If affirmative action and other ethnicity-based social programs are justified, then J. Angelo Corlett believes it is important to come to an adequate understanding of the nature of ethnicity in general and ethnic group membership in particular. In Race, Racism, and Reparations, Corlett reconceptualizes traditional ideas of race in terms of ethnicity. As he makes clear, the answers to the questions "What is a Native American?" or "What is a Latino?" have important implications for public policy, especially for those programs (...) designed to address historic injustices and economic and social imbalances among different groups in our society. Having supplanted "race" with a well-defined concept of ethnicity, the author then analyzes the nature and function of racism. Corlett argues for a notion of racism that must encompass not only racist beliefs but also racist actions, omissions, and attempted actions. His aim is to craft a definition of racism that will prove useful in legal and public policy contexts. Corlett places special emphasis on the broad questions of whether reparations for ethnic groups are desirable and what forms those reparations should take: land, money, social programs? He addresses the need for differential affirmative action programs and reparations policies—the experiences of different ethnic groups vary greatly. Arguments for reparations to Native and African Americans are considered in light of a variety of objections that are or might be raised against them. Corlett articulates and critically analyzes a number of possible proposals for reparations. (shrink)

Since Leibniz's time, Cartesian mental causation has been criticized for violating the conservation of energy and momentum. Many dualist responses clearly fail. But conservation laws have important neglected features generally undermining the objection. Conservation is _local_, holding first not for the universe, but for everywhere separately. The energy in any volume changes only due to what flows through the boundaries. Constant total energy holds if the global summing-up of local conservation laws converges; it probably doesn't in reality. Energy conservation holds (...) if there is symmetry, the sameness of the laws over time. Thus, if there are time-places where symmetries fail due to nonphysical influence, conservation laws fail there and then, while holding elsewhere, such as refrigerators and stars. Noether's converse first theorem shows that conservation laws imply symmetries. Thus conservation trivially nearly entails the causal closure of the physical. But expecting conservation to hold in the brain simply assumes the falsehood of Cartesianism. Hence Leibniz's objection begs the question. Empirical neuroscience is another matter. So is Einstein's General Relativity: far from providing a loophole, General Relativity makes mental causation _harder_. (shrink)

* This is a fragment of J. L. Schellenberg’s paper “Divine Hiddenness and Human Philosophy” originally published in Adam Green and Eleonore Stump, Hidden Divinity and Religious Belief, 23–25, 28. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABSTRACTThe seminal work of David Marr, popularized in his classic work Vision, continues to exert a major influence on both cognitive science and philosophy. The interpretation of his work also co...

Artificial Neural Networks have reached “grandmaster” and even “super-human” performance across a variety of games, from those involving perfect information, such as Go, to those involving imperfect information, such as “Starcraft”. Such technological developments from artificial intelligence (AI) labs have ushered concomitant applications across the world of business, where an “AI” brand-tag is quickly becoming ubiquitous. A corollary of such widespread commercial deployment is that when AI gets things wrong—an autonomous vehicle crashes, a chatbot exhibits “racist” behavior, automated credit-scoring processes (...) “discriminate” on gender, etc.—there are often significant financial, legal, and brand consequences, and the incident becomes major news. As Judea Pearl sees it, the underlying reason for such mistakes is that “... all the impressive achievements of deep learning amount to just curve fitting.” The key, as Pearl suggests, is to replace “reasoning by association” with “causal reasoning” —the ability to infer causes from observed phenomena. It is a point that was echoed by Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis in a recent piece for theNew York Times: “we need to stop building computer systems that merely get better and better at detecting statistical patterns in data sets—often using an approach known as ‘Deep Learning’—and start building computer systems that from the moment of their assembly innately grasp three basic concepts: time, space, and causality.” In this paper, foregrounding what in 1949 Gilbert Ryle termed “a category mistake”, I will offer an alternative explanation for AI errors; it is not so much that AI machinery cannot “grasp” causality, but that AI machinery (qua computation) cannot understand anything at all. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper argues that striving is a cardinal virtue in sport and life. It is an overlooked virtue that is an important component of human happiness and a source of a sense of dignity. The human psychological capacity for striving emerged as a trait for addressing the entropic features of our existence, but it can be engaged and used for other purposes. Sport is one such example. Sport appears exceptional in being designed specifically to test and display our capacities (...) to strive. Although striving is connected to pursuit of excellence in sport, it supports a more democratic conception of the value of sport than achievement-oriented perfectionist accounts. (shrink)

This article argues that, despite their distance across the colonial divide, a creolizing reading of Frantz Fanon and Paul Ricœur can yield valuable insights into decoloniality. Tracing their shared philosophical concerns with embodied phenomenology, social ontology and recognition, I argue that their respective accounts of sociogeny and hermeneutics can be productively read together as describing a shared end of mutual recognition untainted by racism or coloniality – a ‘new skin’ for humanity, as Fanon describes it. More specifically, Fanon contributes to (...) Ricœur an understanding of how divergences in social location can be overcome through liberatory action that posits a new logic of sociality; likewise, Ricœur provides Fanon with an account of how liberatory horizons are produced through this praxis, based on the imaginative connection between ideology and utopia. This article concludes by arguing that these congruent methodological and normative concerns can be read together to concretize – and potentially actualize – the utopic end of liberatory struggle in mutual recognition through fashioning this new skin. (shrink)

Head transplantation fits within the broader conceptual space occupied by transhumanists and others who seek to extend the lives of human beings indefinitely. It is reasonable to reflect on whether, under what circumstances, and in what ways human immortality would be good. In this paper, I disambiguate the ways in which immortality might be considered a human good and then argue that immortality is neither necessary nor sufficient condition for objective meaning in life. I also argue that mortality is not (...) a necessary condition for objective meaning in life. (shrink)

Neorepublicanism holds that domination is the foremost political evil. More, it claims to be able to address today’s most pressing issues. It follows that neorepublicanism should, then, speak to questions of migration, membership, and domination. However, this is not the case. Some critical voices inspired by the idea of non-domination arrive at interesting critiques of migration, membership, and domination, but their answers are often partial and in some ways problematic. They are also largely ahistorical. The contemporary paucity of neorepublican reflections (...) on migration contrasts sharply with its centrality in republican history. In the US, from the colonial period until late into the 19th century, some republicans understood the domination of migrants and citizens as conjoined concerns. They developed a robust account of the relationship between domestic domination and exclusionary migration regimes. They conceptualized the republic as a global asylum where membership is based on volitional allegiance, and they vigorously defended the right of aliens to expatriate. Those ideas were ultimately defeated by aristocratic, oligarchic, and statist forces. This article explicates that history through a genealogical account of what I call ‘insurgent republicanism’. The article then returns to contemporary theorization to diagnose its limitations, continuities, and potentials as seen from the perspective of the insurgent republican tradition. (shrink)

This paper will develop the concept of semiogenesis – a process of novel sign generation – and how instances of this process, such as agency, relate to their built environment and beyond. Section two will build on Hoffmeyer’s discussion of swarms, specifically the idea of overlapping swarms and its manifestation in the creation of termite mounds, in order to introduce three types of structure. Building upon this real-world example explored in section two, the third section will present a heuristic for (...) semiogenesis: a neuromorphic dynamic system model grounded in information and thermodynamic theory. Through the lens of this heuristic model, the penultimate section will more rigorously characterize the similarities and differences between termite and human agency in their respective built milieus. (shrink)

While my own philosophical views are largely in keeping with my mentor, Dallas Willard, nevertheless, I find his conception of the human person puzzling, hard to specify precisely, and prima facie contradictory in a few places. Dallas's central goal in formulating his anthropology was to develop a model that shed light on, allowed for deeper insight into, and fostered interest in spiritual formation, especially the role of the body in spiritual maturation. I share this goal, and agree with most of (...) his model. But in what follows, I will make more precise what his views were, try to clear up what, prima facie, seem to be contradictions in his theory, and, finally, recommend an alternative that captures the central concerns Dallas had for his own position. Thus, I will lay out a few general points of Dallas's ontology, provide a description of his philosophical/theological anthropology, along with two problems that seem to be present, and offer a slightly adjusted alternative to his position that accomplishes his main goal in a way with which I believe he would be satisfied. (shrink)

Clear and careful thinking is an indispensable aid in the pursuit of answers to the difficult ethical question faced by clinicians, patients, and families. In this issue of The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy devoted to issues in clinical ethics, the authors engage in this enterprise by reflecting on morally good medical decision making, conscientious objection, presumed consent in organ donation, the permissibility of surrogate decision making, and the failure of legislative limits on the scope of euthanasia in Belgium.

Prof. Alberto Urquidez, in an important recent article that appears in different form in his book, Redefining Racism, offers an informed, sustained, careful, multi-pronged, and sometimes original critique of the volitional analysis of racism, which I have proposed in a series of articles over the past two dozen years. Here I expand and improve VAR’s analysis of paternalistic racists and their beliefs, clarify its ‘infection’-model’s explanation of racism’s spread and variety, and lay out what it is for something to be (...) ‘characteristically’ racist, an understanding that I then use to offer a unified account of the way in which both certain physical objects and certain abstract objects can properly be called racist. Identifying and engaging some presuppositions behind Urquidez’s social, political, and moral criticisms of VAR, I respond to complaints from him and others, showing that VAR’s content is neither politically conservative nor dependent on religious doctrine, and point out that race theory would in fact profit from taking more seriously and internalizing the Christian morality of most African-Americans. (shrink)

The reception history of the French Revolution in France and England is well documented among Anglophone scholars; however, the debate over the Revolution in Germany is much less well known. Fichte's Contribution played an important role in this debate. Presented here for the first time in English, Fichte's work provides a distinctive synthesis of Locke's "possessive individualism," Rousseau's general will, and Kant's moral philosophy. This eclectic blend results in an unusual rights theory that at times veers close to a form (...) of anarchism. Written in 1792–93, just before Fichte moved to Jena to develop his philosophical system in a series of works—above all the Wissenschaftslehre of 1794—the Contribution provides invaluable insight into Fichte's early development. In addition, Fichte's work predates much of Kant's political philosophy, and can shed light on the rich dialogue in German political thought in the 1790s. (shrink)

ABSTRACT On 19 July 2019, Agnes Heller died whilst swimming in Lake Balaton outside Budapest. With her passing, the culture of humanity lost one of its most remarkable representatives. So too, contemporary critique lost a philosophical sensibility that is, today, within the neoliberal university, increasingly rare. It is this philosophical sensibility with which this essay is concerned. Through a critical reconstruction of Heller’s reading of three key figures from the philosophical tradition (Marx, Pascal and Kierkegaard), this essay both charts the (...) changes and continuities in Heller’s philosophy of concrete subjectivity and makes a case for its continuing relevance to the cultural project of philosophy. (shrink)

FRANTZEN: KRIT. B. Z. FISCHARTS ÜBERS. RABELAIS' AST 3.

We aim to move the externalism and self-knowledge debate forward by exploring two novel sceptical challenges to the prospects of self-knowledge of a paradigmatic sort, both of which result from ways in which our thought content, cognitive processes and cognitive successes depend crucially on our external environments. In particular, it is shown how arguments from extended cognition ; Clark A. Supersizing the mind: Embodiment, action, and cognitive extension. Oxford: Oxford University Press ) and situationism, Alfano M. Expanding the situationist challenge (...) to reliabilism about inference. In Fairweather A Virtue epistemology naturalized, Springer, Dordrecht, pp 103–122 ; Doris JM. Noûs 32:504–530, Doris JM. Lack of character: Personality and moral behavior. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge ; Harman G. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. 99:315–331, Harman G. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 100:223–226 ) pose hitherto unexplored challenges to the prospects of self-knowledge as it is traditionally conceived. It is shown, however, that, suitably understood, these apparent challenges in fact only demonstrate two ways in which our cognitive lives can be dependent on our environment. As such, rather than undermining our prospects for attaining self-knowledge, they instead illustrate how self-knowledge can be extended and expanded. (shrink)

J.L. Chretien is a French public intellectual, philosopher and poet, widely published and revered in his home country and in academic circles worldwide. This translation makes his work available to an English-language audience for the first time and a crucial contribution to our understanding of the phenomenology of religious experience.