The essays in this collection, written by prominent scholars, offer a new approach to their work.

_Deleuze and Guattari: New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy and Culture_ Edited by Eleanor Kaufman and Kevin Jon Heller Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998 ISBN 0-8166-30283 320 pp.

This anthology in epistemology is a collection of essays and excerpts from seminal texts on ways of knowing in mathematics, the natural and social sciences and the liberal and fine arts and communication.

Bayesian networks are computer programs which represent probabilitistic relationships graphically as directed acyclic graphs, and which can use those graphs to reason probabilistically , often at relatively low computational cost. Almost every expert system in the past tried to support probabilistic reasoning, but because of the computational difficulties they took approximating short-cuts, such as those afforded by MYCIN's certainty factors. That all changed with the publication of Judea Pearl's Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems, in 1988, which synthesized a decade of (...) research making accurate graphical probabilistic reasoning computationally achievable.Bayesian network technology is now one of the fastest growing fields of research in artificial intelligence. That it has become a publication industry in its own right is shown by a search on Google scholar :This development, together with a parallel related growth in the use of causal discovery algorithms which automate the learning of Bayesian networks from sample data, has generated considerable interest, and controversy, within the philosophy-of-science community.Three central questions bringing together AI researchers and philosophers of science are: Are Bayesian networks Bayesian? What is the relation between probability and causality? Are the assumptions behind causal discovery of Bayesian networks realistic or fantastical?Jon Williamson, as a philosopher of science with a keen interest in the technology, asks and answers these questions in his new book. Although it is self-contained, his book is not very likely as an introduction to the technology , nor is it optimal even as an introduction to the philosophical problems in interpreting Bayesian networks . Rather Williamson's book is an attempt to move the debate forward by solving the central problems of the …. (shrink)

Graphical AbstractScience and technology consortia provide a viable solution for the recent unsustainable academic growth in biomedical research.

The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Until recently, no federal appellate court had ever struck down any gun law as a violation of the Second Amendment. In fact, even laws outlawing most handgun possession, or restricting other types of firearms, had been upheld, in part, because the laws did not interfere with (...) the functioning of state militias.Then, in 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court — for the first time in nearly 70 years — decided a case squarely addressing the meaning of the Second Amendment. In District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court concluded that the Second Amendment protected an individual right to own handguns in the home, invalidating a Washington, D.C. law.But Heller left many issues undecided, including the precise scope of the Second Amendment. (shrink)

Western Australia, like Tasmania, can slip too easily off the map, a periphery on the periphery, its significance occluded by the hegemony of the eastern states of Australia. Yet Western Australia is core to Australia’s economy, not least through mining, and through its proximity to Asia. The West is itself connected more closely to region, in both the local and transnational senses. Its tradition of secessionist thinking indicates a kind of exceptionalist culture. This is a difference which begs for explanation. (...) This essay introduces some motifs and themes of this special issue of Thesis Eleven, entitled ‘Way Out West: Mapping Western Australia’. It locates the West in some recent historical, geographical and narrative context. It gestures toward the biography of its editors, Jon Stratton and Peter Beilharz, and their locations spread across the west and east of the continent. It calls for further scrutiny of these, and other antipodes. (shrink)

Traces Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben's engagement with deconstructive thought from his early work in the 1960s to the present, examining his key concepts - infancy, Voice, potentiality, sovereignty, bare life, messianism - in relation to key texts and concepts in Jacques Derrida's work.

McGovern, Kevin The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) released a new Instruction on bioethics on 12 December 2008, and titled it as Dignitas Personae. A brief summary of the new Vatican Instruction on bioethics is presented, which is aimed at contributing to the formation of conscience, and to promote biomedical research which is ethically sound and which truly serves human beings.

Mainstream political liberalism holds that legal coercion is permissible only if it is based on reasons that all can share, access or accept. But these requirements are subject to well-known problems. I articulate and defend an intelligible reasons requirement as an alternative. An intelligible reason is a reason that all suitably idealized members of the public can see as a reason for the person who offers it according to that person’s own evaluative standards. It thereby permits reasons into public justification (...) that all cannot share, access, or accept, and so contrasts with standard approaches to public justification. The intelligible reasons requirement has two striking implications. First, it severs the connection between public justification and principles of deliberative restraint. Second, it pushes political liberals to appeal to other political processes to publicly justify law, specifically bargaining, adjudication, and social evolution. (shrink)

First published: Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2005.

This book, first published in 1979, is composed of studies in a descending sequence from perfect rationality, through imperfect and problematical rationality, to irrationality. Specifically human rationality is characterized by its capacity to relate strategically to the future, in contrast to the myopic 'gradient climbing' of natural selection.

This paper analyses the methods of the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) for evaluating the carcinogenicity of various agents. I identify two fundamental evidential principles that underpin these methods, which I call Evidential Proximity and Independence. I then show, by considering the 2018 evaluation of the carcinogenicity of styrene and styrene‐7,8‐oxide, that these principles have been implemented in a way that can lead to inconsistency. I suggest a way to resolve this problem: admit a general exception to Independence (...) and treat the implementation of Evidential Proximity more flexibly where this exception applies. I show that this suggestion is compatible with the general principles laid down in the 2019 version of IARC's methods guide, its Preamble to the Monographs. (shrink)

In the 1830s and 1840s, there was a decisive conflict between the Danish followers of Hegel and his opponents. The latter criticized Hegel’s philosophy for being overly abstract and having lost touch with reality. Kierkegaard is given credit for this criticism and for establishing a new philosophical direction that rejects abstraction and focuses on the concrete experience of the individual. The present article argues that there was nothing particularly new about Kierkegaard’s rejection of abstract philosophy and his attempt to emphasize (...) actuality and life. In fact, the conflict was wider and extended to many other Danish thinkers at the time who were critical of precisely this point in Hegel. (shrink)

Michel Foucault's involvement with politics, both as an individual and a writer, has been much commented upon but until now has not been systematically reviewed. This is the first major introductory study of Michel Foucault as a political thinker. Jonathon Simons explores the importance of the political in all areas of Foucault's work and life, including important material only recently made available and the implications of various revelations about his private life. Simons relates Foucault's work both to contemporary political thinkers (...) such as Michael Walzer, Charles Taylor and Jurgen Habermas, and to those challenging conventional political categories, especially people who write on feminist and gay theory, such as Judith Butler. Students of Foucault and of political and social theory, as well as those working in lesbian and gay theory, and feminist studies, will find this book essential. (shrink)

This piece defends the asymmetric convergence approach to public justification against James Boettcher's recent critique.

This chapter contains sections titled: Notes.

While some argue that this German Catholic philosopher and theologian neglected the role of procreation in marriage, this book shows that von Hildebrand's writings on reverence and superabundant finality contribute to a contemporary understanding of the significance of procreation within marriage. Schemenauer analyzes von Hildebrand's integration of conjugal love and procreation, showing him to be an insightful and parallel voice to the that of John Paul II.

In this paper I argue that there is a significant but often overlooked metaphysical distinction to be made between contextualism and contrastivism. The orthodox view is that contrastivism is merely a form of contextualism. This is a mistake. The contextualist view is incompatible with certain naturalist claims about the metaphysical nature of concepts within whichever domain is being investigated, while the contrastivist view is compatible with these claims. So, choosing one view over the other will involve choosing to affirm or (...) deny a significant metaphysical claim. As such, a demarcation ought to be put in place between contextualism and contrastivism. (shrink)

Anth. Pal.10.92, ascribed to Palladas of Alexandria, appears to be a short iambic prologue to a single epigram. Evidently addressed to a judge of some sort, it survives only in the Palatinus, which preserves the text as follows:Ἐπεὶ δικάζεις καὶ σοφιστεύεις λόγοις,κἀγὼ φέρω σοι τῆς ἐμῆς ἀηδόνοςἐπίγραμμα σεμνόν, ἄξιον παρρησίας·οὐ γὰρ σὲ μέλπων τῆς Δίκης ὕπνους ἔχει.

Metabolism is a set of chemical reactions, used by living organisms to process chemical compounds in order to take energy and eliminate toxic compounds, for example. Its processes are referred as metabolic pathways. Understanding metabolism is imperative to biology, toxicology and medicine, but the number and complexity of metabolic pathways makes this a difficult task. In our paper, we investigate the use of causal Bayesian networks to model the pathways of yeast saccharomyces cerevisiae metabolism: such a network can be used (...) to draw predictions about the levels of metabolites and enzymes in a particular specimen. We propose a two-stage methodology for causal networks, as follows. First construct a causal network from the network of metabolic pathways. The viability of this causal network depends on the validity of the causal Markov condition. If this condition fails, however, the principle of the common cause motivates the addition of a new causal arrow or a new `hidden' common cause to the network (stage 2 of the model formation process). Algorithms for adding arrows or hidden nodes have been developed separately in a number of papers, and in this paper we combine them, showing how the resulting procedure can be applied to the metabolic pathway problem. Our general approach was tested on neural cell morphology data and demonstrated noticeable improvements in both prediction and network accuracy. (shrink)

A traditional ethic of medicine asserts that physicians have special obligations to individual patients with whom they have a clinical relationship. Contemporary trends in US healthcare financing like bundled payments seem to threaten traditional conceptions of special obligations of individual physicians to individual patients because their population-based focus sets a tone that seems to emphasise responsibilities for groups of patients by groups of physicians in an organisation. Prior to undertaking a cogent debate about the fate and normative weight of special (...) obligations and a traditional ethic for contemporary healthcare, we need a deeper examination of what the traditional ethic of special obligations really means. Here we offer a conception of ‘doubly distributed’ special obligations. Physicians and similarly minded healing professionals abiding by a traditional ethic have always spread their devotion and attention across multiple patients and have shared responsibilities with physician and non-physician colleagues in much the same way devoted parents have frequently distributed their special obligations across multiple children and across multiple parents. By taking up the extended analogy of parent we argue that doubly distributing special obligations need not contradict the possibility of special obligations in restructured collective forms of healthcare delivery and financing. (shrink)

Ethicists widely accept the notion that scientists have moral responsibilities to benefit society at large. The dissemination of scientific information to the public and its political representatives is central to many of the ways in which scientists serve society. Unfortunately, the task of providing information can often give rise to moral quandaries when scientific experts participate in politically charged debates over issues that are fraught with uncertainty. This paper develops a theoretical framework for an “ethics of expertise” (EOE) based on (...) the notion that scientists have responsibilities to provide information in a way that promotes autonomous decision-making on the part of the public and its representatives. Moreover, insofar as the principle of informed consent has developed in biomedical ethics as a way for physicians to promote autonomous decision-making on the part of their patients, this paper suggests that the informed-consent concept may suggest a set of criteria and guidelines that can help scientists to fulfill their similar ethical responsibilities to the public. In order to illustrate how the resulting EOE could provide practical guidance for scientific experts, the paper examines a case study involving the dissemination of information about the low-dose biological effects of toxic chemicals and carcinogens. (shrink)

In spite of its success, Neo-Darwinism is faced with major conceptual barriers to further progress, deriving directly from its metaphysical foundations. Most importantly, neo-Darwinism fails to recognize a fundamental cause of evolutionary change, “niche construction”. This failure restricts the generality of evolutionary theory, and introduces inaccuracies. It also hinders the integration of evolutionary biology with neighbouring disciplines, including ecosystem ecology, developmental biology, and the human sciences. Ecology is forced to become a divided discipline, developmental biology is stubbornly difficult to reconcile (...) with evolutionary theory, and the majority of biologists and social scientists are still unhappy with evolutionary accounts of human behaviour. The incorporation of niche construction as both a cause and a product of evolution removes these disciplinary boundaries while greatly generalizing the explanatory power of evolutionary theory. (shrink)

Morality – the subjective sense that humans discern between right and wrong – plays a ubiquitous role in everyday life. Deontological reasoning conceptualizes moral decision-making as rigid, such that many moral choices are forbidden or required. Not surprisingly, the language used in measures of deontological reasoning tends to be rigid, including phrases such as “always” and “never.” Two studies drawn from two different populations used commonly used measures of moral reasoning and measures of morality to examine the link between individual (...) differences in deontological reasoning and language on the endorsement of moral foundations. Participants low on deontological reasoning generally showed less endorsement for moral principles when extreme language was used in the measures. (shrink)

The heart of my dissertation project is the proposal of a new updating rule for responding to learning experiences consisting of continuous streams of evidence. I suggest characterizing this kind of learning experience as a continuous stream of stipulated credal derivatives, and show that Continuous Probability Kinematics is the uniquely coherent response to such a stream which satisfies a continuous analogue of Rigidity – the core property of both Bayesian and Jeffrey conditionalization. In the first chapter, I define neighborhood norms (...) of rationality with reference to Kenny Easwaran’s definition of neighborhood properties. I summarize and comment on some of the key arguments in the dispute between time-slice epistemologists, who argue that there are no fundamentally diachronic norms of rationality, and the proponents of diachronic norms. I am sympathetic to two of the key motivations often given in support of the synchronist position: mentalist internalism and the idea that metaphysical disputes about the identity of persons in bizarre puzzle cases should not play a central role in epistemologists’ assessments of the rationality of agents. However, I argue that time-slice epistemology cannot adequately address the rationality of temporally-extended processes like reasoning and learning. Neighborhood norms present a viable third way between these two positions, capturing much of the spirit of the previously-discussed synchronist motivations while still providing just enough temporal structure to meaningfully guide and evaluate temporally-extended rational processes. Continuous Probability Kinematics is an example of one such neighborhood norm. In the second chapter, I develop my updating rule CPK and establish many of its core properties. Of special note here are the deep connections to Jeffrey’s Probability Kinematics, as well as some key differences. The net result of any CPK updating process will always be representable as a Jeffrey shift on the refined partition generated by the propositions that the agent is receiving direct evidence concerning. However, one crucial difference is that CPK provides an intuitive account of how to combine the effects of learning experiences that are each about fundamentally different underlying partitions. In CPK’s formalism, an agent can receive simultaneous evidence streams about an arbitrary (finite) number of propositions, which can themselves be evidentially related in any way. At any given instant, the result of the combination is a simple sum of the effects that learning about the individual propositions would have separately. CPK is concerned with a novel kind of learning experience and involves a novel characterization of evidence. The third and final chapter of this dissertation is concerned with explaining what this characterization of evidence means and with arguing that it can be the basis for genuine learning. I begin by characterizing learning experiences in terms of the Value of Information, and prove a Value of Information theorem for CPK learning experiences under the assumption of a Martingale constraint on the agent’s prior distribution over the signals that they might receive. I examine Timothy Williamson’s arguments that evidence must be propositional and express my skepticism. I then explore two different routes to model agents who update by CPK as if they are learning some propositional content and updating the rest of their credences by Bayesian conditionalization on this content. The second of these two routes provides a very interesting lens to reexamine the evidential commitments that underwrite updating by CPK, which I analyze. (shrink)