Many want to know what bitcoin is and how it works. But bitcoin is as complex as it is controversial, and relatively few have the technical background to understand it. In this paper, I offer an accessible on-ramp for understanding bitcoin in the form of a model. My model reveals both what bitcoin is and how it works. More specifically, it reveals that bitcoin is a fictional substance in a massively coauthored story on a network that automates and (...) distributes jobs normally entrusted to centralized publishing institutions. My model therefore falsifies a popular view according to which each bitcoin is a chunk of code. (shrink)

We set out a fundamental ontology of atomism in terms of matter points. While being most parsimonious, this ontology is able to match both classical and quantum mechanics, and it remains a viable option for any future theory of cosmology that goes beyond current quantum physics. The matter points are structurally individuated: all there is to them are the spatial relations in which they stand; neither a commitment to intrinsic properties nor to an absolute space is required. The spatial relations (...) change. All that is needed to capture change is a dynamical structure, namely dynamical relations as expressed in terms of the dynamical parameters of a physical theory. (shrink)

This article reviews the literature on Holocaust and genocide studies to consider the question, ‘what is the sex doing in the genocide?’ Of the three answers usually given: sexual violence is like other forms of genocidal violence, sexual violence is a coordinate in genocide and sexual violence is integral to genocidal violence, the author argues for the third position, but takes issue with Catharine MacKinnon’s claim that sexual violence destroys women as a group, thereby destroying the ethnic, racial, religious, (...) or national group to which women belong. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s concept of natality, the author argues that sexual violence is an attack on a fundamental condition for the possibility of the existence of human groups. When political violence is used to force biological birth in the service of death, it is a form of thanatonatality. (shrink)

Background: The field of clinical ethics is examining ways of determining competency. The Assessing Clinical Ethics Skills (ACES) tool offers a new approach that identifies a range of skills necessary in the conduct of clinical ethics consultation and provides a consistent framework for evaluating these skills. Through a training website, users learn to apply the ACES tool to clinical ethics consultants (CECs) in simulated ethics consultation videos. The aim is to recognize competent and incompetent clinical ethics consultation skills by watching (...) and evaluating a videotaped CEC performance. We report how we set a criterion cut score (i.e., minimally acceptable score) for judging the ability of users of the ACES tool to evaluate simulated CEC performances.Methods: A modified Angoff standard-setting procedure was used to establish the cut score for an end-of-life case included on the ACES training website. The standard-setting committee viewed the Futility Case and estimated the probability that a minimally competent CEC would correctly answer each item on the ACES tool. The committee further adjusted these estimates by reviewing data from 31 pilot users of the Futility Case before determining the cut score.Results: Averaging over all 31 items, the proposed proportion correct score for minimal competency was 80%, corresponding to a cut score that is between 24 and 25 points out of 31 possible points. The standard-setting committee subsequently set the minimal competency cut score to 24 points.Conclusions: The cut score for the ACES tool identifies the number of correct responses a user of the ACES tool training website must attain to “pass” and reach minimal competency in recognizing competent and incompetent skills of the CECs in the simulated ethics consultation videos. The application of the cut score to live training of CECs and other areas of practice requires further investigation. (shrink)

Kenneth C. Schaffner's paper is an important contribution to the literature on behavioral genetics and on genetics in general. Schaffner has a long record of injecting real molecular biology into philosophical discussions of genetics. His treatments of the reduction of Mendelian to molecular genetics first drew philosophical attention to the problems of detail that have fuelled both anti-reductionism and more sophisticated models of theory reduction. An injection of molecular detail into discussions of genetics is particularly necessary at the present time, (...) when so many philosophers seem happy to discuss the philosophical and ethical implications of molecular biology using gene concepts derived from evolutionary biology ). Schaffner has long advocated the view that the philosophy of biology should be more than the philosophy of evolution. This paper shows how radically a picture of gene action derived from molecular biology undercuts the popular picture associated with a more evolutionary view of genes as units of heredity or as ‘difference-makers’ mediated by the ‘black box’ of development. (shrink)

The main intention of the notes composing this book is to present Claude Lefort's reflection on the political as an insightful combination of premises drawn from phenomenological as well as classical sources. From this perspective, this book especially brings out an important compatibility between the Lefortean phenomenological elucidation of the political and Leo Strauss' recovery of the Socratic-Platonic view of political philosophy, one made possible by the pre-scientific, interpretive notion of regime, or politeia, they share.

The argument of this paper suggests that for the last hundred years or so fundamental premisses of logic have been incorrect. From these premisses a vast superstructure has been developed which, it would seem, is no more meaningful than a game such as chess.The basic errors in current class theory, it seems to me, have impeded progress in the fields of mathematics and logic. I am certain that on the theory proposed, the correct definition of a natural number can be (...) provided. I can, in fact, provide this. What benefits it will bring to logic only time will tell.Of the greatest importance is the fact that if the theory is true, at last, there will be a firm link between the Humanities and the Sciences. (shrink)

Historians and biologists identify the debate between mechanists and vitalists over the nature of life itself with the arguments of Driesch, Loeb, and other prominent voices. But what if the conversation was broader and the consequences deeper for the field? Following the suspicions of Joseph Needham in the 1930s and Francis Crick in the 1960s, we deployed tools of the digital humanities to an old problem in the history of biology. We analyzed over 31,000 peer-reviewed scientific papers and learned (...) that bioexceptionalism participated in a robust discursive landscape throughout subfields of the life sciences, occupied even by otherwise unknown biologists. (shrink)

This chapter provide an introductory portrait of global media ethics as an evolving discipline in broad strokes—its motivating questions, its distinct concerns and methods, how the discipline is related to other forms of ethics, and why we need a global media ethics. Since our global world is linked by many forms of media, the chapter argues that we need an accompanying global media ethics that challenges the use of media to promote racism, xenophobia, extreme nationalism, and the denial of human (...) rights. The chapter explores the types of research and writing that comprise global media ethics and concludes with an outline of how a global media ethics can be realized in practice. (shrink)

Research on the cognitive consequences of bilingualism typically proceeds by labeling participants as “monolingual” or “bilingual” and comparing performance on some measures across these groups. It is well-known that this approach has led to inconsistent results. However, the approach assumes that there are clear criteria to designate individuals as monolingual or bilingual, and more fundamentally, to determine whether a communication system counts as a unique language. Both of these assumptions may not be correct. The problem is particularly acute when participants (...) are asked to classify themselves or simply report how many languages they speak. Participants' responses to these questions are shaped by their personal perceptions of the criteria for making these judgments. This study investigated the perceptions underlying judgments of bilingualism by asking 528 participants to judge the extent to which a description of a fictional linguistic system constitutes a unique language and the extent to which a description of a fictional individual's linguistic competence qualifies that person as bilingual. The results show a range of responses for both concepts, indicating substantial ambiguity for these terms. Moreover, participants were asked to self-classify as monolingual or bilingual, and these decisions were not related to more objective information regarding the degree of bilingual experience obtained from a detailed questionnaire. These results are consistent with the notion that bilingualism is not categorical and that specific language experiences are important in determining the criteria for being bilingual. The results impact interpretations of research investigating group differences on the cognitive effects of bilingualism. (shrink)

The goal of this thesis to defend the philosophical view of the new ante rem substantivism against its supposed alternatives. To achieve such goal, we will present four views about the nature of laws, two kinds of realism and two kinds of anti-realism, and evaluate them critically. The disadvantages from those theories are going to be presented for us to show that they are insufficient to provide a metaphysics that is able to explain the world's counterfactuality, universality, and regularity, and (...) that just one form of realism, the new ante rem substantivism, can. This goal is important because the concept of laws of nature is widely used in many areas of science and philosophy, and because according to the view we accept, the laws may fulfill some theoretical roles, and not others. We intent to show that the new ante rem substantivism's laws are able to fulfill the roles that scientists would hope the natural laws to fulfill. (shrink)

Quasi-realists argue that meta-ethical expressivism is fully compatible with the central assumptions underlying ordinary moral practice. In a recent paper, Andy Egan has developed a vexing challenge for this project, arguing that expressivism is incompatible with central assumptions about error in moral judgments. In response, Simon Blackburn has argued that Egan's challenge fails, because Egan reads the expressivist as giving an account of moral error, rather than an account of judgments about moral error. In this paper I argue that the (...) challenge can be reinstated, even if we focus only on the expressivist's account of judgments about moral error. (shrink)

There is an argument often deployed by those who object to the rapid advances in technology, whether in agriculture and animal husbandry or in medicine, that some procedure is ‘unnatural’, and therefore should not be actually prohibited. An attempt is made to analyse and appraise the moral force, if any, of the dichotomy ‘natural’/‘unnatural’, especially in the area of assisted conception. The emotional resonances of the concept of Nature are partially explored, and found to be deep-seated and various, but not (...) of themselves the source of moral imperatives. Footnotes1 Royal Institute of Philosophy Annual Lecture, 2002. (shrink)

The classic action-effect (Kahneman & Tversky, 1982a) describes a phenomenon in which people associate stronger emotional regret with negative outcomes when the outcomes are a result of an action c...

The dialectic discourse of the ‘gene’ as the unit of heredity deduced from the phenotype, whether an intervening variable or a hypothetical construct, appeared to be settled with the presentation of the molecular model of DNA: the gene was reduced to a sequence of DNA that is transcribed into RNA that is translated into a polypeptide; the polypeptides may fold into proteins that are involved in cellular metabolism and structure, and hence function. This path turned out to be more bewildering (...) the more the regulation of products and functions were uncovered in the contexts of integrated cellular systems. Philosophers struggling to define a unified concept of the gene as the basic entity of genetics confronted those who suggested several different ‘genes’ according to the conceptual frameworks of the experimentalists. Researchers increasingly regarded genes de facto as generic terms for describing their empiric data, and with improved DNA-sequencing capacities these entities were as a rule bottom-up nucleotide sequences that determine functions. Only recently did empiricists return to discuss conceptual considerations, including top-down definitions of units of function that through cellular mechanisms select the DNA sequences which comprise ‘genomic-footprints’ of functional entities. (shrink)