Sometimes, we act in concert with others, as when we go for a walk together, or when two mathematicians try to prove a difficult theorem with each other. An interesting question is what distinguishes the actions of individuals that together constitute some joint activity from those that amount to a mere aggregation of individual behaviours. It is common for philosophers to appeal to collective intentionality to explain such instances of shared agency. This framework generalizes the approach traditionally used to explain (...) individual action: a behaviour is an action just in case it causally follows from the relevant intention. Contemporary philosophers of action, as well as cognitive psychologists, however, have criticised this way of explaining individual actions, favouring instead an approach that puts “control” or “guidance” as the discerning factor: a behaviour is an action just in case the agent controls it, or just in case it is guided by the agent. In this paper, I argue that we should include talk of guidance even in cases of joint action. I first show that problems of deviant causation arise also in cases of joint action, and that therefore guidance is required to face this issue. Then, I show what a “capacity to guide” amounts to for a group and how joint guidance relates to individual guidance. Joint guidance is actually constituted by task co-representation and the sense of commitment. I argue that an approach that favours joint guidance over collective intentions eschews a lot of metaphysical problems about collective mentality and group subjects, and it is thus more explanatorily fruitful. (shrink)

This article gives a practice-based overview of the implementation aspects of Corporate Responsibility. After discussing the success factors for implementing Corporate Responsibility, the article describes a model for implementing Corporate Responsibility. Special attention is given to the success factors in the subsequent phases of implementation (sensitivity to the organizational environment, awareness of core values and clear leadership), to ensure that the most optimal results attainable for the organization can be reached. The implementation-model is clarified by looking at experiences in implementing (...) Corporate Responsibility at Chiquita. (shrink)

The classification of medical interventions as either invasive or non-invasive is commonly regarded to be morally important. On the most commonly endorsed account of invasiveness, a medical intervention is invasive if and only if it involves either breaking the skin (‘incision’) or inserting an object into the body (‘insertion’). Building on recent discussions of the concept of invasiveness, we show that this standard account fails to capture three aspects of existing usage of the concept of invasiveness in relation to medical (...) interventions—namely, (1) usage implying that invasiveness comes in degrees, (2) that the invasiveness of an intervention can depend on the characteristics of the salient alternative interventions, and (3) that medical interventions can be invasive in non-physical ways. We then offer the beginnings of a revised account that, we argue, is able to capture a wider range of existing usage. Central to our account is a distinction between two properties: basic invasiveness and threshold invasiveness. We end by assessing what the standard account gets right, and what more needs to be done to complete our schematic account. (shrink)

This paper examines the philosophical discourse surrounding the role of models in bioinspired disciplines, focusing on biorobotics as a case study. I address the ongoing debate on the distinctions between ‘model of’ and ‘model for’ within the context of biomimetics, a field that seeks inspiration from nature to address different scientific and technological goals. I will develop the argument that in biorobotics it is quite impossible to indicate what a model per se is. Instead, a bio-inspired model, such as a (...) robot, can be seen as a ‘model for’ or a ‘model of’, depending on the epistemic activity and scientific and technological game (in the sense of Wittgenstein) this is part of. By doing so, I contribute to the broader discussion on modelling practices as well as to exploring the epistemology of biomimetics. First, I outline biomimetics’ peculiarities and address mimetic symmetry, the challenge of integrating bio-inspired technologies into biological systems. Second, I recall the distinction between ‘model for’ and ‘model of’. Third, I examine biorobotics’ modelling practices. Fourth, I explore the interconnection of ‘model for’ and ‘model of’ in biorobotics. Fifth, using the notion of technological game (Wittgenstein) and epistemic actions (Chang), I investigate reconsider the mimetic asymmetry problem. (shrink)

How should defenders of liberalism think about access to reproductive technologies? Mitochondrial replacement technique (MRT) enables women with pathogenic variations of mitochondrial disease to have children without the fear of transmission. This technology can also allow lesbians, or partners with female-assigned physiology (PFP), to have genetically related offspring. Cavaliere and Palacios-Gonzalez argue that lesbians should be able to access MRT on autonomy grounds. They argue MRT should not be restricted to those with mitochondrial disease because it is non-therapeutic and invokes (...) the Millian harm principle. Yet, Baylis argues that a desire for genetically related offspring is not sufficient to access MRT because it contributes to harmful social narratives about adopted families. I strengthen Cavaliere and Palacios-Gonzalez’s liberal defence by bringing another liberal commitment—equality. Ultimately, I argue that the liberal state must allow PFPs to use MRT. I first show that the use of MRT by PFPs is permissible even if MRT is therapeutic by comparing MRT with cosmetic surgery—that is, social uses of therapeutic interventions are permitted if we are interested in doing so. Borrowing from Dillard, a possible interest is self-replication. Next, I outline and respond to a possible criticism by Baylis—MRT is necessary but not sufficient for self-replication. Ultimately, I show that the liberal state must permit MRT because (a) it provides PFPs with an equal opportunity to experience having genetically related offspring with their partner and (b) contributing to harmful social narratives is insufficient for limiting autonomy. (shrink)

This essay pushes the history of a scientific discipline, morphology, toward a broader philosophically informed and cross-disciplinarily engaged history of knowledge. It shows that by looking at how knowledge and practices circulated between scientific disciplines (such as biology) and technoscientific ones (like architecture and design) we can better understand how (morphological) knowledge was produced. By doing so, the analysis contributes to the study of the mechanisms of knowledge exchange between the organic and the technical worlds and, more broadly, to the (...) study of the dynamics of knowledge circulation. First, the essay analyzes the engineering studies of organic form conducted by the Austro-Hungarian botanist Raoul Heinrich Francé (1874–1943) and the Scottish polymath D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson (1860–1948). Subsequently, the essay moves to twenty-first-century morphogenesis. It examines the transfer of the notion of morphospace, a paleontological practice of data visualization, into biology-inspired architectural design. The conclusion deals with the broader features of knowledge transfer and circulation. Twentieth- and twenty-first-century morphologists successfully translate and transfer morphogenetic processes from nature into technical artifacts to achieve technical solutions to given problems. In the translation of organic morphogenesis into a technical process, evolution’s intrinsic historical contingency was deliberately left behind. (shrink)

This paper focuses on two passages of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, one in Z 3, the other in H1, in which Aristotle seems to assert that the hupokeimenon is said in three ways, as matter, form, and the compound of matter and form. From these two passages it is often said that subjecthood is a criterion for being substance. A consequence of this is that, if form is to be substance, and form is substance, namely first substance, it has to comply with (...) the subject-criterion. This paper challenges this reading, purporting to show that these two passages need not commit Aristotle to the subject-criterion, and that there are good reasons not to commit him to it. (shrink)

Research on organizational epistemic vice alleges that some organizations are epistemically malevolent, i.e. they habitually harm others by deceiving them. Yet, there is a lack of empirical research on epistemic malevolence. We connect the discussion of epistemic malevolence to the empirical literature on organizational deception. The existing empirical literature does not pay sufficient attention to the impact of an organization’s ability to control compromising information on its deception strategy. We address this gap by studying eighty high-penalty corporate misconduct cases between (...) 2000 and 2020 in the United States. We find that organizations use two different strategies to deceive: Organizations ‘sow doubt’ when they contest information about them or their impacts that others have access to. By contrast, organizations ‘exploit trust’ when they deceive others by obfuscating, concealing, or falsifying information that they themselves control. While previous research has focused on cases of ‘sowing doubt’, we find that organizations ‘exploit trust’ in the majority of cases that we studied. This has important policy implications because the strategy of ‘exploiting trust’ calls for a different response from regulators and organizations than the strategy of ‘sowing doubt’. (shrink)

In Unfit for the Future, Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu present a sophisticated argument in defense of the imperative of moral enhancement. They claim that without moral enhancement, the future of humanity is seriously compromised. The possibility of ultimate harm, caused by a dreadful terrorist attack or by a final unpreventable escalation of the present environmental crisis aggravated by the availability of cognitive enhancement, makes moral enhancement a top priority. It may be considered optimistic to think that our present moral (...) capabilities can be successfully improved by means of moral education, moral persuasion, and fear of punishment. So, without moral enhancement, drastic restrictions on human freedom would become the only alternative to prevent those dramatic potential outcomes. In this article, I will try to show that we still have reason to be less pessimistic and that Persson & Savulescu’s arguments are fortunately unconvincing. (shrink)

Journal Name: Apeiron Issue: Ahead of print.

In the theoretical literature on moral responsibility, one sometimes comes across cases of manipulated agents. In cases of this type, the agent is a victim of wholesale manipulation, involving the implantation of various pro-attitudes (desires, values, etc.) along with the deletion of competing pro-attitudes. As a result of this manipulation, the agent ends up performing some action unlike any that she would have performed were it not for the manipulation. These sorts of cases are sometimes thought to motivate historical views (...) of responsibility, on which the agent’s past is relevant to whether she is responsible for a specific action. In a recent paper, Daniel Sharp and David Wasserman bring these theoretical discussions on moral responsibility to bear on practical issues regarding neurological modifications of individuals. After proposing and arguing for a historical view, Sharp and Wasserman offer some insight into how such a view may help us in determining the responsibility of subjects who have undergone Deep Brain Stimulation. This paper aims to join this discussion, by arguing that the correct historical view to be applied will also appeal to the agent’s control over her mental life and the fact that this was bypassed. I conclude with some brief comments on the practical implications of such a historical view. (shrink)

Between 1909 and 1913, Berlin’s Museum für Naturkunde (Berlin Museum of Natural History) unearthed more than 225 tons of fossils in former German East Africa and transported them to Berlin. Among them were the bones of Brachiosaurus brancai, which would eventually become the biggest mounted dinosaur in the world. By analyzing the social and communicative strategies that made this expedition possible, this paper aims to reveal several aspects of natural history knowledge production at the end of the long nineteenth century. (...) Using rhetoric, the director of the Geological–Paleontological Museum in Berlin, Wilhelm von Branca, conducted a highly successful campaign to market the dinosaurs in Prussia and to convince public opinion and the Prussian central state of the value of paleontology. He fired the Prussian imagination and took advantage of the competitive urge to emulate American paleontology and industry. This work examines how his public relations strategies shaped the German biological “landscape” of the first decades of the twentieth century. It asks: when and under what conditions did paleontology successfully appeal to the public? How does communication dictate, shape, and constrain the development of a specific epistemic agenda? And what kind of power do the public and money have? (shrink)

Young children interpret some acts performed by adults as normatively governed, that is, as capable of being performed either rightly or wrongly. In previous experiments, children have made this interpretation when adults introduced them to novel acts with normative language (e.g. ‘this is the way it goes’), along with pedagogical cues signaling culturally important information, and with social-pragmatic marking that this action is a token of a familiar type. In the current experiment, we exposed children to novel actions with no (...) normative language, and we systematically varied pedagogical and social-pragmatic cues in an attempt to identify which of them, if either, would lead children to normative interpretations. We found that young 3-year-old children inferred normativity without any normative language and without any pedagogical cues. The only cue they used was adult socialpragmatic marking of the action as familiar, as if it were a token of a well-known type (as opposed to performing it, as if inventing it on the spot). These results suggest that – in the absence of explicit normative language – young children interpret adult actions as normatively governed based mainly on the intentionality (perhaps signaling conventionality) with which they are performed. (shrink)

A standard approach to examining Deleuze's concept of difference in Difference and Repetition is to follow his critique of representation through an overturning of Platonism, which Deleuze finds to be the definitive task of philosophy after Nietzsche. While engaging this largely critical project, however, there is a tendency to overlook the dimensions of Platonism that Deleuze rehabilitates in a differential and immanent register. This paper aims to recover the essential dimensions of Platonism at the very heart of Deleuze's philosophy of (...) difference. This recovery is accomplished by distinguishing Nietzsche's overturning of Platonism through his evaluation of the reactive politics of the Idea from Deleuze's own reversal of Platonism through his evaluation of the active politics of simulacra. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The paper aims to show that Rahel Jaeggi's objections to Walzer's model of internal critique are in many respects inconsistent, and above all that these objections are a sign of a political deficit in the neo-Hegelian methodology adopted by Jaeggi to develop her model of immanent critique. The same deficit concerns Jaeggi's use of Marx's model of the critique of ideology, which can be fruitfully reworked by Walzer's reinterpretation of Gramsci's theory of the struggle for hegemony.

Vice epistemology studies the qualities of individuals and collectives that undermine the creation, sharing, and storing of knowledge. There is no settled understanding of which epistemic vices exist at the collective level. Yet understanding which collective epistemic vices exist is important, both to facilitate research on the antecedents and effects of collective epistemic vice, and to advance philosophical discussions such as whether some collective epistemic vices are genuinely collective. I propose an empirical approach to identifying epistemic vices in corporations, analyzing (...) a large dataset of online employee reviews. The approach has parallels to the methodology for identifying the big-five personality traits. It surfaces epistemic vices that are attributed to corporations by its own members and reduces the number of vices to the minimum required to describe differences between corporations. This approach yields a new taxonomy of epistemic vices for corporations. While two vices identified have close correlates in the existing literature, four others have not been identified at all or only in aspects. Two of these vices are ‘genuinely’ collective in the sense that they can only be attributed to collectives. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore how bio-hybrid forms can be created and combined starting from organic forms. The thesis put forward is epistemological: the combinatorial practice of bionics, biomimetics, biorobotics, and all design strategies inspired by nature is not based on a kind of biomimetic inspiration, i. e., on a kind of imitation of nature, but on a practice of translation. To develop this thesis, I focus on the practices of contemporary biorobotics, first examining the practice of translating natural forms (...) into technical artefacts as developed by Raoul Heinrich Francé at the beginning of the 20th century, secondly, analysing the production of robots capable of replicating complex locomotion systems and, finally, investigating the interaction between robots and living organisms (fish). In the last part of the paper, I reflect on the philosophical payoff and broader conditions of possibility for this translational practice. I discuss when and to what extent a translation of biological forms into biotechnical ones is acceptable and point out the notion of form that underlies this practice. Moreover, I draw attention to the need to philosophically investigate what happens between different domains of knowledge – and especially between science and technology. This article is thus an invitation to philosophers to develop a philosophy in the interstices of knowledge production. (shrink)

Este artigo pretende examinar questões centrais no particularismo moral de Jonathan Dancy a partir de uma comparação de suas principais teses com a ética aristotélica. Embora Dancy não reivindique uma linhagem aristotélica, será argumentado que tal comparação pode ser esclarecedora para o particularismo moral, bem com o para a ética aristotélica, especialmente no que concerne às regras que parecem não admitir qualquer exceção, como a proibição moral de agir com crueldade, ou o assassinato.

The emergence of life in our societies stablishes one of the fundamental dimensions to understand our contemporary world. Biomedicine, biosecurity, biotechnology and bioterrorism are just some of the new concepts that appear due to this phenomenon. In this sense, this article will introduce one of the main current theories that aim to analyse this reconceptualization of life: posthumanism. Specifically, we will work on the proposals made by the Italian-Australian philosopher Rosi Braidotti and the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk. Simultaneously, a project (...) of radical allokhronía will be proposed towards drift in evolution. This is made in order to overcome the persistence of the anthropocentric view that remains the main problem of both proposals for improvement of humanism. La emergencia de la vida en nuestras sociedades constituye una de las dimensiones prioritarias y fundamentales para comprender nuestra contemporaneidad. Biomedicina, bioseguridad, biotecnología o bioterrorismo, son sólo algunos de los nuevos conceptos que dan cuenta de este fenómeno. En este sentido, el presente artículo abordará una de las principales corrientes teóricas que se propone analizar dicha reconceptualización de lo vivo, a saber, el denominado "posthumanismo". Específicamente, se analizarán las propuestas desarrolladas por la filósofa ítalo-australiana Rosi Braidotti y el pensador alemán Peter Sloterdijk. Simultáneamente, se propondrá un proyecto deallokhroníaradical hacia la deriva de evolución que permita superar el vicio antropocéntrico que continúa siendo el eje prioritario de problematización de ambas propuestas de superación del humanismo. (shrink)

Este trabalho apresenta algumas considerações do pensador italiano Gianni Vattimo acerca da religião na idade contemporânea. O referido filósofo tem como base de suas reflexões a ideia de uma filosofia pós-moderna que se caracteriza pela desconstrução da metafísica da tradição moderna. Nesse sentido, o autor visualiza nas filosofias de Nietzsche e Heidegger a inauguração de uma nova orientação do pensamento ocidental, marcada por esse rompimento com as filosofias totalizantes e pela consideração do ser como resultado das circunstancias eventuais que compõem (...) a experiência existencial. A religião, por sua vez, não acompanhou tal movimento, mas conservou um pensamento marcado ainda pela estrutura da metafísica tradicional, por isso, não se encontra em condições de responder às atuais demandas deste mundo plural. O autor sinaliza para a necessidade da abdicação das estruturas dogmáticas e dos fundamentalismos da religião como meio para a abertura ao diálogo inter-religioso e intercultural. (shrink)

This article aims to introduce some features of the literary output of Gling-ras-pa Padma rdo-rje, who was the teacher of the ‘Brug-pa bKa’-brgyud-pa school’s founder, gTsan-pa rGya-ras Ye-shes rdo-rje in Tibet. The work that I draw upon here is titled A Torch of Crucial Points. A Condensation and Presentation of all Dharmas that are to be Practiced, a presentation of the entire outline of Buddhist practice that resembles the doctrinal stages literary genre. Based on an edition and translation of the (...) fifth chapter of the 17 that comprise the work, here I focus on several concepts, such as the three natures and the allground consciousness, that pertain to the system of Yogācāra and the terminology related to it. These are shown as they appear in the framework of the work, which is heavily influenced by the tradition of Mahāmudrā and the background of its author’s life as a wandering yogin in the lineage of Mi-la ras-pa. (shrink)

In combating the ongoing global health threat of the COVID-19 pandemic, decision-makers have to take actions based on a multitude of relevant health data with severe potential consequences for the affected patients. Because of their presumed advantages in handling and analyzing vast amounts of data, computer systems of algorithmic decision-making are implemented and substitute humans in decision-making processes. In this study, we focus on a specific application of ADM in contrast to human decision-making, namely the allocation of COVID-19 vaccines to (...) the public. In particular, we elaborate on the role of trust and social group preference on the legitimacy of vaccine allocation. We conducted a survey with a 2 × 2 randomized factorial design among n = 1602 German respondents, in which we utilized distinct decision-making agents and prioritization of a specific social group as design factors. Our findings show that general trust in ADM systems and preference for vaccination of a specific social group influence the legitimacy of vaccine allocation. However, contrary to our expectations, trust in the agent making the decision did not moderate the link between social group preference and legitimacy. Moreover, the effect was also not moderated by the type of decision-maker. We conclude that trustworthy ADM systems must not necessarily lead to the legitimacy of ADM systems. (shrink)

Recensiòn del libro Jacques Ellul de Carlos Díaz.

Este estudio se define y articula a partir de la pregunta por el significado, sentido y estructura de la noción de “historia del pensamiento”, tal como ésta emerge y actúa desde los últimos pronunciamientos e intervenciones de Foucault, de un modo singularmente claro y revelador a partir de la primera versión del Prefacio a la “Historia de la sexualidad”, texto del que nos ocupamos con atención prioritaria a lo largo de este trabajo.

This paper explores the possibility of developing a new understanding of the traditional notion of human death as the separation of soul and body by relying on the resources of St Thomas’s hylomorphism. It therefore develops the concept of material kenosis, showing in what way the Thomistic understanding of death should be broadened beyond the mere understanding of it as substantial change. The paper concludes by suggesting that this view of human death supplements St Thomas’s interpretation of the notion of (...) Divine kenosis in Philippians 2:7. (shrink)