Il semble tout autant irrecevable de comprendre l’Esthétique à l’aune de la Logique que de mettre sur le même plan les écrits des différentes périodes de Kant : on nie par là même le sens positif de l’Esthétique, puisque, en expliquant ce passage en rapport à ce qui suit, on en gomme la spécificité. C’est alors l’irréductibilité de la passivité et la signification véritable de l’espace et du temps qui se trouvent anéanties. Or cette passivité est pourtant attestée par l’expression (...) selon laquelle espace et temps sont des grandeurs infinies données : elles ne sont pas construites et ne relèvent pas d’une synthèse. Aussi faut-il distinguer ces grandeurs des grandeurs extensives et de celles intensives qui apparaissent dans l’Analytique des principes. Il faudra, dans cet effort pour soutenir le sens positif de l’Esthétique, s’appuyer sur la note litigieuse du paragraphe 26, afin de distinguer l’espace et le temps comme intuitions pures, donc comme quanta proprement originaires, des concepts de l’espace et du temps qui sont construits à partir de l’application des catégories à la forme de l’intuition. Pour ne parler que de l’espace, cela signifie qu’il faut distinguer deux plans: l’espace de l’Esthétique forme le sous-bassement à partir duquel sont construits les concepts mathématiques d’espace – par exemple l’espace de la géométrie euclidienne. Une telle thèse a l’avantage, comme le soulignait Joseph Moreau, qui dissocie. (shrink)

Après la diffusion en intégralité, le samedi 28 septembre 2019, du discours d’Eric Zemmour à la « Convention de la droite », une large polémique est relayée, dans les médias et sur les réseaux sociaux, sur l’opportunité d’une telle diffusion. Le premier ministre Edouard Philippe a qualifié ces propos de « nauséabonds et profondément contraires à l’idée que nous nous faisons de la France et de la République ». Entre accusations et justifications, beaucoup reconnaissent que ce discours a posé (...) des problèmes. Les thèmes habituels du polémiste y sont abordés, avec de nombreux cas de propos pouvant relever de la discrimination, notamment envers les femmes. Pour mener cette étude, cet article présente une analyse textométrique de ce discours, dont les conclusions questionnent plus particulièrement les propos tenus vis-à-vis des femmes, notamment dans trois chapitres spécifiques de son ouvrage, Le suicide français. Au-delà, l’article interroge la légitimité d’Eric Zemmour, en mettant en valeur le « savoir » et l’« érudition » qu’il matérialise dans ses prises de parole, et la manière dont il parvient à auto-légitimer ses propos – ce qui lui confère une certaine "autorité" dans les médias. (shrink)

BackgroundResearch ethics and the measures deployed to ensure ethical oversight of research (e.g., informed consent forms, ethics review) are vested with extremely important ethical and practical goals. Accordingly, these measures need to function effectively in real-world research and to follow high level standards.MethodsWe examined approved consent forms for Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) studies approved by Canadian research ethics boards (REBs).ResultsWe found evidence of variability in consent forms in matters of physical and psychological risk reporting. (...) Approaches used to tackle the emerging issue of incidental findings exposed extensive variability between and within research sites.ConclusionThe causes of variability in approved consent forms and studies need to be better understood. However, mounting evidence of administrative and practical hurdles within current ethics governance systems combined with potential sub-optimal provision of information to and protection of research subjects support other calls for more scrutiny of research ethics practices and applicable revisions. (shrink)

© 2017. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.We present new observations of the low-mass companion to HD 984 taken with the Gemini Planet Imager as a part of the GPI Exoplanet Survey campaign. Images of HD 984 B were obtained in the J and H bands. Combined with archival epochs from 2012 and 2014, we fit the first orbit to the companion to find an 18 au orbit with a 68% confidence interval between 14 and 28 au, an eccentricity (...) of 0.18 with a 68% confidence interval between 0.05 and 0.47, and an inclination of 119°with a 68% confidence interval between 114°and 125°. To address the considerable spectral covariance in both spectra, we present a method of splitting the spectra into low and high frequencies to analyze the spectral structure at different spatial frequencies with the proper spectral noise correlation. Using the split spectra, we compare them to known spectral types using field brown dwarf and low-mass star spectra and find a best-fit match of a field gravity M6.5 ±1.5 spectral type with a corresponding temperature of K. Photometry of the companion yields a luminosity of log=2.88 ± 0.07 dex with DUSTY models. Mass estimates, again from DUSTY models, find an age-dependent mass of 34 ±1 to 95 ±4 M Jup. These results are consistent with previous measurements of the object. (shrink)

We often rely on others for guidance about what to do. But wouldn't it be better to rely instead on only your own solo judgment? Deferring to others about moral matters, after all, can seem to conflict what Enlightenment demands. In Guided by Voices, however, Eric Wiland argues that there is nothing especially bad about relying on others in forming your moral views. You may rely on others for forming your moral views, just as you can your views about (...) anything else. You can accept moral testimony without loss. Furthermore, there are several distinctive social goods attainable by being guided by what others say. Thus, it can be better to be guided by moral testimony than by your own moral lights. Wiland also argues that relying on others for moral advice has one advantage over relying on others for moral testimony. For when you trust your adviser's advice, you both thereby form a joint agent that can achieve autonomy, moral understanding, and morally worthy action. Sometimes taking another's advice is your only way to act well. Arguing against the presumption that moral reasoning is ideally done alone, Guided by Voices is the first book to significantly address both moral testimony and advice. (shrink)

Sovereign is he who provides the exception.…The exception is more interesting than the rule. The rule proves nothing; the exception proves everything. In the exception the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition.In spring 2020, in response to the COVID-19 crisis, world leaders imposed severe restrictions on citizens’ civil, political, and economic liberties. These restrictions went beyond less controversial and less demanding social distancing measures seen in past epidemics. Many states (...) and countries imposed universal lockdowns. Lockdowns, as we define them here, require people to stay home; in some countries and places, citizens must have ad hoc licenses to... (shrink)

Although the terminology of Big Data has so far gained little traction in economics, the availability of unprecedentedly rich datasets and the need for new approaches – both epistemological and computational – to deal with them is an emerging issue for the discipline. Using interviews conducted with a cross-section of economists, this paper examines perspectives on Big Data across the discipline, the new types of data being used by researchers on economic issues, and the range of responses to this opportunity (...) amongst economists. First, we outline the areas in which it is being used, including the prediction and ‘nowcasting’ of economic trends; mapping and predicting influence in the context of marketing; and acting as a cheaper or more accurate substitute for existing types of data such as censuses or labour market data. We then analyse the broader current and potential contributions of Big Data to economics, such as the ways in which econometric methodology is being used to shed light on questions beyond economics, how Big Data is improving or changing economic models, and the kinds of collaborations arising around Big Data between economists and other disciplines. (shrink)

In 2015, a flourish of “alarums and excursions” by the scientific community propelled CRISPR/Cas9 and other new gene-editing techniques into public attention. At issue were two kinds of potential gene-editing experiments in humans: those making inheritable germ-line modifications and those designed to enhance human traits beyond what is necessary for health and healing. The scientific consensus seemed to be that while research to develop safe and effective human gene editing should continue, society's moral uncertainties about these two kinds of experiments (...) needed to be better resolved before clinical trials of either type should be attempted. In the United States, the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine convened the Committee on Human Gene Editing: Scientific, Medical and Ethical Considerations to pursue that resolution. The committee's 2017 consensus report has been widely interpreted as “opening the door” to inheritable human genetic modification and holding a line against enhancement interventions. But on a close reading it does neither. There are two reasons for this eccentric conclusion, both of which depend upon the strength of the committee's commitment to engaging diverse public voices in the gene-editing policy-making process. (shrink)

In this article, the author explores some possible applications of Wittgenstein’s humanistic psychology, epistemology and philosophy of culture for the philosophy of technology, and more particularly, for the question of valuing a possible future technocracy over contemporary democratic systems. Major aspects of the article involve a discussion of some of Wittgenstein’s key views on certainty, cultural relativism, the problem of other minds, and gradual socio-cultural change. In order to examine these problems, the author draws from both a wide range of (...) Wittgenstein’s works, as well as secondary sources in Wittgenstein studies. An analogy is made between socio-cultural change over time and gradual visual loss. The author has incorporated important elements of Wittgenstein’s biography, both as a philosopher and as an engineer and architect, underlining the profound link between his life and thought. (shrink)

What is group well-being? There is, as of yet, shockingly little philosophical literature explicitly aiming to answer this question. This essay sketches some of the logical space of possible answers, and nudges us to seriously consider certain overlooked options. There are several importantly different ways the well-being of a collective or a group could be related to the well-being of the individuals who constitute it: 1) eliminativism, 2) functionalism, 3) partialism, or 4) the independent view. If the relation between individual (...) and collective well-being is either functional or partial, then we face a further question: What is the direction of constitutive dependence? Does the well-being of a group depend upon the well-being of the well-being of the individuals who compose it, or does the well-being of an individual depend upon the well-being of the groups to which they belong? Or both? These questions raise some puzzles that I begin to resolve. I conclude that there might be a wide variety of ways the well-being of a collective obtains, only some of which are related to the well-being of the individuals who are its members. In the end, I hope to vindicate the thought that an injury to one is an injury to all. (shrink)

According to what I call the Traditional View, there is a fundamental semantic distinction between counting and measuring, which is reflected in two fundamentally different sorts of scales: discrete cardinality scales and dense measurement scales. Opposed to the Traditional View is a thesis known as the Universal Density of Measurement: there is no fundamental semantic distinction between counting and measuring, and all natural language scales are dense. This paper considers a new argument for the latter, based on a puzzle I (...) call the Fractional Cardinalities Puzzle: if answers to ‘how many’-questions always designate cardinalities, and if cardinalities are necessarily discrete, then how can e.g. ‘2.38’ be a correct answer to the question ‘How many ounces of water are in the beaker?’? If cardinality scales are dense, then the answer is obvious: ‘2.38’ designates a fractional cardinality, contra the Traditional View. However, I provide novel evidence showing that ‘many’ is not uniformly associated with the dimension of cardinality across contexts, and so ‘how many’-questions can ask about other kinds of measures, including e.g. volume. By combining independently motivated analyses of cardinal adjectives, measure phrases, complex fractions, and degrees, I develop a semantics intended to defend the Traditional View against purported counterexamples like this and others which have received a fair amount of recent philosophical attention. (shrink)

In Jeremy Waldron’s book, The Harm in Hate Speech, it is not always clear whether he argues that hate speech causes harm or whether it constitutes harm. This article considers this uncertainty, concluding that the best understanding of Waldron’s argument is that hate speech tends to cause harm - a weak form of the consequentialist case for its proscription. His argument is not advanced by his apparent reliance on speech-act theory.

This paper begins by observing a tension in the Zhuangzi (or Chuang Tzu). On the one hand, Zhuangzi often advocates radical skepticism and relativism. On the other hand, he often makes a variety of factual claims and endorses and condemns various ways of living, in apparent disregard of any skeptical or relativist considerations. I resolve this tension by suggesting that Zhuangzi does not mean what he says when he advocates skepticism and relativism - that he aims in the apparently skeptical (...) and relativist passages not to convince anyone of the truth of these positions, but rather simply to have a certain sort of anti-dogmatic, therapeutic effect. I support this position with a variety of arguments centered around the idea that Zhuangzi does not feel the need to take seriously that which can be put into words. (shrink)

This paper reviews the natural philosophies of John Polkinghorne and Nancy Cartwright, with particular emphasis on the role of pluralism in their respective writings. While often motivated by distinct projects, their philosophies display some interesting and perhaps unexpected similarities. It is suggested that Polkinghorne's views are not far away from some of Cartwright's proposals, and further that certain debates about God's providential action could be helpfully reoriented if the insistence on natural laws as a centerpiece of scientific explanation were relinquished.

ABSTRACT This essay calls attention to two blind spots in Power Without Knowledge. First, the book has little to say about the role that political institutions can play in promoting effective democratic governance. Drawing on the “mixed government” tradition, I argue that properly designed institutions can correct for the epistemic deficits that Friedman describes by creating what I call the “pressure to conflict.” Second and more importantly, the book has nothing to say about the role of responsible leadership in a (...) democratic technocracy. Drawing on Max Weber’s analysis of the ethics of responsibility and the ethics of conviction, I argue that responsible leadership can promote judicious technocracy in a dynamic that I call the “spiral of responsibility.” The responsible leader recognizes that to recuse oneself from the exercise of technocratic power is to empower the unscrupulous and irresponsible. According to Weber, any theory of politics that fails to embrace the ethics of responsibility will therefore occupy an uneasy middle ground between quietism and enthusiasm. This, I fear, is where Power Without Knowledge may leave us. (shrink)

In this article, I engage in a criticism of Jean François Lyotard’s tropological approach to Judaism, arguing that his articulation of the “the jew” as figural projection serves to establish and rigidify a number of freighted binaries such as those between reason and myth, philosophy and theology, and modern and postmodern. In comparison, I posit Theodor Adorno’s approach to tropes of Judaism as one which encompasses Lyotard’s productive emphases on the role of forgetting in subject formation while loosening these same (...) binaries. (shrink)

Braitenberg et al.'s view that the cerebellum contributes to multijoint sequences of movement is too narrow to account adequately for results from new anatomical, neurobehavioral, and neuroimaging studies. A broader view is that the cerebellum modulates attention, sensory, motor, and other neural systems in order to accomplish its prime function, which is to learn to predict and prepare for imminent information acquisition, analysis, or action.

In the last years, TV documentaries, articles in popular magazines, and Internet content have increased the public visibility of deep brain stimulation (DBS). The media may have also provoked significant clinical and public interest in potential future applications for treating psychiatric disorders beyond the current use of DBS in neurological disorders. In this article, we review and discuss the topic of patient and public understanding of DBS, focusing on both the clinical consequences of patient understanding as well as the broader (...) social consequences of public understanding. The literature and the experience of clinicians suggest that strongly optimistic media reports of DBS have had detrimental consequences for informed consent and the management of patient expectations before and after surgery. Likewise, this context has created complex issues for trust between clinicians, patients, and their families and may have hard-to-predict social impacts including on the relationships between public understanding of neuroscience, biological therapies, stigma, and mental illness. We propose an approach to tackle the clinical and social consequences of media messages on public understanding within a broad and interdisciplinary effort with concrete actions. This approach includes actions by all key players, including not only providers but also patients and their family members, as well as journalists. To further address issues at the intersection of informed consent and patient expectation, there should be more discussion on and actual testing and measurement of these recommendations or similarly minded practice changes. (shrink)

Abstract Finding a moral justification for humanitarian intervention has been the objective of a great deal of academic inquiry in recent years. Most of these treatments, however, make certain arguments or assumptions about the morality of humanitarian intervention without fully exploring their precise philosophical underpinnings, which has led to an increasingly disjointed body of literature. The purpose of this essay, therefore, is to suggest that the conventional arguments and assumptions made about the morality of humanitarian intervention can be encompassed in (...) what is essentially a consequentialist framework. After a brief examination of consequentialist ethics, this essay reveals a number of morally relevant factors concerning humanitarian intervention, wherein I suggest that the general consensus in the literature on these factors constitutes ?commonsense morality?. In doing so, I argue that consequentialism as a theory of the right provides the best fit with commonsense morality on humanitarian intervention. This is important not only to reveal the precise philosophical underpinnings of the debate, but also to bring ethical, prudential and political considerations together in a coherent ethical discourse. (shrink)

Untying Things Together helps to clarify the stakes of the last fifty years of literary and cultural theory by proposing the idea of a sexuality of theory. In 1905, Freud published his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, the book that established the core psychoanalytic thesis that sexuality is central to formations of the unconscious. With this book, Eric L. Santner inverts Freud’s title to take up the sexuality of theory—or, more exactly, the modes of enjoyment to be (...) found in the kinds of critical thinking that, since the 1960s, have laid claim to that ancient word, “theory.” Santner unfolds his argument by tracking his own relationship with this tradition and the ways his intellectual and spiritual development has been informed by it. Untying Things Together is both an intellectual history of major theoretical paradigms and a call for their reexamination and renewal. Revisiting many of the topics he has addressed in previous work, Santner proposes a new way of conceptualizing the eros of thinking, attuned to how our minds and bodies individually and collectively incorporate or “encyst” on a void at the heart of things. Rather than proposing a “return to theory,” Santner’s book simply employs theory as a way of further “tying together” the resources of philosophy, art and literature, theology, psychoanalysis, political thought, and more. (shrink)

In 1989, Susan Wolf convincingly warned of a troublesome consequence that should discourage any movement in American society towards physician-assisted death—a legal backlash against the gains made for limiting life-sustaining treatment. The authors demonstrate that this dire consequence did not come to pass. As physician-assisted suicide gains a foothold in USA and elsewhere, many other slippery slope arguments are being put forward. Although many of these speculations should be taken seriously, they do not justify halting the new practice. Instead, our (...) courts, regulatory agencies, journalists, professional organisations and researchers should carefully monitor and study it as it unfolds, allowing continuous improvement just as our society has done in implementing the practice of limiting life-sustaining treatment. (shrink)

Some worry that offering too much money to participate in medical research can seduce people into participating against their better judgment. These overly attractive offers that impair judgment are often referred to as ‘undue inducements’. The current approach to prevent undue inducement is to limit the size of such offers. The hope is that smaller offers will not be attractive enough to impair judgment. Even if this is true, I argue that we should reject this solution. In Section 1, I (...) go over the problem of undue inducement, and our current approach to preventing it, in more detail. In Section 2, I argue that, like money, therapeutic benefits of medical research may also unduly induce. In Section 3, I argue that the current approach to preventing undue inducement is absurd in the case of therapeutic inducements. In Section 4, I argue that our current approach is analogously problematic in the case of monetary inducements. (shrink)