Purpose The purpose of this paper is to identify the key roles of transparency in making artificial intelligence (AI) greener (i.e. causing lesser carbon dioxide emissions) during the design, development and manufacturing stages or processes of AI technologies (e.g. apps, systems, agents, tools, artifacts) and use the “explicability requirement” as an essential value within the framework of transparency in supporting arguments for realizing greener AI. Design/methodology/approach The approach of this paper is argumentative, which is supported by ideas from existing literature (...) and documents. Findings This paper puts forward a relevant recommendation for achieving better and sustainable outcomes after the reexamination of the identified roles played by transparency within the AI technology context. The proposed recommendation is based on scientific opinion, which is justified by the roles and importance of the two approaches (compliance and integrity) in ethics management and other areas of ethical studies. Originality/value The originality of this paper falls within the boundary of filling the gap that exists in sustainable AI technology and the roles of transparency. (shrink)

This work addresses the challenge of contemporary materialism for thinking about God. The book examines contemporary theories of consciousness and defends a non-materialist theory of persons, subjectivity and God. A version of dualism is articulated that seeks to avoid the fragmented outlook of most dualist theories. Dualism is often considered to be inadequate both philosophically and ethically, and is seen as a chief cause of denigrating the body and of promoting individualism and scepticism. Charles Taliaferro defends a holistic understanding (...) of the person-body relationship in which the two are distinguishable yet integrally related. This integrated dualism is spelled out in a way that avoids the ethical and philosophical problems associated with other dualistic accounts, especially in its Platonic and Cartesian forms. A defence is then made of the intelligibility of thinking about God as non-physical, yet integrally present to creation. Charles Taliaferro is co-editor of the forthcoming A Companion to Philosophy of Religion, with Philip Quinn. He has had work published in, among others, The Philosophical Quarterly, Metaphilosophy, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, and Philosophia. (shrink)

This volume focuses on the development of empiricism as an interest in the body - as both the object of research and the subject of experience.

Let us now consider the third class of statements, those completely nonrestrictive. For example, "Something exists." Since this is the pure contradictory of the wholly restrictive, "Nothing exists," which we have found reason to regard as impossible, and since the contradictory of an impossible statement is necessary, we should expect "Something exists" to be necessarily true, a statement valid a priori. And we see that it excludes nothing from existence, except bare "nothing" itself. But the existence of bare nothing is (...) no existence. Further, "Something exists" is in no conceivable circumstances falsifiable, since the falsifying experience would have to exist, and it would also have to be the experience of something existing--at least if, as I should maintain, experience is essentially a relative term, requiring that to which it is relative, or of which it is the experience. But though "Something exists" is unfalsifiable, it is verified every moment. Could the verifiable but in any conceivable world absolutely unfalsifiable be false? I hold that the necessarily true must be knowable as true and only as true, and that, conversely, whatever is in principle verifiable though not falsifiable is thereby shown to be necessarily true. (shrink)

Are they needed? To be sure. The Darwinian industry, industrious though it is, has failed to provide texts of more than a handful of Darwin's books. If you want to know what Darwin said about barnacles (still an essential reference to cirripedists, apart from any historical importance) you are forced to search shelves, or wait while someone does it for you; some have been in print for a century; various reprints have appeared and since vanished." -Eric Korn,Times Literary Supplement (...) class='Hi'>Charles Robert Darwin (1880-1882) has been widely recognized since his own time as one of the most influential writers in the history of Western thought. His books were widely read by specialists and the general public, and his influence had been extended by almost continuous public debate over the last 130 years. New York University Press' edition makes it possible for the first time to review Darwin's public literary output as a whole, plus his scientific journal articles, his private notebooks, and his correspondence. This is the first complete edition containing all of Darwin's published books, featuring definitive texts recording original paginations with Darwin's indexes retained. All illustrations and plates are presented, inclucing 82 color plates of birds and mammals and several folding maps and plates. The set also features a general introduction and index, and textural introductions in each volume. (shrink)

The concept of “progress” in evolutionary theory and its relationship to a putative notion of “Progress” in a global, normatively loaded sense of “change for the better” have been the subject of debate since Darwin admonished himself in a marginal note to avoid using the terms ‘higher’ and ‘lower.’ While an increase in some kind of complexity in the natural world might seem self-evident, efforts to explicate this trend meet notorious philosophical difficulties. Numerous historians pin the Modern Synthesis as a (...) pivotal moment in this history; Michael Ruse even provocatively hypothesizes that Ernst Mayr and other “architects” of the Synthesis worked actively to eliminate Progress from evolutionary biology’s scientific purview. I evaluate these claims here with a textual analysis of the journals _Evolution_ and _Proceedings of the Royal Society B_ (a corpus of 27,762 documents), using a dynamic topic modeling approach to track the fate of the term ‘progress’ across the Modern Synthesis. The claim that this term declines in importance for evolutionary theorizing over this period can, indeed, be supported; more tentative evidence is also provided that the discussion of ‘progress’ is largely absent from the British context, emphasizing the role of American paleontology in the rise and fall of ‘progress’ in 20th-century evolutionary biology. (shrink)

Should engineering ethics be taught? Despite the obvious truism that we all want our students to be moral engineers who practice virtuous professional behavior, I argue, in this article that the question itself obscures several ambiguities that prompt preliminary resolution. Upon clarification of these ambiguities, and an attempt to delineate key issues that make the question a philosophically interesting one, I conclude that engineering ethics not only should not, but cannot, be taught if we understand “teaching engineering ethics” to mean (...) training engineers to be moral individuals (as some advocates seem to have proposed). However, I also conclude that there is a justification to teaching engineering ethics, insofar as we are able to clearly identify the most desirable and efficacious pedagogical approach to the subject area, which I propose to be a case study-based format that utilizes the principle of human cognitive pattern recognition. (shrink)

Research in the intensive care unit (ICU) is commonly thought to pose 'serious risk' to study participants. This perception may be at the root of a variety of impediments to the conduct of clinical trials in the ICU setting. Component analysis offers a promising approach to the ethical analysis of ICU research. Because clinical trials commonly involve a mixture of study interventions, therapeutic and nontherapeutic procedures must be analyzed separately. Therapeutic procedures must meet the requirement of clinical equipoise. Risks associated (...) with nontherapeutic procedures must be minimized consistent with sound scientific design, and be deemed reasonable in relation to the knowledge to be gained. When research involves a vulnerable population, such as adults incapable of providing informed consent, nontherapeutic risks are limited to a minor increase over minimal risk. Understood in this way, the incremental risk posed by participation in ICU research may be minimal. This realization has important implications for review by institutional review boards of such research and for the informed consent process. (shrink)

This is a book about hope in the midst of a polarized culture. Camosy begins with a hopeful starting point in the midst of a crumbling US political culture: two of every three Americans constitute an exhausted majority who reject right/left polarization and are open to alternative viewpoints. Especially at this time of realignment, we have been given a unique moment to put aside the frothy, angsty political debates and think harder about our deepest values. A Consistent Life Ethic, especially (...) one which embraces Pope Francis' challenge to resist throwaway culture, has the capacity to unite people who for the last several decades imagined themselves in a polarized culture war. On issues ranging from hook-up culture, reproductive technology, abortion, euthanasia, poverty, immigration, treatment of animals, and mass incarceration, this book articulates a new moral vision in which a culture of encounter and hospitality replaces a consumer culture in which the most vulnerable get used and discarded as so much trash. At bottom, Camosy offers readers a golden opportunity to dialogue about what kinds of values should serve as the foundation for a new political culture. (shrink)

Originally published in 1910, this is a volume of philosophy by an author who found his main calling in the creation of novels, Charles Francis Keary. Unusual in its relatively personal exploration of ideas, together with its accessible, literary style, the text nonetheless maintains an academically rigorous approach to its exploration of the boundaries of reason. The fundamental premise is that mental processes generally thought to be based on intuition can, more accurately, be seen to find their basis in (...) reasoning; this premise, in turn, forms the basis for an exposition of Keary's philosophy of life and religion. This is a highly readable, and critically underrated, book that will be of value to anyone with an interest in philosophy and theology. (shrink)

This book is comprised of essays previously published in Philosophy & Public Affairs and also an extended excerpt from Michael Walzer's Just and Unjust Wars.

This three-volume history of England from before the Roman conquest through to the Glorious Revolution of 1688 was originally serialised in Charles Dickens' magazine Household Words between 1851 and 1853. The text was published in book form in the same period, although each volume was post-dated to the following year. Dickens dedicated the work to his own children, intending it to be a stepping stone to more substantial histories. The volumes were popular with readers for decades, and were used (...) in British schools well into the twentieth century. Dickens employs his signature style to bring events and personalities to life, making use of vivid similes, unabashedly partisan language and direct speech, as well as the occasional moral lesson. Volume 1 covers the period up to 1216. Volume 2 continues from Henry III to Richard III. Volume 3 traces events from Henry VII's accession to James II's fall. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this article we call for a paradigm change in relation to the way we tend to look at how markets and morals are entwined in the writings of Jonathan Swift (1667–1745). We argue that it would be wrong to apply contemporary notions of economics retrospectively and somewhat a-historically to a thinker of an axial time in which economics as a separate sphere did not exist, and morals and markets and the way they relate to each other were about (...) to be reconceptualised. We argue that it is thus no accident that Scottish Enlightenment thinkers such as David Hume and Adam Smith took to Swift. They admired more than the expressive or rhetorical skills in Swift; in the first instance, they read Swift as somebody who managed to express moral sentiments (and even outrage) in an appealing, that is mostly satirical way, thereby not only criticizing the cruel conditions in Ireland at the time but also identifying the gap between rhetoric and reality and thus taking issue with the hypocrisy and double standards of the time. We will use two famous examples of Swift's work to illustrate our case, A Modest Proposal (1729) and Directions to Servants (1745). (shrink)

Originally published in 1963, this classic book is a rethinking of the history of Western political philosophy. Charles N. R. McCoy contrasts classical-medieval principles against the "hypotheses" at the root of modern liberalism and modern conservativism. In Part I, "The Classical Christian Tradition from Plato to Aquinas," the author lays the foundation for a philosophical "structure" capable of producing "constitutional liberty." Part II, "The Modern Theory of Politics from Machiavelli to Marx," attempts to show, beginning with Machiavelli, the reversal (...) and destruction of the pre-modern "structure" postulated in Part I. McCoy stresses the great contributions of Aristotle to political thought found in his more familiar Ethics and Politics, but also includes key insights drawn from Metaphysics and Physics. These contributions are developed and perfected, McCoy argues, by Augustine and Aquinas. Two other important features include McCoy's epistemological insights into Plato's work that will be new to many readers and the author's juxtaposition of traditional natural law with "the modernized theory of natural law." The modern account of autonomous natural law, in McCoy's view, helps explain the totalitarian direction of key aspects of modern political thought. This classic volume on the origins of modern philosophical thought remains a standard in the field. (shrink)

This three-volume history of England from before the Roman conquest through to the Glorious Revolution of 1688 was originally serialised in Charles Dickens' magazine Household Words between 1851 and 1853. The text was published in book form in the same period, although each volume was post-dated to the following year. Dickens dedicated the work to his own children, intending it to be a stepping stone to more substantial histories. The volumes were popular with readers for decades, and were used (...) in British schools well into the twentieth century. Dickens employs his signature style to bring events and personalities to life, making use of vivid similes, unabashedly partisan language and direct speech, as well as the occasional moral lesson. Volume 3 covers the period from Henry VII through to the fall of James II, with a short chapter on events between 1688 and the accession of Queen Victoria. (shrink)

Two philosophical theories, mathematical Platonism and nominalism, are the background of six dialogues in this book. There are five characters in these dialogues: three are nominalists; the fourth is a Platonist; the main character is somewhat skeptical on most issues in the philosophy of mathematics, and is particularly skeptical regarding the two background theories.