A short, provocative book about why "useless" science often leads to humanity's greatest technological breakthroughs A forty-year tightening of funding for scientific research has meant that resources are increasingly directed toward applied or practical outcomes, with the intent of creating products of immediate value. In such a scenario, it makes sense to focus on the most identifiable and urgent problems, right? Actually, it doesn't. In his classic essay "The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge," Abraham Flexner, the founding director of the (...) Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the man who helped bring Albert Einstein to the United States, describes a great paradox of scientific research. The search for answers to deep questions, motivated solely by curiosity and without concern for applications, often leads not only to the greatest scientific discoveries but also to the most revolutionary technological breakthroughs. In short, no quantum mechanics, no computer chips. This brief book includes Flexner's timeless 1939 essay alongside a new companion essay by Robbert Dijkgraaf, the Institute's current director, in which he shows that Flexner's defense of the value of "the unobstructed pursuit of useless knowledge" may be even more relevant today than it was in the early twentieth century. Dijkgraaf describes how basic research has led to major transformations in the past century and explains why it is an essential precondition of innovation and the first step in social and cultural change. He makes the case that society can achieve deeper understanding and practical progress today and tomorrow only by truly valuing and substantially funding the curiosity-driven "pursuit of useless knowledge" in both the sciences and the humanities. (shrink)

Recent work on distributed cognition and self-narrative has emphasised how autobiographical memories and their narration are, rather than being stored and created by an individual, distributed across embodied organisms and their environment. This paper postulates a stronger form of distributed narration than has been accommodated in the literature so far, which I call narrative deference. This describes the phenomena whereby a person is significantly dependent upon another person for the narration of some significant aspect of their own autobiographical self-narrative. I (...) suggest that a person is more likely to narratively defer where they suffer a mnemonic impairment regarding some significant adverse life experience like trauma, illness or injury. Following a recent turn in the literature towards investigating the harmful aspects of distributed cognition as well as its many advantageous features, this paper explores how the benefits of autobiographical self-narrative deference within close personal relationships are complexly related to its harms. (shrink)

Miranda Fricker’s influential concept of epistemic injustice has recently seen application to many areas of interest, with an increasing body of healthcare research using the concept of epistemic injustice in order to develop both general frameworks and accounts of specific medical conditions and patient groups. This paper illuminates tensions that arise between taking steps to protect against committing epistemic injustice in healthcare, and taking steps to understand the complexity of one’s predicament and treat it accordingly. Work on epistemic injustice is (...) therefore at risk of obfuscating legitimate and potentially fruitful inquiry. This paper uses Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/Myalgic Encephalomyelitis as a case study, but I suggest that the key problems identified could apply to other cases within healthcare, such as those classed as Medically Unexplained Illnesses, Functional Neurological Disorders and Psychiatric Disorders. Future work on epistemic injustice in healthcare must recognise and attend to this tension to protect against unsatisfactory attempts to correct epistemic injustice. (shrink)

Large, black, flightless birds with unpredictable tempers and colourful heads and necks, cassowaries have enthralled European audiences for centuries, but perhaps no one more so than private collector and zoologist Lionel Walter Rothschild (1868-1937). Throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Rothschild acquired hundreds of living cassowaries which were kept in his private zoological collection. This paper explores the nature of Rothschild's private zoo and how the collection of living cassowaries was used to support his zoological activities. Spread across (...) three sites-the family estate at Tring Park, the zoological gardens in Regent's Park, and the business premises of Cambridge-based taxidermist Frederick Doggett-it will examine how Rothschild used the living birds kept in his private zoo to devise and inform a process for the preparation and display of cassowary specimens in museum galleries. It will show how he recruited specialist artists and taxidermists to perfect the art, and the significant financial investment this entailed. This is followed by exploration of how Rothschild's access to and observations of living birds informed his taxonomic work and, in particular, the identification of species and subspecies. The argument is made that Rothschild's private zoo and access to living cassowaries enabled his dedication to the study of the genus and ultimately underpinned his reputation as a world authority on cassowaries in the early 20th century. (shrink)

In Simone de Beauvoir's Philosophy of Lived Experience, Eleanore Holveck presents Simone de Beauvoir's theory of literature and metaphysics, including its relationship to the philosophers Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Immanuel Kant, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Jean-Paul Sartre, with references to the literary tradition of Goethe, Maurice Barr_s, Arthur Rimbaud, AndrZ Breton, and Paul Nizan. The book provides a detailed philosophical analysis of Beauvoir's early short stories and several major novels, including The Mandarins and L'invitZe.

I argue that the best spacetime setting for Newtonian gravitation (NG) is the curved spacetime setting associated with geometrized Newtonian gravitation (GNG). Appreciation of the ‘Newtonian equivalence principle’ leads us to conclude that the gravitational field in NG itself is a gauge quantity, and that the freely falling frames are naturally identified with inertial frames. In this context, the spacetime structure of NG is represented not by the flat neo-Newtonian connection usually made explicit in formulations, but by the sum of (...) the flat connection and the gravitational field. 1 Introduction2 Newtonian Gravity: The Orthodox Approach3 Newtonian Gravity: Additional Symmetries4 Cosmological Considerations5 A Newtonian Equivalence Principle: Inertial Frames in Newtonian Gravitation6 Theory Equivalence?7 Conclusion. (shrink)

I argue that the need to understand spacetime structure as emergent in quantum gravity is less radical and surprising it might appear. A clear understanding of the link between general relativity's geometrical structures and empirical geometry reveals that this empirical geometry is exactly the kind of thing that could be an effective and emergent matter. Furthermore, any theory with torsion will involve an effective geometry, even though these theories look, at first glance, like theories with straightforward spacetime geometry. As it's (...) highly likely that there will be a role for torsion in quantum gravity, it's also highly likely that any theory of quantum gravity will require us to get to grips with emergent spacetime structure. (shrink)

In this paper, we analyze two key claims offered by recruitment AI companies in relation to the development and deployment of AI-powered HR tools: (1) recruitment AI can objectively assess candidates by removing gender and race from their systems, and (2) this removal of gender and race will make recruitment fairer, help customers attain their DEI goals, and lay the foundations for a truly meritocratic culture to thrive within an organization. We argue that these claims are misleading for four reasons: (...) First, attempts to “strip” gender and race from AI systems often misunderstand what gender and race are, casting them as isolatable attributes rather than broader systems of power. Second, the attempted outsourcing of “diversity work” to AI-powered hiring tools may unintentionally entrench cultures of inequality and discrimination by failing to address the systemic problems within organizations. Third, AI hiring tools’ supposedly neutral assessment of candidates’ traits belie the power relationship between the observer and the observed. Specifically, the racialized history of character analysis and its associated processes of classification and categorization play into longer histories of taxonomical sorting and reflect the current demands and desires of the job market, even when not explicitly conducted along the lines of gender and race. Fourth, recruitment AI tools help produce the “ideal candidate” that they supposedly identify through by constructing associations between words and people’s bodies. From these four conclusions outlined above, we offer three key recommendations to AI HR firms, their customers, and policy makers going forward. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Current attempts to understand unusually high rates of psychiatric illness in complex, chronic illnesses can be guilty of operating within an explanatory framework whereby there are two options. Either (a) that the psychiatric predicaments are secondary to the bodily condition, and (b) that they are primary. In this paper, I draw upon philosophical work on affect, contemporary empirical work, and qualitative first-person patient data to illustrate a much messier reality. I argue that affective experience is generally more complex in (...) such conditions, and that a variety of pre- and post-morbid causal factors dynamically interact such that the resultant psychiatric predicaments do not permit to classification as strictly primary or secondary to the bodily condition. Affective scaffolding, in my view, provides an apt theoretical framework for capturing this nuance. (shrink)

'There are no substantive rights for subjects in Hobbes's political theory, only bare freedoms without correlated duties to protect them'. This orthodoxy of Hobbes scholarship and its Hohfeldian assumptions are challenged by Curran who develops an argument that Hobbes provides claim rights for subjects against each other and (indirect) protection of the right to self-preservation by sovereign duties. The underlying theory, she argues, is not a theory of natural rights but rather, a modern, secular theory of rights, with something to (...) offer current discussions in rights theory. (shrink)

This paper looks at the relationship between spacetime functionalism and Harvey Brown’s dynamical relativity. One popular way of reading and extending Brown’s programme in the literature rests on viewing his position as a version of relationism. But a kind of spacetime functionalism extends the project in a different way, by focussing on the account Brown gives of the role of spacetime in relativistic theories. It is then possible to see this as giving a functional account of the concept of spacetime (...) which may be applied to theories that go beyond relativity. This paper explores the way in which both the relationist project and the functionalist project relate to Brown’s work, despite being incompatible. Ultimately, these should not be seen as two conflicting readings of Brown, but two different directions in which to take his project. (shrink)

Several modern accounts of explanation acknowledge the importance of abstraction and idealization for our explanatory practice. However, once we allow a role for abstraction, questions remain. I ask whether the relation between explanations at different theoretical levels should be thought of wholly in terms of abstraction, and argue that changes of the quantities in terms of which we describe a system can lead to novel explanations that are not merely abstractions of some more detailed picture. I use the example of (...) phase transitions as described by statistical mechanics and thermodynamics to illustrate this, and to demonstrate some details of the relationship between abstraction, idealization, and novel explanation. (shrink)

Hobbes, in his political writing, is generally understood to be arguing for absolutism. I argue that despite apparently supporting absolutism, Hobbes, in Leviathan, also undermines that absolutism in at least two and possibly three ways. First, he makes sovereignty conditional upon the sovereign’s ability to ensure the safety of the people. Second and crucially, he argues that subjects have inalienable rights, rights that are held even against the sovereign. When the subjects’ preservation is threatened they are no longer obliged to (...) obey the sovereign. Third, there is also a possible limitation on the absolute power of the sovereign in the form of restrictions Hobbes puts in place on what laws he may legitimately make. Finally, Hobbesian absolutism is compared to the absolutism of Carl Schmitt. This exercise demonstrates the limitations that Hobbes places on the power and authority of the sovereign. (shrink)

Functional imaging techniques, such as positron emission tomography and functional magnetic resonance imaging, present a unique opportunity to examine, in humans, the cerebral representation of space in vivo. Space is ubiquitous and not a unitary phenomenon, and the brain uses visual, vestibular and proprioceptive inputs to produce multiple representations of space subserving spatial cognition, ranging from gaze control to remembering multiple complex large-scale environments. Functional imaging studies have shown the importance of the parietal cortex in perceptual, motor, attention and working (...) memory aspects of body-centred human spatial cognition. Functional imaging has also revealed pathways in humans homologous to those found in monkeys for the separate processing of spatial location and object identity. There are further suggestions of similar differentiation in working memory. The importance of the medial temporal region in the recall of spatial location has been confirmed also and novel virtual reality paradigms are now providing insights into the cerebral representation of spatially-extended large-scale environments. We still have much to learn about the cerebral representation of space in the human brain and functional brain imaging, in concert with patient studies and animal models, will allow us to continue investigating. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Why the Family is Beautiful (Lacan Against Badiou)Eleanor Kaufman (bio)The theory of ethics that can be distilled from the work of Jacques Lacan and Alain Badiou bears no resemblance to many commonly received notions of the ethical, especially any that would link ethics to a system of morality. In fact, ethics is not necessarily the central concept in their work, even in Lacan's The Ethics of Psychoanalysis or (...) Badiou's recent Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. If anything, it is defined vicariously and in relation to other more central concepts, such as the workings of desire for Lacan and the fidelity to an event—or truth-process—for Badiou. Nonetheless, an examination of the network of concepts held together under the umbrella of the ethical allows for a sharp distinction between the work of Lacan and Badiou, one that Badiou—himself avowedly indebted to Lacan—is hesitant to make. Where Lacan elevates the beautiful over the good in his reading of Sophocles's Antigone, Badiou elevates the truth-process over the evil betrayal of such an event, drawing on examples ranging from National Socialism to the love relation between two people. A truth-process is a situation-specific adherence, or fidelity, to the revolutionary potential of an event that may take place in one of the four realms of politics, art, science, and love. Perhaps Badiou's best example of a truth-process—what I will also refer to as fidelity to an event—is one not described in the text under consideration here: the apostle Paul's proclamation of and fierce loyalty to the event of Christ's resurrection. It is in the particular form in which the ethical fidelity to a truth-process may be hard to distinguish from evil that I will take issue with Badiou, for both his political examples and his evocation of love as one of four conduits to a truth-process reflect a difficult inflexibility in his extraordinarily lucid and provocative system. Lacan, on the other hand, uses Antigone's strange family values to suggest a more flexible model of ethics, one that is focused on the encounter with the inhuman and the fragile boundary between life and death.Lacan's most sustained discussion of ethics occurs in his seminal Seminar Seven from 1959-60, entitled The Ethics of Psychoanalysis.1 Not only does this seminar register a gradual shift from an earlier emphasis on desire to a later focus on the real and the drive, but it is also a crucial articulation of what might seem for some to be an oxymoronic conjunction—psychoanalysis and ethics. Such a conjunction, as opposed to a Sartrean or Levinasian model that would situate ethics in relation to the Other,2 takes as its [End Page 135] touchstone Freud's stinging critique in Civilization and Its Discontents of the biblical injunction to love the neighbor as oneself. Here it is not merely a question of understanding why the neighbor may be equally an object of hatred, but of understanding how contradictory sentiments are also to be found at the heart of the self, and hence why a viable system of ethics must take this into consideration.3 In other words, ethics is not to be thought primarily as a relation to the other so much as a nonrelation to the self.4 Thus, when Lacan opposes the good to the beautiful, it is precisely the relational aspect of the good that he denigrates.Lacan links the good to the dialectic and to the power to deprive others, situating it squarely in the realm of morality. The beautiful, by contrast, marks a space of nonrelation where it is not so much a matter of two distinct selves but rather of a single self whose desire is not its own. In Seminar Six from the previous year, Lacan analyzes Hamlet and suggests that the reason Hamlet does not kill Claudius is that he is traversed by his mother's desire. He emphasizes that Hamlet's desire is "the desire not for his mother, but of his mother."5 Between Seminars Six and Seven, Lacan shifts his focus from desire to ethics, from... (shrink)

Background People who are at elevated risk of suicide stand to benefit from internet-based interventions; however, research in this area is likely impacted by a range of ethical and practical challenges. The aim of this study was to examine the ethical issues and practical barriers associated with clinical studies of internet-based interventions for suicide prevention. Method This was a mixed-methods study involving two phases. First, a systematic search was conducted to identify studies evaluating internet-based interventions for people at risk of (...) suicide, and information pertaining to safety protocols and exclusion criteria was extracted. Second, investigators on the included studies were invited to complete an online survey comprising open-ended and forced-choice responses. Quantitative and qualitative methods were used to analyse the data. Results The literature search identified 18 eligible studies, of which three excluded participants based on severity of suicide risk. Half of the 15 suicide researchers who participated in the survey had experienced problems obtaining ethics approval, and none had encountered adverse events attributed to their intervention. Survey respondents noted the difficulty of managing risk in online environments and the limitations associated with implementing safety protocols, although some also reported increased confidence resulting from the ethical review process. Respondents recommended researchers pursue a collaborative relationship with their research ethics committees. Conclusion There is a balance to be achieved between the need to minimise the risk of adverse events whilst also ensuring interventions are being validated on populations who may be most likely to use and benefit from them. Further research is required to obtain the views of research ethics committees and research participants on these issues. Dialogue between researchers and ethics committees is necessary to address the need to ensure safety while also advancing the timely development of effective interventions in this critical area. (shrink)

Acoustic experiences of nature represent a growing area in restorative environments research and are explored in this narrative literature review. First, the work surveyed indicates that nature is broadly characterized by the sounds of birdsong, wind, and water, and these sounds can enhance positive perceptions of natural environments presented through visual means. Second, isolated from other sensory modalities these sounds are often, although not always, positively affectively appraised and perceived as restorative. Third, after stress and/or fatigue nature sounds and soundscapes (...) can lead to subjectively and objectively improved mood and cognitive performance, as well as reductions in arousal, although some inconsistencies in findings are observed. Fourth, theoretical frameworks of restorative environments would benefit from inclusion of acoustic environmental properties such as sound intensity or frequency. Fifth, findings regarding positive, learned semantic associations with nature have arisen as a result of recent work on sounds and restoration. This represents another important area of potential theoretical development for broader restorative environments research. (shrink)

This book takes a new look at the history of individual rights, focusing on how philosophers have written that history. Eleanor Curran argues that the turn to jurisprudence, after the philosophical rejection of natural rights, has resulted in an impoverished notion of rights as no more than claims and entitlements.

This paper points to a more expansive conception of grief by arguing that the losses of illness can be genuine objects of grief. I argue for this by illuminating underappreciated structural features of typical grief — that is, grief over a bereavement — which are shared but under-recognized. I offer a common chronic illness, chronic fatigue syndrome/myalgic encephalomyelitis (CFS/ME), as a striking case study. I then use this analysis to highlight some clinical challenges that arise should this claim receive uptake (...) in clinical practice. Extant literature on CFS/ME tells us that rates of comorbid depression are atypically high. If one accepts that people with CFS/ ME can grieve over losses associated with the condition, and that grief can be easily mistaken for depression in this context, this might suggest that rates of comorbid depression are inflated. I show, however, that the challenge of distinguishing between healthy and pathological grief arises in its place, and is just as tricky to solve. (shrink)

The aim of research is to determine moral Realism and religious Beliefs. Regardless of whether moral truths correspond to moral facts or characterise moral qualities, Peripatetics and moral constructivists, on the other hand, believe that moral truths are discovered via an analysis of the circumstances of practical reasoning and human interests. Moral constructivism's perspective on the existence of moral characteristics is similar to Mullā Ṣadrā's on the Platonic Form of the Good. Because he believed that universal conceptions should be reflected (...) in the intellectual domain, Mullā Ṣadrā recognised the reality of the Platonic Forms. The research also determines the analysis of the foundations of ethical normativity in theistic traditions. However, the researcher did not think an appeal to the Forms could be utilised to overcome epistemological concerns concerning natural sorts. Similarly, constructivists and peripatetics might acknowledge a basic account of realism for moral facts and attributes while rejecting the idea that moral knowledge can be obtained by appealing to direct intuitions. Understanding human nature and using common sense are the foundations of moral knowledge that is not dependent on revelation. (shrink)

This paper aims to understand how recent discussion of novel and robust behaviour in physics might be applied in biology and other special sciences. In particular, it looks at the prospects for extending an account of novel explanation to biological examples. Despite the differences in the disciplines, the prospects look good, at least when we look at a biological example in which a certain kind of reduction is possible.

For centuries in the UK and elsewhere, charities have been widely regarded as admirable and virtuous organisations. Business corporations, by contrast, have been characterised in the popular imagination as entities that lack a capacity for moral judgement. Drawing on the philosophical literature on the moral agency of organisations, we examine how the law shapes the ability of charities and business corporations headquartered in England to exercise moral agency. Paradoxically, we find that charities are legally constrained in exercising moral agency in (...) ways in which business corporations are not. Implications for charities and business corporations are then explored. (shrink)

Loneliness is often described as a deadly epidemic sweeping across the population, a silent killer. Loneliness, we are told, is a social disease that must be cured. But what does it mean to think of loneliness as a feminist issue, and what might a specifically feminist theorisation bring to conceptualisations of loneliness? In this paper, I argue that feminism helps us see that loneliness is not just personal but political. I trace how stories of loneliness surface, circulate, shift and compound (...) within the specificity of the present, centring on recent strategies proposed by the UK government in their ‘national mission to end loneliness’. I outline how this policy discourse upholds certain normative attachments as having the promise to alleviate loneliness: coupled love, the family, community. Such framings serve to depoliticise contemporary conditions of loneliness, positioning loneliness as a personal failure, with the cure for loneliness as the responsibility of individuals and communities. Absent in government depictions of the problem of loneliness are the wider mechanisms that condemn people to lonely lives, when infrastructures fail, when people find themselves violently cut off from the world. Finally, I speculate on what might happen if we were to challenge this framing of loneliness as always and only a problem in need of a cure. I seek to uncover some of the political potentials of loneliness, asking what can be learnt through reflecting upon shared experiences of loneliness? For, as feminist politics has shown us, feelings of disaffection and alienation can help us imagine other worlds. (shrink)

(2002). A VERY PECULIAR ROYALIST. HOBBES IN THE CONTEXT OF HIS POLITICAL CONTEMPORARIES. British Journal for the History of Philosophy: Vol. 10, No. 2, pp. 167-208. doi: 10.1080/096087800210122455.