This contribution aims at proposing a framework for articulating different kinds of “normativities” that are and can be attributed to “algorithmic systems.” The technical normativity manifests itself through the lineage of technical objects. The norm expresses a technical scheme’s becoming as it mutates through, but also resists, inventions. The genealogy of neural networks shall provide a powerful illustration of this dynamic by engaging with their concrete functioning as well as their unsuspected potentialities. The socio-technical normativity accounts for the manners in (...) which engineers, as actors folded into socio-technical networks, willingly or unwittingly, infuse technical objects with values materialized in the system. Surveillance systems’ design will serve here to instantiate the ongoing mediation through which algorithmic systems are endowed with specific capacities. The behavioral normativity is the normative activity, in which both organic and mechanical behaviors are actively participating, undoing the identification of machines with “norm following,” and organisms with “norminstitution”. This proposition productively accounts for the singularity of machine learning algorithms, explored here through the case of recommender systems. The paper will provide substantial discussions of the notions of “normative” by cutting across history and philosophy of science, legal, and critical theory, as well as “algorithmics,” and by confronting our studies led in engineering laboratories with critical algorithm studies. (shrink)

In this review, I survey theoretical accounts of exploitation in business, chiefly through the example of low wage or sweatshop labor. This labor is associated with wages that fall below a living wage standard and include long working hours. Labor of this kind is often described as self-evidently exploitative and immoral (Van Natta 1995). But for those who defend sweatshop labor as the first rung on a ladder toward greater economic development, the charge that sweatshop labor is self-evidently exploitative fails (...) adequately to explain the nature of the alleged wrongdoing. While all sides might agree that poor working conditions are unfortunate and undesirable, defenders of sweatshop labor argue that they provide the best available employment alternative for some workers and the best chance at economic development for many low and middle income countries (LMICs). Some defenders of sweatshop labor even embrace the label of exploitation. <br><br>Unless there is a clear, widely understood account by which exploitation is a moral wrong, then charging a practice as exploitative will do little to advance debates over whether and why a practice is morally problematic. A considerable body of work has been developed applying a growing literature on exploitation to sweatshop labor. While many forms of moral wrong are associated with sweatshop labor, I will focus specifically on the worry that low wages allow relatively wealthy employers wrongfully to take advantage of or gain from relatively poor workers, especially in LMICs. In particular, I will focus on instances of alleged exploitation in employment relationships that are voluntary and mutually beneficial. I have two reasons for doing so. First, by restricting this review to voluntary and mutually beneficial instances of exploitation, I can isolate the moral wrong of exploitation from other moral wrongs, especially the wrongs of coercion and outright harms to workers. Second, the focus on mutually beneficial and voluntary relationships will allow for arguments that sweatshop labor is not only not exploitative, but is a morally praiseworthy means of helping to encourage economic growth in poor areas of the world and to provide jobs that pay better and are more stable than any existing alternatives.<br><br>In this review, I aim to accomplish three goals. First, I will provide an overview of the many different uses of the charge of exploitation in business practice through an examination of the uses of the term in the literature on sweatshop labor. While it is often not clear what kind of moral wrong is assumed to take place when the charge of exploitation is used, I will demonstrate that many distinct types of exploitation, connected to distinct moral wrongs, are used in the literature on sweatshop labor and elsewhere in business ethics. Specifically, I will identify two broad categories of exploitation—exploitation as unfairness and exploitation as the mere use of others—with subgroups under each main category of exploitation. Second, I will discuss which of these senses of exploitation are defensible as identifying clear moral wrongs that take place in the context of business and, specifically, sweatshop labor. As I will argue, not all uses of the charge of exploitation are capable of persuasively identifying clear moral wrongs. Moreover, there is not a single, clear type of exploitation that takes place in business but, rather, several distinct forms. Third, I will apply the lessons learned from my exploration of exploitation in sweatshop labor to other specific areas of business. As I will argue, there are multiple viable models of exploitation in the sweatshop literature that can illuminate exploitative practices of relatively well compensated employees, customers, suppliers, and entire communities. <br><br>While discussions of theories of exploitation tend to argue for a single, correct account of this moral wrong, my review of the literature on exploitation in sweatshop labor supports the conclusion that there are multiple defensible accounts of the moral wrong of exploitation. For this reason, those who would charge that a relationship is exploitative should specify the form of exploitation that they believe is taking place. (shrink)

In Section 2, I survey some of the ways that computers are used in mathematics. These raise questions that seem to have a generally epistemological character, although they do not fall squarely under a traditional philosophical purview. The goal of this article is to try to articulate some of these questions more clearly, and assess the philosophical methods that may be brought to bear. In Section 3, I note that most of the issues can be classified under two headings: some (...) deal with the ability of computers to deliver appropriate “evidence” for mathematical assertions, a notion that is explored in Section 4, while others deal with the ability of computers to deliver appropriate mathematical “understanding,” a notion that is considered in Section 5. Final thoughts are provided in Section 6. (shrink)

The 1-consistency of arithmetic is shown to be equivalent to the existence of fixed points of a certain type of update procedure, which is implicit in the epsilon-substitution method.

Issues pertaining to sex and gender continue to be some of the most hotly debated topics of our time. While many of the most heated disputes occur at the level of politics and public policy, metaphysics, too, has a crucial role to play in these debates. In this essay, I explore several key metaphysical debates concerning sex and gender through the lenses of two important areas in contemporary metaphysics: the metaphysics of essence and the ontology of the human person. The (...) goal here is not to advocate any particular position on these issues, but to show how the tools of contemporary metaphysics can help to offer a more comprehensive map of the conceptual terrain, indicating where major areas of agreement can be found and where the most important disagreements really lie. (shrink)

Shearmur draws on his years as Popper's assistant, on unpublished material in the Hoover archive, and on wider themes within Popper's philosophy to offer striking critical re-interpretations of his ethical and social theory. This title available in eBook format. Click here for more information . Visit our eBookstore at: www.ebookstore.tandf.co.uk.

is it possible to have a first-person experience of our own agency? In nineteenth-century France, this question was subject to intense philosophical debate. The two figures primarily associated with each side of the debate were Maine de Biran and Charles Renouvier. Biran developed powerful objections to Hume's arguments that purported to prove the impossibility of the experience of one's inner causal force. These objections were the match that lit this philosophical fire, and formed the foundation of the philosophy of the (...) French spiritualist school; a school that included Félix Ravaisson, Jules Lachelier, Émile Boutroux, and Henri Bergson.1... (shrink)

The evidence for a positive, direct link between the representation of women on boards of directors and financial performance is tenuous. Given the importance of the gender diversity–financial performance debate, researchers are left to examine how, if at all, the two are linked. The present study takes the position that the link is indirect. Specifically, following stakeholder theory, an argument is made that women on boards’ attunement to stakeholder interests leads them to influence firms’ prosocial actions, which results in higher (...) levels of corporate social responsibility. In turn, following the extant literature, CSR is expected to be positively linked to financial performance. Relying on a sample of Australia’s largest publicly traded firms, the results demonstrate that women on boards are linked to CSR and that CSR is linked to financial performance. However, in the mediation test, CSR appears to fully mediate the link between women on boards and financial performance. The results are discussed along with limitations and future research directions. (shrink)

Animalism, the view that human persons are human animals in the most straightforward, non-derivative sense, is typically taken to conflict with the intuition that a human person would follow her functioning cerebrum were it to be transplanted into another living human body. Some animalists, however, have recently called into question the incompatibility between animalism and this “Transplant Intuition,” arguing that a human animal would be relocated with her transplanted cerebrum. In this paper, we consider the prospects for this cerebrum transplant-compatible (...) variant of animalism, which we call “Transplanimalism.” After presenting its account of three related thought experiments, and outlining its key advantages over Standard Animalism, we raise two concerns for Transplanimalism. First, we argue that Transplanimalism, like other closest-continuer accounts of the human person, encounters difficulties with symmetrical fission cases. Second, we introduce a new thought experiment that pushes Transplanimalism into surprisingly counterintuitive results. As a result of these concerns, we conclude that, despite its attractiveness, animalists should not endorse Transplanimalism. (shrink)

There may be more than 1 answer to a question, and more than 1 way to achieve the result, even in science.

The pandemic creates unprecedented challenges to society and to health care systems around the world. Like all crises, these provide a unique opportunity to rethink the fundamental limiting assumptions and institutional inertia of our established systems. These inertial assumptions have obscured deeply rooted problems in health care and deflected attempts to address them. As hospitals begin to welcome all patients back, they should resist the temptation to go back to business as usual. Instead, they should retain the more deliberative, explicit, (...) and transparent ways of thinking that have informed the development of crisis standards of care. The key lesson to be learned from those exercises in rational deliberation is that justice must be the ethical foundation of all standards of care. Justice demands that hospitals take a safety‐net approach to providing services that prioritizes the most vulnerable segments of society, continue to expand telemedicine in ways that improve access without exacerbating disparities, invest in community‐based care, and fully staff hospitals and clinics on nights and weekends. (shrink)

This study examined the drivers of climate change innovations and the effects of these innovations on firm outcomes in a sample of 203 firms in the South Australian wine cluster. The results of structural equation modeling analysis suggest that absorptive capacity has a direct effect on climate change innovations, and stimulates knowledge exchanges between firms in the cluster. KEs between firms in the cluster in turn directly affect the climate change innovations. The findings suggest a perhaps counterintuitive interrelationship between firm- (...) and cluster-level impacts, in which KEs between firms in the cluster play a partial mediating role in the innovation process. The study further finds that climate change innovations are related to firm performance and reductions in greenhouse gases : mitigative innovations lead to greater GHG reductions while adaptive innovations impact on FP. Contributions of the findings are discussed, as are future research directions. (shrink)

The presidency of Donald Trump saw the rise of a new kind of conspiracy in QAnon. The internet-assembled meta-conspiracy has grown to include elements of other growing conspiracies such as the anti-mask movement and anti-vaxxers. As it has grown, QAnon has attracted significant support for its beliefs from white evangelicals who also supported Trump in huge numbers in both 2016 and 2020. In this integrative review of literature, I explore the reasons that QAnon has performed so well so quickly, finding (...) justification for conspiracy theory support among evangelicals in the theory of cognitive dissonance. QAnon has found a foothold in evangelical circles during worldwide pandemic, which has left many evangelicals unmoored from their spiritual family and susceptible to other realms of community online. The conspiracy theory has infiltrated evangelicalism by using the language and concerns of Christianity in its messaging and by attempting to justify evangelical support of Donald Trump. Although traditional media are quick to point out the theory’s inconsistencies and failed prophecies, this paper finds that the harm QAnon has done to the evangelical community may only be undone through spiritual connection and practice. (shrink)

I take issue with Bernard Gert’s interpretation of Hobbes on two main points. First, I argue that Hobbes’s moral theory reduces to a sophisticated form of consequentialism. Second, I argue that Hobbes’s moral theory is more demanding than Gert’s interpretation, and some of Hobbes’s own remarks, make it appear. I focus on Gert’s reading of Hobbes’s second law of nature, and argue that the law presents us with a Hobson’s choice—that is, the appearance of a choice of how much liberty (...) to relinquish when really there is none. (shrink)

We show that the theory ATR0 is equivalent to a second-order generalization of the theory $\widehat{ID}_{<\omega}$. As a result, ATR0 is conservative over $\widehat{ID}_{<\omega}$ for arithmetic sentences, though proofs in ATR0 can be much shorter than their $\widehat{ID}_{<\omega}$ counterparts.

We present a simple propositional proof system which consists of a single axiom schema and a single rule, and use this system to construct a sequence of combinatorial tautologies that, when added to any Frege system, p-simulates extended-Frege systems.

Hilbert’s program: • Formalize abstract, infinitary, nonconstructive mathematics. • Prove consistency using only finitary methods.

In 1985, van den Dries showed that the theory of the reals with a predicate for the integer powers of two admits quantifier elimination in an expanded language, and is hence decidable. He gave a model-theoretical argument, which provides no apparent bounds on the complexity of a decision procedure. We provide a syntactical argument that yields a procedure that is primitive recursive, although not elementary.

Abstract: This article considers how the formal structure of metaphysical thought is displayed in Oscar Wilde's Importance of Being Earnest . One frequent aim of metaphysics is to understand the world as a whole. We cannot gain such a global vantage point without separating ourselves from all the particular meanings things have for us within the world. But we start within the world, and so can only proceed on the basis of those particular meanings. Consequently we can only separate ourselves (...) from them if they work to cancel themselves in favor of the global understanding. When the separate range of meanings is established, however, it and the world it aims to understand no longer have any meaning for each other. Metaphysics therefore succeeds by establishing and canceling its relevant meaning, all at once. This self-canceling moment or process of thought constitutes a grasp of the world as a whole. It also allows different understandings of reality as a whole to recognize and so enter into dialogue with each other. The climactic moments of The Importance of Being Earnest are structured as a map of this insight-granting process of the self-cancellation of a global range of meanings. That is, they express the formal structure of metaphysical thought. (shrink)

COVID-19 presents many challenges, both clinical and philosophical. In this paper we discuss a major lacuna that COVID-19 revealed in our philosophy and understanding of medicine. Whereas we have some understanding of how physician-scientists interrogate the world to learn more about medicine, we do not understand the epistemological costs and benefits of the various ways clinicians acquire new knowledge in their fields. We will also identify reasons this topic is important both when the world is facing a pandemic and when (...) it is not. (shrink)

Legal and Political Philosophy , edited by Enrique Villanueva, is the first volume in the series Social, Political, and Legal Philosophy , published by Rodopi also under his editorship. It contains six original essays by leading political philosophers and philosophers of law , along with critical papers on those essays, and replies. This is cutting edge work that elicits sharp responses already as it is published, with the debate joined as the authors reply. Social, Political, and Legal Philosophy is a (...) new book series, edited by Enrique Villanueva, and published by Rodopi Publishers as part of Rodopi Philosophical Studies . The series will publish collections of new essays on topics in social or political or legal philosophy. New volumes will be published approximately every year or every other year. (shrink)

The ontology of medicine—the question of whether disease entities are real or not—is an underdeveloped area of philosophical inquiry. This essay explains the primary question at issue in medical ontology, discusses why answering this question is important from both a philosophical and a practical perspective, and argues that the problem of medical ontology is unique, i.e., distinct, from the ontological problems raised by other sciences and therefore requires its own analysis.

Spatial Big Data—be this natively geocoded content, geographical metadata, or data that itself refers to spaces and places—has become a pervasive presence in the spaces and practices of everyday life. Beyond preoccupations with “the geotag” and with mapping geocoded social media content, this special theme explores what it means to encounter and experience spatial Big Data as a quotidian phenomenon that is both spatial, characterized by and enacting of material spatialities, and spatializing, configuring relations between subjects, objects, and spaces in (...) new and unprecedented ways. (shrink)

This essay proposes an anti-work Christian ethics of work: that is, an ethics of work that breaks Christianity’s complicity with capitalism’s death-dealing ideology of work. Taking up feminist anti-work theory’s call to the “refusal of work,” the essay first clarifies the relationship between work and care within the capitalist work-system. It then argues that the activist framework known as reproductive justice—once it is expanded to the whole sphere of social reproduction—offers a moral norm adequate for an anti-work Christian ethics of (...) work. This new norm resonates with the Christian account of Creation, in which ruach circulates for the joy-filled liveliness of all. (shrink)

Through a close re-examination of Eugene O'Neill's oeuvre, from minor plays to his Pulitzer-winning works, this study proposes that O'Neill's vision of tragedy privileges a particular emotional response over a more "rational" one among his audience members. In addition to offering a new paradigm through which to interpret O'Neill's work, this book argues that O'Neill's theory of tragedy is a robust account of the value of difficult theatre as a whole, with more explanatory scope and power than its cognitivist counterparts. (...) This paradigm reshapes our understanding of live theatrical tragedy's impact and significance for our lives. The book enters the discussion of tragic value by way of the plays of Eugene O'Neill, and through this study, Killian makes the case that O'Neill has refused to allow Plato to define the terms of tragedy's merit, as the cognitivists have. He argues that O'Neill's theory of tragedy is non-cognitive and locates the value of a play in its ability to trigger certain emotional responses from the audience. This would be of great interest to students and scholars of performance studies, literature and philosophy. (shrink)

I enter a debate herein concerning the role that Plato’s Forms are thought to play in the epistemic lives of everyday people. While some scholars believe that the Forms play a major role in everyday thinking, others maintain that their part is very minor. The latter view, I contend, is the more tenable. I argue that recent attempts to draw upon the Republic to establish the former are not only unsuccessful, but they tip the scale in favor of the latter.

In November of 1959, William Bean published in the Archives of Internal Medicine a scathing review of Félix Martí-Ibañez’s Centaur: Essays on the History of Medical Ideas. Martí-Ibañez and Bean were two of the leading exponents of the importance of medical humanism during a formative period from the 1950s through the 1970s. But the two physicians differed fundamentally in their views of the ideal relationships among the pharmaceutical industry, the medical profession, and the medical humanities. We situate Bean’s review within (...) its historical context, shedding light on the history and diverging uses of the medical humanities. (shrink)

How foreign policy embodies human values is an issue worth studying. Such a value not only refers to the interests of social and political elites but to the prevailing welfare of people. In 2016, t...

Because Sartre's theatre is one of representation and authenticity, plays like The Victors offer Sartrean philosophical explorations of subjects pushed to the limits of existence by torture and oppressive social edicts. It is in extreme situations that a subject most clearly exercises or fails to exercise his freedom and therefore his authenticity. But Sartre's interest in a complete explication of this process wanes before he fully outlines his project of self formation, which leaves the present paper to prove: (1) the (...) unattainability of any final or permanent authenticity, since each subject represents itself alternately in authentic and inauthentic ways and because the representations of a single subject are constantly in flux; (2) the primacy of representation as the force by which the self is formed and authenticity achieved or avoided; and (3) the criteria for the assessment of authenticity levels and how these processes come to light in plays like The Victors. (shrink)

This book explores how thinking with Alfred North Whitehead and various continental philosophers can advance ideas about sustainability and civilization writ large. Contributors employ Whitehead and one or more continental thinkers around a given topic, whether philosophical or social, to produce the dislocations necessary for generating new ideas.

This paper explores similarities between the sacrilegious revaluations Nietzsche and Spinoza undertook with regards to Christianity and Judaism respectively. In both cases, these revaluations involve a devaluation of an ancestral religious tradition, followed by the infusion of alternative values posited through forms of secular salvation linked to immanent conceptions of eternity. Given the importance of the structural and phenomenological similarities the paper analyses, it is argued that if Nietzsche thought of himself as the Anti-Christ, there is a convincing case to (...) think of Spinoza as the Anti-Moses. And because both the Anti-Christ and the Anti-Moses not only devaluated their respective religious traditions, but also suggested forms of beatitude based on a valorizing notion of eternity, their efforts are profoundly religious. Accordingly, Nietzsche and Spinoza are not only arguably the greatest Christian and Jewish heretics, but also the prophets of innovative forms of secular and immanent religiosity. (shrink)

Un rite de deuil particulier et rarement attesté dans les sources classiques consiste à raser la crinière des chevaux et parfois des mulets à la mort d’un haut personnage. Cette pratique apparaît notamment parmi les mesures du deuil décrété par Alexandre à la mort d’Héphaistion en 324, ce qui a été versé par les Anciens — et souvent par les Modernes à leur suite — à la liste des comportements excessifs et barbares du conquérant macédonien à la fin de son (...) règne. Une enquête sur les origines de ce rite montre que ce dernier constitue un bel exemple des transferts culturels du ve siècle entre les Perses et les Grecs, avec une réception favorable en Thessalie et une perception plus mitigée en Grèce du sud. Cette pratique offre un éclairage sur ce que les Grecs appelaient un mega penthos (grand deuil / deuil public) et sur l’utilisation politique qu’Alexandre a essayé d’en faire en 324. (shrink)

ABSTRACTClarisse Coignet played an important role in a number of the most important intellectual movements in nineteenth-century France. She grew up around and documented the leaders of...

The history of market regulations provides an important perspective on the gendering of systems of food within the evolution of urban economies. This article addresses an important and distinctive period in this process, when New York shifted away from colonial and English-derived institutions in the first four decades of the nineteenth century. The legal status of women was unsettled during this time, introducing uncertainty into women's economic activities. New York City's public marketplaces were carefully regulated through a network of ancient (...) and sometimes arcane laws that inscribed particular activities within well-defined spaces while prohibiting them elsewhere. While these laws were derived from traditional English practices, enforcement was becoming increasingly legalistic rather than customary. While these market laws did not specifically invoke gender, they produced a system that was less navigable to women due to their problematic status as legal subjects. Because the system's navigability differed by commodity, these laws significantly shaped the gendered identity of foodstuffs, such as meat and fruit. Carefully delineating these legal constructions allows us to better understand how women navigated the real and conceptual spaces of the food system, and to see how the changing legal realities of New York impinged on women's employment. (shrink)

Philip Pettit has made central to modern republican theory a distinctive account of freedom—republican freedom. On this account, I am not free solely because I can make choices without interference. I am truly free, only if that non-interference does not itself depend on another’s forbearance. Pettit believes that the principal justification for the traditional focus of the criminal law is that it constitutes a bulwark against domination. I will, in part, be considering the merits of this claim. Is the importance (...) of the orthodox realm of the criminal law solely or mainly explained by the wish to protect people from domination? In short, the answer is that it is not. Across the board, the criminal law rightly protects us equally from threats to what Pettit calls ‘effective,’ as opposed to formal, republican freedom. I will develop my critique of Pettit’s account of criminal law, in part to raise questions about the role of ‘domination’ in political theory, and about whether it poses a significant challenge to liberal accounts of criminal law. (shrink)

SummaryEarlier studies of the “Pride of Halikarnassos” have emphasized its role situating Halikarnassos in the changing geopolitical landscape of the second century. In these interpretations Rome looms large. The inscription, however, is also an example of a Local Discourse Environment, in which different versions of Halikarnassian myth and history, some Greek, others Karian, are used to assert the competing traditions of the different groups who inhabited Halikarnassos. Comparison with other inscriptions from Halikarnassos underscores the continued existence of local groups, defined (...) by ethnicity, familial affiliation, even neighbourhood, each vying with the other for preeminence. The “Pride of Halikarnassos” offers a vision of the reconciliation of local rivalries through shared narratives. (shrink)

Popper’s methodological individualism faces some problems. It is not clear if we should interpret it as Weberian or along the lines of rational choice theory. As contrasted with what was done in Ian C. Jarvie’s admirable The Revolution in Anthropology, the theory was not addressed to concrete problem situations in social theory and does not fit well with Popper’s early ideas about methodological rules or his later ideas about metaphysical research programs. Further, its defenders–including Jarvie–interpret it in ways that give (...) it little content, or which, I think mistakenly, take its thrust to be moral. In reinterpreting this nonetheless important idea, I think that we should take our lead from Jarvie in The Revolution in Anthropology. (shrink)