Broadening access to both computational and educational resources is crit- ical to diffusing machine learning (ML) innovation. However, today, most ML resources and experts are siloed in a few countries and organizations. In this article, we describe our pedagogical approach to increasing access to applied ML through a massive open online course (MOOC) on Tiny Machine Learning (TinyML). We suggest that TinyML, applied ML on resource-constrained embedded devices, is an attractive means to widen access because TinyML leverages low-cost and globally (...) accessible hardware and encourages the development of complete, self-contained applications, from data collection to deployment. To this end, a collaboration between academia and industry produced a four part MOOC that provides application-oriented instruction on how to develop solutions using TinyML. The series is openly available on the edX MOOC platform, has no prerequisites beyond basic programming, and is designed for global learners from a variety of backgrounds. It introduces real-world applications, ML algorithms, data-set engineering, and the ethi- cal considerations of these technologies through hands-on programming and deployment of TinyML applications in both the cloud and on their own microcontrollers. To facili- tate continued learning, community building, and collaboration beyond the courses, we launched a standalone website, a forum, a chat, and an optional course-project com- petition. We also open-sourced the course materials, hoping they will inspire the next generation of ML practitioners and educators and further broaden access to cutting-edge ML technologies. (shrink)

This paper will present a negative result—an account of my failure to explain why belief is involuntary. When I announced my question a year or so ahead of time, I had a vague idea of how it might be answered, but I cannot make it work out. Necessity, this time, has not given birth to invention. Still, my tussle with the question may contribute either towards getting it answered or showing that it cannot be answered because belief can be voluntary (...) after all. Most of the paper was written while I expected to get the question answered, and I have chosen not to hide that fact by revising the tone. I offer the paper as an essay in the ‘analytic’ manner in Descartes’s sense of that term. It is the manner of the Meditations—a presentation in the order of discovery or, in my case, of non-discovery. (shrink)

Making Things Up By BennettKarenOxford University Press, 2018. xii + 260 pp.

This essay focuses on personal love, or the love of particular persons as such. Part of the philosophical task in understanding personal love is to distinguish the various kinds of personal love. For example, the way in which I love my wife is seemingly very different from the way I love my mother, my child, and my friend. This task has typically proceeded hand-in-hand with philosophical analyses of these kinds of personal love, analyses that in part respond to various puzzles (...) about love. Can love be justified? If so, how? What is the value of personal love? What impact does love have on the autonomy of both the lover and the beloved? (shrink)

Philosophers and psychologists have been attracted to two differing accounts of addictive motivation. In this paper, we investigate these two accounts and challenge their mutual claim that addictions compromise a person’s self-control. First, we identify some incompatibilities between this claim of reduced self-control and the available evidence from various disciplines. A critical assessment of the evidence weakens the empirical argument for reduced autonomy. Second, we identify sources of unwarranted normative bias in the popular theories of addiction that introduce systematic errors (...) in interpreting the evidence. By eliminating these errors, we are able to generate a minimal, but correct account, of addiction that presumes addicts to be autonomous in their addictive behavior, absent further evidence to the contrary. Finally, we explore some of the implications of this minimal, correct view. (shrink)

The claim that we have a moral obligation, where a choice can be made, to bring to birth the 'best' child possible, has been highly controversial for a number of decades. More recently Savulescu has labelled this claim the Principle of Procreative Beneficence. It has been argued that this Principle is problematic in both its reasoning and its implications, most notably in that it places lower moral value on the disabled. Relentless criticism of this proposed moral obligation, however, has been (...) unable, thus far, to discredit this Principle convincingly and as a result its influence shows no sign of abating. I will argue that while criticisms of the implications and detail of the reasoning behind it are well founded, they are unlikely to produce an argument that will ultimately discredit the obligation that the Principle of Procreative Beneficence represents. I believe that what is needed finally and convincingly to reveal the fallacy of this Principle is a critique of its ultimate theoretical foundation, the notion of impersonal harm. In this paper I argue that while the notion of impersonal harm is intuitively very appealing, its plausibility is based entirely on this intuitive appeal and not on sound moral reasoning. I show that there is another plausible explanation for our intuitive response and I believe that this, in conjunction with the other theoretical criticisms that I and others have levelled at this Principle, shows that the Principle of Procreative Beneficence should be rejected. (shrink)

This essay seeks to give philosophical expression to the vitality, willfullness, and recalcitrance possessed by nonhuman entities and forces. It also considers the ethico-political import of an enhanced awareness of "thing-power." Drawing from Lucretius, Spinoza, Gilles Deleuze, Bruno Latour, and others, it describes a materialism of lively matter, to be placed in conversation with the historical materialism of Marx and the body materialism of feminist and cultural studies. Thing-power materialism is a speculative onto-story, an admittedly presumptuous attempt to depict the (...) nonhumanity that flows around and through humans. The essay concludes with a preliminary discussion of the ecological implications of thing-power. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that our practice of giving and demanding apologies is rationalized by a belief that apologies make a difference to our normative situation. The characteristic normative effects of an apology are, I claim, that it removes an obligation on others to distance themselves from the wrongdoer, and that it makes the apologizer personally accountable to the addressee for their future compliance with the obligation they violated. However, if we ask what rationalizes that belief, two influential views (...) on the literature on apology – that I call the Reassurance View and the Performing Deference View – prove to be inadequate. In particular, these views cannot explain how apology can be both an expression of remorse for one’s wrongdoing but also a performative through which, by carrying out certain canonical actions, one can – all at once – change one’s normative situation. In order to explain these features of apology, I suggest that we see apology as akin to a normative power, but a normative power that is exercised expressively, or by an expressive action. In particular, I suggest that we see the power of apology as exercised by the performance of the expressive action of dissociation. (shrink)

This chapter analyses making/allowing in terms of positive/negative: you allow something to happen if an explanation of its happening requires only a negative fact about your behaviour. A negative fact about your behaviour is a highly general or uninformative one; it corresponds to almost the whole of the logical space of your possible ways of moving. An objection to this analysis, based on giving a very special status to immobility, is described and countered. The possibility space might have a different (...) metric, i.e. be structured in terms of something other than possible ways of moving. One such alternative metric is discussed. (shrink)

David Lewis famously takes mereology ‘to be perfectly understood, unproblematic, and certain". In this chapter, the author proceeds by articulating four theses that Lewis holds about composition. Three of them are familiar; Lewis himself explicitly articulates and relies upon them. The fourth remains implicit, but it is nonetheless important. The four theses include: composition is unique (the same things cannot have two different fusions); composition is unrestricted (any two things whatsoever have a fusion); composition is ontologically innocent (composed entities do (...) not "count" beyond their parts); and composition is unmysterious (it is not problematic to treat it as primitive, and can function in demystifying explanations). The author devotes a section to each thesis: explaining what it says, pointing to the texts that illustrate that Lewis believes it, and explaining why Lewis believes it. Lewis uses the label ‘uniqueness’ and explicitly endorses the thesis. (shrink)

In 2019 public trust in politicians was at an all-time low in many parts of the world. Then again, it had been low for quite some time.1 Public trust in epistemic authority is a more complicated matter. The success of many right-wing politicians—Trump, Johnson, Bolsonaro, etc.—is partly due to their efforts to discredit traditional sources of information, including the “mainstream media” and whichever scientific institutions prove inconvenient to their political interests. But worries about the erosion of epistemic standards in public (...) discourse are easily overstated, and some polling data have shown that publics are not as distrustful of experts as we might fear.2Nonetheless, there are some political and social... (shrink)

Friendship, as understood here, is a distinctively personal relationship that is grounded in a concern on the part of each friend for the welfare of the other, for the other's sake, and that involves some degree of intimacy. As such, friendship is undoubtedly central to our lives, in part because the special concern we have for our friends must have a place within a broader set of concerns, including moral concerns, and in part because our friends can help shape who (...) we are as persons. Given this centrality, important questions arise concerning the justification of friendship and, in this context, whether it is permissible to “trade up” when someone new comes along, as well as concerning the possibility of reconciling the demands of friendship with the demands of morality in cases in which the two seem to conflict. (shrink)

Bernard Linsky and Edward Zalta have recently proposed a new form of actualism. I characterize the general form of their view and the motivations behind it. I argue that it is not quite new – it bears interesting similarities to Alvin Plantinga’s view – and that it definitely isn’t actualist.

Rational explanation of action out of emotion faces a number of challenges. The Wrong Explanation Challenge says that explaining action out of emotion by reference to a purpose rather than an emotion gets it wrong. The Redundancy Challenge says that if explanation of an action by reference to emotion is sufficient then rational explanation is redundant. And the No Further Justification Challenge says that there is no more to say, at the level of rational explanation, about why people act as (...) they do out of a particular emotion. Furthermore, even if these challenges can be addressed, there is a Problem of Expressive Action, since many actions out of emotion seem unpromising candidates for being guided by normative practical reasons of the prudential, instrumental, deontic or consequentialist sort. In response, I argue that many actions out of emotions should be understood as expressive actions guided by the agent's conception of normative practical reasons: specifically, their conception of expressive reasons. (shrink)

A coin rotating back in depth in some sense presents a changing, elliptical shape. How are we to understand such (in this case) ‘appearances of ellipticality’? How is the experiential sense of such shifting shape appearances related to the experiential sense of enduring shape definitive of perceived shape constancy? Is the experiential recovery of surface shape based on the prior (perhaps more fundamental) recovery of point or element 3D spatial locations?—or is the perception of shape a largely independent perceptual achievement? (...) Do we gain access to enduring shape properties by first detecting and working from ‘shape appearances’? These are some of the topics taken up in this paper. (shrink)

This book analyzes contemporary visual art produced in the context of conflict and trauma from a range of countries, including Colombia, Northern Ireland, South Africa, and Australia. It focuses on what makes visual language unique, arguing that the "affective" quality of art contributes to a new understanding of the experience of trauma and loss. By extending the concept of empathy, it also demonstrates how we might, through art, make connections with people in different parts of the world whose experiences differ (...) from our own. The book makes a distinct contribution to trauma studies, which has tended to concentrate on literary forms of expression. It also offers a sophisticated theoretical analysis of the operations of art, drawing on philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze, but setting this within a postcolonial framework. _Empathic Vision_ will appeal to anyone interested in the role of culture in post-September 11 global politics. (shrink)

Some philosophers think that forgiveness should only be granted in response to the wrongdoer’s repentance, while others think that forgiveness can properly be given unconditionally. In this paper I show that both of these positions are partially correct. In redemptive forgiveness we wipe the wrong from the offender’s moral record. It is wrong to forgive redemptively in the absence of some atonement. Personal forgiveness, on the other hand, is granted when the victim overcomes inappropriate though humanly understandable feelings of hate (...) or vindictive anger towards the wrongdoer and comes to see them as deserving of a certain unconditional respect ’qua’ moral agent. Personal forgiveness is unconditionally admirable. (shrink)

I am very grateful to Stephan Leuenberger, Erica Shumener and Naomi Thompson for their excellent and thoughtful commentaries on Making Things Up. I have learned a lot from thinking through their replies. As it happens, they focus on pretty disparate aspects of the book: necessitation, relative fundamentality, and what builds the building facts, respectively. I will thus engage with their remarks separately.

Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter treats several immensely important and understudied topics—public ignorance of economics, political ideology, and their connection to policy error—from an orthodox economic perspective whose applicability to these topics is overwhelmingly disproven by the available evidence. Moreover, Caplan adds to the traditional and largely irrelevant orthodox economic notion of rational public ignorance the claim that when voters favor counterproductive economic policies, they do so deliberately, i.e., knowingly. This leads him to assume (without any evidence) (...) that “emotion or ideology” explain mass economic error. Straightforward, unchosen mass ignorance of economic principles—neither “rational” nor “irrational,” but simply mistaken—is a more coherent explanation for economic error, and it is backed up by the vast body of public‐opinion research. (shrink)

Efficiency requires legislative political institutions. There are many ways efficiency can be promoted, and so an ongoing legislative institution is necessary to resolve this choice in a politically sustainable and economically flexible way. This poses serious problems for classical liberal proposals to constitutionally protect markets from government intervention, as seen in the work of Ilya Somin, Guido Pincione & Fernando Tesón and others. The argument for the political nature of efficiency is set out in terms of both Pareto optimality and (...) aggregate welfare maximisation, and similar arguments can be generalised to other social values. (shrink)

The Principle of Procreative Beneficence claims that we have a moral obligation, where choice is possible, to choose to create the best child we can. The existence of this moral obligation has been proposed by John Harris and Julian Savulescu and has proved controversial on many levels, not least that it is eugenics, asking us to produce the best children we can, not for the sake of that child's welfare, but in order to make a better society. These are strong (...) claims that require robust justification that can be open to scrutiny and debate. This article argues that robust justifications are currently lacking in the work of Savulescu and Harris. The justifications provided for their conclusions about this obligation to have the best child possible rely heavily on Derek Parfit's Non-Identity Problem and the intuitive response this provokes in many of us. Unfortunately Harris and Savulescu do not embrace the entirety of the Non-Identity Problem and the puzzle that it presents. The Non-Identity Problem actually provides a refutation of PPB. In order to establish PPB as a credible and defendable principle, Harris and Savulescu need to find what has eluded Parfit and many others: a solution to the Non-Identity Problem and thus an overturning of the refutation it provides for PPB. While Harris and Savulescu do hint at possible but highly problematic solutions to the Non-Identity Problem, these are not developed or defended. As a result their controversial is left supported by little more than intuition. (shrink)

The motivational problem is the problem of understanding how we can have rational control over what we do. In the face of phenomena like weakness of the will, it is commonly thought that evaluation and reason can always remain intact even as we sever their connection with motivation; consequently, solving the motivational problem is thought to be a matter of figuring out how to bridge this inevitable gap between evaluation and motivation. I argue that this is fundamentally mistaken and results (...) in a conception of practical reason that is motivationally impotent. Instead, I argue, a proper understanding of evaluation and practical reason must include not only evaluative judgments but emotions as well. By analyzing the role of emotions in evaluation and the rational interconnections among emotions, desires, and evaluative judgments, I articulate a new conception of evaluation and motivation according to which there is a conceptual connection between them, albeit one that allows for the possibility of weakness of the will. (shrink)

This stimulating work takes the concept of 'rationality', a concept that more than any other is supposed to express the essence of what it means to be human, and submits it to a careful and penetrating analysis. The conclusions drawn often challenge those previously suggested by both philosophers and psychologists.

When it is wrong to bring into existence someone who will be miserable, what makes it wrong is not the threat of misery hanging over the possible person, but rather the fact that if one does it there will be real misery for an actual person. This belongs in the same category as the wrongness of making a happy person miserable, or of failing to make a person less miserable than he is. These arc all matters of the (dis)utilities—the ill-fare (...) and welfare—of present and future actual people. (shrink)

This paper considers the ethics of routine antenatal HIV testing and the role of informed consent within such a policy in order to decide how we should proceed in this area—a decision that ultimately rests on the relative importance we give to public health goals on the one hand and respect for individual autonomy on the other.A recent illuminating qualitative study by Zulueta and Boulton1 explores the practicalities of informed consent in routine antenatal HIV testing. Its results support what I (...) have argued1 is inevitable with routine testing policies of this kind: that routine antenatal testing regimes are incompatible with requirements for informed consent. It has become clear that intervention could reduce the risk of transmitting HIV from mother to child from 15–20%2 to around 8%,3 or possibly as low as 2%.4,5 The evidence of this possibility produced a general trend towards introducing routine antenatal HIV screening in developed countries worldwide.6,7,8,9,10 The aim was to dramatically reduce the rate of HIV transmission from mother to child by encouraging universal antenatal HIV testing. The UK has been no exception, and in 1999 the government instructed health authorities to implement a policy of offering and recommending an HIV test to all pregnant women.11This UK antenatal screening policy and others like it, although well-meaning, are problematic in their formulation. In order to reflect contemporary ethical and legal practice, such policies attempt to marry the public health aims of maximising uptake of testing with a commitment to respect the choices of patients by requiring informed consent before they participate in screening. Thus, in the case of UK policy, health professionals are instructed to recommend the HIV test to all pregnant women in order to achieve the target of a 90% …. (shrink)

In considering the appropriate use of the terms “science” and “scientific instrument,” tracing the history of “mathematical instruments” in the early modern period is offered as an illuminating alternative to the historian's natural instinct to follow the guiding lights of originality and innovation, even if the trail transgresses contemporary boundaries. The mathematical instrument was a well-defined category, shared across the academic, artisanal, and commercial aspects of instrumentation, and its narrative from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century was largely independent from (...) other classes of device, in a period when a “scientific” instrument was unheard of. (shrink)

I am interested in what main differences there are between Homo sapiens and other known terrestrial species, or (for short) between man and beast. We have a sense that we differ vastly from all the rest in some respect that is mental rather than grossly physical, but we are not agreed on what respect it is. This is my topic today. I shall bring in some work done in recent years by ethologists and animal psychologists. It is relevant less because (...) it provides news about the beasts than because it spurs our thinking about what we already think or intuit about the beasts and how they differ from us. That is really my topic: although we don’t agree in what we say about what mainly differentiates us from the other animals, I think we have the same picture of the difference, the same sense of what it is; and I want to know whether that shared picture, or intuition, can be parlayed into an agreed description. One proper study of humankind is ourselves; that includes our thoughts, which include our thoughts about what makes us special. I shall go on talking as though the question were: What is the difference? But really it is: What difference do we already think is there? Or, anyway: What difference can be known to obtain between us and them, on the basis of what we already know about us and about them? I am interested in differences of kind rather than of degree. If the final story is merely that we are more intelligent than the beasts are, that means that our common picture of how we relate to them is false. Mortimer Adler, in his book The Difference of Man and the Difference it Makes argues for a fundamental intellectual difference of kind between humans and other animals. Having identified me in that book as an ally, on the strength of my book Rationality, he wrote to me about the matter. During the correspondence that followed, I wrote that while I agreed with his conclusion, I didn’t hold it with such passion as he did, perhaps because I was sure that the difference between kind and degree is itself a difference of degree.. (shrink)

Kalevi Kull’s target article importantly rejects the argument from biological aesthetics, that beauty is a product of natural selection. Instead, beauty is a reflection of the ongoing diversity of free semiotic choosing and fitting. From this view, biosemiotic aesthetics could become the semiotic branch par excellence, in its theorization of the origins of what has always been the central interest of general semiotics. The narrow argument about sexual selection is couched inside the broader ambition to establish a biological but nonreductive (...) definition and scope for aesthetics itself. One of the most important services biosemiotics can provide to the larger community is to bestow upon it some really unifying general principles applicable to all branches of semiotics, and the theory of biosemiotic aesthetics promises to do just this. General semiotics may later adopt some of Kull’s present theorization and apply it to the textual concerns which Kull prefers to consign to other specialists. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAn influential view in recent philosophy of punishment is that the apparatus of criminal justice should be geared at least in part to state censure of wrongdoing. I argue that if it were to be so geared, such an apparatus would make ambitious claims to authority, and that the legitimacy of the relevant state would then depend on whether those claims can be vindicated. This paper looks first at what kind of authority is being claimed by this apparatus. The criminal (...) law, I argue, cannot merely be thought of as claiming a right to rule and to be obeyed. Rather, its authority is better understood as the authority of moral oversight: a power to alter, at will, citizens’ liability to answer for their compliance with—and to be officially censured for their failure to comply with—a designated set of pre-existing moral 7reasons. The paper then looks at whether a state could realistically be expected to possess such authority—that is, whether a state that claims to have such a power could ever be legitimate. (shrink)

The observed complexity of nature is often attributed to an intrinsic propensity of matter to self-organize under certain (e.g., dissipative) conditions. In order better to understand and test this vague thesis, we define complexity as “logical depth,” a notion based on algorithmic information and computational time complexity. Informally, logical depth is the number of steps in the deductive or causal path connecting a thing with its plausible origin. We then assess the effects of dissipation, noise, and spatial and other symmetries (...) of the initial conditions and equations of motion on the asymptotic complexity-generating abilities of statistical-mechanical model systems. We concentrate on discrete, spatially-homogeneous, locally-interacting systems such as kinetic Ising models and cellular automata. (shrink)

Peter Strawson’s “Freedom and Resentment” usefully connected the concepts of freedom and responsibility with the reactive attitudes, but there has been some controversy concerning both the nature of that connection and what the reactive attitudes are. I shall argue—tentatively and speculatively—that we can best understand the reactive attitudes by seeing them as individually presupposing and jointly constituting both our respect for persons and the dignity to which that respect is responsive. Consequently, being both a proper subject and object of the (...) reactive attitudes is to be a member of the normative community of fellow persons within which one both takes responsibility and is held responsible for what one does. This just is to be a responsible agent. (shrink)

Symposium on Christopher Bennet's The Apology Ritual. A Philosophical Theory of Punishment [Cambridge University Press, 2008].