The following essay explores the intersection of care with ethical reflections on artificial intelligence. The current debate around AI ethics focuses on questions of moral AI judgment and the general criteria for maximizing the fairness, accountability, and transparency of these judgments. While this discussion is important, it all too often obfuscates the actual purpose and intention behind the use of the algorithmic or AI technology. Where the rationale for developing these technologies focuses on increasing optimization and innovation, concern must be (...) shifted to ensure that AI will be used primarily to address current inequities and harms, from exacerbating climate change to manipulating voters via social media to creating “better” weapons. (shrink)

In this paper I look to develop a defence of “presentist temporal passage” that renders presentism immune from recent arguments due to Eric Olson. During the course of the paper, I also offer comment on a recent reply to Olson’s argument due to Ian Phillips. I argue that it is not clear that Phillips’ arguments succeed.

Bíos y zoé son dos nociones que se encuentran en la base de las reflexiones contemporáneas tanto en la bioética como en biopolítica. Su resonancia proviene de una experiencia originaria de lo viviente que aparece desde el pensamiento antiguo en Grecia, incluso antes que la filosofía. Los di- versos derroteros de estas dos ideas han marcado las múltiples maneras en que la modernidad occidental ha comprendido la vida pero, al mismo tiempo, estas formas de comprensión ocultan su complejidad a través (...) de una tendencia a reducirlas a objetos de la racionalidad instrumental. (shrink)

Causation, says David Lewis now, is to be understood as the ancestral of counterfactual influence, where C influences E (roughly) iff little changes in C map onto big changes in E. I argue that the influence account provides neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for causation, and suggest that what is missing is the notion of effluence, or physical connection.

: "Therapeutic misconception" has been misconstrued, and some of the newer, mistaken interpretations are troublesome. They exaggerate the distinction between research and treatment, revealing problems in the foundations of research ethics and possibly weakening informed consent.

Various influential ethical theories propose that we should strive to develop morally sound character traits, either because good actions are those that issue from good character traits, or because good traits are those that generally incline us toward actions that are good for some independent reason such as the intentions with which they are performed or the consequences of performing them. This proposal obviously raises questions about the nature and origins of character traits, and our degree of control over them. (...) For if we cannot develop our traits then this proposal should be abandoned, and if we can then we need to know how this is best achieved. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is two fold: first, I look to show Oaklander’s theory of time to be false. Second, I show that the only way to salvage the B-theory is via the adopting of the causal theory of time, and allying this to Oaklander’s claim that tense is to be eliminated. I then raise some concerns with the causal theory of time. My conclusion is that, if one adopts eternalism, the unreality of time looks a better option than (...) the B-theory. (shrink)

The expanding interest in book history over recent years has heralded the coming together of an interdisciplinary research community drawing scholars from a variety of literary, historical and cultural studies. Moreover, with a growing body of literature, the field is becoming increasingly visible on a wider scale, not least through the existence of the Society for the History of Authorship, Readership and Publishing , with its newly founded journal Book History. Within the history of science, however, there remains not a (...) little scepticism concerning the practical value of such an approach. It is often dismissed as an intellectual fad or as an enterprise which is illuminating but ultimately peripheral, rather than being valued as an approach which can offer major new insights within the field. This is no doubt in part because much of the most innovative work in history of science over recent years has been carried out by historians anxious to get away from an earlier overemphasis on printed sources. Eager to correct a profoundly unsocial history of ideas, usually rooted in texts, historians have looked increasingly to both the practices and the material culture of science. In such a context, a renewed focus on the history of books sometimes seems like a retrograde step, especially given the common misidentification of ‘books’ with ‘texts’. On the contrary, however, it is just such a twin emphasis on practices and material culture which also characterizes the new book history. Indeed, to the question ‘what is book history for?’ we might answer that its object is to reintroduce social actors, engaged in a variety of practices with respect to material objects, into a history in which books have too often been understood merely as disembodied texts, the meaning of which is defined by singular, uniquely creative authors, and is transparent to readers. (shrink)

Time flows. This oft-lamented fact of human existence seems plain enough, but is remarkably difficult to explain scientifically. Physical theory follows a greater goal—symmetry—and the directional nature of time is left adrift. The phenomenon must nevertheless be explained.Scientists since Isaac Newton have searched classical mechanics for answers, but precious little progress has been made on his mystical ideas. The discoveries of thermodynamics, though clearly relevant, have posed more problems than they have solved.Now a new solution presents itself through quantum mechanics. (...) The intimate relation between thermodynamics and time is not in doubt, but now quantum theory is explaining how the laws of entropy arise from a stranger reality. The theory of decoherence begins to explain time as a holistic quantum concept. (shrink)

Fair lotteries offer familiar ways to pose a number of epistemological problems, prominently those of closure and of scepticism. Although these problems apply to many epistemological positions, in this paper I develop a variant of a lottery case to raise a difficulty with the reliabilist's fundamental claim that justification or knowledge is to be analyzed as a high truth-ratio (of the relevant belief-forming processes). In developing the difficulty broader issues are joined including fallibility and the relation of reliability to understanding.

Pickering & Garrod's (P&G's) claim that conversationalists do not explicitly keep track of their interlocuters' information states is important. Nonetheless, via alignment, they seem to create a virtually symmetrical view of the information states of speaker and addressee – a key component of their accounts of collaborative utterances and of self-monitoring. As I show, there is significant evidence for intrinsic contextual misalignment between conversationalists that can persist across turns.

Truth, etc. is a wide-ranging study of ancient logic based upon the John Locke lectures given by the eminent philosopher Jonathan Barnes in Oxford. Its six chapters discuss, first, certain ancient ideas about truth; secondly, the Aristotelian conception of predication; thirdly, various ideas about connectors which were developed by the ancient logicians and grammarians; fourthly, the notion of logical form, insofar as it may be discovered in the ancient texts; fifthly, the question of the 'justification of deduction'; and sixthly, (...) the attitude which has been called logical utilitarianism and which restricts the scope of logic to those forms of inference which are or might be useful for scientific proofs. In principle, the book presupposes no knowledge of logic and no skill in ancient languages: all ancient texts are cited in English translation; and logical symbols and logical jargon are avoided so far as possible. There is no scholarly apparatus of footnotes, and no bibliography. It can be read in an armchair. Anyone interested in ancient philosophy, or in logic and its history, will find it interesting. (shrink)

Third-party punishment (TPP) occurs when the perpetrator of a transgression is punished by an individual who is not the victim of the transgression and, therefore, not directly affected by it. As F...

Proceedings of the conference held in Vand¶uvres, Genáeve, Sept. 2-6, 2002.