The relationship between Bonaventure and Dionysius in scholarship is a little peculiar. Bonaventure's use of hierarchy or other Dionysian tropes and concepts, together with his knowledge of Dionysius, is taken for granted but he is rarely analysed as a reader of Dionysius. Their ideas are compared while their texts, generally, are not. Since so many different Dionysii have been proffered in the last hundred years, from a duplicitous pagan holdout to a cryptic Constantinopolitan scholar to a liturgically-oriented Syrian monk, against (...) just which one Bonaventure might be compared is practically a matter of taste. The profusion of Dionysii makes it all more necessary to crack open the Corpus Dionysiacum to... (shrink)

Joint actions often require agents to track others’ actions while planning and executing physically incongruent actions of their own. Previous research has indicated that this can lead to visuomotor interference effects when it occurs outside of joint action. How is this avoided or overcome in joint actions? We hypothesized that when joint action partners represent their actions as interrelated components of a plan to bring about a joint action goal, each partner’s movements need not be represented in relation to distinct, (...) incongruent proximal goals. Instead they can be represented in relation to a single proximal goal – especially if the movements are, or appear to be, mechanically linked to a more distal joint action goal. To test this, we implemented a paradigm in which participants produced finger movements that were either congruent or incongruent with those of a virtual partner, and either with or without a joint action goal (the joint flipping of a switch, which turned on two light bulbs). Our findings provide partial support for the hypothesis that visuomotor interference effects can be reduced when two physically incongruent actions are represented as mechanically interdependent contributions to a joint action goal. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Joseph Halpern and Judea Pearl draw upon structural equation models to develop an attractive analysis of ‘actual cause’. Their analysis is designed for the case of deterministic causation. I show that their account can be naturally extended to provide an elegant treatment of probabilistic causation. 1Introduction 2Preemption 3Structural Equation Models 4The Halpern and Pearl Definition of ‘Actual Cause’ 5Preemption Again 6The Probabilistic Case 7Probabilistic Causal Models 8A Proposed Probabilistic Extension of Halpern and Pearl’s Definition 9Twardy and Korb’s Account 10Probabilistic (...) Fizzling 11Conclusion. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to shed some light on the early Stoics' practice of managing platonic suggestions to construct their epistemology. Instances of such a practice, which scholars have recently focussed on, are the Stoic reassessment of the account of phantasia Plato offers in the Sophist and the image of the wax block as discussed in the Theaetetus. In this work I put forward a comparison between the simile of the soul-book, as presented by Socrates in (...) the Philebus (39a1-c2), and the Stoic image of the soul as a sheet in which conceptions are inscribed. I try to show that a far-reaching investigation of the relationship between Plato and early Stoic epistemology should take such a comparison into due account. In section one, I go into the details of the comparison and argue that Plato's perceptual judgment (this is how I translate the term doxa as it is used in the relevant section of the Philebus) is compatible with Stoic phantasia. In section two, I try to show that the theorisation of assent enable the Stoics to reply to an objection Aristotle made to Plato's definition of phantasia as a mixture of perception and judgment. (shrink)

If panpsychism is true, it suggests that consciousness pervades not only our brains and bodies but also the entire universe, prompting a reevaluation of our existential attitudes. Hence, panpsychism potentially fulfills psychological needs typically addressed by religious beliefs, such as a sense of belonging and purpose but also transcendence. The discussion is organized into two main areas: the implications of panpsychism for basic human existential needs, such as feelings of kinship, ommunication, and loneliness; and for greater existential questions relating to (...) mystical experiences including transcendent unity and alleviation of the fear of death. In conclusion panpsychism may provide a deeper meaning in life for some people but its broader impact depends on individual dispositions and the cultural context in which it is embedded. (shrink)

AI and robotic technologies attract much hype, including utopian and dystopian future visions of technologically driven provision in the health and care sectors. Based on 30 interviews with scientists, clinicians and other stakeholders in the UK, Europe, USA, Australia, and New Zealand, this paper interrogates how those engaged in developing and using AI and robotic applications in health and care characterize their future promise, potential and challenges. We explore the ways in which these professionals articulate and navigate a range of (...) high and low expectations, and promissory and cautionary future visions, around AI and robotic technologies. We argue that, through these articulations and navigations, they construct their own perceptions of socially and ethically ‘acceptable futures’ framed by an ‘ethics of expectations.’ This imbues the envisioned futures with a normative character, articulated in relation to the present context. We build on existing work in the sociology of expectations, aiming to contribute towards better understanding of how technoscientific expectations are navigated and managed by professionals. This is particularly timely since the COVID-19 pandemic gave further momentum to these technologies. (shrink)

Implementationalism maintains that conventional, silicon-based artificial systems are not conscious because they fail to satisfy certain substantive constraints on computational implementation. In this article, we argue that several recently proposed substantive constraints are implausible, or at least are not well-supported, insofar as they conflate intuitions about computational implementation generally and consciousness specifically. We argue instead that the mechanistic account of computation can explain several of the intuitions driving implementationalism and noncomputationalism in a manner which is consistent with artificial consciousness. Our (...) argument provides indirect support for computationalism about consciousness and the view that conventional artificial systems can be conscious. (shrink)

While shaping and defending a criterion to individuate the sensory modalities, philosophers have to deal with groups of perceptual states that don’t fit into the catalogue of the senses comfortably. I call these groups «grey areas». In this paper, I present the «artificial grey area», which is about perceptions obtained through artificial devices that replace or augment one’s sensory abilities. More precisely, the spotlight is on the results that the experiential criterion, the experiential-ontological criterion and the subtractive criterion provide when (...) artificially-assisted perceptions fall under their scope. The main theses of the paper are that each sensory device allows users to access a peculiar sensory world, and that each of these worlds should be associated with a peculiar, independent sensory modality. (shrink)

Riassunto: In questo lavoro intendo discutere alcune questioni metodologiche relative al dibattito sull’individuazione delle modalità sensoriali. In primo luogo, cercherò di distinguere tra un problema metafisico, che riguarda la natura dei sensi, e un problema di classificazione, che riguarda la loro tassonomia. I criteri comunemente impiegati per individuare i sensi dovrebbero essere in grado di affrontare entrambi i problemi. In secondo luogo, delineerò cinque zone grigie, ossia cinque gruppi di casi problematici, che gli autori interessati nel difendere un criterio dovrebbero (...) essere in grado di affrontare. Il fine di questo lavoro non è quello di discutere i criteri e le aree grigie per se, bensì quello di chiarire alcune premesse metodologiche sullo sfondo del dibattito che qui si sta considerando. Parole chiave: Individuazione dei sensi; Filosofia della percezione; Metafisica dei sensi; Classificazione dei sensi; Zone grigie Methodological Considerations on the Individuation of the Senses: In this paper, I discuss some methodological issues relevant to the debate on the individuation of the sensory modalities. First, I make a distinction between a metaphysical question related to the nature of the senses, and a classificatory question related to their taxonomization. The criteria commonly used to individuate the senses should be able to address both questions. Second, I articulate five grey areas, namely, five groups of problematic cases that authors interested in defending a specific criterion should be able to tackle. The aim of this paper is not to discuss these criteria and grey areas per se, but to clarify some methodological premises that frame the debate under consideration. Keywords: Individuation of the Senses; Philosophy of Perception; Metaphysics of the Senses; Classification of the Senses; Grey Areas. (shrink)

According to Hermann von Helmholtz, sensations are signs that external causes impress on our sense organs; those signs are then used by the mind to acquire knowledge of the reality. Helmholtz's work points out the difficulty of defining a notion of causality suitable for explaining the relation between sensations on the one hand and the physical world on the other. In fact, he states that: 1) Physical stimuli, understood as the causal origins of sensations, are unknowable in themselves; 2) There (...) is no empirical evidence for the kind of causality from which sensations originate; 3) A transcendental causality is nothing but the urge of the intellect to know everything. It is necessary to keep in mind that Helmholtz is a committed empiricist : therefore, he believes that all knowledge originates from sensations. He tries avoiding commitments with any kind of pre-established harmony between the two sides of the causal relation. That is to say, sensible perceptions give us information about the peculiarities of the external world, but the relation between sensations and the reality should be explained and should not be taken for granted. In this paper, I study Helmholtz's struggles with providing a suitable explanation of that relation; in doing so, I also make use of Emile Du Bois-Reymond's work concerning the limits of human understanding, and in particular the transcendent difficulty of grasping the origins of sensations. (shrink)

Riassunto: In questo articolo, vengono difese due tesi. La prima è che esistono ragioni per sganciare i dibattiti sull’individuazione delle modalità sensoriali e sul criterio esperienziale-ontologico dalle nozioni di “esperienza pura”, “esclusività” ed “esaustività”; piuttosto, è preferibile collocare le esperienze percettive sotto il cappello dell’unità soggettiva. La seconda è che lo sviluppo del criterio esperienziale-ontologico può essere portato avanti senza assumere che le modalità sensoriali costituiscono generi naturali. La prima tesi riguarda le esperienze percettive, la seconda riguarda le modalità sensoriali. (...) Affermare, con il criterio esperienziale-ontologico, che le realtà percettive svolgono un ruolo ontologico non implica che lo stesso valga per le classificazioni teoriche dei sensi ottenute per suo mezzo. La proposta consiste nell’inquadrare le tassonomizzazioni dei sensi in una cornice strumentalista. Parole chiave: Individuazione dei sensi; Modalità sensoriali; Esperienza percettiva; Criterio esperienziale-ontologico; Strumentalismo Towards an Instrumentalist Interpretation of the Senses: Two main theses are defended in this paper. First, I submit that the notions of “pure experience”, “exclusivity” and “exhaustivity” are far-fetched, and that a better proposal is to focus on the subjective unity of perceptual experiences. Second, I claim that the experiential-ontological criterion for the individuation of the sensory modalities doesn’t require the senses to be understood as natural kinds. The first thesis is about perceptual experiences, while the second one concerns the senses. According to the experiential-ontological criterion, perceptual realities have to be defined in ontological terms, but that doesn’t imply that the same holds true for the senses, which are theoretical notions. The proposal is to put the task of taxonomizing the senses in an instrumentalist frame. Keywords: Individuation of the Senses; Sensory Modalities; Perceptual Experiences; Experiential-ontological Criterion; Instrumentalism. (shrink)

In the last chapter of The Ethics of Liberty, Rothbard discusses his theory of strategy for liberty, and recommends tools such as education that libertarians can lean on to attain the highest political goal of freedom. Building on Rothbard’s shoulders, the main thesis of this paper is that an effective theory of strategy for liberty cannot dispense with privacy, which needs to be understood as a condition for the enjoyment of liberty and not as a right per se. In the (...) first section, the discussion is framed in the context of natural rights libertarianism. Then, a metaphysical taxonomy of property is provided, which articulates the functioning of property rights and privacy in the realm of the body and of the mind, in the realm of alienable goods and services, and in the realm of information. The third section deals with the war on privacy that is raging nowadays; not coincidentally, the ultimate enemy of this war is private property. The last part of the paper contends that Rothbard is correct in reducing privacy rights to property rights, but this doesn’t mean that privacy has no place in libertarian thought; on the contrary, privacy is one of the main conditions for the defense and preservation of property rights, and, in the case of information, property cannot even exist without it. If these theses are true, libertarians need to find a proper place for privacy in their theory of strategy for liberty. (shrink)

While Plantinga has famously argued that acceptance of neo-Darwinian theory commits one to the rejection of naturalism, Plantinga’s argument is vulnerable to an objection developed by Evan Fales. Not only does Fales’ objection undermine Plantinga’s original argument, it establishes a general challenge which any attempt to revitalize Plantinga’s argument must overcome. After briefly laying out the contours of this challenge, we attempt to meet it by arguing that because a purely naturalistic account of our etiology cannot explain the correlation between (...) our preference for simplicity and simplicity’s ability to serve as a veridical method of theory selection, the scientific realist is committed to the rejection of naturalism. (shrink)

We investigate whether standard counterfactual analyses of causation imply that the outcomes of space-like separated measurements on entangled particles are causally related. Although it has sometimes been claimed that standard CACs imply such a causal relation, we argue that a careful examination of David Lewis’s influential counterfactual semantics casts doubt on this. We discuss ways in which Lewis’s semantics and standard CACs might be extended to the case of space-like correlations.

In rebellion against low‐dimensional (e.g., two‐factor) theories in psychology, the authors make the case for high‐dimensional theories. This change in perspective requires a shift towards a focus on computation and quantitative reasoning.

Fanatics claim that we must give up guaranteed goods in pursuit of extremely improbable Utopia. Recently, Wilkinson has defended Fanaticism by arguing that nonfanatics must violate at least one plausible rational requirement. We reject Fanaticism. We show that by taking stakes-sensitive risk attitudes seriously, we can resist the core premises in Wilkinson’s argument.

This article argues that history played a larger role in the thought of Gottlob Frege than has usually been acknowledged. Frege’s logical writings frequently employed statements about the past as examples that included references to historical persons. Frege also described history as a science and argued that historical propositions could support valid inferences and reliably identify historical persons and events. But Frege’s eternalist theory of reference, designed primarily for formal concepts and objects, struggled to accommodate such propositions. Identifying an objective (...) referent for the subjectivity of historical actors was particularly problematic. The article suggests that Frege’s writings are interesting for the philosopher of history for at least two reasons: first, his work is clarificatory when considering the key features that historical propositions must have to count as objective knowledge, and second, it foreshadowed the issues with historicity that analytical philosophy experienced in the twentieth century. It concludes that the problems Frege raised exposed the need for a new concept of inter-subjectivity to replace his own Platonic foundation for objectivity. (shrink)

This paper presents the results of an experiment designed to test for nationality bias among members of the Brazilian philosophical community. Faculty members and postgraduate students from philosophy departments at seven Brazilian universities evaluated texts attributed to authors of European and Latin American nationalities. Results showed a clear preference for French nationality over Brazilian. They were inconclusive, however, when contrasting other Latin American nationalities with European nationalities, which likely relates to the academic background of the participants. These overall results support (...) the claim that Brazilian academic philosophers are highly critical of Brazilians who produce theories of their own. The paper calls on philosophers to carefully consider the ways in which Eurocentrism impacts their very ability to reason. (shrink)

This paper proposes an ecological approach to the perception and interpretation of signs. The theory draws upon the ecological approach of James Gibson . It is proposed that cultural and natural perception can both be explained in terms of the direct pick-up of structured information and the Gibsonian concept of affordances without having to invoke a sharp distinction between direct and indirect perception. The application of the theory is exemplified through attention to language and to the visual and audio arts.

Felix Pinkert has proposed a solution to the no-difference problem for AC. He argues that AC should be supplemented with a requirement that agents’ optimal acts be modally robust. We disagree.

Agent-relative consequentialism is thought attractive because it can secure agent-centred constraints while retaining consequentialism's compelling idea—the idea that it is always permissible to bring about the best available outcome. We argue, however, that the commitments of agent-relative consequentialism lead it to run afoul of a plausibility requirement on moral theories. A moral theory must not be such that, in any possible circumstance, were every agent to act impermissibly, each would have more reason to prefer the world thereby actualized over the (...) world that would have been actualized if every agent had instead acted permissibly. (shrink)

Wrongdoing is inescapable. We all do wrong and are wronged; and in response we often blame one another. But if blame is a defining feature of our social lives, so is ceasing to blame. We might excuse, justify, or forgive an offender; or simply let the offence go. Each mode of ceasing to blame is a social practice and each has characteristic norms that influence when and how we do it, as well as how it’s received. We argue that how (...) we relinquish blame, and how effective we are, depends on many circumstances only partially within our control. Like any norm-governed practice, one can do it well or poorly, appropriately or inappropriately, successfully or unsuccessfully. To successfully participate in a practice, one’s action must be done for the right reasons and secure uptake. We argue that social and material circumstances can compromise one’s ability to effectively cease to blame in the manner one prefers. But if one can fail, then one can lack access to particular ceasing to blame practices if one is regularly prevented from effectively relinquishing blame. However, uncooperative social and material circumstances do not only arise by chance. Our central argument is that circumstances of oppression can systematically compromise one’s ability and opportunities to effectively perform a variety of ceasing to blame practices. This deprivation is an insidious facet of oppression that is neglected both in theories of oppression and of forgiveness but which has significant implications for how we understand the power and purpose of forgiveness. (shrink)

The papers in this special issue make important contributions to a longstanding debate about how we should conceive of and explain mental phenomena. In other words, they make a case about the best philosophical paradigm for cognitive science. The two main competing approaches, hotly debated for several decades, are representationalism and enactivism. However, recent developments in disciplines such as machine learning and computational neuroscience have fostered a proliferation of intermediate approaches, leading to the emergence of completely new positions, in particular (...) the Predictive Processing approach. Here, we will consider the different approaches discussed in this volume. (shrink)

This study looked at personality trait and personality disorder correlates of self-rated altruism. In two studies over 4,000 adult British managers completed a battery of tests including a ‘bright side’ personality trait measure ; a ‘dark side’/disorders measure, and a measure of their Motives and Values which included Altruism. The two studies showed similar results revealing that those who were low on Adjustment but high on Interpersonal Sensitivity, Prudence and Inquisitiveness were more likely to value Altruism and be motivated to (...) commit altruistic acts which concerns helping others and creating an environment that places emphasis on customer service. Those more interested in “Getting Along” with others were more Altruistic than those more interested in “Getting Ahead” of others. Implications for the selection and management of altruistic people in a business are considered. Limitations and future directions of this research are also noted. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

_Thinking Through Utilitarianism: A Guide to Contemporary Arguments_ offers something new among texts elucidating the ethical theory known as Utilitarianism. Intended primarily for students ready to dig deeper into moral philosophy, it examines, in a dialectical and reader-friendly manner, a set of normative principles and a set of evaluative principles leading to what is perhaps the most defensible version of Utilitarianism. With the aim of laying its weaknesses bare, each principle is serially introduced, challenged, and then defended. The result is (...) a battery of stress tests that shows with great clarity not only what is attractive about the theory, but also where its problems lie. It will fascinate any student ready for a serious investigation into what we ought to do and what is of value. (shrink)

Negative self-schemas are fundamental to social anxiety disorder and contribute to its persistence, thus understanding how to change schemas is of critical importance. Memory-based interventions and associated theories propose that reconstructing autobiographical memories tethered to schemas with conceptual details that challenge the associated expectations will lead to schema change. Here, we test this proposal in a between-subjects behavioural experiment with undergraduate participants with social anxiety. All participants were asked to recall aversive social memories, evaluated these memories on a series of (...) scales, including estimates of reoccurrence, and provided ratings of negative and positive schema beliefs. Next, half the participants reconstructed (rescripted) these aversive memories with conceptual details that challenged the active schema (conceptual condition) and the other half reconstructed the memories with additional experiential details (perceptual condition). All participants provided again evaluations of the original memory and their schema beliefs. Our analysis revealed that the conceptual condition led to significant reductions in negative self-schemas, increases in positive self-schemas, and decreases in estimates of future negative event reoccurrence. Thus, effective schema-change, both a weakening of negative schemas and a strengthening of more positive, adaptive schemas, is dependent on altering the underlying meaning of associated autobiographical memories. (shrink)

The creation of biobanks depends upon people’s willingness to donate their samples for research purposes and to agree to sample storage. Moreover, biobanks are a public good that requires active participation by all interested stakeholders at every stage of development. Therefore, knowing public’s attitudes towards participation in a biobank and biobank management is important and deserves investigation.

Compared to our understanding of positive prediction error signals occurring due to unexpected reward outcomes, less is known about the neural circuitry in humans that drives negative prediction errors during omission of expected rewards. While classical learning theories such as Rescorla–Wagner or temporal difference learning suggest that both types of prediction errors result from a simple subtraction, there has been recent evidence suggesting that different brain regions provide input to dopamine neurons which contributes to specific components of this prediction error (...) computation. Here, we focus on the brain regions responding to negative prediction error signals, which has been well-established in animal studies to involve a distinct pathway through the lateral habenula. We examine the activity of this pathway in humans, using a conditioned inhibition paradigm with high-resolution functional MRI. First, participants learned to associate a sensory stimulus with reward delivery. Then, reward delivery was omitted whenever this stimulus was presented simultaneously with a different sensory stimulus, the conditioned inhibitor. Both reward presentation and the reward-predictive cue activated midbrain dopamine regions, insula and orbitofrontal cortex. While we found significant activity at an uncorrected threshold for the CI in the habenula, consistent with our predictions, it did not survive correction for multiple comparisons and awaits further replication. Additionally, the pallidum and putamen regions of the basal ganglia showed modulations of activity for the inhibitor that did not survive the corrected threshold. (shrink)

In the mid-twentieth century, the identity of those who oversaw the UK electricity grid tentatively and slowly began to shift from those who joined the electricity industry directly from secondary school to a university-educated elite with a higher level of technical education. At the same time, electricity infrastructure became increasingly centralised, leading to the creation of a national grid in 1938, meaning that control of electricity became concentrated in the hands of an ever-smaller group and increasing the stakes in debates (...) over strategy. By using the case studies of power engineer Paul Schiller and mathematician Maurice Davies, this paper traces how the boundaries of what mathematics could or could not be used for were renegotiated between factions within the UK electricity industry. Schiller unsuccessfully attempted to use mathematics, including the authority of academic mathematicians, to reinforce controversial arguments about the strategic direction of the industry in the 1940s. Such arguments failed to resonate with a class of, as Schiller put it, “practical men” that still held considerable influence. Davies on the other hand was employed by the industry in the 1950s to improve efficiency, and was able to implement lasting measures in this effort by using the weather to forecast electricity demand, and successfully defended the usefulness of his work in the 1970s against colleagues who felt that forecasting could be done better with mathematical models without weather inputs. The contrast between these two stories shows how the influence of mathematical thinking was contingent upon existing power dynamics, and reinforce how the history of mathematics should be socially embedded. (shrink)

Much recent philosophical attention has been devoted to variants on the Best System Analysis of laws and chance. In particular, philosophers have been interested in the prospects of such Best System Analyses for yielding *high-level* laws and chances. Nevertheless, a foundational worry about BSAs lurks: there do not appear to be uniquely appropriate measures of the degree to which a system exhibits theoretical virtues, such as simplicity and strength. Nor does there appear to be a uniquely correct exchange rate at (...) which the theoretical virtues of simplicity, strength, and likelihood trade off against one another in the determination of a best system. Moreover, it may be that there is no *robustly* best system: no system that comes out best under *any* reasonable measures of the theoretical virtues and exchange rate between them. This worry has been noted by several philosophers, with some arguing that there is indeed plausibly a set of tied-for-best systems for our world. Some have even argued that this entails that there are no Best System laws or chances in our world. I argue that, while it *is* plausible that there is a set of tied-for-best systems for our world, it doesn't follow from this that there are no Best System chances. Rather, it follows that the Best System chances for our world are *unsharp*. (shrink)

Recent experimental evidence indicates that intuitions about inherence and system justification are distinct psychological processes, and that the inherence heuristic supplies important explanatory frameworks that are accepted or rejected based on their consistency with one's motivation to justify the system.

The following work represents the extension of a debate that began in July of 2009. The authors felt it useful to commit to document their exchanges, and questions for one another, over the issues of building the Left project in the international context, where are the subjects to be found for alternative political projects, how are we to interpret the Iranian protest movement, and whether it is possible to resuscitate Marxism for our age.

Elizabeth Anscombe's forthright philosophy speaks directly to many religious and ethical issues of current concern.This collection of her essays forms a companion volume to the critically acclaimed _Human Life, Action and Ethics_ published in 2005.