This article examines life assurance and the politics of ‘big data’ in mid-19th-century Britain. The datasets generated by life assurance companies were vast archives of information about human longevity. Actuaries distilled these archives into mortality tables – immensely valuable tools for predicting mortality and so pricing risk. The status of the mortality table was ambiguous, being both a public and a private object: often computed from company records they could also be extrapolated from public projects such as the census, or (...) clerical records. Life assurance more generally straddled the line between private enterprise and collective endeavour, though its advocates stressed the public interest in its success. Reforming actuaries such as Thomas Rowe Edmonds wanted the data on which mortality tables were based to be made publicly available, but faced resistance. Such resistance undermined insurers’ claims to be scientific in spirit and hindered Edmonds’s personal quest for a law of mortality. Edmonds pushed instead for an open actuarial science alongside fellow travellers at the Statistical Society of London, which was populated by statisticians such as William Farr as well as by radical mathematicians such as Charles Babbage. The article explores Babbage’s little-known foray into the world of insurance, both as a budding actuary but also as a fierce critic of the industry. These debates over the construction, ownership, and accessibility of insurance datasets show that concern about the politics of big data did not begin in the 21st century. (shrink)

The agenda informing this compact book has the transparency of crystal. Against the widely repeated claim that the so‐called Information Age began with the invention of the transistor in 1947, a claim trumpeted both by the knowledgeable and the ignorant , Daniel Headrick seeks a more distant source for the information‐saturated environment in which we now live. He sensibly points out that human demand for information is as old as humanity itself, and consequently we should not look to name (...) any single moment as the “dawn” of the Information Age. Instead we should be attentive to historical periods during which the availability of information accelerates sharply. Often such moments are associated with particular technical innovations, such as the appearance of double‐entry bookkeeping, printing, the telegraph, and, yes, the computer. But Headrick wants to direct attention away from particular machines and technologies as accelerators of information and toward the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a period during which a host of novel information systems were introduced.On this basis the book discusses a series of developments in information systems under five headings. The first, “Organizing Information,” describes how Linnaeus and Lavoisier and Guyton de Morveau created new languages to process and communicate scientific information. The creation of the metric system finds a niche in this chapter as well. Headrick's second heading, “Transforming Information,” discusses the attempt by governments to collect statistics about populations, culminating in the specification of a decennial census in the American Constitution and the repeated attempts by French revolutionary regimes to conduct a census during the 1790s. The third heading, “Displaying Information,” turns to innovations in mapmaking during the eighteenth century and the invention of graphical representation. Under the fourth heading, “Storing Information,” Headrick describes eighteenth‐century encyclopedias and dictionaries, an overview that thankfully ranges considerably more widely than Diderot's Encyclopédie. Finally, the heading “Communicating Information” discusses the development of postal systems in various European countries and North America, as well as the invention of telegraphy. Of particular interest here is the extensive network of visual telegraphs established in France during the 1790s and then elsewhere in Europe.This breadth of coverage is impressive and suggests the comprehensiveness and significance of Headrick's story, but it also betrays certain weaknesses. First, the treatment of topics is highly uneven. The discussion of encyclopedias and dictionaries, for example, is deep and well informed by the primary sources. The treatment of Linnaeus's taxonomy, Lavoisier's chemical nomenclature, and the metric system is far more superficial, as is the analysis of postal systems. Second, this same breadth causes one to wonder just what the phenomenon is that Headrick means to describe. Such concerns are certainly not diminished by the wholly unsatisfactory definition provided for the book's central concept, information. As the book defines it, information is “the patterns of energy and matter that humans understand” . That somewhat underdetermines the object, I should say.Disappointing too was the book's failure to engage very deeply with an explanation of why these changes occurred. Leaving aside the question of whether all of the changes described really constitute changes in information systems , and also the question of whether all of these eighteenth‐century novelties could not be traced farther back in time, as several surely could, we can still ask what brought such developments together. A book of such synthetic reach ought to be ideal for such ruminations. As one might expect, Headrick does attribute the rising demand for information to the attempt by enlightened absolutist governments and later revolutionary regimes to develop policies to stimulate economic growth, along with the needs of actors in an increasingly complex and robust economic system. But all too often the book simply asserts that because this was the Age of Reason, the innovations occurred because they were inherently more rational. Linnaeus's nomenclature appealed to the “orderly minds of mid‐eighteenth‐century rationalists” , while the physician William Farr's statistical compilation of disease data for the English General Register Office gave “a more scientific basis to the classification of diseases” , and so on. (shrink)

Robert M. Farr, The Roots of Modern Social Psychology. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. £40.00 (hbk), £12.99 (pbk), xvii + 204 pp. Graham Richards, Putting Psychology in its Place: An introduction from a critical historical perspective. London: Routledge, 1996. £40.00 (hbk), £12.99 (pbk), x + 197 pp. Daniel N. Robinson, An Intellectual History of Psychology, 3rd edn. London: Arnold, 1995. £14.99 (pbk), viii + 381 pp.

Physicians, philosophers, and theologians consider how to address death and dying for a diverse population in a secularized century.Most of us are generally ill-equipped for dying. Today, we neither see death nor prepare for it. But this has not always been the case. In the early fifteenth century, the Roman Catholic Church published the Ars moriendi texts, which established prayers and practices for an art of dying. In the twenty-first century, physicians rely on procedures and protocols for the efficient management (...) of hospitalized patients. How can we recapture an art of dying that can facilitate our dying well? In this book, physicians, philosophers, and theologians attempt to articulate a bioethical framework for dying well in a secularized, diverse society.Contributors discuss such topics as the acceptance of human finitude; the role of hospice and palliative medicine; spiritual preparation for death; and the relationship between community, and individual autonomy. They also consider special cases, including children, elderly patients with dementia, and death in the early years of the AIDS epidemic, when doctors could do little more than accompany their patients in humble solidarity.These chapters make the case for a robust bioethics—one that could foster both the contemplation of finitude and the cultivation of community that would be necessary for a contemporary art of dying well.ContributorsJeffrey P. Bishop, Lisa Sowle Cahill, Daniel Callahan, Farr A. Curlin, Lydia S. Dugdale, Michelle Harrington, John Lantos, Stephen R. Latham, M. Therese Lysaught, Autumn Alcott Ridenour, Peter A. Selwyn, Daniel Sulmasy. (shrink)

This chapter begins with a putative puzzle between non-reductive physicalism according to which psychological properties are distinct from, yet metaphysically necessitated by, physical properties, and Hume's dictum according to which there are no necessary connections between distinct existences. However, the puzzle dissolves once care is taken to distinguish between distinct kinds of distinction: numerical distinctness, mereological distinctness, and what the chapter calls ‘weak modal distinctness’ and ‘strong modal distinctness’. For each of these notions, it turns out that either it makes (...) no sense according to non-reductive physicalism or else it is unclear whether Hume's dictum is true. The chapter then deploys these distinctions to argue first that unlike the dualist, the non-reductive physicalist can reject the exclusion principle in the causal exclusion argument, and second that emergentism can be distinguished from non-reductive physicalism. (shrink)

Anlezark, Daniel Review of: Francis of Assisi: The life and afterlife of a medieval saint, by Andre Vauchez, trans. Michael F. Cusato,, pp. xv + 398, $45.00.

Deleuze’s philosophy of immanence, because it vigorously rejects every appeal to the beyond, is often presumed to be indifferent to the concerns of religion. This book argues against such a presumption. It does so, first of all, by emphasising how both Deleuze’s thought and the notion of religion are motivated by a demand to create new modes of existence, or to imagine and enact a future that would substantively break with the present configuration of being. If Deleuze’s thought and the (...) notion of religion intersect in this regard, then their divergence must be located elsewhere, namely in the distinction between immanence and transcendence. The book thus argues that the enemy of Deleuze’s thought is not religion in general but instead the specific operation of transcendence. Furthermore, it argues that since Deleuze’s thought is not simply anti-religious, it cannot be identified with secularism. Along these lines, the book shows how Deleuzian immanence is able both to oppose religious transcendence and to enter an allliance with immanent accounts of the name of God. The effect of this is to suspend the paralysing debate between religion and the secular in order to attend to the ways in which immanence – whether “religious” or “secular” – is able to break with the present and to create the future. (shrink)

The writings of the later Mohists are generally taken to contain several updates to the consequentialist ethical view held by the Mohist school. In this paper, I defend one interpretation of those updates and how they may have served, within the Mohists’ argumentative context, to make their views more defensible. I argue that we should reject A.C. Graham’s prominent interpretation, on which the later Mohists’ argumentative strategy is to develop a conception of the a priori and to ground their ethical (...) view in a form of a priori rationalism. I contend, instead, that the strength of the later Mohists’ ethical view comes largely from their adoption of a subjective criterion for identifying what counts as a benefit within their consequentialist view. I show how the adoption of this subjective criterion fits within a larger trend in later Mohist thought of coming to terms with the diversity of people’s evaluative standpoints, and further show how it equips the later Mohists with worthwhile responses to their philosophical rivals. (shrink)

Many of the problems that would be faced in setting up transnational institutions mirror problems that have already been addressed by appropriate institutional mechanisms in the establishment of the modern nation-state.

The authors examined how a perceiver’s identification of a target person’s actions covaries with attributions of mind to the target. The authors found in Study 1 that the attribution of intentionality and cognition to a target was associated with identifying the target’s action in terms of high-level effects rather than low-level details. In Study 2, both action identification and mind attribution were greater for a liked target, and in Study 3, they were reduced for a target suffering misfortune. In Study (...) 4, it was again found that action identification and mind attribution were greater for a liked target, but like that for the self or a liked other, positive actions were identified at higher levels than negative actions, with the reverse being true for disliked others. In Study 5, the authors found that instructing participants to adopt the target’s perspective did not affect mind attribution but did lead to higher level identifications of the.. (shrink)

. Between 1833 and 1835, Victor Cousin and F.W.J. Schelling engaged in an “amical but serious critique” of each other’s philosophies. I argue that, despite perceptions to the contrary, key to this exchange is a common vision of an atypical, speculative empiricism. That is, against the grain of most commentaries, I contend that there are significant similarities between Cousin’s and Schelling’s philosophies of the early 1830s—similarities that converge on the possibility of a post-Kantian speculative empiricism, which they respectively dub metaphysical (...) psychology or a priori empiricism. (shrink)

In order to clarify the Stoics’ reasons for polemicizing against the other philosophical schools, one has to examine the place and function of dialectic in the Stoic system. It emerges that, instead of the heuristic role that it plays in Academic teaching, for the Stoics dialectic has only a defensive function : it is not used to find out the truth through a critical examination of opposing arguments, but to defend against any objection a truth that is known beforehand. This (...) Stoic belief that they were in possession of truth would then be somewhat similar to a religious faith. (shrink)

O que se oculta na escola? Em oposição à pergunta mais tradicionalmente feita em educação – o que a escola revela? – esta pesquisa encontra caminhos mais escuros para pensar as potências presentes nos tempos e espaços escolares. A partir dos desdobramentos gerados por pesquisa encerrada em 2016 (AUTOR, 2017), este texto tateia cegamente as possibilidades de uma escola que, ao invés de trazer à luz, atenta mais para aquilo que está obscuro, escondido, oculto. Através da leitura de pensadores da (...) filosofia da diferença, como Deleuze e Foucault, tenta situar a escola em uma disputa imanente entre o caos e a ordem, onde as estruturas de poder trabalham através da visibilização e permissão, por um lado, e pela interdição e ocultamento, pelo outro. Através de um olhar filosófico e genealógico da escola e com a ajuda de Heráclito e da deusa Ártemis, este texto cego tenta afirmar a potência dessas forças invisibilizadas, e assumir a infância não como uma fase a ser superada, mas justamente como uma destas potências que permitem manter o mundo oculto, encriptado, e não na forçosa lógica do visível. Tateia, com a ponta dos dedos, escola e infância, para constatar, sem precisar ver, que elas estiveram e estão lá.----(EN)Childhood and invisibility: toward a pedagogy of the concealWhat hides in school? In opposition to the most frequently asked question in the studies of education – what does school reveal? – this research finds more obscure ways to think the potencies present in school times and spaces. From the results generated by previous research (AUTOR, 2017), this text blindly gropes the possibilities of a school that, instead of bringing things to light, gives more attention to what is obscure, hidden, concealed. From readings on philosophers of difference, such as Deleuze and Foucault, attempts to situate the school in an immanent dispute between chaos and order, where the structures of power work through the visibilization and permission, on the one hand, and by the interdiction and concealment, on the other. Through a philosophical and genealogical view of school and with the help of Heraclitus and the goddess Artemis, this blind text tries to affirm the potency of these invisible forces, and to assume childhood not as a phase to be overcome, but as one of these forces that allow the world’s hiddenness, that allow it to keep encrypted, instead of being forced into the logic of the visible. It touches, with its fingertips, school and childhood, to state, without needing to see, that they have been and are there. (shrink)

Philosophy of Jazz discusses the philosophical relevance of jazz, showing that jazz and European art music have more in common than many assume.

This article explores two consequences of intentionalism. My first line of argument focuses on the impact of intentionalism on the ‚hard problem’ of phenomenal character. If intentionalism is true, the phenomenal supervenes on the intentional. Furthermore, if physicalism about the intentional is also true, the intentional supervenes on the physical. Therefore, if intentionalism and physicalism are both true, then, by transitivity of supervenience, physicalism about the phenomenal is true. I argue that this transitivity argument is not persuasive, because on any (...) interpretation of its central terms, at least one of its premises is as controversial as its conclusion already is. My second line of argument is about the consequences of intentionalism for the error theory of color perception. I suggest that if intentionalism is true, projectivism must be true also, because under this condition there is no single concept of color that can be used for the qualification of objects as well as for the characterization of experiences. (shrink)

A small but growing body of philosophically informed survey work calls into question whether the value-free ideal is a dominant viewpoint among scientists. However, the survey instruments in used in these studies have important limitations. Previous work has also made little headway in developing hypotheses that might predict or explain differing views about the value-free ideal among scientists. In this article, we review previous survey work on this topic, describe an improved survey instrument, report results from an initial administration of (...) it that strengthen and refine previous results, and develop two hypotheses that may account for gender effects found in the data. (shrink)

A meditation on the lessons to be learned from South Africa's transformation in the wake of apartheid. Justice, truth, and identity; race, society, and law--all come into dramatic play as South Africa makes the tumultuous transition to a post-apartheid democracy. Seeking the timeless through the timely and trying to find the deeper meaning in the sweep of events, Daniel Herwitz brings the vast resources of the philosophical essay to bear on the new realities of post-apartheid South Africa--from racial identity (...) to truth commissions, from architecture to film and television. A public intellectual's reflections on public life, Herwitz's essays question how the new South Africa has constructed its concepts of reconciliation and return and how its historical emergence has meant a rethinking, reimagining, reexperiencing, relabeling, and repoliticizing of race. Herwitz's purpose is to give a philosophical reading of society--a society already relying on implicitly philosophical concepts in its social and political agendas. Working through these concepts, testing their relevance for reading society, his book itself becomes a part of the politics of definition and description in the new South Africa. (shrink)

Daniel Schläppi hinterfragt die Klickökonomie im Licht ausgewählter Klassiker der Kulturkritik und verortet das Internet als historisches Phänomen mit eigener Geschichte, indem er es mit historischen Parallelphänomenen vergleicht. Dabei wird deutlich, dass für Kollektive, die durch gemeinsame Interessen, Ziele und Errungenschaften zusammengeklammert werden, sekundär ist, wie sie medial vermittelt werden. Die Tragfähigkeit und Nachhaltigkeit digitaler Kollektivitäten hingegen hängen elementar von ihrer medialen Rahmung ab. Hierin unterscheiden sich moderne Figurationen von historischen Personenverbänden, die ihre generationen- und epochenübergreifende Kontinuität kollektiv bewirtschafteten (...) Gütern und gemeinsamen Interessen sowie steter Pflege bestehender Beziehungsgefüge qua Kommunikation, Kollaboration und »Pooling« verdanken. Entscheidende Bedeutung kommt dabei symbolischen und realräumlichen Praktiken zu, wie sie sich auch in digitalen Kollektivitäten allmählich herausbilden. (shrink)

Our ordinary moral practices not only suppose that some people ought to perform some actions, and that some outcomes are morally better or worse than others, but also that there are rights, duties, goodness, and other apparently abstract moral entities. What should we make of these entities, and the talk of these entities? It is not straighforward to account for these entities in other terms. On the other hand, this paper will argue that talk of such entities is not easily (...) eliminated from good moral theorising. Nor are the prospects for paraphrasing apparent talk about these entities into less committal terms very promising. We should either find a place in our ontology for these creatures of ethics, or explain how they can be employed as a convenient fiction. (shrink)

In this essay, I argue in favor of a novel interpretation of the semantic theory that can be found in the Later Mohist writings. Recent interpretations by Chad Hansen and Chris Fraser cast the Later Mohist theory as a realist theory; this includes attributing to the Later Mohists what we can call “kind-realism,” the idea that there is some correct scheme of kind-terms that carves the world at its joints. While I agree with Hansen and Fraser that the Later Mohist (...) theory is realist in various ways, I offer challenges to their kind-realist interpretations, and argue instead for a kind-conventionalist interpretation on which there is no fixed, correct set of kinds, leaving schemes of kind terms to be determined by conventional decisions that occur during disputation. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: References.

SummaryToday remembered primarily as an eighteenth-century predecessor of laissez-faire economics, Bernard Mandeville's notorious Fable of the Bees marks the intersection of two modes of thought. On the one hand, Mandeville was a ‘moralist’ heir to the French Augustinianism of the previous century, viewing sociability as a mere mask for vanity and pride. On the other, he was a ‘materialist’ forerunner of economics, concerned to demonstrate the universality of human appetites for corporeal pleasures. The tension between these two modes of thought (...) results in ambivalences and contradictions—concerning the relative power of norms and interests, the relationship between motives and behaviours, and the historical variability of human cultures—that run throughout the Fable. Both traditions, with their attendant difficulties, have a long afterlife in the later history of the social sciences; understanding their origins in Mandeville's thought can help us get a firmer grip on problems that still trouble us today. (shrink)

In this article, I will discuss Aron Gurwitsch's criticism of Edmund Husserl's theory of hyletic data. First, Husserl’s doctrine will be summarized in its earliest complete formulation. It will then be seen that Gurwitsch's problem with this doctrine is primarily due to his acceptance of gestalt theoretic organization. He conceives of hyletic data as being a kind of formless stuff that undergoes organiza-tion by morphetic components of the noesis, which represents a dualism in percep-tion. Instead, Gurwitsch wants to show us (...) that the organization of these contents is autochthonous. I will consider Gurwitsch's criticism against Husserl's own writings, and especially those that were not available to Gurwitsch. It will be seen that Husserl continues to develop this doctrine and that it very interestingly undergoes a kind of noematization and exhibits certain displays of autochthonous organization that in the end are not far from Gurwitsch's own conception of these affairs.Este artículo versará sobre la crítica de Aron Gurwitsch de los data hylé-ticos de Edmund Husserl. En primer lugar, se resumirá la doctrina de Husserl en su primera formulación completa. A continuación, se verá que el problema de Gur-witsch con esta doctrina se debe principalmente a su aceptación de la organización teórica de la Gestalt. Él concibe los data hyléticos como una especie de material amorfo que se somete a organización por los componentes de morphé de la noesis, lo que representa un dualismo en la percepción. En cambio, Gurwitsch quiere mos-trarnos que la organización de estos contenidos es autóctona. Se examinará la críti-ca de Gurwitsch acerca de los escritos del propio Husserl y especialmente de aque-llos que no estuvieron al alcance de Gurwitsch. Se verá que Husserl sigue desarro-llando esta doctrina y que curiosamente sufre una especie de noematización y muestra ciertas manifestaciones de organización autóctona que, a la postre, no están lejos de la concepción gurwitscheana de estos asuntos. (shrink)

In the New Kingdom of Granada the revolutionary period is usually analyzed in isolation, as if it was an incongruity barely linked to the past or to its own future. Therefore, explanations about the very occurrence of the political transformation discard intimate causalities, privileging instead the actions of small groups as well as external influences and accidents. Thus the main challenge for future research will be to understand this epoch of great transformations as an unexpected coincidence between a dynamic evolution (...) and an explosive juncture. In short, the task will be to place the independence on the plane of history, no longer considering it as a sphere gravitating in space. (shrink)

This article constitutes an attempt to articulate productive crossovers between some of the philosophical groundings and theoretical underpinnings on which various schools of phenomenology are based and areas within the practice and theory of psychoanalysis that chime with these. It works ultimately towards establishing a _phenomenologico-existential psychoanalysis _from these researches, out of which key concepts of illness, structure, situation, and periodicity are excavated; and into which they are incorporated.

G. W. Leibniz has been praised as an exemplar of tolerance on both theological and political grounds. His irenic efforts within Christendom as well as his positive attitude towards pagans like the Chinese is well documented. He thought that “the great majority of mankind” were already “civilized”. This paper highlights Leibniz’s political treatment of the “uncivilized” peoples, whom he termed “barbarians” and “savages”. Given Leibniz’s worldly outlook and prodigious reading, including writings detailing the horrors inflicted on the natives of the (...) Americas, he blithely ignored a reality that was quite at odds with his own vision for such peoples. The dissonance between his ideas on how to treat “barbarian” peoples (whom he considered to be fully human and deserving of mutual respect) and his awareness of their actual treatment in many nascent European colonies is striking. The only conclusion that can be reached (though Leibniz never says so explicitly) is that their conversion to Christianity and the consequent enlightenment of their posterity trumped their present suffering. (shrink)

Des origines à la fin du cinquième siècle. Les Présocratiques -- La période classique. Socrate ; Platon ; Aristote et l'école péripatéticienne -- Les philosophies hellénistiques. La critique de la religion populaire à l'âge hellénistique et la philosophie épicurienne de la religion ; La religion des Stoïciens.