William Tait is one of the most distinguished philosophers of mathematics of the last fifty years. This volume collects his most important published philosophical papers from the 1980's to the present. The articles cover a wide range of issues in the foundations and philosophy of mathematics, including some on historical figures ranging from Plato to Gdel.

The background of these remarks is that in 1967, in ‘’Constructive reasoning” [27], I sketched an argument that finitist arithmetic coincides with primitive recursive arithmetic, P RA; and in 1981, in “Finitism” [28], I expanded on the argument. But some recent discussions and some of the more recent literature on the subject lead me to think that a few further remarks would be useful.

Algorithms silently structure our lives. Algorithms can determine whether someone is hired, promoted, offered a loan, or provided housing as well as determine which political ads and news articles consumers see. Yet, the responsibility for algorithms in these important decisions is not clear. This article identifies whether developers have a responsibility for their algorithms later in use, what those firms are responsible for, and the normative grounding for that responsibility. I conceptualize algorithms as value-laden, rather than neutral, in that algorithms (...) create moral consequences, reinforce or undercut ethical principles, and enable or diminish stakeholder rights and dignity. In addition, algorithms are an important actor in ethical decisions and influence the delegation of roles and responsibilities within these decisions. As such, firms should be responsible not only for the value-laden-ness of an algorithm but also for designing who-does-what within the algorithmic decision. As such, firms developing algorithms are accountable for designing how large a role individual will be permitted to take in the subsequent algorithmic decision. Counter to current arguments, I find that if an algorithm is designed to preclude individuals from taking responsibility within a decision, then the designer of the algorithm should be held accountable for the ethical implications of the algorithm in use. (shrink)

For consciousness to exist, an entity must have prerequisite characteristics and attributes to give rise to it. We explore these “building blocks” of consciousness in detail in this paper, which range from perceptive to computational to meta-representational characteristics of an entity’s cognitive architecture. We show how each cognitive attribute is strictly necessary for the emergence of consciousness, and how the building blocks may be used for any entity to be classified as being conscious. The list of building blocks is not (...) limited to human or organic consciousness and may be used to classify artificial and organisational conscious entities. We further explore a list of attributes that seem intuitively necessary for consciousness, but on further investigation, are neither required nor sufficient. The building blocks do not represent a theory of consciousness but rather a meta-theory on the emergence and classification of consciousness. (shrink)

Gödel regarded the Dialectica interpretation as giving constructive content to intuitionism, which otherwise failed to meet reasonable conditions of constructivity. He founded his theory of primitive recursive functions, in which the interpretation is given, on the concept of computable function of finite type. I will (1) criticize this foundation, (2) propose a quite different one, and (3) note that essentially the latter foundation also underlies the Curry-Howard type theory, and hence Heyting's intuitionistic conception of logic. Thus the Dialectica interpretation (in (...) so far as its aim was to give constructive content to intuitionism) is superfluous. (shrink)

The last section of “Lecture at Zilsel’s” [9, §4] contains an interesting but quite condensed discussion of Gentzen’s first version of his consistency proof for P A [8], reformulating it as what has come to be called the no-counterexample interpretation. I will describe Gentzen’s result (in game-theoretic terms), fill in the details (with some corrections) of Godel's reformulation, and discuss the relation between the two proofs.

Katharine Tait, daughter of Bertrand and Dora Russell, here vividly portrays the extraordinary and stimulating environment she grew up in. In refreshing contrast to the interpretation of Russell as philosopher and public figure, Tait's is a close personal account of her deep love and admiration for her father and its gradual tempering by the imperfections she came to see in him. Touchingly written and beautifully described, the book shows Russell to be a man of great warmth, charm and (...) humour, but is also a testament to the traumas created when he applied his views on marriage and education to his own home. My Father Bertrand Russell is essential reading for those seeking to understand the private background to Russell's ideas, the personal effects of his lifestyle prescriptions, and what it was like to live with a man of such genious. (shrink)

There are some puzzles about G¨ odel’s published and unpublished remarks concerning finitism that have led some commentators to believe that his conception of it was unstable, that he oscillated back and forth between different accounts of it. I want to discuss these puzzles and argue that, on the contrary, G¨ odel’s writings represent a smooth evolution, with just one rather small double-reversal, of his view of finitism. He used the term “finit” (in German) or “finitary” or “finitistic” primarily to (...) refer to Hilbert’s conception of finitary mathematics. On two occasions (only, as far as I know), the lecture notes for his lecture at Zilsel’s [G¨ odel, 1938a] and the lecture notes for a lecture at Yale [G¨ odel, *1941], he used it in a way that he knew—in the second case, explicitly—went beyond what Hilbert meant. Early in his career, he believed that finitism (in Hilbert’s sense) is openended, in the sense that no correct formal system can be known to formalize all finitist proofs and, in particular, all possible finitist proofs of consistency of first-order number theory, P A; but starting in the Dialectica paper.. (shrink)

AT PHAEDO 96A-C Plato portrays Socrates as describing his past study of "the kind of wisdom known as περὶ φυσέως ἱστορία." At 96c-97b, Socrates says that this study led him to realize that he had an inadequate understanding of certain basic concepts which it involved. In consequence, he says at 97b, he abandoned this method and turned to a method of his own. But at this point in the dialogue, instead of proceeding immediately to describe his method, Plato has him (...) interjecting a complaint concerning Anaxagoras and his view that everything should be explained in terms of Mind. His complaint is that Mind would order things in the best possible way and that, therefore, an account of things in terms of Mind would amount to showing that they are ordered in the best possible way. But Anaxagoras did not show this and, instead, offered other kinds of explanations of the various phenomena. Socrates is not just criticizing Anaxagoras here for not doing what he set out to do; he makes it clear, for example at 99b-c, that he believes that the best kind of explanation of the phenomena would be to show that they are ordered in the best possible way. But he was unable to discover an explanation of this kind, either for himself or from others, and so turned to a method which he calls "second best". The actual description of this method is contained in two passages, 99e5-100a7 and 101d5-e1. Between these passages, Socrates invokes the doctrine of Forms and, in particular, the formula. (shrink)

These essays present new analyzes of the central figures of analytic philosophy -- Frege, Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein, and Carnap -- from the beginnings of the analytic movement into the 1930s. The papers do not reflect a single perspective, but rather express divergent interpretations of this controversial intellectual milieu.

The reduction of the lambda calculus to the theory of combinators in [Sch¨ onfinkel, 1924] applies to positive implicational logic, i.e. to the typed lambda calculus, where the types are built up from atomic types by means of the operation A −→ B, to show that the lambda operator can be eliminated in favor of combinators K and S of each type A −→ (B −→ A) and (A −→ (B −→ C)) −→ ((A −→ B) −→ (A −→ C)), (...) respectively.1 I will extend that result to the case in which the types are built up by means of the general function type ∀x : A.B(x) as well as the disjoint union type ∃x : A.B(x)– essentially to the theory of [Howard, 1980]. To extend the treatment of −→ to ∀ we shall need a generalized form of the combinators K and S, and to deal with ∃ we will need to introduce a new form of the combinator S.. (shrink)

The concept of the Anthropocene draws attention to human activity's impact on the planet at the geological scale. It is tempting to reason that like evolution, a heliocentric solar system or quantum mechanics, climate science compels us to accept as real a radical new ontology, the ‘anthroposphere’, with far-reaching social and political consequences. I wish to argue that this temptation should be resisted. The Anthropocene cannot be understood entirely as a natural scientific phenomenon, although it can be treated as such (...) for certain purposes. It is also an irreducibly social phenomenon. This is not to say that it is a socially constructed concept like nationhood, but that it is constituted by natural causal processes that are irreducibly entangled with social causal processes. Adopting the Anthropocene as a working concept therefore requires that we understand the causal processes involved in bringing it about as social causal processes, while also viewing these processes as objectual, open to public scrutiny and capable of compelling public assent. Social causes are not, however, easily subjected to such a naturalistic treatment. I conclude that the Anthropocene is not currently a suitable candidate for inclusion in a naturalist ontology. (shrink)

The “self” does not exist within a vacuum. For an entity to be considered to have a sense of self, it requires certain characteristics and attributes. This paper investigates these “structures” of the sense of self in detail, which range from a unified consciousness to self-awareness to personal identity. The paper details how each attribute and characteristic is strictly necessary for an entity to be classified as having a self, and how the five structures detailed within may be used as (...) a guide for categorising and classifying entities as having selfhood or not (or any point along the spectrum between these). The five structures do not represent a theory of selfhood, but rather a meta-theory on the potential emergence and classification of the self. (shrink)

Firms use algorithms to make important business decisions. To date, the algorithmic accountability literature has elided a fundamentally empirical question important to business ethics and management: Under what circumstances, if any, are algorithmic decision-making systems considered legitimate? The present study begins to answer this question. Using factorial vignette survey methodology, we explore the impact of decision importance, governance, outcomes, and data inputs on perceptions of the legitimacy of algorithmic decisions made by firms. We find that many of the procedural governance (...) mechanisms in practice today, such as notices and impact statements, do not lead to algorithmic decisions being perceived as more legitimate in general, and, consistent with legitimacy theory, that algorithmic decisions with good outcomes are perceived as more legitimate than bad outcomes. Yet, robust governance, such as offering an appeal process, can create a legitimacy dividend for decisions with bad outcomes. However, when arbitrary or morally dubious factors are used to make decisions, most legitimacy dividends are erased. In other words, companies cannot overcome the legitimacy penalty of using arbitrary or morally dubious factors, such as race or the day of the week, with a good outcome or an appeal process for individuals. These findings add new perspectives to both the literature on legitimacy and policy discussions on algorithmic decision-making in firms. (shrink)

Foundations of a General Theory of Manifolds [Cantor, 1883], which I will refer to as the Grundlagen, is Cantor’s first work on the general theory of sets. It was a separate printing, with a preface and some footnotes added, of the fifth in a series of six papers under the title of “On infinite linear point manifolds”. I want to briefly describe some of the achievements of this great work. But at the same time, I want to discuss its connection (...) with the so-called paradoxes in set theory. There seems to be some agreement now that Cantor’s own understanding of the theory of transfinite numbers in that monograph did not contain an implicit contradiction; but there is less agreement about exactly why this is so and about the content of the theory itself. For various reasons, both historical and internal, the Grundlagen seems not to have been widely read compared to later works of Cantor, and to have been even less well understood. But even some of the more recent discussions of the work, while recognizing to some degree its unique character, misunderstand it on crucial points and fail to convey its true worth. (shrink)

This new book is a wide-ranging, contemporary and accessible analysis of familiar and recurring myths about mass education in the United Kingdom. Looking at a variety of important issues and problems, each chapter begins by dispelling myths and assumptions about the classroom, going beyond class, race and gender, to offer analysis of topics such as discipline, youth cultures, information technology and globalisation. Utilising an interdisciplinary lens, this book offers knowledge from disciplines as diverse as sociology, philosophy, jurisprudence and cultural studies. (...) Gordon Tait examines the strengths and weaknesses of different theoretical approaches to education, from critical theory to postmodernism, and Foucaultian governance to post-colonialism. Analysing the many assumptions about education taken for granted in British public discourse, important conclusions are drawn about which of these assumptions are fair and reasonable, and which we should challenge. This book is an essential resource for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate courses on the sociology of education, culture and education, and the philosophy of education. (shrink)

How can firms mitigate the impact of moral violations on consumer evaluations? This question has pervaded the business ethics literature. Though prior research has identified decoupling as a moral reasoning strategy where consumers separate moral judgments from evaluations, it is unclear what motivates individuals to decouple. It is the objective of this research to explore regulatory focus theory as a motivating factor for moral decoupling. Three experiments are undertaken. Study one demonstrates that with a prevention mindset as opposed to promotion (...) mindset, moral decoupling can be achieved. Specifically, those in a prevention mindset report more favorable evaluations when information about a violation explicitly lowers consequences of moral violations. However, when the violation is related to the business functionality of the brand, those in a prevention mindset report less favorable evaluations, except when consequences are lowered. This indicates an inability to decouple, and results in negative emotions. The research shows that inability to decouple for those in a prevention mindset leads to negative emotions, lowering evaluations. These results contribute to the moral reasoning literature by linking regulatory focus to decoupling strategies. Further, the research bridges literature on norm activation, moral foundation, regulatory focus, and moral decoupling to reconcile theoretical differences in judgment styles. Implications for businesses and brands are discussed. (shrink)

The Relevance View, exemplified by Alex Voorhoeve's Aggregate Relevant Claims, has considerable appeal. It accommodates our reluctance to aggregate weak claims in canonical cases like Life for Headaches, while permitting aggregation of claims in a range of other cases. But it has been the target of significant criticism. In an important recent paper, Patrick Tomlin argues that the view suffers from failures of internal logic, violating plausible consistency constraints and generating incoherent combinations of verdicts on cases. And in cases resembling (...) real-world healthcare allocation problems, Tomlin argues that the view offers no guidance at all. In response, I argue that the internal logic of the Relevance View is sound, and the view's core principles, suitably clarified, support a significant extension of the view beyond the simple cases to which it is typically applied. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:The oft-cited privacy paradox is the perceived disconnect between individuals’ stated privacy expectations, as captured in surveys, and consumer market behavior in going online: individuals purport to value privacy yet still disclose information to firms. The goal of this paper is to empirically examine the conceptualization of privacy postdisclosure assumed in the privacy paradox. Contrary to the privacy paradox, the results here suggest consumers retain strong privacy expectations even after disclosing information. Privacy violations are valued akin to security violations in (...) creating distrust in firms and in consumer willingness to engage with firms. This paper broadens the scope of corporate responsibility to suggest firms have a positive obligation to identify reasonable expectations of privacy of consumers. In addition, research perpetuating the privacy paradox, through the mistaken framing of disclosure as proof of anti-privacy behavior, gives license to firms to act contrary to the interests of consumers. (shrink)

In cases where the claims of different groups of people compete, the Relevance View occupies a middle ground between aggregation and nonaggregation. It allows weaker claims to aggregate to outweigh a stronger claim just when the competing claims, compared pairwise, are sufficiently close in strength. The view has strong intuitive appeal when applied to simple binary choices, but I argue that attempts to extend it to nonbinary choices have been unsuccessful. I propose a new extension of the Relevance View to (...) nonbinary choices based on a “binary contrastive” account of the moral reasons that obtain in the cases of interest. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to draw out and make explicit the assumptions made in the treatment of technology within business ethics. Drawing on the work of Freeman (1994, 2000) on the assumed separation between business and ethics, we propose a similar separation exists in the current analysis of technology and ethics. After first identifying and describing the separation thesis assumed in the analysis of technology, we will explore how this assumption manifests itself in the current literature. A different (...) stream of analysis, that of science and technology studies (STS), provides a starting point in understanding the interconnectedness of technology and society. As we will demonstrate, business ethicists are uniquely positioned to analyze the relationship between business, technology, and society. The implications of a more complex and rich definition of lsquotechnologyrsquo ripple through the analysis of business ethics. Finally, we propose a pragmatic approach to understanding technology and explore the implications of such an approach to technology. This new approach captures the broader understanding of technology advocated by those in STS and allows business ethicists to analyze a broader array of dilemmas and decisions. (shrink)

Employee monitoring has raised concerns from all areas of society – business organizations, employee interest groups, privacy advocates, civil libertarians, lawyers, professional ethicists, and every combination possible. Each advocate has its own rationale for or against employee monitoring whether it be economic, legal, or ethical. However, no matter what the form of reasoning, seven key arguments emerge from the pool of analysis. These arguments have been used equally from all sides of the debate. The purpose of this paper is to (...) examine the seven key arguments that have been made with respect to employee monitoring. None of these arguments is conclusive and each calls for managerial and moral consideration. We conclude that a more comprehensive inquiry with ethical concern at the center is necessary to make further progress on understanding the complexity of employee monitoring. The final section of this paper sketches out how such an inquiry would proceed. (shrink)

Newton’s earliest publications contained scandalous epistemological claims: not only did he aim for certainty; he also claimed success. Some commentators argue that Newton ultimately gave up claims of certainty in favor of a high degree of probability. I argue that no such shift occurred. I examine the evidence of a probabilistic shift: a passage from query 23/31 of the Opticks and rule 4 of the Principia. Neither passage supports a probabilistic approach to natural philosophy. The aim of certainty, then, was (...) an enduring feature of Newton’s methodology. (shrink)

The established theories and frameworks on consciousness in the academic literature as related to artificial intelligence (AI), are rooted in anthropocentricism. Even those theories created intentionally for AI are based on the levels of consciousness as it is understood in humans primarily, and in other animals secondarily. This paper will discuss why such anthropocentric frameworks are built on unsecure foundations. We will do this by comparing the capacities and functions of human and AI cognitive architectures, discussing the ramifications and consequences (...) of the behaviors that stem from these, and looking at the neurological conditions in humans that can give the most promising hints as to what a potential conscious AI entity would look like. The paper ends with a proposed solution for building a nonanthropocentric foundation of cognition that could lead toward a truly AI-focused framework of consciousness. (shrink)

Restricted to first-order formulas, the rules of inference in the Curry-Howard type theory are equivalent to those of first-order predicate logic as formalized by Heyting, with one exception: ∃-elimination in the Curry-Howard theory, where ∃x : A.F (x) is understood as disjoint union, are the projections, and these do not preserve firstorderedness. This note shows, however, that the Curry-Howard theory is conservative over Heyting’s system.

Conscious sentient AI seems to be all but a certainty in our future, whether in fifty years’ time or only five years. When that time comes, we will be faced with entities with the potential to experience more pain and suffering than any other living entity on Earth. In this paper, we look at this potential for suffering and the reasons why we would need to create a framework for protecting artificial entities. We look to current animal welfare laws and (...) regulations to investigate why certain animals are given legal protections, and how this can be applied to AI. We use a meta-theory of consciousness to determine what developments in AI technology are needed to bring AI to the level of animal sentience where legal arguments for their protection can be made. We finally speculate on what a future conscious AI could look like based on current technology. (shrink)

The historiography of sexology is young. It is also expanding at a remarkable pace, both in terms of the volume of publications and, more notably, in terms of its geographical, disciplinary, and intersectional reach. This special issue takes stock of these new directions, while offering new research contributions that expand our understanding of the interdisciplinary and transnational formation of this field from the late 19th through to the mid 20th century. The five articles that make up this special issue stage (...) historiographical interventions by challenging the tendency within sexological history to focus on the medical, the homosexual, the human, and the Western European at the expense of other disciplines, diagnoses, non-human subjects, and geographical locations. A particular strength of these contributions is their focus on mapping conversations among and between sexologists on both sides of the Atlantic in the early to mid 20th century – particularly in Germany, Britain, and the US – and between East and West in the early Cold War era. (shrink)

This article assesses undergraduate teaching students’ assertion that there are no right and wrong answers in teaching philosophy. When asked questions about their experiences of philosophy in the classroom for primary children, their unanimous declaration that teaching philosophy has ‘no right and wrong answers’ is critically examined across the three sub-disciplinary areas to which they were generally referring, namely, pedagogy, ethics, and epistemology. From a pedagogical point of view, it is argued that some teach­ing approaches may indeed be more effective (...) than others, and some pupils’ opinions less defensible, but pedagogically, in terms of managing the power relations in the classroom, it is counter-productive to continually insist on notions of truth and falsity at every point. From an ethical point of view, it is contended that anti-realist approaches to meta-ethics may represent a viable intellectual position, but from the point of view of normative ethics, notions of right and wrong still retain significant currency. From an epistemological point of view, it is argued using Karl Popper’s work that while it may be difficult to determine what constitutes a right answer, determining a wrong one is far more straightforward. In conclusion, it is clear that prospective teachers engaging in philosophy in the classroom, and also future teachers in general, require a far more nuanced philosophical understanding of the notions of right and wrong and truth and falsity. In view of this situation, if we wish to promote the effective teaching of philosophical thinking to children, or produce educators who can understand the conceptual limits of the claims they make and their very real and often serious practical and social consequences, it is recommended that philosophy be reinstated to a fundamental, foundational place within the pre-service teaching curriculum. (shrink)

Informed consent is central to the bioethical principle of respect for persons, a process that involves a discussion between the physician and patient with disclosure of information sufficient to allow the patient to make an informed decision about her or his care. However, despite the importance of informed consent in clinical practice, the process is often ritualized, perfunctory, and performed by individuals with little or no training in the consent process. This article discusses the lack of medical students’ and residents’ (...) training in informed consent and questions the practice of allowing untrained residents and surrogates to obtain consent from patients. (shrink)

The classical theory of types in question is essentially the theory of Martin-Löf [1] but with the law of double negation elimination. I am ultimately interested in the theory of types as a framework for the foundations of mathematics and, for this purpose, we need to consider extensions of the theory obtained by adding ‘well-ordered types,’ for example the type N of the finite ordinals; but the unextended theory will suffice to illustrate the treatment of extensional equality.

There are some puzzles about G¨ odel’s published and unpublished remarks concerning finitism that have led some commentators to believe that his conception of it was unstable, that he oscillated back and forth between different accounts of it. I want to discuss these puzzles and argue that, on the contrary, G¨ odel’s writings represent a smooth evolution, with just one rather small double-reversal, of his view of finitism. He used the term “finit” (in German) or “finitary” or “finitistic” primarily to (...) refer to Hilbert’s conception of finitary mathematics. On two occasions (only, as far as I know), the lecture notes for his lecture at Zilsel’s [G¨ odel, 1938a] and the lecture notes for a lecture at Yale [G¨ odel, *1941], he used it in a way that he knew—in the second case, explicitly—went beyond what Hilbert meant. Early in his career, he believed that finitism (in Hilbert’s sense) is openended, in the sense that no correct formal system can be known to formalize all finitist proofs and, in particular, all possible finitist proofs of consistency of first-order number theory, P A; but starting in the Dialectica paper.. (shrink)

The preface by Parsons begins: “This book contains the most substantial philosophical papers I wrote for publication up to 1977, with one new essay added. … The collection is unified by a common point of view underlying the essays and by certain problems that are approached from different angles in different essays. Most are directly concerned with the philosophy of mathematics, and even in those that are not … the connection between the issues discussed and mathematics is never far from (...) the surface … in the Introduction I articulate some elements of my general point of view and point out some connections between the essays.“ The nine previously published papers are unrevised except in some cases for added postscripts and footnotes. Of the essays written for publication before 1977, essay 7, “Quine on the Philosophy of Mathematics,” has not been, in fact, previously published. The eleventh, “Sets and modality,“ is the new essay. A general point of view does indeed show itself in these essays, but it is rigorously subordinated to careful and balanced analyses of the problems discussed. That is why, without sharing all elements of the point of view, I have profited so much from these essays and, seeing them collected together, am so impressed by them. (shrink)

This article argues that political performance reveals the significance of the emotions, emotional feelings, affect and mood in relation to the censorship of democratic expression. Belarus Free Theatre performers spoke about fear as they gave personal accounts of imprisonment and undertook extreme physical action on aerial ropes, creating performances that evoked both emotionally felt responses and bodily affect. The aesthetic mood effect in these performances shifted from amusing audiences with the absurdity of political censorship to alarming them with the terror (...) of political persecution. Antonio Damasio points out that although aspects of the emotions merge in everyday life, ideas or impressions need to be separated out from the physiology of emotional feeling in their study. While the turn to affect emphasizes convergence and, importantly, recognizes human sensitivity to nonhuman energies, an impersonal energetic field can be distinguished from the personal and the psychological. This analysis of theatrical performance reveals the ways in which it presents social ideas of the emotions and aesthetic moods, as well as elicits the affect of bodily sensation and invites the emotionally felt responses of audience members. Theatrical performance offers a space for expressing emotions in political protest. (shrink)

When animal ethicists deal with welfare they seem to face a dilemma: On the one hand, they recognize the necessity of welfare concepts for their ethical approaches. On the other hand, many animal ethicists do not want to be considered reformist welfarists. Moreover, animal welfare scientists may feel pressed by moral demands for a fundamental change in our attitude towards animals. The analysis of this conflict from the perspective of animal ethics shows that animal welfare science and animal ethics highly (...) depend on each other. Welfare concepts are indispensable in the whole field of animal ethics. Evidence for this can be found by analyzing the structure of theories of animal ethics and the different ways in which these theories employ welfare concepts. Furthermore, the background of values underneath every welfare theory is essential to pursue animal welfare science. Animal ethics can make important contributions to the clarification of underlying normative assumptions with regard to the value of the animal, with regard to ideas about what is valuable for the animal, and with regard to the actions that should follow from the results of animal welfare science. (shrink)

The assumption that students are differently talented often underlies the public and philosophical debate about the justice of school systems. It is striking that despite the centrality of the notion of ‘talent’ in these debates, the concept is hardly ever explicated. I will suggest two explications: First, philosophers who point to different talents often assume that these are somehow fixed potentials that pose limits to what someone can achieve. According to this understanding, no matter how hard someone tries, she simply (...) cannot perform well due to a lack of talent. Second, talking about different talents can be understood as saying that two students who will receive the same amount of educational resources are nevertheless expected to perform differently in the future. In the public as well as the philosophical debate it is common to assume that educational prospects should be equalized when it comes to unequal social backgrounds, but not when it comes to unequal talents. In this paper, I put into question three reasons that could speak in favor of this assumption: the first refers to the connection between talents and limits, the second to the relation between talents and the transformation of resources and the last one to the idea that talents somehow go back to the person’s true self. (shrink)

Theoretical and methodological discussions of ethnography and ethics have appeared regularly in the Journal of Religious Ethics for at least the past 13 years. Many of these conversations have been preoccupied by the relationship between “normative” work in religious ethics and “descriptive” work on moral worlds and patterns of reasoning. However, there has often been a perceived impasse when it comes to drawing “normative” ethical arguments from fine-grained ethnographic study. This paper begins by assessing significant contributions to religious ethics made (...) by ethnographers of Islam, focusing on the way they render a stark descriptive/normative binary irrelevant. I then turn to an example from my own fieldwork that expands our understanding of the relationship between ethnography and ethics. Through this example, I argue that ethical thinkers working outside the academy—theologians, activists, and cultural producers—also draw on an “ethnographic imagination” to make moral arguments. I end by reflecting on how the “ethnographic imagination” situates religious ethics as part of broader humanistic inquiry, showing that careful accounts of how people do live are always enmeshed with visions of how we should live. (shrink)

An observation and a thesis: The observation is that, whatever the connection between Kant’s philosophy and Hilbert’s conception of finitism, Kant’s account of geometric reasoning shares an essential idea with the account of finitist number theory in “Finitism”, namely the idea of constructions f from ‘arbitrary’ or ‘generic’ objects of various types. The thesis is that, contrary to a substantial part of contemporary literature on the subject, when Kant referred to number and arithmetic, he was not referring to the natural (...) or whole numbers and their arithmetic, but rather to the real numbers and their arithmetic. (shrink)

This paper defends a deontological egalitarianism in the ethics of future generations. Concerns about the non-identity problem have been taken as a reason to develop sufficientarian approaches to intergenerational justice. This paper argues for a solution to the non-identity problem that refers to the claims of future persons. In principle, the content of these claims could be spelled out with a sufficientarian and an egalitarian approach. What speaks against sufficientarianism, however, is that the sufficiency threshold, unless it is set very (...) low, would have to be set arbitrarily. The hidden justification behind a higher threshold would be egalitarian. It draws its plausibility from the justified belief that future persons have a claim on us that we leave equally valuable shares of natural resources to them. (shrink)

All animals have evolved solutions to manage their genomes, enabling the efficient organization of meters of DNA strands in the nucleus and allowing for nuanced regulation of gene expression while keeping transposable elements suppressed. Epigenetic modifications are central to accomplishing all these. Recent advances in sequencing technologies and the development of techniques that profile epigenetic marks and chromatin accessibility using reagents that can be used in any species has catapulted epigenomic studies in diverse animal species, shedding light on the multitude (...) of epigenomic mechanisms utilized across the evolutionary tree. Now, comparative epigenomics is a rapidly growing field that is uncovering mechanistic aspects of epigenetic modifications and chromatin organization in non‐model invertebrates, ranging from octopus to sponges. This review puts recent discoveries in the epigenetics of non‐model invertebrates in historical context, and describes new insight into the patterning and functions of DNA methylation and other highly conserved epigenetic modifications. (shrink)

Using the works of Merleau-Ponty and of Heidegger, this paper argues that our spatial experience is rooted in the way we are engaged with and in our world. Space is not a predetermined and uniform geometrical grid, but the network of engagement and alienation that provides one's orientation in the inter-humanworld. Drawing on a phenomenological conception of space, this paper demonstrates that the neuroses of agoraphobia and, more unexpectedly, hypochondria must not be understood as mere "psychological" problems, but rather as (...) problems of one's overall way of spatial being-in-the-world, that is, of "dwelling." With respect to both neuroses, the paper argues that subjects experience a sense of spatial contraction that mirrors a contraction in their abilities to engage with the people, the environment, and the situations that surround them. (shrink)

Early modern experimental philosophers often appear to commit to and utilise corpuscular and mechanical hypotheses. This is somewhat mysterious, for such hypotheses frequently appear to be simply assumed, which is odd for a research program which emphasises the careful experimental accumulation of facts. Isaac Newton was one such experimental philosopher, and his optical work is considered a clear example of the experimental method. Focusing on his optical investigations, Walsh identifies three roles for hypotheses. First, Newton introduces a hypothesis to explicate (...) his abstract theory. The purpose here is primarily to improve understanding or uptake of the theory. Second, he uses a hypothesis as a platform from which to generate some crucial experiments to decide between competing accounts. The purpose here is to suggest experiments in order to bring a dispute to empirical resolution. Third, he uses a hypothesis to suggest an underlying physical cause, which he then operationalises and represents abstractly in his formal theory. The second and third roles are related in that they are both cases of scaffolding: hypotheses provide a temporary platform from which further experimental work and/or theorising can be carried out. In short, the entities and processes included in Newton’s optical hypothesis are not simply assumed hypothetical posits. Rather, they play instrumental roles in Newton’s experimental philosophy. (shrink)

While research on meaningfulnesss in life is becoming increasingly popular in analytic philosophy, there is still a dearth of literature on the topic of meaninglessness. This is surprising, given that a better understanding of the nature of meaninglessness may help to illuminate features of meaningfulness previously unobserved or misunderstood. Additionally, the topic of meaninglessness is interesting in its own right - independent of what it can tell us about meaningfulness. In my dissertation, I construct and defend my own conception of (...) meaninglessness. -/- I adopt Thaddeus Metz's (2013) analysis of meaninglessness presented in his new book, Meaning in Life: An Analytic Study. For Metz, meaninglessness is not the absence of meaningfulness but a positively bad state to be in - one that can detract from the overall meaningfulness of a life. I distinguish between the following: negative meaning (i.e., meaninglessness as a dis-value), positive meaning (i.e., meaningfulness), and lives that lack positive meaning. I defend a conception of negative meaning. In contrast, most conceptions of meaninglessness are conceptions of lives where positive meaning is absent. Philosophers defending these conceptions have yet to acknowledge the existence of negative meaning. I explain why conceptions of meaninglessness (as the absence of positive meaning) are inadequate and I provide support for the existence of negative meaning. (shrink)

In this article,we address how the professionalization process is reflected in the way Danish nursing textbooks present ‘nursing’ to new members of the profession during the 20th century. The discussion is based on a discourse analysis of seven Danish textbooks on basic nursing published between 1904 and 1996. The analysis was inspired by the work of Michel Foucault, in particular the concepts of rupture and rules of formation. First, we explain how the dominating role of the human body in nursing (...) textbooks disappears in the mid‐20th century. This transformation can of course be attributed to changes in tasks and responsibilities for nurses or to the implementation of increasing amounts of knowledge and theories from other disciplines than medicine into the nurses’ knowledge base. However, inspired by Foucault, we consider these historical changes to be the conditions of possibilities and not causes. The second part of the analysis shows that along with ‘the disappearance of the body’, a second discursive change appears: the role of doctors and medicine changes fundamentally from about mid‐20th century. Finally, we argue that this discursive reorganization enabling new patterns of thought to emerge was driven by a professional interest in describing nursing as an independent profession. (shrink)

I argue that, although we are inherently intersubjective beings, we are not first or most originally “public” beings. Rather, to become a public being, that is, a citizen—in other words, to act as an independent and self-controlled agent in a community of similarly independent and self-controlled agents and, specifically, to do so in a shared space in the public arena—is something that we can successfully do only by emerging from our familiar, personal territories—our homes. Finding support in texts from philosophy, (...) psychology, and the social sciences, I construe the claim that citizenship is a developed stance as a spatial issue. I conclude that a state (or, for that matter, a philosophy) that takes the human being to begin as an isolated individual agent fails to recognize the essential spatial relationships on which we depend—namely, those arising through our way of being-at-home in the world; and, as a result, such a stance not only misconstrues the parameters on which citizenship is itself possible but also risks developing a social situation that encourages behaviors we see in the agoraphobic—namely, the behaviors of alienated and fundamentally homeless human beings. (shrink)

Simple heuristics exploit basic human abilities, such as recognition memory, to make decisions based on sparse information. Based on the relative speed of recognizing two objects, the fluency heuristic infers that the one recognized more quickly has the higher value with respect to the criterion of interest. Behavioral data show that reliance on retrieval fluency enables quick inferences. Our goal with the present functional magnetic resonance imaging study was to isolate fluency-heuristic-based judgments to map the use of fluency onto specific (...) brain areas that might give a better understanding of the heuristic’s underlying processes. Activation within the claustrum for fluency heuristic decisions was found. Given that claustrum activation is thought to reflect the integration of perceptual and memory elements into a conscious gestalt, we suggest this activation correlates with the experience of fluency. (shrink)

The use of artificial intelligence in healthcare has led to debates about the role of human clinicians in the increasingly technological contexts of medicine. Some researchers have argued that AI will augment the capacities of physicians and increase their availability to provide empathy and other uniquely human forms of care to their patients. The human vulnerabilities experienced in the healthcare context raise the stakes of new technologies such as AI, and the human dimensions of AI in healthcare have particular significance (...) for research in the humanities. This article explains four key areas of concern relating to AI and the role that medical/health humanities research can play in addressing them: definition and regulation of “medical” versus “health” data and apps; social determinants of health; narrative medicine; and technological mediation of care. Issues include data privacy and trust, flawed datasets and algorithmic bias, racial discrimination, and the rhetoric of humanism and disability. Through a discussion of potential humanities contributions to these emerging intersections with AI, this article will suggest future scholarly directions for the field. (shrink)