Collecting papers read at a conference with the same title at Harris Manchester College, Oxford, in 1997, the present volume bears eloquent witness to the growing interest in idealistic philosophy. In his introduction, the editor, Bill Mander, provides historical sketches of the idealists covered, but the historical scholarship signalled by the title is interwoven throughout with — mostly idealist — philosophizing in the present. Staying short for the most part of broader historical perspectives, some papers highlight important aspects (...) of the intellectual context in which idealism, as reconsidered today, necessarily finds itself, and point to its possible contributions, while others continue an idealistic discourse very much on its own terms. Properly enough in the idealistic context however, most of the contributors seem to be aware that history and present philosophizing cannot be wholly separated. If they do not directly address it, most contributions at least illustrate abundantly what is presently, and what was during the historical period covered, taking place on the modern scene as set by broader and deeper cultural forces, the proper understanding of which, as will soon become clear, I think in some cases holds a key to the assessment of important aspects of their subject-matter. Mention will be made of all papers, but since in-depth analyses of each are here impossible, while being in this case at the same time desirable, I choose to discuss about one third of the contributions in greater detail. (shrink)

What is the role of conscious experience in the epistemology of perceptual knowledge: how should we characterise what is going on in seeing that o is F in order to illuminate the contribution of seeing o to their status as cases of knowing that o is F? My proposal is that seeing o involves conscious acquaintance with o itself, the concrete worldly source of the truth that o is F, in a way that may make it evident to the subject (...) that o is an instance of ‘x is F’ as she understands this, and hence evident that o is F. Seeing that o is F is thus a way of its being evident that o is F and is therefore a way of knowing that o is F. (shrink)

1. Michael A PetersBeijing Normal UniversityChatGPT is an AI chatbot released by OpenAI on November 30, 2022 and a ‘stable release’ on February 13, 2023. It belongs to OpenAI’s GPT-3 family (genera...

In addition to the many easily observable differences between people, there are also differences in people's subjective experiences that are harder to observe, and which, as a consequence, remain hidden. For example, people vary widely in how much visual imagery they experience. But those who cannot see in their mind's eye, tend to assume everyone is like them. Those who can, assume everyone else can as well. We argue that a study of such hidden phenomenal differences has much to teach (...) cognitive science. Uncovering and describing this variation (a search for unknown unknowns) may help predict otherwise puzzling differences in human behavior. The very existence of certain differences can also act as a stress test for some cognitive theories. Finally, studying hidden phenomenal differences is the first step toward understanding what kinds of environments may mask or unmask links between phenomenal experience and observable behavior. (shrink)

The Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI) is an ontology that provides terms with precisely defined meanings to describe all aspects of how investigations in the biological and medical domains are conducted. OBI re-uses ontologies that provide a representation of biomedical knowledge from the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) project and adds the ability to describe how this knowledge was derived. We here describe the state of OBI and several applications that are using it, such as adding semantic expressivity to (...) existing databases, building data entry forms, and enabling interoperability between knowledge resources. OBI covers all phases of the investigation process, such as planning, execution and reporting. It represents information and material entities that participate in these processes, as well as roles and functions. Prior to OBI, it was not possible to use a single internally consistent resource that could be applied to multiple types of experiments for these applications. OBI has made this possible by creating terms for entities involved in biological and medical investigations and by importing parts of other biomedical ontologies such as GO, Chemical Entities of Biological Interest (ChEBI) and Phenotype Attribute and Trait Ontology (PATO) without altering their meaning. OBI is being used in a wide range of projects covering genomics, multi-omics, immunology, and catalogs of services. OBI has also spawned other ontologies (Information Artifact Ontology) and methods for importing parts of ontologies (Minimum information to reference an external ontology term (MIREOT)). The OBI project is an open cross-disciplinary collaborative effort, encompassing multiple research communities from around the globe. To date, OBI has created 2366 classes and 40 relations along with textual and formal definitions. The OBI Consortium maintains a web resource providing details on the people, policies, and issues being addressed in association with OBI. (shrink)

F. H. Bradley did not write extensively or systematically on the philosophy of religion, and much of what he did write has the character of either tentative speculation or the pre-emptive rebuttal of potential misinterpretations that might threaten his general philosophical position. ‘I admit that on this subject I never had much to say’ he warns. But such a remark should not discourage us from considering his views on this topic, since the disclaimer is typically Bradleian, and more reflective of (...) his high standards for what is required in order to claim to have something to say about some matter than of any genuine lack of opinion. On closer inspection we find that he has, scattered throughout his work, a great many important things to say about this subject. (shrink)

Temporal regularities in speech, such as interdependencies in the timing of speech events, are thought to scaffold early acquisition of the building blocks in speech. By providing on-line clues to the location and duration of upcoming syllables, temporal structure may aid segmentation and clustering of continuous speech into separable units. This hypothesis tacitly assumes that learners exploit predictability in the temporal structure of speech. Existing measures of speech timing tend to focus on first-order regularities among adjacent units, and are overly (...) sensitive to idiosyncrasies in the data they describe. Here, we compare several statistical methods on a sample of 18 languages, testing whether syllable occurrence is predictable over time. Rather than looking for differences between languages, we aim to find across languages (using clearly defined acoustic, rather than orthographic, measures), temporal predictability in the speech signal which could be exploited by a language learner. First, we analyse distributional regularities using two novel techniques: a Bayesian ideal learner analysis, and a simple distributional measure. Second, we model higher-order temporal structure—regularities arising in an ordered series of syllable timings—testing the hypothesis that non-adjacent temporal structures may explain the gap between subjectively-perceived temporal regularities, and the absence of universally-accepted lower-order objective measures. Together, our analyses provide limited evidence for predictability at different time scales, though higher-order predictability is difficult to reliably infer. We conclude that temporal predictability in speech may well arise from a combination of individually weak perceptual cues at multiple structural levels, but is challenging to pinpoint. (shrink)

In the correspondence with Clarke, Leibniz proposes to construe physical theory in terms of physical (spatio-temporal) relations between physical objects, thus avoiding incorporation of infinite totalities of abstract entities (such as Newtonian space) in physical ontology. It has generally been felt that this proposal cannot be carried out. I demonstrate an equivalence between formulations postulating space-time as an infinite totality and formulations allowing only possible spatio-temporal relations of physical (point-) objects. The resulting rigorous formulations of physical theory may be seen (...) to follow Leibniz' suggestion quite closely. On the other hand, physical assumptions implicit in the postulation of space-time totalities are made explicit in the reconstruction of the space-time versions from the physical-relation versions. (shrink)

This volume addresses a wide variety of moral concerns regarding slavery as an institutionalized social practice. By considering the slave's critical appropriation of the natural rights doctrine, the ambiguous implications of various notions of consent and liberty are examined. The authors assume that, although slavery is undoubtedly an evil social practice, its moral assessment stands in need of a more nuanced treatment. They address the question of what is wrong with slavery by critically examining, and in some cases endorsing, certain (...) principles derived from communitarianism, paternalism, utilitarianism, and jurisprudence. (shrink)

Efforts to promote responsible conduct of research (RCR) should take into consideration how scientists already conceptualize the relationship between ethics and science. In this study, we investigated how scientists relate ethics and science by analyzing the values expressed in interviews with fifteen science faculty members at a large midwestern university. We identified the values the scientists appealed to when discussing research ethics, how explicitly they related their values to ethics, and the relationships between the values they appealed to. We found (...) that the scientists in our study appealed to epistemic and ethical values with about the same frequency, and much more often than any other type of value. We also found that they explicitly associated epistemic values with ethical values. Participants were more likely to describe epistemic and ethical values as supporting each other, rather than trading off with each other. This suggests that many scientists already have a sophisticated understanding of the relationship between ethics and science, which may be an important resource for RCR training interventions. (shrink)

W. J. Mander presents the first ever synoptic history of British Idealism, the school of thought which dominated English-language philosophy from the 1860s to the early 20th century. He restores to its proper place this neglected period of philosophy, introducing the exponents of Idealism and explaining its distinctive concepts and doctrines.

Natural languages make prolific use of conventional constituent‐ordering patterns to indicate “who did what to whom,” yet the mechanisms through which these regularities arise are not well understood. A series of recent experiments demonstrates that, when prompted to express meanings through silent gesture, people bypass native language conventions, revealing apparent biases underpinning word order usage, based on the semantic properties of the information to be conveyed. We extend the scope of these studies by focusing, experimentally and computationally, on the interpretation (...) of silent gesture. We show cross‐linguistic experimental evidence that people use variability in constituent order as a cue to obtain different interpretations. To illuminate the computational principles that govern interpretation of non‐conventional communication, we derive a Bayesian model of interpretation via biased inductive inference and estimate these biases from the experimental data. Our analyses suggest people's interpretations balance the ambiguity that is characteristic of emerging language systems, with ordering preferences that are skewed and asymmetric, but defeasible. (shrink)

"Annual General Meeting Members Lunch." Ethos: Official Publication of the Law Society of the Australian Capital Territory, (202), pp. 17.

Bill Brewer presents an original view of the role of conscious experience in the acquisition of empirical knowledge. He argues that perceptual experiences must provide reasons for empirical beliefs if there are to be any determinate beliefs at all about particular objects in the world. This fresh approach to epistemology turns away from the search for necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge and works instead from a theory of understanding in a particular area.

Contra common belief, idealists need to account for the relationship between the mind and the brain every bit as much as do physicalists and dualists. However, they must conceive of that relationship in a very different way to either of their metaphysical rivals. This paper presents an appropriate idiom in which idealists may describe that connection. But the gain is not simply one of language, for it is argued that this idiom rules out understanding mind-brain correlation either a relationship of (...) causation or as one of identity. Exploiting literary parallels, it is further suggested that this lexicon for understanding how mind and brain stand one to another highlights the subsidiary status of physical reality, turning the mind-brain correlation from an apparent refutation of idealism into something that in fact vindicates it. (shrink)

Cet article explore la conception que les idéalistes britanniques se firent de la relation entre la philosophie et la poésie. J’examine la classification proposée par Hegel ainsi que la façon dont ils la modifièrent, et les difficultés auxquelles ils firent face dans leur tentative d’accommoder les critiques bien connues de Platon. J’examine ensuite certaines critiques adressées aux idéalistes à partir du point de vue de la philosophie analytique pour en conclure qu’elles ne sont guère convaincantes.This article explores the relation between (...) philosophy and poetry according to the British Idealists. I examine their place in Hegel’s classification as they modified it and the difficulties that they faced when trying to accommodate Plato’s well-known criticisms. I examine further some of the criticisms of the British Idealist conceptions from the standpoint of Analytic Philosophy, in order to show how inconclusive they are. (shrink)

A major new source for research of the 19th century and history of ideas, this dictionary covers all of the major, and a range of the less well-known, thinkers and writers of the time.

W. J. Mander examines the nature of idealist ethics, that is to say, the form and content of ethical belief most typically adopted by philosophical idealists. His inquiry has two aims. The first is historical: from the record of past philosophy, Mander demonstrates that there exists a discernible idealist approach to moral philosophy; a tradition of 'idealist ethics', and examines its characteristic marks and varieties. The second aim is apologetic. He argues that such idealist ethics offers an attractive (...) way of looking at moral questions and that it has much to contribute to contemporary discussion. In particular he argues that Idealist ethics have the power to cut through the sterile opposition between moral realism and moral anti-realism. To be an idealist is precisely to hold that the universe is so constituted that things are real if and only if they are ideal; to hold that uncovering in something the work of mind makes it more not less significant. (shrink)

W. J. Mander provides a brief introduction to and critical assessment of the thought of the greatest of the British Idealist philosophers, F. H. Bradley (1846-1924), whose work has been largely neglected in this century. After a general introduction to Bradley's metaphysics and its logical foundations, Mander shows that much of Bradley's philosophy has been seriously misunderstood. Mander argues that any adequate treatment of Bradley's thought must take full account of his unique dual inheritance from the traditions (...) of British empiricism and Hegelian rationalism. The scholarship of recent years is assessed, and new interpretations are offered of Bradley's views about truth, predication, and relations, and of his arguments for idealism. (shrink)

A taped conversational interview with Daniel Dennett and Bill Uzgalis covers a wide range of topics arising from Dennett’s thoughts about computing and human beings. The background of Dennett’s work is explored as are his views about mind-brain identity theory, artificial intelligence, functionalism, human exceptionalism, animal culture, language, pain, freedom and determinism, and quality of life.

This chapter provides a survey of issues about diagrams in traditional geometrical reasoning. After briefly refuting several common philosophical objections, and giving a sketch of diagram-based reasoning practice in Euclidean plane geometry, discussion focuses first on problems of diagram sensitivity, and then on the relationship between uniform treatment and geometrical generality. Here, one finds a balance between representationally enforced unresponsiveness (to differences among diagrams) and the intellectual agent's contribution to such unresponsiveness that is somewhat different from what one has come (...) to expect in modern logic. Finally, challenges and opportunities for further work are indicated. (shrink)

Various Value-Conscious Design frameworks have recently emerged to introduce moral and ethical intelligence into business and technical design contexts, with the goal of proactively influencing the design of technologies to account for moral and ethical values during the conception and design process. Two attempts to insert ethical intelligence into technical design communities to influence the design of technologies in ethical- and value-conscious ways are described, revealing discouraging results. Learning from these failed attempts, the article identifies three key challenges of pragmatic (...) engagement with technical design communities: confronting competing values; identifying the role of the values advocate; and the justification of a value framework. Addressing these challenges must become a priority if one is to be successful in pragmatically engaging with real-world business and design contexts to bring moral and ethical intelligence to bear in the design of emerging information and communication technologies. (shrink)

Students in two classes in the fall of 2004 making extensive use of online courseware were logged as they visited over 500 different “learning pages” which varied in length and in difficulty. We computed the time spent on each page by each student during each session they were logged in. We then modeled the time spent for a particular visit as a function of the page itself, the session, and the student. Surprisingly, the average time a student spent on learning (...) pages was of almost no value in predicting how long they would spend on a given page, even controlling for the session and page difficulty. The page itself was highly predictive, but so was the average time spent on learning pages in a given session. This indicates that local considerations, e.g., mood, deadline proximity, etc., play a much greater role in determining student pace and attention than do intrinsic student traits. We also consider the average time spent on learning pages as a function of the time of semester. Students spent less time on pages later in the semester, even for more demanding material. (shrink)

The INBIOSA project brings together a group of experts across many disciplines who believe that science requires a revolutionary transformative step in order to address many of the vexing challenges presented by the world. It is INBIOSA’s purpose to enable the focused collaboration of an interdisciplinary community of original thinkers. This paper sets out the case for support for this effort. The focus of the transformative research program proposal is biology-centric. We admit that biology to date has been more fact-oriented (...) and less theoretical than physics. However, the key leverageable idea is that careful extension of the science of living systems can be more effectively applied to some of our most vexing modern problems than the prevailing scheme, derived from abstractions in physics. While these have some universal application and demonstrate computational advantages, they are not theoretically mandated for the living. A new set of mathematical abstractions derived from biology can now be similarly extended. This is made possible by leveraging new formal tools to understand abstraction and enable computability. [The latter has a much expanded meaning in our context from the one known and used in computer science and biology today, that is "by rote algorithmic means", since it is not known if a living system is computable in this sense (Mossio et al., 2009).] Two major challenges constitute the effort. The first challenge is to design an original general system of abstractions within the biological domain. The initial issue is descriptive leading to the explanatory. There has not yet been a serious formal examination of the abstractions of the biological domain. What is used today is an amalgam; much is inherited from physics (via the bridging abstractions of chemistry) and there are many new abstractions from advances in mathematics (incentivized by the need for more capable computational analyses). Interspersed are abstractions, concepts and underlying assumptions “native” to biology and distinct from the mechanical language of physics and computation as we know them. A pressing agenda should be to single out the most concrete and at the same time the most fundamental process-units in biology and to recruit them into the descriptive domain. Therefore, the first challenge is to build a coherent formal system of abstractions and operations that is truly native to living systems. Nothing will be thrown away, but many common methods will be philosophically recast, just as in physics relativity subsumed and reinterpreted Newtonian mechanics. -/- This step is required because we need a comprehensible, formal system to apply in many domains. Emphasis should be placed on the distinction between multi-perspective analysis and synthesis and on what could be the basic terms or tools needed. The second challenge is relatively simple: the actual application of this set of biology-centric ways and means to cross-disciplinary problems. In its early stages, this will seem to be a “new science”. This White Paper sets out the case of continuing support of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) for transformative research in biology and information processing centered on paradigm changes in the epistemological, ontological, mathematical and computational bases of the science of living systems. Today, curiously, living systems cannot be said to be anything more than dissipative structures organized internally by genetic information. There is not anything substantially different from abiotic systems other than the empirical nature of their robustness. We believe that there are other new and unique properties and patterns comprehensible at this bio-logical level. The report lays out a fundamental set of approaches to articulate these properties and patterns, and is composed as follows. -/- Sections 1 through 4 (preamble, introduction, motivation and major biomathematical problems) are incipient. Section 5 describes the issues affecting Integral Biomathics and Section 6 -- the aspects of the Grand Challenge we face with this project. Section 7 contemplates the effort to formalize a General Theory of Living Systems (GTLS) from what we have today. The goal is to have a formal system, equivalent to that which exists in the physics community. Here we define how to perceive the role of time in biology. Section 8 describes the initial efforts to apply this general theory of living systems in many domains, with special emphasis on crossdisciplinary problems and multiple domains spanning both “hard” and “soft” sciences. The expected result is a coherent collection of integrated mathematical techniques. Section 9 discusses the first two test cases, project proposals, of our approach. They are designed to demonstrate the ability of our approach to address “wicked problems” which span across physics, chemistry, biology, societies and societal dynamics. The solutions require integrated measurable results at multiple levels known as “grand challenges” to existing methods. Finally, Section 10 adheres to an appeal for action, advocating the necessity for further long-term support of the INBIOSA program. -/- The report is concluded with preliminary non-exclusive list of challenging research themes to address, as well as required administrative actions. The efforts described in the ten sections of this White Paper will proceed concurrently. Collectively, they describe a program that can be managed and measured as it progresses. (shrink)

Saul Smilansky holds that there is a widespread intuition to the effect that pre-punishment – the practice of punishing individuals for crimes which they have not committed, but which we are in a position to know that they are going to commit – is morally objectionable. Smilanksy has argued that this intuition can be explained by our recognition of the importance of respecting the autonomy of potential criminals. (Smilansky, 1994) More recently he has suggested that this account of the intuition (...) only vindicates it if determinism is false, and argues that this presents a problem for compatibilists, who, he says, are committed to thinking that the truth of determinism makes no moral difference (Smilansky, 2007).In this paper I argue that the intuitions Smilansky refers to can be explained and vindicated as consequences of the truth of a communicative conception of punishment. Since the viability of the communicative conception does not depend on the falsity of determinism, our intuitions about pre-punishment do not clash with (what Smilanksy calls) compatibilism. And if the communicative theory of punishment is – as Duff (2001) suggests – a form of retributivism, the account also meets New's (1992) challenge to retributivists to explain what is wrong with pre-punishment. (shrink)

In many regions around the world, those at highest risk for acquiring HIV are young adults and adolescents. Young men who have sex with men in the USA are the group at greatest risk for HIV acquisition, particularly if they are part of a racial or ethnic minority group.1 Adolescent girls and young women have the highest incidence rates of any demographic subgroup in sub-Saharan Africa.2 To reverse the global AIDS pandemic’s toll on these high-risk groups, it is important to (...) deploy the most effective HIV prevention tools to young MSM in the USA, to adolescent girls and young women in sub-Saharan Africa, and to any other adolescents and young adults at high risk for HIV as products are proven to be safe and efficacious. Although prevention interventions with proven efficacy, such as oral pre-exposure prophylaxis, are available,3–8 they have not been sufficient to stem the tide and an expanded prevention toolkit is urgently needed to serve these populations. The field of HIV prevention continues to identify promising leads in the development of new biomedical prevention products, either delivering antiviral drug topically or systemically. The dapivirine ring has been shown to provide modest protection and is currently being tested in open label studies while injectable cabotegravir is being tested in a large efficacy trial for preventing HIV acquisition. Advances in the field of HIV prevention mean that scientists and regulators must plan for how they will bring prevention tools to populations at high risk for HIV as they conduct efficacy and effectiveness trials. For instance, safety data from younger age groups can also be used in combination with efficacy data from adult studies, where appropriate, as bridging studies to expand labelling to younger ages. If these …. (shrink)