whole account of the relation between evidence and the larger state of affairs the evidence is evidence of—an account that was elucidated in the paper ‘Truthmaking, Evidence of, and Impossibility Proofs’ —provides a better basis for epistemology than causal relations between events. I apply this to a well-known phenomenon in physics which suggests that causal connectedness is not necessary for knowledge.

Anscombe seems to think that, even though “the knowledge that a man has of his intentional actions” is not “knowledge by observation”, it can be aided by observation. My aim in this essay is to explain how I think we should understand this thought. I suggest that, in a central class of cases, knowledge of one's intentional action is knowledge whose canonical linguistic expression is an utterance of the form “I am doing something to that G": knowledge in which the (...) subject, at once, knows himself “as self" (and so, not by observation), and knows an outer object “as other” (and so, by observation). To characterise this knowledge either as knowledge by observation, or as knowledge not by observation, is to characterise it in a manner that abstracts away from its fundamental unity. (shrink)

In seinem Aufsatz “Transparency, Self-Consciousness, and Reflection” und in seinem Buch Transparency and Reflection entwickelt Boyle eine Lösung für das Problem der Transparenz. Antworten, die auf Fragen über das Bewusstsein gegeben werden, bringen demnach nur die Arten des Gegebenseins zum Ausdruck, die in Antworten auf weltbezogene Fragen schon enthalten sind. Diese sowie auch die Lösung für ein anderes Problem, das Boyle „the anti-egoist challenge“ nennt, gründen auf der Idee, dass eine Antwort auf eine weltbezogene Frage eine Art des Gegebenseins enthält, (...) die ihrerseits implizit auf das antwortende Subjekt referiert. Diese wird expliziert, wenn eine Frage über das Bewusstsein beantwortet wird. Mir scheint, dass diese Idee einen Fallstrick spannt. Denn damit die von Boyle vorgeschlagene Lösung gelingt, muss die relevante Referenz auf die erste Person in einer Art des Gegebenseins des Subjekts bestehen. Doch wenn diese Art des Gegebenseins die typische Fregeanische Spezifizierung erfüllt, dann ist sie privat, – und genauso privat ist dann auch die Art des Gegebenseins, in der sie enthalten ist. Folglich wird sich die Privatheit über diejenigen Antworten, die sich auf Fragen über das Bewusstsein richten, auf alle Antworten hinaus ausbreiten, die sich auf die mit ihnen verknüpften Fragen über die Welt richten. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 10, October 2020, Page 26-29.

This article seeks to answer the following questions: is Quentin Skinner right to claim that actions in the past should not be described by means of concepts not available at the time those actions occurred? And is Ian Hacking right to claim that such descriptions do not merely describe but actually change the past? The author begins by arguing that it is not clear precisely what Skinner is claiming and shows how, under the pressure of criticism, his methodological strictures collapse (...) into trivialities. The author then argues that, although Hacking has given us no reason to accept his claim, we can make sense of it by appealing to the idea of a "Cambridge change." The author concludes by suggesting that as long as we are exercising the right kind of concepts, a suitably modified version of Hacking 's conclusion can be retained. Key Words: action • history • changes in the past • Quentin Skinner • Ian Hacking. (shrink)

It is widely believed that the “strong programme” in the sociology of knowledge comes into serious conflict with mainstream epistemology. I argue that the programme has two aspects—one modest, and the other less so. The programme’s modest aspect—best represented by the “symmetry thesis”—does not contain anything to threaten much of the epistemological mainstream, but does come into conflict with a certain kind of epistemological “externalism”. The immodest aspect, however—in the form of “finitism”—pushes the programme towards a radical form of relativism (...) about truth. Accepting these points will allow us to put an end to much unnecessary debate surrounding the strong programme, and allow a more fruitful discussion to begin.Author Keywords: Author Keywords: Strong programme; Epistemology; Normativity; Relativism; Finitism. (shrink)

The misuse of alcohol inflicts a major toll on individual users, their families, and the wider society. This includes disruptions of family life, violence, absenteeism and problems in the workplace, child neglect and abuse, and excess morbidity and mortality. The World Health Organization estimates that alcohol ranks eighth among global risk factors for death and is the third leading global risk factor for disease and disability. In the United States, alcohol dependence affects four to five percent of the population at (...) any given time. Alcohol dependence also exacts a significant financial toll.... (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to suggest that the current conversation about the relationship between capitalism and the poor assumes a story about business that is shopworn and outmoded. There are assumptions about business, human behavior, and language that are no longer useful in the twenty first century. Business needs to be understood as how we cooperate together to create value and trade. It is fundamentally about creating value for stakeholders. Human beings are not solely self-interested, but driven by (...) meaning, purpose, and the ability to cooperate. And, language is best understood as a tool, rather than a source of representation. Business and capitalism with these new assumptions can be realized by large and small businesses as not just about money and profits but as the creation of meaning within a prophetic framework. (shrink)