This interdisciplinary study takes a real-life look at evil deeds and evil nature, from the Global Financial Crisis to the Rwanda Genocide and beyond. The authors share their personal and poignant views on evil.

This paper focuses on the fact that AI is predominantly portrayed as white—in colour, ethnicity, or both. We first illustrate the prevalent Whiteness of real and imagined intelligent machines in four categories: humanoid robots, chatbots and virtual assistants, stock images of AI, and portrayals of AI in film and television. We then offer three interpretations of the Whiteness of AI, drawing on critical race theory, particularly the idea of the White racial frame. First, we examine the extent to which this (...) Whiteness might simply reflect the predominantly White milieus from which these artefacts arise. Second, we argue that to imagine machines that are intelligent, professional, or powerful is to imagine White machines because the White racial frame ascribes these attributes predominantly to White people. Third, we argue that AI racialised as White allows for a full erasure of people of colour from the White utopian imaginary. Finally, we examine potential consequences of the racialisation of AI, arguing it could exacerbate bias and misdirect concern. (shrink)

A brief history of affective responses to AI.

This commentary is a response to ‘More than Skin Deep’ by Shelley M. Park, and a development of our own 2020 paper ‘The Whiteness of AI’. We aim to explain how representations of AI can be varied in one sense, whilst not being diverse. We argue that Whiteness’s claim to universal humanity permits a broad range of roles to White humans and White-presenting machines, whilst assigning a much narrower range of stereotypical roles to people of colour. Because the attributes of (...) AI in the popular imagination, such as intelligence, power and passing as human, are associated by the White racial frame with Whiteness, AI is cast predominantly as White. Following Sparrow, we suggest this presents a dilemma for those creating or representing AI. We discuss three possible solutions: avoiding anthropomorphisation, explicitly critiquing racial role-typing, and representing powerful AI as non-White. (shrink)

Za klasično in moderno politično filozofijo od Hobbesa prek Kanta in Hegla do Marxa postanemo državljani, ko svojo zakoreninjenost v družinske in družbene vezi spremenimo v pravni in/oziroma politični obstoj. Judith Butler in Marc Abélès, s tem da poudarjata prekarnost politike, postavljata pod vprašaj klasične distinkcije, kot je ločevanje med zasebnim in javnim, ko pokažeta, da sta imanentnost in kontingentnost konfliktov konstitutivna za vznik politike danes. Ker mislita politiko onstran države, tako Butler kot Abélès pojmujeta politični prostor kot križišče (...) različnih razsežnosti konkretnega prostora, kjer postane vidna prekarnost teles. Opirajoč se na ta dognanja, se avtorica distancira od ontologije prekarnosti, kolikor le-ta zamrači radikalno kontingentnost svobode, ki je vedno svoboda pod različnimi pogoji. Zato da bi lahko naredili vidno kontingentnost ustvarjanja političnega prostora, je zato nujno upoštevati konkretne družbene in zgodovinske pogoje takega ustvarjanja. Neontološko pojmovanje prekarnosti politike pa nasprotno omogoča pokazati nenavadno bližino metod, ki jih uporabljajo v psihoanalizi in politični antropologiji. Psihoanalizi in politiki je skupno to, da konstruirata prostor za tavanje. Toda če psihoanalize vseeno ni mogoče priličiti politiki, kolikor ima namreč opraviti s posameznimi singularnostmi in ne kolektivi, pa vseeno lahko ponudi orodja za analizo političnih situacij. (shrink)

This commentary responds to Stephen Cave and Kanta Dihal’s call for further investigations of the whiteness of AI. My response focuses on three overlapping projects needed to more fully understand racial bias in the construction of AI and its representations in pop culture: unpacking the intersections of gender and other variables with whiteness in AI’s construction, marketing, and intended functions; observing the many different ways in which whiteness is scripted, and noting how white racial framing exceeds white casting (...) and thus cannot be undone by more diverse and inclusive hiring. Our techno-utopian fantasies, I conclude, are morally suspect in ways that go beneath and beyond the white plastic covering on robotic bodies. (shrink)

Although the word empathy only recently came into existence, eighteenth century philosopher, David Hume, significantly contributed to our current understanding of the term. Hume was among the first to suggest that an empathic mechanism is the central means by which we make ethical judgments and glean moral knowledge. In this paper, I explore Hume's moral sentimentalism, and I argue that his conception of empathy provides a surprisingly apposite framework for interpreting and addressing a current issue in practical ethics: the moral (...) significance of ultra-violent video games. Ultimately, I attempt to show that a Humean account of morality uniquely explains the dangers of ultra-violent video gaming by elucidating a direct connection between playing such games and moral harm. (shrink)

Spiritual messages of Jayēntira Sarasvati, Jagatguru Sankaracharya of Kamakoti, b. 1935, Hindu religious leader.

This symposium on Monique Deveaux’s Poverty, Solidarity, and Poor-Led Social Movements includes commentaries by Sally Matthews, Renante D. Pilapil, Violetta Igneski, and Wouter Peeters, with a reply from Deveaux. The book makes the case that normative thinking about poverty should engage closely with the aims, insights, and actions of poor-led organizations and social movements. Challenging conventional framings of poverty by moral philosophers, Deveaux argues that chronic poverty is centrally about the subordination and dispossession of the poor – not mere (...) needs scarcity. To exclude people living in poverty from shaping antipoverty solutions is therefore to perpetuate their social-political domination and epistemic oppression. Deveaux’s book explains what a political reframing of poverty looks like from the vantage point of several poor-led organizations and social movements, using concrete examples from across the globe, and argues for political responsibility for solidarity with those movements. (shrink)

This book, now open-access from OUP, develops a normative theory of political responsibility for solidarity with poor populations by engaging closely with empirical studies of poor-led social movements in the Global South. Monique Deveaux rejects familiar ethical framings of problems of poverty and inequality by arguing that normative thinking about antipoverty remedies needs to engage closely with the aims, insights, and actions of “pro-poor,” poor-led social movements. Defending the idea of a political responsibility for solidarity, nonpoor outsiders—individuals, institutions, and (...) states—can help to advance a transformative anti-poverty agenda only by supporting the efforts of these movements. (shrink)

It is not uncommon for philosophers to name disinterestedness, or some like feature, as an essential characteristic of love. Such theorists claim that in genuine love, one’s concern for her beloved must be non-instrumental, non-egocentric, or even selfless. These views prompt the question, “What, if any, positive role might self-interestedness play in genuine love?” In this paper, I argue that attachment, an attitude marked primarily by self-focused emotions and emotional predispositions, helps constitute the meaning and import of at least some (...) kinds of adult reciprocal love. In this way, attachment represents a type of self-interestedness that not only contributes positively to such relationships but is also essential to them. (shrink)

In the contemporary philosophical literature, the topic of security has been largely neglected, and this is especially true of the affect of security. In what follows, I aim to nudge the affect of security toward the philosophical foreground by offering a basic analysis of this attitude. Specifically, I sketch an account on which the affect of security is helpfully construed as a feeling of confidence in one’s ability to competently and effectively exercise one’s agency. Security, so construed, is an affective (...) attitude toward one’s agency that both admits of affect regulation and plays a crucial meta-affective regulatory role in facilitating and modulating other affective dispositions and occurrent emotions. Examining this attitude can help to illuminate both the phenomenology and motivational structure of agency and the nature of certain emotions. (shrink)

Classical commentary on Brahmasūtra of Bādarāyaṇa, aphoristic work on Vedanta.

Introduction by Paul Brunton. Dr. Mishra brings a medical reasoning and a guru's practice to the ancient science of yoga. Concentration and meditation exercises make this an invaluable introduction to yoga. 14 black-and-white drawings.

This book offers a persuasive new argument for reconciling the tensions that arise when liberal democratic states try to protect two important kinds of equality: sexual equality and cultural equality.

Compendium of Advaita and Dvaita Vedanta philosophy; includes Yogendrānandīdīpikā Sanskrit commentary and Hindi interpretation of Gaudabrahmanandi sanskrit commentary ofand Hindi commentary.

Theorists often conceive of forgiveness as “wiping the slate clean” or something of the sort with respect to the offender’s moral infraction. This raises a puzzle concerning how (or whether) the relevant wrongdoing can continue to play a role in the forgiver’s deliberations, attitudes, and practical orientation toward the offender once forgiveness has taken place. For example, consider an agent who forgives her offender for an act of wrongdoing only to later blame her again for that very same act. Is (...) the relevant agent morally criticizable for breaching a commitment internal to her earlier forgiveness? When, if ever, is “un- forgiving,” justified? In brief, I argue that sometimes, we can genuinely forgive a wrongdoer for a particular transgression and at some later time, justifiably un-forgive her for it. Though the act of un-forgiving is underexplored, I argue that attending to this phenomenon will not only illuminate an important, often overlooked aspect of moral life, but it will also help to inform extant accounts of the nature and ethics of forgiveness. (shrink)

Aesthetic desire and distaste prime everyday life in surprising ways. The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic casts much-needed light on the complex mix of meanings our aesthetic activities weave into cultural existence. Anchoring aesthetic experience in our relationships with persons, places, and things, Monique Roelofs explores aesthetic life as a multimodal, socially embedded, corporeal endeavor. Highlighting notions of relationality, address, and promising, this compelling study shows these concepts at work in visions of beauty, ugliness, detail, nation, ignorance, and cultural (...) boundary. Unexpected aesthetic pleasures and pains crop up in sites where passion, perception, rationality, and imagination go together but also are in conflict. Bonds between aesthetics and politics are forged and reforged. Cross-disciplinary in outlook, and engaging the work of theorists and artists ranging from David Hume to Theodor W. Adorno, Frantz Fanon, Clarice Lispector, and Barbara Johnson, The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic lays open the interpretive web that gives aesthetic agency its vast reach. (shrink)

Xenotransplantation is defined as “any procedure that involves the transplantation, implantation, or infusion into a human recipient of either live cells, tissues, or organs from a nonhuman animal source, or human body fluids, cells, tissues or organs that have had ex vivo contact with live nonhuman animal cells, tissues, or organs.” Xenotransplantation has been viewed by desperate patients and their surgeons as a solution to the problem of the paucity of human organs available for transplantation. Foes of xenotransplantation argue that (...) the use of animal organs degrades the human race and should be avoided.In this paper, we briefly review the cultural context of xenotransplantation and explore the infectious disease risk of xenotransplantation. The United States Code of Federal Regulations requires life-long surveillance of a xenotransplantation recipient due to the largely unknown risk of novel infectious disease transmitted across species, known as xenogeneic infectious disease. We argue that despite being in the interest of protecting the public health, the imposition of lifelong surveillance requirements on xenotransplant recipients effectively abrogates the right to withdraw from a clinical trial after the transplantation has taken place. Moreover, we argue that a waiver of the right to withdraw should be made explicit in the interest of full disclosure, out of respect for the research subject’s right of self-determination. (shrink)

The yoga system accepts the S nkhya metaphysics, the fundamental variation being that consciousness is held to be supreme. The goal to be achieved is to attain this final state of pure consciousness. All obstacles, mental and physical, are subjugated and transcended. The method is the development of concentration by controlling all thought modes. It starts by the purification of the body by the control of posture and breathing. The mind is purified by the rejection of hindrances to the development (...) of concentration. Both require a mandatory practice of the ethical ideals prescribed. The final goal of sam dhi is not a post-mortem state but realisable here and now. Many extraordinary capabilities acquired due to concentration are mere hindrances which are to be discarded. The Yoga S tras are four in number and made up p d s (steps). Only the first two s tras are explained in a very sketchy manner. (shrink)

Dans cet ouvrage, Monique Lauret retrace l'histoire du mouvement psychanalytique en Chine qui ne cesse de croître depuis les années 1980, analyse l'influence de la pensée chinoise sur la théorisation de Lacan, et établit des passerelles entre pensée chinoise et psychanalyse. Il existe un passage inattendu entre pensée chinoise et psychanalyse autour de la question de l'humanisation et du rêve. Lacan s'intéressa en particulier à trois notions de la philosophie chinoise: la nature, le désir et la sagesse (discernement). Il (...) reprit les concepts clés de Mencius, fils spirituel de Confucius: le Xing (nature ou sexuel) et le Ming (décret du Ciel ou destin) à partir desquels il conçut la nature de l'être parlant soumis aux lois du Ciel, c'est-à-dire celles de son désir et de sa jouissance. Il porta aussi un regard neuf sur la langue et l'écriture idéographique chinoises: il y découvrit un système de signifiance révélant le mécanisme subtil de l'inconscient structuré comme écriture, ce qui lui permit d'approfondir les concepts de jouissance, d'identification et de Trait unaire. Enfin, il dénonça l'effondrement de la ' sagesse ' de l'humanité à l'origine de nos maux contemporains: une précipitation dans la haine et l'archaïque, la haine étant le plus puissant vecteur de la pulsion de mort. Par ce dialogue entre deux pensées civilisationnelles qui défendent l'idée que l'homme ne peut être humain que dans sa relation à l'autre, cet ouvrage propose une position de discernement face à l'essor de la révolution techno-numérique et au malaise dans la civilisation. (shrink)

Classical compendium, with Gauḍabrahmānandī Sanskrit commentary by Brahmānandasarasvatī, 17th cent., on Advaita Vedanta philosophy.

Work on self-realization in Hinduism includes Hindi commentary.

Collection of philosophical writings by a Hindu religious leader.

Dans la Genèse, l’exil abrahamique, paradigme d’un mouvement qui constitue le premier pas de la réalisation de l’homme, est caractérisé par une séparation et une mise en route. C’est le début du temps historique. L’Exode fait le récit d’un exil collectif sous la houlette de Moïse : la sortie d’Égypte, le séjour dans le désert, avant d’atteindre la Terre promise. Ce séjour dans le désert est le temps d’initiation des Hébreux à la vie sociale. D’un assemblage de tribus, les Hébreux (...) deviennent un peuple, avec des lois et une justice, métaphore de la transformation potentielle par l’analyse. (shrink)

The philosophical investigation of consciousness has a long-standing history in both Indian and Western thought. The conceptual models and analyses that have emerged in one cultural framework may be profitably reviewed in the light of another. In this context, a study of the notion of consciousness in the transcendental phenomenology of Edmund Husserl is not only important as a focus on a remarkable achievement in the context of Western thought, but is also useful for an appreciation of the concern with (...) this question in the Indian philosophical tradition, and especially in the tradition of Advaita Vedānta of Ādi Śamkara. The starting point for this paper is the belief that phenomenology has a recognizably common face for both these traditions. This paper investigates the possibility of a parallel notion of consciousness in the transcendental phenomenology of Husserl and the Advaita Vedānta of Śamkara, with particular emphasis on Husserl’s ‘Transcendental I’ and Śamkara’s ‘Witness Consciousness’ (Sākshi Caitanya). In the process, it explores the phenomenological relevance of the concept of consciousness in Indian philosophy, with special reference to the concept of pure consciousness as one of the essential criteria for any sound theory of knowledge. It more importantly highlights the Advaitic understanding of pure consciousness as one of the major contributions to the field of comparative philosophy that forms a vantage point for cross-cultural comparison. While pointing to significant differences in their respective approaches to understanding the nature of consciousness, the exploration finally unveils the common thesis for both Śamkara and Husserl that ‘pure consciousness’ is essentially foundational, evidencing and absolute for any epistemic act. (shrink)

Despite the recent explosion of philosophical literature on forgiveness, relatively few theorists have addressed the possibility of un-forgiving someone for a moral violation. And among those who have addressed the question, “Can we un-forgive?” we find little consensus. In this paper, I consider whether and in what sense forgiveness is rescindable, retractable, or otherwise reversible. In other words, I consider what it might mean to say that a victim who forgave her offender for a particular act of wrongdoing later un-forgave (...) that individual for the very same act. Examining the possibility of un-forgiving positions us to gain richer understandings of both forgiveness and the complexity of navigating moral relationships more broadly. (shrink)

Felt necessity, or the phenomenon of experiencing some person or object as a felt need, plays important roles in structuring human agency. Philosophical treatments of the relationship between agency and felt necessity have tended to focus on appetitive needs and necessities arising from a particular type of care. I argue that we have much to gain by considering a third underexplored variety of felt necessity that I call “attachment necessity.” Attachment necessity has its own distinct parts to play in structuring (...) agency, and like its more familiar relatives, it can also illuminate important aspects of addiction and love. (shrink)

The term “emotional practices” is gaining currency in the historical study of emotions. This essay discusses the theoretical and methodological implications of this concept. A definition of emotion informed by practice theory promises to bridge persistent dichotomies with which historians of emotion grapple, such as body and mind, structure and agency, as well as expression and experience. Practice theory emphasizes the importance of habituation and social context and is thus consistent with, and could enrich, psychological models of situated, distributed, and (...) embodied cognition and their approaches to the study of emotion.It is suggested here that practices not only generate emotions, but that emotions themselves can be viewed as a practical engagement with the world. Conceiving of emotions as practices means understanding them as emerging from bodily dispositions conditioned by a social context, which always has cultural and historical specificity. Emotion-as-practice is bound up with and dependent on “emotional practices,” defined here as practices involving the self , language, material artifacts, the environment, and other people. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus, the essay emphasizes that the body is not a static, timeless, universal foundation that produces ahistorical emotional arousal, but is itself socially situated, adaptive, trained, plastic, and thus historical. Four kinds of emotional practices that make use of the capacities of a body trained by specific social settings and power relations are sketched out—mobilizing, naming, communicating, and regulating emotion—as are consequences for method in historical research. (shrink)