The present paper aims to validate our research on human–humanoid interaction (HHI) using the minimalist humanoid robot Telenoid. We conducted the human–robot interaction test with 142 young people who had no prior interaction experience with this robot. The main goal is the analysis of the two social dimensions (‘‘Perception’’ and ‘‘Believability’’) useful for increasing the natural behaviour between users and Telenoid.Weadministered our custom questionnaire to human subjects in association with a well defined experimental setting (‘‘ordinary and goal-guided task’’). A thorough (...) analysis of the questionnaires has been carried out and reliability and internal consistency in correlation between the multiple items has been calculated. Our experimental results show that the perceptual behaviour and believability, as implicit social competences, could improve the meaningfulness and the natural-like sense of human–humanoid interaction in everyday life task-driven activities. Telenoid is perceived as an autonomous cooperative agent for a shared environment by human beings. (shrink)

I am very pleased to see the response by J S Taylor to my critique of the “organs debate”. He makes some notable and important points, but also some errors to which attention should be drawn.Taylor erroneously attributes to me concern that the organ debate excessively focuses on saving the lives of a few people. My concern was about the narrow framework within which the debate is embedded and that it focuses on the lives of a few privileged people—those who (...) can pay—while largely neglecting the lives of those who cannot. The fact that some attention has been paid to such issues in some journals does not negate the importance of my claim. Moreover, it is not that the question of millions of premature deaths has …. (shrink)

Tara Smith's book on Rand's ethics is reviewed by Stephen Hicks for *Philosophy in Review.*.

Part of the accepted scholarly lore about Kierkegaard is that he holds that “existence”—human existence—and “the System” are mutually incompatible. For Kierkegaard, human being cannot be understood in terms of a nice, neat, complete systematic package; he shows, on this view, that the Hegelian attempt to grasp all of reality in terms of a philosophical system will always fail to grasp the reality of at least one thing: the concrete, living, existing individual human being.

In this response to Jeff Pflug’s review of my dissertation Michael Polanyi’s Integrative Philosophy, I note that Pflug focused on my discussion of possible extension of Polanyi’s epistemology; he has also taken my statements on scientific truth out of context. In addition, he ignored the four major elements of the dissertation, thereby not giving the reader a “map” to the meaning and the rationale of the work – an intellectual biography of Polanyi.

Besides the observable properties it exhibits and the actual processes it undergoes, a thing is full of threats and promises. The dispositions or capacities of a thing — its flexibility, its inflammability, its solubility — are no less important to us than its overt behaviour, but they strike us by comparison as rather ethereal. And so we are moved to inquire whether we can bring them down to earth; whether, that is, we can explain disposition terms without any reference to (...) occult powers. (shrink)

Appreciation of M.N. Roy, 1893-1954, radical humanist; transcript of the 1983 M.N. Roy lecture delivered at the Indian Renaissance Institute, Dehradun.

Following promulgation of the Nuremberg code in 1947, the ethics of research on human subjects has been a challenging and often contentious topic of debate. Escalation in the use of research participants in low-income countries over recent decades , has intensified the debate on the ethics of international research and led to increasing attention both to exploitation of vulnerable subjects and to considerations of how the 10:90 gap in health and medical research could be narrowed. In 2000, prompted by the (...) discussions over several years that led to the US NIH launching a capacity building programme on research ethics for members of research ethics committees in developing countries, we advanced a ‘new look’ for the ethics of international research.1 Since then progress has been made on several fronts.First, our ideas—considered somewhat radical and impractical at the time—have been provocatively addressed by scholars who have either contested them or advanced similar conceptions of what obligations international researchers have to research participants and communities in low income countries before, during and after clinical trials. Second, those researchers who have been sympathetic to our ideas have either endeavoured to put these into practice or have investigated the feasibility of doing so. Third, the intractability of the 10/90 gap and the escalation of interest in global health have sensitised many to the need to amplify the uptake of these ideas in practice.Here, we briefly review the conceptual and practical developments in international research ethics. While much conceptual progress has been made (and the concepts are now appearing …. (shrink)