In “All Play and No Work,” Andrew Kania claims that standard form jazz involves no works, only performances. This article responds to Kania by defending one of the alternative ontological proposals that he rejects, namely, that jazz works are ontologically continuous with works of classical music. I call this alternative “the standard view,” and I argue that it is the default position in the ontology of standard form jazz. Kania has three objections to the standard view. The bulk of the (...) article is devoted to explaining why none of these objections succeed. (shrink)

The article explores the concept of infodemics during the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on the propagation of false or inaccurate information proliferating worldwide throughout the SARS-CoV-2 health crisis. We provide an overview of disinformation, misinformation and malinformation and discuss the notion of “fake news”, and highlight the threats these phenomena bear for health policies and national and international security. We discuss the mis-/disinformation as a significant challenge to the public health, intelligence, and policymaking communities and highlight the necessity to design measures (...) enabling the prevention, interdiction, and mitigation of such threats. We then present an overview of selected opportunities for applying technology to study and combat disinformation, outlining several approaches currently being used to understand, describe, and model the phenomena of misinformation and disinformation. We focus specifically on complex networks, machine learning, data- and text-mining methods in misinformation detection, sentiment analysis, and agent-based models of misinformation spreading and the detection of misinformation sources in the network. We conclude with the set of recommendations supporting the World Health Organization’s initiative on infodemiology. We support the implementation of integrated preventive procedures and internationalization of infodemic management. We also endorse the application of the cross-disciplinary methodology of Crime Science discipline, supplemented by Big Data analysis and related information technologies to prevent, disrupt, and detect mis- and disinformation efficiently. (shrink)

Human cognitive performance has crucial significance for legal process, often creating the difference between fair and unfair imprisonment. Lawyers, judges, and jurors need to follow long and complex arguments. They need to understand technical language. Jurors need to remember what happens during a long trial. The demands imposed on jurors in particular are sizeable and the cognitive challenges are discussed in this chapter. Jurors are often subjected to both tremendous decision complexity and tremendous evidence complexity. Some of these problems could (...) be ameliorated if we can somehow enhance the cognitive capacities, including attention and memory, of various players in trials. There are multiple ways in which cognition can be improved either by external tools or by an increasing number of biomedical interventions that act directly on the brain. The article surveys a range of beneficial and detrimental effects that substances can have on cognition. (shrink)

A crucially important part of the biosphere – the virosphere – is too often overlooked. Inclusion of the virosphere into the global picture of protein structure space reveals that 63 protein domain superfamilies in viruses do not have any structural and evolutionary relatives in modern cellular organisms. More than half of these have functions which are not virus‐specific and thus might be a source of new folds and functions for cellular life. The number of viruses on the planet exceeds that (...) of cells by an order of magnitude and viruses evolve up to six orders of magnitude faster. As a result, cellular species are subject to a constitutive ‘flow‐through’ of new viral genetic material. Due to this and the relaxed evolutionary constraints in viruses, the transfer of domains between host‐to‐virus could be a mechanism for accelerated protein evolution. The virosphere could be an engine for the genesis of protein structures, and may even have been so before the last universal common ancestor of cellular life. (shrink)

There is a plurality of good reasons for action. An adequate theory of practical rationality has to be compatible with it even if it requires certain modifications of our everyday practices of reasoning. Usual theories of practical rationality do not pass this test. It is envisaged how to revise adequately our understanding of practical rationality.

This case takes place in the context of a small to medium-sized retail clothing firm. It examines the latest trends in social media marketing technology and the potential ethical issues regarding privacy infringement and behavioral control of teenagers and young adults that such technology presents. The scenario invites students to consider how much, if at all, such marketing practices should be resisted going forward.

Nussbaum’s moral cosmopolitanism informs her capability-based theory of justice, which she uses in order to develop a distinctive model of cosmopolitan democratic education. I characterize Nussbaum’s educational model as a ‘statist model,’ however, because it regards cosmopolitan democratic education as necessary for realizing democratic arrangements at the domestic level. The socio-cultural diversity of virtually every nation, Nussbaum argues, renders it mandatory to educate citizens in a cosmopolitan fashion. Citizens must develop empathy and sympathy towards all co-citizens of their domestic polities (...) and cope effectively with socio-cultural diversity. I criticize Nussbaum’s statist model, because it neglects that due to the ways in which international institutions already constrain national decision-making, citizens will not fully enjoy the human freedom of co-determining the political choices that affect their lives unless international affairs are further democratized. Therefore I suggest extending Nussbaum’s statist model and outline an ‘internationalist model’ of cosmopolitan democratic education. (shrink)

Simplifying somewhat, sonicists believe that works of music are individuated purely in terms of how they sound. For them, exact sound-alikes are identical. Stephen Davies, in his ‘Musical Works and Orchestral Colour’ ( BJA 48 (2008), pp. 363–375) took me to task for defending a version of sonicism. In this paper I seek to explain why Davies's objections miss their mark. In the course of the discussion, I make some methodological remarks about the ontology of music.

ABSTRACT The central aim of Peter Hägel’s Billionaires in World Politics (BWP) is to challenge the assumption that private individuals lack agency and power in world politics – an assumption that is widely shared in the field of International Relations (IR). Hägel’s methodological strategy to achieve this aim is twofold. First, he concentrates on minutest biographical aspects of billionaires to lay bare the idiosyncrasy of their choices, and to falsify, thus, structuralist assumptions of how individual agency is undermined by factors (...) such as class, roles, or fields. Second, Hägel engages in counter-factual reasoning to support the claim that these individual decisions end up having a real impact on public affairs abroad. This impact is difficult to overestimate given that, as Hägel reveals, billionaires have affected a whole array of political issues, including Brexit, climate change policy, democratic development in Eastern Europe, global health policy, the Israeli-Palestine conflict, and the war in Iraq. This introduction starts off by elaborating on the central scholarly contribution of BWP. Following that, this introduction explains why the insights that BWP provides suggest that we do not live in a neo-feudal order, despite the immense global economic inequality which billionaires’ wealth manifests. (shrink)

The notion of objectivity in science has come under critique of feminist writers. The scientific ideal of a detached, neutral observer, who has no race, no gender, no cultural identity, no class, and views the world “from nowhere,” has been challenged, and patterns of domination explored. Feminists argue that objectivity is a tacit generalization from the subjectivity of a small, privileged social group “of educated, usually prosperous, white men.” Hence, it is a result of the denial of the subjectivity of (...) women and other marginalized people. The task which I set before myself is to inquire into the problem of objectivity in science and to explore the relationship between objectivity and subjectivity. I argue that, although the feminists’ critique of objectivity contributes to a greater awareness of the problem of objectivity in science and indeed subjectivity matters, their critique is ill founded. It is an example of one of many stereotypes and simplifications that we can find in today’s feminist thought. The affective engagement with the world, the approach that I propose, leads us to knowledge beyond objectivity. It is a prerequisite of knowing persons as persons and things as they are. (shrink)

The problem of individuality, physical and mental, is one which obviously has great interest for philosophy. The unity and continuity of the ordinary human consciousness—the “ ego,” the “personality—give us the concrete standard by which we ordinarily judge other systems which have tended towards individuation. A comparative and evolutionary study of biological data, however, will provide us with many facts which throw a new light on the problem. They are often puzzling, but must be taken into account.

Name der Zeitschrift: Zeitschrift für kritische Sozialtheorie und Philosophie Jahrgang: 5 Heft: 1 Seiten: 4-13.

Advances in brain–brain interface technologies raise the possibility that two or more individuals could directly link their minds, sharing thoughts, emotions, and sensory experiences. This paper explores conceptual and ethical issues posed by such mind-merging technologies in the context of clinical neuroethics. Using hypothetical examples along a spectrum from loosely connected pairs to fully merged minds, the authors sketch out a range of factors relevant to identifying the degree of a merger. They then consider potential new harms like loss of (...) identity, psychological domination, loss of mental privacy, and challenges for notions of autonomy and patient benefit when applied to merged minds. While radical technologies may seem to necessitate new ethical paradigms, the authors suggest the individual-focus underpinning clinical ethics can largely accommodate varying degrees of mind mergers so long as individual patient interests remain identifiable. However, advanced decisionmaking and directives may have limitations in addressing the dilemmas posed. Overall, mind-merging possibilities amplify existing challenges around loss of identity, relating to others, autonomy, privacy, and the delineation of patient interests. This paper lays the groundwork for developing resources to address the novel issues raised, while suggesting the technologies reveal continuity with current healthcare ethics tensions. (shrink)

Our ordinary conception of time has it that there are temporal particulars: not only do people do things, but there are particular doings by people; not only are we born, but the birth of each one of us was a particular event, and each of us will have our own particular death. Temporal particulars in this sense are individuated, fundamentally, by their temporal locations or relations, rather than by their intrinsic or qualitative characteristics. In this respect they are unrepeatable, not (...) just de facto, but as a matter of their very nature. However, there is a tradition in philosophy that seriously downplays this aspect of our thinking about time. According to this tradition, the fundamental unit of temporal representation is _tensed truth_; the notion of an unrepeatable particular, individuated by its temporal location, is at best an abstraction from a complex of tensed truths. The aims of this paper are, first, to argue that the representation of temporal particulars is deeply implicated in our ordinary conception of the past as fixed and unalterable; and, secondly, to argue that the theorist of tensed truth is able to provide only a pale imitation of this aspect of our thinking. I will then reflect on the consequences of this for debates about the metaphysics of tense. (shrink)

El objetivo del presente trabajo es identificar el uso político de la imagen al servicio del Estado y la función del régimen democrático al interior del sistema filosófico de Thomas Hobbes. Tal propósito se aborda en dos momentos: I. se propone un análisis iconográfico, con lo cual se destaca una lógica de la presencia/ausencia de la multitud como un cuerpo político (i.e. problema de la dispersión); II. se retoman las discusiones en torno a la función de la democracia, y se (...) expone el problema de la dispersión como el paso de la multitud disuelta al pueblo junto a la consolidación del cuerpo soberano (i.e. régimen democrático). Se concluye que el uso político de la imagen, descrita a partir de la distinción entre la adoración civil y la adoración divina, por parte del poder soberano, es una exhortación hobbesiana a la regulación del miedo (ciu bono del sostenimiento del poder soberano). En consecuencia, el gobierno de la imagen implica el problema del régimen democrático. (shrink)

Culture is a uniquely human property. Although precursors to cultural practices are found in other animals, these precursors differ in kind from the conditions of human culture that have emerged through evolutionary processes. In order to illuminate the mutual dependence of biological-genetic and cultural evolution, the author investigates technology and the use of tools, as well as the way these abilities are transmitted, in order to understand what properties and abilities separate human beings from animals.

In ‘Kant’s Changing Cosmopolitanism’ and Kant and Cosmopolitanism: The Philosophical Ideal of World Citizenship, Pauline Kleingeld argues that, in ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent,’ Kant meant for the Bund of states to be a coercive federation. Kleingeld admits that there is a disparity between this earlier coercive idea of the Bund and Kant’s talk of a voluntary congress in Toward Perpetual Peace and The Metaphysics of Morals. She explains this disparity by: appealing to a semantic ambiguity (...) in the term ‘Bund’; making claims about with which contemporary 18th century works Kant was acquainted; and ultimately attempting to draw a parallel between the unsocial sociability of individual people within a state and the unsocial sociability of individual states in a larger community of states. In this paper, I argue that while Kleingeld’s claims are superficially supported by the text, her claims depend on her apparent conflating of teleology and morality. (shrink)

Self-awareness is thought to be tied to processes of higher-order perspective taking including empathy. These abilities appear to be reserved for humans, great apes, and possibly, dolphins. Recent examinations reveal that both self-awareness and empathy may have origins in the right hemisphere. It is possible that, as in language, lateralization plays a key role in the development of higher-order perspective taking and self-awareness.

An entertaining and thought-provoking look at the food on our plates, and what it can teach us about being human, from the author of The Pig That Want's to be Eaten.

“It’s not good enough to say there’s some mechanism such that you start out with amoebas and you end up with us. Everybody agrees with that. The question is in this case in the mechanical details. What you need is an account, as it were step by step, about what the constraints are, what the environmental variables are, and Darwin doesn’t give you that.”.

Kids can astonish with the philosophical ideas they spontaneously have, but are they really able to follow through their implications systematically and logically? And isn’t that what philosophy is essentially about, not just having interesting ideas?

You can't go through a graduate programme in other humanities subjects and be considered competent in those fields unless you've done some work on gender and race issues. Feminist work is mainstream. In philosophy that's just not true. You could go through a philosophy degree to this day and never have a class by a woman, never have to encounter anything having to do with feminism or gender or race.