This book addresses an epidemic that has developed on a global scale, and, which under the heading of “addiction,” presents a new narrative about the travails of the human predicament. The book introduces phenomenological motifs, such as desire, embodiment, and temporality, to uncover the existential roots of addiction, and develops Martin Heidegger’s insights into technology to uncover the challenge of becoming a self within the impulsiveness and depersonalization of our digital age. By charting a new path of philosophical inquiry, the (...) book allows a pervasive, cultural phenomenon, ordinarily reserved to psychology, to speak as a referendum about the danger which technology poses to us on a daily basis. In this regard, addiction ceases to be merely a clinical malady, and instead becomes a “signpost” to exposing a hidden danger posed by the assimilation of our culture within a technological framework. (shrink)

ABSTARCT When people go shopping, they enter a building. But the shop cannot be identified with the building, because it would remain the same shop if it moved to another building or if it became an e-store. Daniel Korman [2019] uses these two observations to argue that establishments are immaterial objects. However, all that follows is that establishments are not buildings. I argue that establishments are organisations or corporate agents that are constituted by people. This entails that they are material (...) objects. Korman’s observations can be accommodated in terms of the further observation that corporate agents can but need not own or rent buildings. (shrink)

Edited by Susan E. Carey, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, and approved October 18, 2007 (received for review May 11, 2007).

Kochen has suggested an interpretation of quantum mechanics in which he denies that wavepackets ever collapse, while affirming that measurements have definite results. In this paper I attempt to show that his interpretation is untenable. I then suggest ways in which to construct similar, but more satisfactory, hidden variable interpretations.

I start off by relating the standard philosophical account of what time travel is to models of time travel that have recently been discussed by physicists. I then discuss some puzzles associated with time travel. I conclude that philosophers’ arguments against time travel are relevant when assessing the likelihood of the occurrence time travel in our world, and are relevant to the assessment whether time travel is physically possible.

Social sustainability plays a prominent role in the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals, but a proper analysis of the concept is still lacking. According to a widespread conception, a system is sustainable when it is preserved or developed in a robust manner. I argue, however, that social sustainability is best understood in explicitly normative terms. Formulating suitable development goals requires a conception of the kind of society that is worth sustaining. I propose that, for a system to be socially sustainable (...) is for it to secure a range of values, including justice. Furthermore, I argue that social sustainability is first and foremost a property of institutions. I go on to ask what it takes for an institution to secure values and why justice is so important for institutions. The answers culminate in a social sustainability framework, which explains why making institutions more sustainable is so challenging. (shrink)

The terms “politics” and “political” have become so overdetermined that it is difficult to use them in any effective manner. We argue that this has dangerous political consequences, and that this could be addressed by providing a new, sounder, notion of politics. This paper argues that defining politics in relation to the notion of play can provide a notion both intuitively appealing and able to withstand the problematic overdeterminations. We argue that politics is the set of practices through which the (...) indeterminate of Spielraum is made more determinate. This suggests that politics is always partly a matter of play: it is about instituting values without making any claims about the legitimacy of this instituting act. With reference to Huizinga and Nietzsche’s analyses of play, we define play as the living unity of seriousness and frivolity, and non-play as either seriousness without frivolity or frivolity without seriousness. In order to illustrate this, we comparatively analyse the attitudes of Barack Obama and Donald Trump in the single context of the well-known yearly White House Correspondent’s Dinner. There, we see two opposed attitudes to playfulness. Our analysis allows us to apply our _Spielraum_ model of politics to show that the thrust of Obama’s attitude involves an embrace of the non-foundational nature of politics as play, whereas Trump’s attitude is politicidal: it is animated by a refusal to acknowledge its own lack of foundation, leading to an oscillation between over-seriousness and over-frivolity. (shrink)

This critical note responds to Guiaşu and Tindale’s “Logical fallacies and invasion biology,” from our perspective as ecologists and philosophers of science engaged in debates about invasion biology and invasive species. We agree that “the level of charges and dismissals” surrounding these debates might be “unhealthy” and that “it will be very difficult for dialogues to move forward unless genuine attempts are made to understand the positions being held and to clarify the terms involved.” Although they raise several important scientific, (...) conceptual, and ethical issues at the foundations of invasion biology, we believe Guiaşu and Tindale’s attempts to clarify the debate were unsuccessful. Like some other critics of the field, they tend to misrepresent invasion biology by cherry-picking and constructing “straw people,” inaccurately portraying invasion biology, and thus failing to elevate the dialogue. In this critique, we clarify areas in the invasion biology literature misrepresented by Guiaşu and Tindale. We attempt to provide a more balanced view of areas of reasonable debate within invasion biology, including disputes about empirical evidence, diverse risk attitudes, and other diverse ethical commitments. (shrink)

Central to the thought of C.B. Macpherson are his critique of the culture of ‘possessive individualism’ and his defence of liberal-democratic socialism. Resurgence of interest in his works is in reaction to the rise of neoliberalism and efforts to find an alternative to societies dominated by capitalist markets. Macpherson’s theories are explained and applied to 21st century challenges.

In his first summer lecture at Berkeley in 1914, Josiah Royce, American philosopher of community, confessed as follows.

In this essay, I will outline the adjustments in Heidegger’s account of technicity that are necessary to address the danger ( Gefahr ) that revolves around recent advances, including cybernetics. These adjustments that Parvis Emad was among the first to pioneer, are hermeneutic guidelines that delineate the wholesale appearance of beings through the prism of a “mathematical project”. The mathematical project of ‘nature’ creates a platform on which cybernetics can arise in two ways: 1). by converting the linear sequencing of (...) ‘time’ (as “making present”) into a universal form of calculation and 2). by subdividing ‘space’ into infinite points. The danger, then, does not lie in the ominous effects of technicity, but as a throwback to the metaphysical distortion of the reciprocity between being and time in which the former is confined to the presencing of beings through a model of calculability and the latter is reduced to the “digitizing” of a linear sequence of units. The hermeneutic guidelines allow for the “retrograsping” ( zürckgenommen [Emad’s translation] of the danger of technicity (including its transmutation into cybernetics) as a “throwback” to the abandonment of and by being ( Seinsverlassenheit ). (shrink)

This article surveys the history of labor- and middle-class-sponsored efforts to mobilize shopping on behalf of working people from the late nineteenth century through the present. It analyzes the class dynamics of these movements to, first, underscore workers' own ability to mount consumer campaigns and, second, critique middle-class campaigns in the present that can treat workers as unorganized, passive victims. It underscores the potential hierarchical dynamics inherent in consumer-labor campaigns, both between classes and within the labor movement, including dynamics of (...) race, gender, and space. (shrink)

A computational model of inference during story comprehension is presented, in which story situations are represented distributively as points in a high‐dimensional “situation‐state space.” This state space organizes itself on the basis of a constructed microworld description. From the same description, causal/temporal world knowledge is extracted. The distributed representation of story situations is more flexible than Golden and Rumelhart's [Discourse Proc 16 (1993) 203] localist representation.A story taking place in the microworld corresponds to a trajectory through situation‐state space. During the (...) inference process, world knowledge is applied to the story trajectory. This results in an adjusted trajectory, reflecting the inference of propositions that are likely to be the case. Although inferences do not result from a search for coherence, they do cause story coherence to increase. The results of simulations correspond to empirical data concerning inference, reading time, and depth of processing.An extension of the model for simulating story retention shows how coherence is preserved during retention without controlling the retention process. Simulation results correspond to empirical data concerning story recall and intrusion. (shrink)

I offer an account of the relation between explanations of behaviour in terms of psychological states and explanations in terms of neural states that: makes it transparent how they can be true together; explains why explanations in terms of psychological states are characteristically of behaviour described in general and relational terms, and explains why certain sorts of neurological investigations undermine psychological explanations of behaviour, while others leave them intact. In the course of the argument, I offer an account of implicit (...) theories. (shrink)

A groundbreaking exploration of Heidegger and embodiment, from which a radical ethical perspective emerges.

The present article seeks to provide an overview of the general characteristics of the cultural and scientific climate in the Duchy of Urbino. Three of the Duchy’s milieus seem to have been particularly important for scholars who were engaged in the study of mathematics: the so-called “School of Urbino”, the environment of the court, and the world of the technicians and engineers. While the Urbino School has already been the object of previous studies, the other two milieus and their effect (...) on the mathematicians’ work have been rather neglected and are, consequently, addressed here. The paper’s final section presents some documents that attest the importance of Renaissance scholars’ interaction with these environments to their actual scientific activity, taking the case of Guidobaldo dal Monte as an example. (shrink)

Diminishing resources seem to be forcing rationing of medical services. Rationing the public health care system means that there needs to be ethical discussion on justice. Several years before resource allocation could impact on the levels of morbidity and mortality, economic problems created numerous methods of regulating medical and nursing services. In clinical practice, regularisation means a reduction of the possibility to decide autonomously and therefore requires specific ethical discussion. The different methods of regularisation from standards and quality control to (...) managed care are discussed with respect to their influence on medical thinking and decision making. Formalised decisions in severe disease can also be a field for regularisation, for example guidelines on the termination of life sustaining treatment (vs. Do-Not-Attempt-Resuscitation Orders). The debate on futility is discussed as a part of the economic discussion, with special regard to the impact of the macroeconomic situation on ”peripheral” medical decisions, which very often are made unconsciously, as shown by a new German study. It is impossible to discuss the influence of macroeconomy, different attempts at regularisation and the individual decision of the doctor without reflecting on their principle interdependency. Ethical reflection in this field cannot be sectioned into an economic, medical decision-making and futility sections. (shrink)