This paper explores the role of ethics in design. Traditionally, ethical questions have been seen as marginal issues in the design of technology. Part of the reason for this stems from the widely held notion of technology being “out of control.” This notion is a barrier to what I call “ethical design” because it implies that ethics has no role to play in the development of technology. This view, however, is challenged by recent work in the field of Science and (...) Technology Studies (STS). Looking into the dynamics of technological change, STS scholars argue that human choices are present at every stage of a technology’s development and, furthermore, that human values are reflected in the very design of artifacts. This alternative view suggests that ethics can and should be included in the design process. Drawing on examples from the privacy arena. I point to some of the potential advantages of addressing ethical concerns early on in the design of a technology. I conclude with some general strategies for bringing ethics back into design. (shrink)

Patrick Colm Hogan announced in 2002 that "cognitivist methods, topics, and principles have come to dominate what are arguably the most intellectually exciting academic fields today". Today, what dominates those "cognitivist methods, topics, and principles" is likely to be Distributed Cognition. The term was initially addressed by Edwin Hutchin in Cognition in the Wild and currently has been developed to encompass an intertwined group of theories including embodied cognition, embedded cognition, extended cognition, and enactive cognition. The distributed views of (...) cognition generally hold that mind is "spread out over the brain, the non-neural body and an environment... (shrink)

Modern generative AI systems have shown the capacity to produce remarkably fluent language, prompting debates both about their semantic understanding and, less prominently, about whether they can perform speech acts. This paper addresses the latter question, focusing on assertion. We argue that to be capable of assertion, an entity must meet two requirements: it must produce outputs with descriptive functions, and it must be capable of being sanctioned by agents with which it interacts. The second requirement arises from the nature (...) of assertion as a norm-governed social practice. Pre-trained large language models that have not been subject to fine-tuning fail to meet the first requirement. Language models that have been fine-tuned for ‘groundedness’ or ‘correctness’ may meet the first requirement, but fail the second. We also consider the significance of the point that AI systems can be used to generate proxy assertions on behalf of human agents. (shrink)

Social media is full of dead people. Untold millions of dead users haunt the online world where we increasingly live our lives. What do we do with all these digital souls? Can we simply delete them, or do they have a right to persist? Philosophers have been almost entirely silent on the topic, despite their perennial focus on death as a unique dimension of human existence. Until now. -/- Drawing on ongoing philosophical debates, Digital Souls claims that the digital dead (...) are objects that should be treated with loving regard and that we have a moral duty towards. Modern technology helps them to persist in various ways, while also making them vulnerable to new forms of exploitation and abuse. This provocative book explores a range of questions about the nature of death, identity, grief, the moral status of digital remains and the threat posed by AI-driven avatars of dead people. In the digital era, it seems we must all re-learn how to live with the dead. (shrink)

Affective experience in nonhuman animals is of great interest for both theoretical and practical reasons. This paper highlights research by the psychologists Anthony Dickinson and Bernard Balleine which provides particularly good evidence of conscious affective experience in rats. This evidence is compelling because it implicates a sophisticated system for goal-directed action selection, and demonstrates a contrast between apparently conscious and unconscious evaluative representations with similar content. Meanwhile, the evidence provided by some well-known studies on pain in nonhuman animals is much (...) less convincing. This comparison may offer lessons for the future study of animal consciousness. (shrink)

The collection contains published and unpublished essays, lecture transcripts, notes, poems, etc., often with handwritten edits and comments. Topics vary, with a focus on Chinese philosophy, comparison of Chinese and Western thought, contemporary intellectual and social reform movements, biographical reflections and self-criticism. The collection may reflect how 20th century political developments, especially the Cultural Revolution, impacted Feng Youlan's thought.

Di 1 juan. San song tang zi xu -- di 2-3 juan. Zhongguo zhe xue shi -- di 4-5 juan. Zhen yuan liu shu -- di 6 juan. Zhongguo zhe xue jian shi [translation of Short history of Chinese philosophy] -- di 7-9 juan. Zhongguo zhe xue shi xin bian -- di 10 juan. Zhe xue lun wen ji.

本书选取冯友兰作品中关于哲思的经典篇目,讲述作者对人生诸多领域的思考,对诸多人生问题的剖析,处处洋溢着丰富的智慧与哲人的洞见.

A growing number of political and legal theorists deny that there is a widespread duty to obey the law. This has lent a sense of urgency to recent disagreements about whether a state’s legitimacy depends upon its ‘subjects” having a duty to obey the law. On one side of the disagreement, John Simmons, Robert Paul Wolff, David Copp, Hannah Pitkin, Leslie Green, George Klosko, and Joseph Raz hold that a state could only be legitimate if the vast majority of its (...) subjects have a duty to obey the law. On the other side, M.B.E. Smith, Jeffrey Reiman, Kent Greenawalt. (shrink)

: Understanding Helmholtz's philosophy of science requires attention to his experimental practice. I sketch out such a project by showing how experiment shapes his theory of perception in three ways. One, the theory emerged out of empirical and experimental research. Two, the concept of experiment fills a critical conceptual gap in his theory of perception. Experiment functions not merely as a scientific technique, but also as a general epistemological strategy. Three, Helmholtz's experimental practice provides essential clues to the interpretation of (...) his theory of perception. A case study from experimental investigation of hearing shows how he designed such studies in accordance with the epistemological commitments of the theory of perception. Yet, while the theory was important to his experiments, the soundness of the experimental strategy was epistemically independent of those commitments. Secondly, the case study illustrates how Helmholtz consistently held that causal inferences underwrite reference to a real, but indirectly experienced external world. (shrink)

Recent work by Marchisella exposed a gap in the literature on causal non-monotonic reasoning: what is needed is an approach whose primary motivation is the formal representation of the way in which humans typically reason with cause and effect. We extend the work of Marchisella, and propose a new type of causal non-monotonic reasoning, _Plausible Causal Reasoning_, which fills the gap in the literature. We propose some new principles which help characterise Plausible Causal Reasoning, and suggest a family of non-monotonic (...) logics which provides a suitable starting point for its formalisation. (shrink)

According to Tacitus, this was Galba's verdict on Nero's fall. The tyrant's undoing had been of his own making. As for what determined the outcome, Galba is unequivocal. Two factors had proved decisive: Nero's immanitas and luxuria.

THE emotive theory of ethics made its first brief and rather tentative appearance in The Meaning of Meaning by Ogden and Richards in 1922. It did not gain currency, however, nor receive anything like a complete formulation until it was adopted by Logical Positivism, and in particular by A J Ayer in Language, Truth and Logic. Ayer’s account was soon superseded by that of Charles L Stevenson, whose views were finally elaborated in Ethics and Language in 1942. This, the classic (...) statement of emotivism, is one of the great works of moral philosophy of this century, worthy to be ranked with the Principia Ethica of G E Moore. (shrink)

What kind of experience might help to confirm and make sense of the puzzling belief in divine creation, so central to the main monotheistic religions? Anselm and Aquinas developed a philosophical understanding of 'Creation' as an asymmetrical relationship between the world and God i.e. that the world is really related to God in a relationship of total dependence but God is in no way really related to or modified by this created world. This idea of an asymmetrical relationship is the (...) key concept unifying all aspects of this book which discusses the three main inter-related questions in a philosophical discussion about God -- the question of meaning, the question of existence, and the question of co-existence.The book explores various 'ciphers' of this asymmetrical relationship in our pre-philosophical lived experience. These are experiences such as that of the relationship between our knowledge and what we know, or our sense of obligation to our vulnerable neighbour. It argues that deciphering such experiences helps to make sense of the 'asymmetrical' relation of creation and that it in turn makes sense of them. Masterson argues further that this idea of asymmetrical relationship provides insight into the main questions of philosophy of religion and is an illuminating source of critical dialogue with contemporary Anglo/American and Phenomenological approaches in philosophy of religion. (shrink)

'Doing an Aristotle' on Form: a highly compressed attempt to explain what we mean by the ambiguous term "form" in visual arts.

Affektregulierung als wichtiger Bestandteil von Mentalisierung beinhaltet unterschiedliche Teilaspekte, die in der psychoanalytischen Literatur zum Thema Affekt ausführlich beschrieben werden. Der vorliegende Beitrag bespricht eine Affekttheorie aus der französischsprachigen psychoanalytischen Literatur, die die Transformation von heftigen Affektzuständen mittels Signalen und Zeichen zur Symbolisierung in Bildern und Sprache verdeutlicht.Mithilfe phänomenologischer sowie entwicklungspsychologischer Ansätze wird es möglich, zwischen den Theorien Lacans und Greens eine Brücke zu schlagen. Anhand eines kinderanalytischen Prozesses wird illustriert, wie das normale Spannungsverhältnis zwischen Affekt und Sprache aufgrund einer (...) traumatischen Vorgeschichte besonders starken Belastungen ausgesetzt sein kann. Die detaillierte Analyse klinischen Materials aus der Phase der Diagnostik und aus zwei Therapiesitzungen gibt einen Einblick in die Ängste und Kontaktwünsche eines traumatisierten Kindes und veranschaulicht, wie affektregulierende Therapie im Dienste der Symbolisierung aussehen kann. (shrink)

Moderate realists hold that scientific theories are truthlike, rather than exactly true. Although scientific realism has been challenged by arguments such as the pessimistic induction, moderate realism hasn’t been challenged directly on the grounds that it makes scientific progress rely on inferences from theories that are only truthlike. This paper shows that moderate realism is incompatible with the claim that deductive arguments from scientific theories are reliable. Using truthlike claims as the premises of some patterns of deductive reasoning renders the (...) argument dramatically unreliable. The conclusion is not guaranteed to be true. Nor is the conclusion guaranteed to be at least as truthlike as the premises. Nor even is the conclusion shown to be likely to be true. This is because the consequences of truthlike theories are neither guaranteed to be true, nor even more likely to be truthlike than not. Truthlike theories cannot function like true theories in deductive arguments; instead they function as radically false theories would. In short, truthlike theories behave exactly like radically false theories for the purposes of their deductive consequences. And since scientists would not trust deductions from radically false theories, they should not trust deductions from truthlike theories either. Furthermore, this applies to a wide range of logics and patterns of deductive argument. The moderate realist must either reject bivalence, deny that theories are truth-apt, or accept that scientific theories are not used in deductive arguments. (shrink)