Speakers’ perception of a visual scene influences the language they use to describe it—which objects they choose to mention and how they characterize the relationships between them. We show that visual complexity can either delay or facilitate description generation, depending on how much disambiguating information is required and how useful the scene's complexity can be in providing, for example, helpful landmarks. To do so, we measure speech onset times, eye gaze, and utterance content in a reference production experiment in which (...) the target object is either unique or non-unique in a visual scene of varying size and complexity. Speakers delay speech onset if the target object is non-unique and requires disambiguation, and we argue that this reflects the cost of deciding on a high-level strategy for describing it. The eye-tracking data demonstrate that these delays increase when speakers are able to conduct an extensive early visual search, implying that when speakers scan too little of the scene early on, they may decide to begin speaking before becoming aware that their description is underspecified. Speakers’ content choices reflect the visual makeup of the scene—the number of distractors present and the availability of useful landmarks. Our results highlight the complex role of visual perception in reference production, showing that speakers can make good use of complexity in ways that reflect their visual processing of the scene. (shrink)

Debates about the development of artificial superintelligence and its potential threats to humanity tend to assume that such a system would be historically unprecedented, and that its behavior must be predicted from first principles. I argue that this is not true: we can analyze multiagent intelligent systems (the best candidates for practical superintelligence) by comparing them to states, which also unite heterogeneous intelligences to achieve superhuman goals. States provide a model for several problems discussed in the literature on superintelligence, such (...) as principal-agent problems and Instrumental Convergence. Philosophical arguments about governance, therefore, provide possible solutions to these problems, or point out problems in previously suggested solutions. In particular, the liberal concept of checks and balances, and Hannah Arendt’s concept of legitimacy, describe how state behavior is constrained by the preferences of constituents that could also apply to artificial systems. However, they also point out ways in which present-day computational developments could destabilize the international order by reducing the number of decision-makers involved in state actions. Thus, interstate competition not only serves as a model for the behavior of dangerous computational intelligences but also as the impetus for their development. (shrink)

1. In the opening chapter of his arresting book on Immanuel Kant’s philosophy of international and cosmopolitan right, Kant and the Law of War,1 Arthur Ripstein presents Kant’s position as a respon...

A l'été 2019, le parlement français se saisira de la loi sur la bioéthique. Ajouter une pierre au débat, tel est l'objectif de ce court livre qui aborde les différentes questions liées à l'éthique et aux sujets actuellement en débat au sein de la société française et sur lesquels le parlement sera amené à délibérer : - procréation (PMA, GPA), - fin de vie (assistance au suicide, accompagnement des malades en fin de vie), - dons d'organes, - intelligence artificielle.

Dans une page de L'individuation consacrée au problème du fondement de la connaissance, Simondon affirme que 'l'être individué est le sujet transcendantal'. Cette phrase énigmatique croise deux conceptions du sujet connaissant apparemment incompatibles : ontogénétique et transcendantale. Elle ouvre une lecture possible de l'œuvre qui révèle un dialogue constant avec Kant, à travers lequel la réforme philosophique qui anime Simondon se comprend comme un effort réflexif duquel le concept de sujet en ressort quasiment méconnaissable, transformé par les révolutions scientifiques et (...) techniques qui ont fait notre temps. En héritier, Simondon continue l'histoire de la philosophie et annonce une nouvelle époque, un avenir pour le transcendantal."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

La loi de la nuit se décline suivant une grande variété de situations : festives ou angoissées, solitaires ou politiques. Consentir à la nuit, c'est accepter de se soumettre aux expériences singulières qu'elle seule rend possibles. Bonne ou mauvaise, intime et sensible, elle ouvre un espace où il devient possible de vivre sans témoin. Au fil des pages, le lecteur s'apercevra qu'il peut être minuit à midi, et que les expériences nocturnes contribuent à montrer les choses sous un nouveau jour.

Social researchers have extensively addressed the immigration of one million Russian speakers to Israel/palestine over the past twenty-five years. However, the immigrants’ incorporation into the Israeli occupation regime and the ongoing colonisation of Palestine have rarely been questioned as such. In the interviews informing this article, Russian-speaking immigrant women living in Arab-Palestinian communities discuss their complex relations with Palestinian, Jewish-Israeli and Russian-Israeli communities. Sharing a background with Russian-speaking Jewish Israelis on the one hand, and marital kinship ties to Palestinians on (...) the other, these women encounter multiple boundaries of territory and identity in their everyday lives. Drawing on feminist border thinking, I explore these encounters as a navigation through geopolitical and epistemic borderlands in a dense colonial reality. I am particularly interested in the potential of such an exploration to question essentialism and destabilise binary ethno-national categories of identity, such as Arab/jew and Israeli/palestinian, that dominate not only hegemonic but also emancipatory discourses. These binary divisions are not a straightforward outcome of political regimes but rather the result of ongoing border-making processes, which are vulnerable to disorder and disruption. This perspective aims to enrich understandings of the roles that gendered ethno-national identities play in sustaining the colonial relations of power in Israel/palestine. (shrink)

The article examines philosophical conceptions of responsibility found in the contributions of Martin Buber, Hans Jonas and Emmanuel Levinas. It argues that, despite the significant differences of these contributions, they all share important goals, significant structural features, and corresponding challenges. All three thinkers try to overcome the solipsistic limitations of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology as well as the egocentrism of Heidegger’s concept of "solicitude" or "self-care." All three try to overcome the Kantian subject-object dichotomy. All three understand responsibility as a bipolar (...) relation only. In consequence, all of them face similar challenges resulting from new forms of dichotomies and the exclusion of “thirdness” that are the result of their conceptual decisions. (shrink)

Classical logic is explosive in the face of contradiction, yet we find ourselves using inconsistent theories. Mark Colyvan, one of the prominent advocates of the indispensability argument for realism about mathematical objects, suggests that such use can be garnered to develop an argument for commitment to inconsistent objects and, because of that, a paraconsistent underlying logic. I argue to the contrary that it is open to a classical logician to make distinctions, also needed by the paraconsistent logician, which allow a (...) more nuanced ranking of theories in which inconsistent theories can have different degrees of usefulness and productivity. Facing inconsistency does not force us to adopt an underlying paraconsistent logic. Moreover we will see that the argument to best explanation deployed by Colyvan in this context is unsuccessful. I suggest that Quinean approach which Colyvan champions will not lead to the revolutionary doctrines Colyvan endorses. (shrink)

Changes in the methodology of the historical sciences make them more vulnerable to unjustifiable speculations being passed off as scientific results. The integrity of historical science is in peril due the way speculative and often unexamined causal assumptions are being used to generate data and underpin the identification of correlations in such data. A step toward a solution is to distinguish between plausible and speculative assumptions that facilitate the inference from measured and observed data to causal claims. One way to (...) do that is by comparing these assumptions against a well-attested set of aspects of causation, such as the so-called “Bradford Hill Criteria”. The BHC do not provide a test for causation or necessary and sufficient conditions for causation but do indicate grounds for further investigation. By revising the BHC to reflect the needs and focus of historical sciences, it will be possible to assess the cogency of methods of investigation. These will be the Historical Sciences Bradford Hill Criteria. An application to one area in historical science is used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the HSBHC, namely biogeography. Four methods are assessed in order to show how the HSBHC can be used to examine the assumptions between our data and the causal biogeographical processes we infer. (shrink)

Two questions are addressed in this article: 1. Why are people attracted to leaders? 2. How are leaders' images construed? The first question is analyzed by using the concept of “deity” as a frame of reference for an “ideal model” of leadership. God as a “screen of projections” can satisfy the believer's fundamental needs and desires, as well as serving as a reference for causal attributions and a provider of transcendental meaning. Using Construal Level Theory, deity, as a frame of (...) reference, also facilitates analysis of the second question. This analysis explains universal principles underlying the leadership construal, and the psychological principles and culture-bound processes relevant to construing different images of leadership in different collectives. (shrink)

A review of the evolution of the ethical foundations of free enterprise reveals the essentially utilitarian ethical foundation prevailing today. To enrich those foundations the article attempts to establish the ethical validity of free transactions by relating them to the basic principle of interpersonal ethics: the Golden Rule. The validity of the transactional ethic is presented as an articulation of freedom in a valid social and economic context.

The playful discussion of 'horsemanship' that opens Sir Philip Sidney's Defence of Poesie has been variously interpreted as a straightforward anecdote about the chivalric arts, or an oblique rhetorical flourish, or something in between. This essay suggests a new context for Sidney's exordium by focusing primarily on its affiliation to the genre of the 'Art of Poetry'. In Horace's Ars poetica and other classical, scholastic and Renaissance treatises, horse–men and other unnatural hybrids embody the tension between decorum and poetic liberty. (...) Three major traditions inform this trope: by the Renaissance the centaur could be an allegory of reason's struggle with the passions, an emblem of the poetic imagination, or a figure for compositional hybridity associated, especially, with Lucianic satire. Reading Sidney in the light of these traditions, finally, this essay explores aspects of the centaur's significance in the Defence and the Arcadia, and suggests that this kind of attention to metaphor might provide a bridge between critical and creative modes of Renaissance poetic thought. (shrink)

ABSTRACTLloyd encourages us to look anew at philosophy and science by using a comparative methodology, comparing the familiar Western form of philosophy, for example, with the forms found in ancient China. Taking lessons from comparative biology, this paper attempts to show that such comparison can only take place when we understand what we are looking at in the familiar case. The question of the centrality of the drive for certainty is addressed. Why has certainty been so attractive and what does (...) it mean if philosophers and scientists cannot achieve certainty? (shrink)

Mitunter werden Konzeptionen der normativen Ethik als VerfahrensethikenVerfahrensethik bzw. als prozeduralistische Ethiken gekennzeichnet. Dadurch wird offenbar angezeigt, dass in diesen Konzeptionen Verfahren bzw. Prozeduren eine besondere Rolle zukommt. Kontraktualistische, kohärentistische und diskurstheoretischeDiskursethik Ansätze werden in diesem Sinne als exemplarisch betrachtet.

In der Technikethik spielt das Konzept der Verantwortung eine zentrale Rolle. ›Verantwortung‹ ist ein Basiskonzept, das, ähnlich wie die Konzepte ›Pflicht‹ oder ›Schuld‹, in vielfältigen Kontexten gebraucht wird. Dennoch lassen sich einige allgemeine Aussagen über seine Bedeutung treffen. Gerade Autoren, die im Bereich der Technik- und Wissenschaftsethik aktiv sind, haben sich nachdrücklich um eine Klärung des allgemeinen Verantwortungsbegriffs und seiner verschiedenen Aspekte und Gebrauchsweisen bemüht.

The article reviews the various ramifications in the discussion on leadership, focusing on the view of leadership as relationships between leaders and followers. Three main types of leader-follower relations are discussed, and their specific characteristics are described: regressive relations, symbolic relations, and developmental relations. After analyzing the major implications, as well as the conceptual limitations, of these perspectives, the article suggests directions for a more integrative conceptualization of leader-follower relations.

One of the few points of consensus in the Kantian literature is that Kant’s Moral Law is binding universally and unconditionally. Hence, the Moral Law is binding for all human agents (universally) irrespective of the agents’ particular interests (unconditionally). Whether or not we intend to act on the Moral Law, this is the law we ought to follow. Beyond this point of consensus, however, even the most important details are matters of controversy. What exactly does the Moral Law require of (...) us? What, if anything, grounds its bindingness? In particular, does Kant argue that the Moral Law is binding because it is ‘self-legislated’? What is the relation between the Moral Law (supreme principle of morality) and substantive moral laws such as the law that we ought to promote the happiness of others? What does Kant mean by his claim that the will has autonomy? In the four articles discussed in this special issue, Kleingeld proposes novel answers to these questions. This introduction presents the articles and brings to the fore the larger theme tying them all together. (shrink)

Advances in science and technology have added to our insights into the vulnerabilities of human agency as well as to the methods of exploiting them. This has raised the stakes for efforts to clarify the concept and ethics of manipulation. Among these efforts, Robert Noggle’s influencer-centered account of manipulation has been most significant. He defines manipulative acts as those whereby an agent intentionally influences a recipient’s attitudes so that they do not conform as closely as they otherwise would to the (...) pertinent norms and ideals endorsed by the influencer. This provides a relatively simple and in many ways clear definition of manipulation. It sidesteps thorny debates about autonomy, freedom, or practical rationality. It also promises to reveal a conceptual parallel between manipulating and lying, and thus to explain why manipulation is pro tanto wrong. In one respect, however, the account remains ambiguous: It remains unclear whether, and to what extent, it requires that influencers’ beliefs about what is ideal for their recipients to be grounded in some effort on the part of the influencer to identify with or take on the role of her recipient. This paper explains this ambiguity. It argues that influencer-centrism cannot remain indifferent to the validity of an agent’s beliefs about the ideal state of the recipient and provide an identification requirement that would render the whole account plausible and sufficiently determinate. (shrink)

Interiority and Law presents a groundbreaking reassessment of a medieval Jewish classic, Baḥya ibn Paquda's Guide to the Duties of the Hearts. Michaelis reads this work anew as a revolutionary intervention in Jewish law, or halakha. Overturning perceptions of Baḥya as the shaper of an ethical-religious form of life that exceeds halakha, Michaelis offers a pioneering historical and conceptual analysis of the category of "inner commandments" developed by Baḥya. Interiority and Law reveals that Baḥya's main effort revolved around establishing a (...) new legal formation - namely, the "duties of the hearts" - which would deal entirely with human interiority. Michaelis takes up the implications of Baḥya's radical innovation, examining his unique mystical model of proximity to God, which he based on an increasingly growing fulfillment of the inner commandments. With an integrative approach that puts Baḥya in dialogue with other medieval Muslim and Jewish religious thinkers, this work offers a fresh perspective on our understanding of the interconnectedness of the dynamic, neighboring religious traditions of Judaism and Islam. Contributing to conversations in the history of religion, Jewish studies, and medieval studies on interiority and mysticism, this book reveals Baḥya as a revolutionary and demanding thinker of Jewish law. (shrink)

At Protagoras 353de, Socrates gives three possible reasons for calling some pleasures ‘wrong’. Scholarly attention has focused on the second of these, according to which pleasures are ‘wrong’ when they have negative consequences. This paper argues that the first reason corresponds to beliefs held by Democritus, among others; and that the third reason is the view adopted by Socrates in the dialogue.