With a discussion of Gridlock: Why Global Cooperation is Failing When We Need it Most. By Thom Hale, David Held, and Kevin Young. Guest editors Marcello Di Paola Pietro Maffettone Submission deadline Long abstract : 15 July, 2015 Full paper : […].

At the center of medical morality is the healing relationship. It is defined by three phenomena: the fact of illness, the act of profession, and the act of medicine. The first puts the patient in a vulnerable and dependent position; it results in an unequal relationship. The second implies a promise to help. The third involves those actions that will lead to a medically competent healing decision. But it must also be good for the patient in the fullest possible sense. (...) The physician cannot fully heal without giving the patient an understanding of alternatives such that he or she can freely arrive—together with the physician—at a decision in keeping with his or her personal morality and values. In today's pluralistic society, universal agreement on moral issues between physicians and patients is no longer possible. Nevertheless, a reconstruction of professional ethics based on a new appreciation of what makes for a true healing relationship between patient and physician is both possible and necessary. (shrink)

SummaryThe congruence between medicine and philosophy which we find in the Protagoras and the Treatise on Ancient Medicine as well as the tensions symbolized in the dialectic between Eryximachus and Diotima will always be with us. The congruence and the divergence of these ancient disciplines are both important to human well-being. By opposing one another, medicine and philosophy can each balance the other's pretension to universality. By converging, they illumine some of the most important questions of human existence. This essay (...) has examined ways in which medicine and philosophy can converge in our times as philosophy and medicine, philosophy in medicine, and philosophy of medicine. The present moment in our intellectual history is particularly propitious for the nurture of the engagement of medicine and philosophy. The most fruitful form of that interaction may be in the philosophy of medicine, which is a definable discipline with a set of issues specific to it. If the obvious intellectual dangers can be avoided, those who practice medicine, those who think about it, and those who are served by it can gain deeper insight into the nature and the purpose of medicine as well as the nature of the profession and of man himself. Perhaps—positioned as it is, at the intersection of the sciences, the humanities, and technology—medicine can become “… a medium and the focus in which the problems of wisdom and science meet” (Buchanan 1938, p. 194). (shrink)

: Artificial intelligences and robots increasingly mimic human mental powers and intelligent behaviour. However, many authors claim that ascribing human mental powers to them is both conceptually mistaken and morally dangerous. This article defends the view that artificial intelligences can have human-like mental powers, by claiming that both human and artificial minds can be seen as extended minds – along the lines of Chalmers and Clark’s view of mind and cognition. The main idea of this article is that the Extended (...) Mind Model is independently plausible and can easily be extended to artificial intelligences, providing a solid base for concluding that artificial intelligences possess minds. This may warrant viewing them as morally responsible agents. Keywords: Artificial Intelligence; Mind; Moral Responsibility; Extended Cognition Intelligenze artificiali come menti estese. Perché no? Riassunto: Intelligenze artificiali e robot simulano in misura sempre crescente le capacità mentali e i comportamenti intelligenti umani. Molti autori, tuttavia, sostengono che attribuire loro capacità mentali umane sia concettualmente errato e moralmente pericoloso. In questo lavoro si difende l’idea per cui le intelligenze artificiali possano avere capacità mentali simili a quelle umane, sostenendo che menti umane e artificiali possano essere considerate come menti estese – sulla scorta della prospettiva di Chalmers e Clark circa la mente e la cognizione. L’idea principale alla base di questo lavoro è che il Modello della Mente Estesa abbia plausibilità a prescindere e che possa essere facilmente esteso alle intelligenze artificiali, fornendo una base solida per concludere che le intelligenze artificiali possiedano delle menti e si possano considerare come agenti moralmente responsabili. Parole chiave: Intelligenza artificiale; Mente; Responsabilità morale; Conoscenza estesa. (shrink)

“Hence it is necessary for a Prince wishing to hold his own to know how to do wrong and to make use of it according to necessity.”—Machiavelli“Every state is a community of some kind and every community is established with a view to some good…”—Aristotle.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 62.3 (2001) 463-482 [Access article in PDF] The "Antiquarianization" of Biblical Scholarship and the London Polyglot Bible (1653-57) Peter N. Miller The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were the heroic age of the antiquaries. Roaming from text to context and back again, these scholars completed the revolution begun by the humanists who realized that Greek and Roman texts could never be understood isolated from (...) the men and societies that made them. These scholars, from Petrarch to Poggio, from Panvinio to Peiresc to Perizonius, looked beyond the page and collected, described, and compared the material remains of the ancient world. That these investigations transformed the understanding of the past and effected a revolution in the method of historical inquiry was insisted upon by Arnaldo Momigliano beginning half a century ago. 1 In recent years these antiquaries have also attracted the attention of historians of early modern art, science, archaeology, politics, and scholarship. 2 [End Page 463]This renewed focus on antiquaries as agents of late humanism has tended to concentrate on their contribution to understanding ancient Greece and Rome, but they were also responsible for the first generation of serious scholarship about the ancient and modern Near East. Drawing on the same methods to ask the same questions they had asked of classical antiquity these antiquaries directed their attention to the extra-European world. Like the study of the earlier Renaissance of Greece and Rome, that of Israel and Egypt was stimulated by a profusion of new materials, streaming back to scholars' studies from the missionaries, merchants, and diplomats traveling to the Ottoman East in greater and greater numbers. It is breadth of inquiry that characterizes this new approach--more texts in more languages--but also a much greater explanatory weight placed on objects as evidence and more confidence in using knowledge provided by people presently living in far-away places to shed light on those who lived there long ago. In this approach to a region and its culture as a whole early modern antiquaries created oriental studies.Because so much of the contemporary interest in the Near East was driven by the ingrained association of these lands and their peoples with the history narrated in the Bible, early oriental studies is inseparable from biblical scholarship. Pietro della Valle's letters from the East were, after all, signed "Il Pellegrino," and Fabri de Peiresc's efforts to recover the Samaritans and their history were triggered by his desire to contribute to the publication of their Pentateuch. It is because oriental studies like these were shaped by the ways and means of antiquaries that so much seventeenth-century biblical scholarship can be described as having been "antiquarianized." Like the earlier humanists who had given Virgil and Horace a context, those fascinated and obsessed with understanding every jot and tittle of the sacred text turned to the Bible's context for help: the history of the ancient Near East as it could be reconstructed from texts, objects, and the long-lived traditions preserved by marginal groups like the Samaritans or in out of the way places like the Coptic monasteries of Wadi Natrûn. This antiquarianization reflects the move from the word to the world that had begun with Petrarch. Early modern sacred philologists--the Englishman Thomas Fuller called this figure "The True Church Antiquary"--set out to prove, by the most sophisticated methods available, that sacred history was historical.At the heart of this inquiry lay a belief in historia sacra, understood as both a theory of providential history and a methodology of historical scholarship. The theory gave them the confidence to pursue with reason the truth of revelation because all had to reflect the plan of the One Creator. The practice encouraged scholars to recruit the evidence of history, philosophy, archaeology, and geography to the service of the sacred, all confirming the triumph of Christianity. They [End Page 464] were convinced that erudition could only amplify, and not undermine, the conclusions already reached by faith. 3 It was this... (shrink)

We start from, and expand on, a basic insight in negative dialectic, namely, that our main concern should be with the absolute worst in political life. We then consider how this might have an impact on the way we understand the role and grounds of moral equality. Subsequently, we move on to explain the importance of decency in political morality. Finally, we take a closer look to basic data about global poverty and inequality and what these might tell us in (...) light of our analysis of the foundations of moral equality and its relationship to social cruelty. (shrink)

The complex organization of syntax in hierarchical structures is one of the core design features of human language. Duality of patterning refers, for instance, to the organization of the meaningful elements in a language at two distinct levels: a combinatorial level, where meaningless forms are combined into meaningful forms; and a compositional level, where meaningful forms are composed into larger lexical units. The question remains wide open regarding how such structures could have emerged. The aim of this paper is to (...) address these two aspects in a self-consistent way. First, we introduce suitable measures to quantify the level of combinatoriality and compositionality in a language, and we present a framework to estimate these observables in human natural languages. Second, we show that a recently introduced multi-agent modeling scheme, namely the Blending Game, provides a mathematical framework to address the problem of how a population of individuals can bootstrap combinatoriality and compositionality. Theoretical predictions based on this model turn out to be in good agreement with empirical data. It is remarkable that the two sides of duality of patterning emerge simultaneously as a consequence of a pure cultural dynamics in a simulated environment that contains meaningful relations, provided a simple constraint on message transmission fidelity is also considered. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The paper shows textual and non-textual evidence that Henry Sidgwick endorses a version of the guise of the good doctrine and a version of the guise of the reasons view. He also rejects the guise of the pleasant doctrine, criticizing Mill’s views of the relations between pleasure, desire and desirability. Sidgwick also anticipates the guise of the apparent good view, i.e. the claim that desire connects with evaluative appearances, not with evaluative full-fledged judgments.

Le volume rassemble 25 études concernant la cosmologie médiévale, abordée à travers ses diverses composantes, à l’intérieur d’une fourchette chronologique allant de Calcidius jusqu’au XIVe siècle. Dix contributions sont consacrées à des questions de cosmologie hébraïque et islamique, traitant en particulier de Gersonide (R. Gatti), Maïmonide (L. Pepi), Avicenne (C. Di Martino, O. Lizzini), Sohravardî (I. Panzeca), Qûnawî (P. Spallino), les Frères de la Pureté (C. Baffioni) ainsi qu’aux interférences qui existent entre moyen âge islamique et latin : la grande (...) question de la cosmologie alchimique (M. Pereira), des textes traduits comme le De secretis naturae (P. Travaglia), la doctrine de la grande année dans Thebit et Pietro d’Abano (F. Seller). Les travaux de E.S. Mainoldi et de R. Gambino consacrent une large place à l’influence de la patristique grecque sur la pensée occidentale. D’autres études présentent le développement de la pensée cosmologique et scientique latine à partir de Calcidius (C. Militello), par l’intermédiaire d’Adélard de Bath (P. Palmeri), de Guillaume de Conches (G. Pellegrino) et d’autres documents divers (A. Tarabochia Canavero) jusqu’à l’avènement de l’aristotélisme physique, en particulier dans les commentaires universitaires aux Météorologiques (G. Fioravanti), au De caelo (C.A. Musatti, A. Vella) et chez Dante (M. Gallarino, P. Falzone). Quant à la littérature scientifique en langue vulgaire, elle est représentée par Restoro d’Arezzo (U. Villani-Lubelli) et Raymond Lull (J.Gayà). La communication de G. Alliney est dédiée à des questions de méthode historiographique, tandis que la contribution magistrale de Tullio Gregory sur “Cosmogonie et cosmologies chrétiennes” reconstitue de manière idéale l’ensemble des liens constituant les coordonnées générales de l’ensemble de la problématique abordée sous ses différentes facettes par les auteurs du volume. (shrink)

Effective altruism is committed to Altruistic Maximization – the claim that any impact of giving to charities ought to be maximized at the margins and counterfactually. This may lead to counterintuitive or contradictory conclusions in certain cases. For instance, when we can bring about a substantial benefit to few or a tiny benefit to a larger number at the same cost, spreading of benefits across a great number of recipients can compensate substantial loss for fewer people. However, sometimes the perspective (...) of widely spreading tiny benefits instead than giving substantial benefits to small groups is counterintuitive, and repugnantly wrong. Call this the ‘Altruistic Repugnant Conclusion.’ Standard solutions to the Repugnant Conclusion do not work if applied to the Altruistic Repugnant Conclusion. The Altruistic Repugnant Conclusion can be rebutted by giving up on the idea that judgements on such cases should be precise. But imprecision undermines Altruistic Maximization. Hence a dilemma for effective altruists follows: either they accept some strongly counterintuitive judgments—weakening the attractiveness of their position—or they give up on the maximizing requirement, thus admitting sub-optimal contributions. (shrink)

The first interpretations of Kant’s unfinished work, the so-called Opus postumum, occur almost exclusively within German Neo-Kantianism . The central point of discussion focuses on the relationship between transcendental idealism and empirical realism in Kant’s late thought. Some Neokantians regard the final development of Kant’s philosophy as a radical form of idealism, either a fictionalism or a scientific idealism . Several interpreters attribute the theory of the so-called “double affection” to the Kant of the Opus postumum. Krause tries instead to (...) match transcendental idealism and empirical realism. The aim of this paper is to present and discuss this debate. (shrink)

Hall’s monograph aims to demonstrate that Kant’s Opus postumum fills a crucial gap in Kant’s critical philosophy concerning the notion of substance in the analogies of experience from the Critique of Pure Reason. It is organized into an introduction, five chapters and a short recapitulatory conclusion.The first chapter argues that Kant, in the analogies of experience, uses two mutually irreducible notions of substance: the first refers to the plurality of “relatively enduring empirical objects”; the second is the notion of a (...) singular “sempiternal and omnipresent Substance”. As the category of substance suits only the “substances,” Kant needs a complementary a priori concept of substance that fits.. (shrink)

The article has two aims. First, it provides a view of why the standard liberal-democratic political theory is unfit for the Anthropocene. Then, it defends two claims: that the fittest politics for the Anthropocene is to be fully non-anthropocentric and that the best model of a non-anthropocentric political theory is to be grounded in the notion of ‘ecological citizenship’, which can be easily extended to non-human living beings and even to non-living objects, such as ecosystems. The latter claim is defended (...) by endorsing and enlarging Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka’s views of animal citizenship rights and by putting forward a view of the Anthropocene as an age of massive domestication of non-human nature. (shrink)

The main claim of this paper is that, contrary to the received view, Ross’ doctrine of resultance does not provide a premise in favour of non-naturalism, but rather makes possible a viable form of non-reductionist naturalism. This is argued mainly by viewing resultance as constitution, where resultant properties are constituted by those natural properties from which they result. Accordingly, resultant properties and their constitutive properties can be viewed as placed in the same ontological realm. However, to rule out reductionism, constitution (...) is to be considered as not implying identity. Some arguments in favour of this view of constitution, above all in the moral realm, are presented in the last sections. (shrink)