Neste artigo, pretendo explicitar o papel da lógica formal no projeto crítico kantiano. No tratamento dessa questão, abordarei a relação entre a lógica formal, frequentemente chamada por Kant de lógica geral, e a lógica transcendental. Assumirei a tese de que a lógica formal e a lógica transcendental são duas ciências racionais puras, distintas, independentes, porém, com conexões entre si, a despeito das leituras que sugerem que a lógica transcendental substitua a lógica formal ou que a lógica formal mantenha a sua (...) existência, devendo, no entanto, ser subordinada à lógica transcendental. Na caracterização da lógica formal, utilizarei, sobretudo, a Jäsche-Logik. Quanto à lógica transcendental, exposta na Kritik der reinen Vernunft, irei me servir da leitura semântica de Loparic para tratar do conhecimento metafísico da natureza. Inicio o artigo apontando a proximidade de Kant com a lógica formal e o seu emprego na elaboração do projeto crítico. (shrink)

Implicações da noção de consciência histórica nas ciências humanas e sociais: um modo de projeção para o futuro e de posição em relação ao passado Resumo: O presente texto, de caráter bibliográfico, discute o problema da consciência histórica com o objetivo de pensar o sentido dessa expressão na atualidade e as variações que esse conceito adquiriu ao longo da história das Ciências Humanas e Sociais, com ênfase no século XX. A hipótese é que a discussão a respeito da consciência histórica (...) passou a se ocupar, na modernidade, com uma múltipla relatividade de pontos de vista, o que é destacado por Gadamer em sua análise sobre os preceitos implicados na definição do que significa “ter senso histórico”. É defendida a tese, portanto, de que a noção de consciência histórica não se limita ao conhecimento das experiências vivenciadas no passado, mas se apresenta como condição de possibilidade de projetar o futuro e se posicionar em relação ao passado, especialmente no que diz respeito às ciências humanas e sociais. A defesa desta ideia central é realizada por meio de dois gestos reflexivos, com apresentação, primeiramente, do marco teórico da consciência histórica e, posteriormente, de suas implicações na constituição das Ciências Humanas e Sociais. Palavras-chave: Ciências humanas e sociais. Senso histórico. Passado. Futuro. Implications of the notion of historical consciousness in human and social sciences: a mode of projection for the future and position in relation to the past: This bibliographic text discusses the problem of historical consciousness with the purpose of thinking about the meaning of this expression in the present time and the variations that this concept has acquired throughout the history of the Humanities and Social Sciences, with emphasis on the twentieth century. The hypothesis is that the discussion about historical consciousness has come to concern itself, in modernity, with a multiple relativity of points of view, which is highlighted by Gadamer in his analysis of the precepts involved in defining what “having a historical sense” means. Therefore, the thesis that the notion of historical consciousness is not limited to the knowledge of past experiences is defended, but is presented as a condition of possibility of projecting the future and positioning itself in relation to the past, especially with regard to humanities and social sciences. The defense of this central idea is made through two reflexive gestures, presenting, first, the theoretical framework of historical consciousness and, later, its implications in the constitution of the Human and Social Sciences. Keywords: Human and social sciences. Historical sense. Past. Future. Implicaciones de la noticia de conciencia histórica en las ciencias humanas y sociales: un modo de proyección para el futuro y de posición en relación al pasado Resumen: El presente texto, de carácter bibliográfico, discute el problema de la conciencia histórica con el propósito de pensar sobre el significado de esta expresión en la actualidad y las variaciones que este concepto ha adquirido a lo largo de la historia de las Humanidades y las Ciencias Sociales, con énfasis en el siglo XX. La hipótesis es que la discusión sobre la conciencia histórica ha llegado a ocuparse, en la modernidad, de una relatividad múltiple de puntos de vista, que Gadamer destaca en su análisis de los preceptos involucrados en la definición de lo que significa “tener un sentido histórico”. " Por lo tanto, se defiende la tesis de que la noción de conciencia histórica no se limita al conocimiento de experiencias pasadas, sino que se presenta como una condición de posibilidad de proyectar el futuro y posicionarse en relación con el pasado, especialmente con respecto a humanidades y ciencias sociales. La defensa de esta idea central se realiza a través de dos gestos reflexivos, presentando, primero, el marco teórico de la conciencia histórica y, luego, sus implicaciones en la constitución de las Ciencias Humanas y Sociales. Palabras clave: Ciencias Humanas y Sociales. Sentido histórico. Pasado. Futuro. Data de registro: 28/05/2019 Data de aceite: 24/10/2019. (shrink)

O presente artigo busca fazer uma análise do papel das questões metodológicas no primeiro escrito publicado por Kant. Iniciamos com a apresentação dos preceitos práticos de pesquisa do jovem Kant e da problemática das forças vivas; depois, analisamos o método propagado por Kant enquanto o principal recurso para a solução da polêmica e a sua origem no método de Mairan. Na sequência, expomos os pressupostos metodológicos sobre os quais Kant construiu a sua solução para os problemas das forças vivas; por (...) fim, fazemos um paralelo do método de 1747 em relação ao do _Preisschrift_ de 1764, considerado o principal escrito pré-crítico de Kant sobre o método. (shrink)

A presença, ainda que parcial, do procedimento categorial no direito privado em Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Rechtslehre é inegável, assim como a sua importância para a construçáo da teoria da posse. Uma prova adicional aos próprios fragmentos da primeira parte do direito natural (cf. MS R, AB 59, 79, 82, 90, 93, 119-121) sáo os esboços categoriais contidos nos Manuscritos da Rechtslehre (particularmente, em Vorarbeiten zum Privatrecht e em Zusammenhängender, signierter Entwurf in Kant's handschriflicher Nachlaß ). Os objetivos desse artigo sáo: (...) 1) expor a coerência interna entre os esboços categoriais do direito privado presentes em Vorarbeiten zur Rechtslehre , e 2) apresentar a correspondência entre esses esboços e o texto jurídico de 1797. O parâmetro de avaliaçáo e de comparaçáo seráo as observações kantianas quanto às categorias nas obras Kritik der reinen Vernunft e Kritik der praktischen Vernunft . Palavras-chave: Arbítrio livre, Categorias, Direito, Liberdade, Posse. (shrink)

In this article we assume that the kantian a priori juridical-political theory can be reconstructed according to the a priori synthetic satisfiability proof theory, initially declared in Kritik der reinen Vernunft and extended to practical domain in Kritik der praktischen Vernunft. In particular, it is assumed that the aim to prove that synthetic judgments, such as “this object of external usage is mine”, can a priori invigorate in private law and public law in general – from the determination of their (...) possibility conditions in the executable actions domain by the free human agent – was carried out in Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Rechtslehre. In what concerns the demonstration of the effectiveness of the law a priori synthetic judgments Kantian theory, i.e., to decide which juridical proposals actually invigorate or not, accepted that this work was not treated on a systematic way by the philosopher Königsberg. There are fragments, spread through many works. Therefore, the task to be developed in this article, aiming to present a field of effectiveness to the law doctrine, is to organize (synthetically) Kant´s statements about politics as a law doctrine exercise, according to the proof theory problems from the a priori synthetic proposals in general. (shrink)

Neste artigo interpreta-se a Rechtslehre kantiana enquanto uma doutrina jurídica crítica, compreensível à luz do projeto crítico – iniciado em Kritik der reinen Vernunft e adaptado ao campo prático em Kritik der praktischen Vernunft . Em particular, objetiva-se destacar, além da aprioridade, do caráter sistemático e da busca pela completude dos princípios jurídicos, o emprego da teoria de solubilidade de problemas da razáo em geral nos "prolegômenos" da Rechtslehre . O estudo desta parte introdutória se justifica por apresentar a divisáo (...) suprema do sistema segundo princípios, donde se deriva uma divisáo da doutrina do direito, que determina o objeto ( Gegenstand ) e, por conseguinte, o campo dessa ciência particular e a discussáo do procedimento de pesquisa. Tal moldura a priori da doutrina do direito é o fundamento da sequente teoria kantiana do direito privado e do direito público. Num quadro maior, esse artigo pode ser compreendido enquanto uma renúncia à leitura de que a Rechtslehr e kantiana náo cumpre com as exigências da filosofia crítica – formulada por Hermann Cohen ( Ethik des reinen Willens , 1904) e detalhada por Christian Ritter ( Der Rechtsgedanke Kants nach den frühen Quellen , 1971). (shrink)

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/1808-1711.2012v16n1p1 A teoria darwinista tem contribuído para a discussão de problemas nos mais diversos campos filosóficos, entre os quais se inclui a ética e a teoria moral. A sociobiologia e a psicologia evolucionista elucidaram muitos aspectos do comportamento social de diversas espécies animais, a partir de mecanismos como a seleção de parentesco e o altruísmo recíproco que, contudo, são insuficientes para explicar a cooperação no caso humano. Como alternativa, a teoria da dupla herança busca explicar o comportamento humano considerando tanto (...) a biologia quanto as ciências sociais. Segundo esta abordagem, a psicologia social humana é caracterizada por instintos sociais tribais e marcadores simbólicos, que resultam em uma mente que pressupõe princípios morais inatos e universais, selecionados para a vida em grupos orientados por normas sociais, mas que são plasticamente moldados à realidade cultural de cada sociedade. (shrink)

One important limitation of the current renditions of interpretivism is that its emphasis on the moral dimension of sport has overlooked the aesthetic dimension lying at the core of this account of sport. The interpretivist’s failure to acknowledge and consider the aesthetic implicitly distances this realm from the moral. Marcia Muelder Eaton calls this distancing the separatist mistake. This paper argues that interpretivism presupposes not only moral but also aesthetic principles and values. What it sets out to demonstrate is that (...) interpretivism is an integralist, or nonseparatist, account of sport, one in which ethical and aesthetic values are not exclusive. Making explicit and specifying interpretivism’s combined moral-aesthetic approach to sport not only helps to better distinguish the whole range of values that make up sport as well as their interconnection but also encourages sportspeople to pursue more coherent sport and, thus, more enriching lives. (shrink)

In this paper I critically evaluate the value neutrality thesis regarding technology, and find it wanting. I then introduce the various ways in which artifacts can come to influence moral value, and our evaluation of moral situations and actions. Here, following van de Poel and Kroes, I introduce the idea of value sensitive design. Specifically, I show how by virtue of their designed properties, artifacts may come to embody values. Such accounts, however, have several shortcomings. In agreement with Michael Klenk, (...) I raise epistemic and metaphysical issues with respect to designed properties embodying value. The concept of an affordance, borrowed from ecological psychology, provides a more philosophically fruitful grounding to the potential way(s) in which artifacts might embody values. This is due to the way in which it incorporates key insights from perception more generally, and how we go about determining possibilities for action in our environment specifically. The affordance account as it is presented by Klenk, however, is insufficient. I therefore argue that we understand affordances based on whether they are meaningful, and, secondly, that we grade them based on their force. (shrink)

The aim of this thesis is to advance a philosophically justifiable account of Artificial Moral Agency (AMA). Concerns about the moral status of Artificial Intelligence (AI) traditionally turn on questions of whether these systems are deserving of moral concern (i.e. if they are moral patients) or whether they can be sources of moral action (i.e. if they are moral agents). On the Organic View of Ethical Status, being a moral patient is a necessary condition for an entity to qualify as (...) a moral agent. This view claims that because artificial agents (AAs) lack sentience, they cannot be proper subjects of moral concern and hence cannot be considered to be moral agents. I raise conceptual and epistemic issues with regards to the sense of sentience employed on this view, and I argue that the Organic View does not succeed in showing that machines cannot be moral patients. Nevertheless, irrespective of this failure, I also argue that the entire project is misdirected in that moral patiency need not be a necessary condition for moral agency. Moreover, I claim that whereas machines may conceivably be moral patients in the future, there is a strong case to be made that they are (or will very soon be) moral agents. Whereas it is often argued that machines cannot be agents simpliciter, let alone moral agents, I claim that this argument is predicated on a conception of agency that makes unwarranted metaphysical assumptions even in the case of human agents. Once I have established the shortcomings of this “standard account”, I move to elaborate on other, more plausible, conceptions of agency, on which some machines clearly qualify as agents. Nevertheless, the argument is still often made that while some machines may be agents, they cannot be moral agents, given their ostensible lack of the requisite phenomenal states. Against this thesis, I argue that the requirement of internal states for moral agency is philosophically unsound, as it runs up against the problem of other minds. In place of such intentional accounts of moral agency, I provide a functionalist alternative, which makes conceptual room for the existence of AMAs. The implications of this thesis are that at some point in the future we may be faced with situations for which no human being is morally responsible, but a machine may be. Moreover, this responsibility holds, I claim, independently of whether the agent in question is “punishable” or not. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Secrecy and Autonomy in Lewis CarrollSusan ShererVictorian novels quiver with morbid secrets and threatening discoveries. Unseen rooms, concealed doors, hidden boxes, masked faces, buried letters, all appear (and disappear) with striking regularity in the fiction of Victorian England. So many of these secret spaces contain children, and especially little girls, little girls in hidden spaces. The young Jane Eyre sits behind a curtain in the hidden window seat, escaping (...) the vindictive wrath of John Reed. Repulsed by her angry brother, Maggie Tulliver flees to the house attic, fantasizing that her family will fear that she has died. Little Dorrit withdraws from the common space of the Marshalsea into her private room above the prison, and Little Nell hides behind trees and walls, silently observing clandestine meetings. Finally the seven-year-old Alice falls down a rabbit-hole into a Wonderland, the dreamspace of her own psyche.Of these images, none can be more embedded in our cultural imagination than the child Alice dropping into the subterranean well of Wonderland. Indeed, of the many celebrated scenes in the Alice narratives, the most memorable, most potent, most quoted is Alice’s initial descent to the bottom of the rabbit-hole. The lastingness of this scene seems even greater when we realize that, although neither Carroll in Alice’s Adventures Underground nor Tenniel in the first edition of Wonderland illustrated the moment with a picture, it still became (along with the Mad Hatter’s tea party) one of the signature images of the Alice stories. Why, we must ask, did the Victorians retain, with a powerful tenacity, this vision of a little girl moving through a tight space toward the hidden world of Wonderland?The answer to this question is not—at least not wholly—that the scene simply represents a child’s metaphorical progress through the [End Page 1] birth canal 1 and that this, in turn, symbolizes some kind of rite of passage, a movement towards some deeper knowledge. For then how do we explain Alice’s conspicuous lack of internal development in both stories? Indeed, for a narrative that thematizes motion, Alice’s psychical growth remains disturbingly static. Throughout both narratives, Alice displays little emotional variation, for when she is not frustrated or anxious, she is, for the most part, vapid or expressionless. In fact, one is immediately struck by her coolness and indifference as she drops through the rabbit-hole. 2 Thus, because scene changes in Wonderland and Looking-Glass rarely betoken any emotional or intellectual modulations, Alice’s falling into Wonderland signals no internal transition.But the image does relocate her body and within this fictive world, location is everything. The scene gestures Alice’s departure, her separation, her movement towards an autonomy of which every child dreams when, in play, retreating to a hidden space. A child’s impulse to hide, to create a secret space, is one of the most compelling of all human wishes, the wish for autonomy and autarchy—“to be cut off from the word and yet owner of the world.” 3 Throughout Victorian literature, the fantasy of autonomy sets children dreaming of far-away worlds and hidden gardens. The young Cathy and Heathcliff flee to the isolated moors, filling the open, empty space with dreams of unrestricted freedom. Little Dorrit envisages the locked garden behind the Marshalsea as an alternative world to the foul prison atmosphere. And what are the Brontës’s Angria and Gondol but disconnected, self-governing realms imagined from the standpoint of childhood powerlessness? The image, then, of Alice’s fall begins to fulfill this powerful wish for autonomy, which culminates, finally, in Alice’s self-coronation at the end of Looking-Glass. Yet it is only within the child’s willing imagination that a secret space can encroach so closely upon autonomy, for as we shall see, secrecy and autonomy are irreconcilable not only in the demanding world of realism, but even in the more elastic world of Carrollian fantasy.IAlice’s descent into Wonderland and her entrance into the Looking-Glass kingdom would seem like ripe metaphors for Carroll to explore the thoughts and fantasies of Alice’s psyche. What could be more... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Secrecy and Autonomy in Lewis CarrollSusan ShererVictorian novels quiver with morbid secrets and threatening discoveries. Unseen rooms, concealed doors, hidden boxes, masked faces, buried letters, all appear (and disappear) with striking regularity in the fiction of Victorian England. So many of these secret spaces contain children, and especially little girls, little girls in hidden spaces. The young Jane Eyre sits behind a curtain in the hidden window seat, escaping (...) the vindictive wrath of John Reed. Repulsed by her angry brother, Maggie Tulliver flees to the house attic, fantasizing that her family will fear that she has died. Little Dorrit withdraws from the common space of the Marshalsea into her private room above the prison, and Little Nell hides behind trees and walls, silently observing clandestine meetings. Finally the seven-year-old Alice falls down a rabbit-hole into a Wonderland, the dreamspace of her own psyche.Of these images, none can be more embedded in our cultural imagination than the child Alice dropping into the subterranean well of Wonderland. Indeed, of the many celebrated scenes in the Alice narratives, the most memorable, most potent, most quoted is Alice’s initial descent to the bottom of the rabbit-hole. The lastingness of this scene seems even greater when we realize that, although neither Carroll in Alice’s Adventures Underground nor Tenniel in the first edition of Wonderland illustrated the moment with a picture, it still became (along with the Mad Hatter’s tea party) one of the signature images of the Alice stories. Why, we must ask, did the Victorians retain, with a powerful tenacity, this vision of a little girl moving through a tight space toward the hidden world of Wonderland?The answer to this question is not—at least not wholly—that the scene simply represents a child’s metaphorical progress through the [End Page 1] birth canal 1 and that this, in turn, symbolizes some kind of rite of passage, a movement towards some deeper knowledge. For then how do we explain Alice’s conspicuous lack of internal development in both stories? Indeed, for a narrative that thematizes motion, Alice’s psychical growth remains disturbingly static. Throughout both narratives, Alice displays little emotional variation, for when she is not frustrated or anxious, she is, for the most part, vapid or expressionless. In fact, one is immediately struck by her coolness and indifference as she drops through the rabbit-hole. 2 Thus, because scene changes in Wonderland and Looking-Glass rarely betoken any emotional or intellectual modulations, Alice’s falling into Wonderland signals no internal transition.But the image does relocate her body and within this fictive world, location is everything. The scene gestures Alice’s departure, her separation, her movement towards an autonomy of which every child dreams when, in play, retreating to a hidden space. A child’s impulse to hide, to create a secret space, is one of the most compelling of all human wishes, the wish for autonomy and autarchy—“to be cut off from the word and yet owner of the world.” 3 Throughout Victorian literature, the fantasy of autonomy sets children dreaming of far-away worlds and hidden gardens. The young Cathy and Heathcliff flee to the isolated moors, filling the open, empty space with dreams of unrestricted freedom. Little Dorrit envisages the locked garden behind the Marshalsea as an alternative world to the foul prison atmosphere. And what are the Brontës’s Angria and Gondol but disconnected, self-governing realms imagined from the standpoint of childhood powerlessness? The image, then, of Alice’s fall begins to fulfill this powerful wish for autonomy, which culminates, finally, in Alice’s self-coronation at the end of Looking-Glass. Yet it is only within the child’s willing imagination that a secret space can encroach so closely upon autonomy, for as we shall see, secrecy and autonomy are irreconcilable not only in the demanding world of realism, but even in the more elastic world of Carrollian fantasy.IAlice’s descent into Wonderland and her entrance into the Looking-Glass kingdom would seem like ripe metaphors for Carroll to explore the thoughts and fantasies of Alice’s psyche. What could be more... (shrink)

It is common in contemporary sport to liken the notion of the team to that of the family. That is, the family is used to evoke team life. Portraying the team as a family usually implies a positive evaluation. Despite its prevalence, the team as a family equation has not been analyzed in the sport philosophy literature. Thus, the purpose of this article is twofold. First, it explores whether the team is to be equated with the family. To discuss the (...) nature of the family and the team, I draw together the work of several sport philosophers with that of Laura Wildemann Kane. Second, and considering what characterizes the team, this article investigates whether teammates have special responsibilities to one another by virtue of their relationship and the value attached to it. I propose that the team as a family equation does not align with the constitution of these two social groups and that teammates have special responsibilities to one another, but such responsibilities are different from those observed in the family. (shrink)

This chapter tries to answer the following question: How should we conceive of the method of mathematics, if we take a naturalist stance? The problem arises since mathematical knowledge is regarded as the paradigm of certain knowledge, because mathematics is based on the axiomatic method. Moreover, natural science is deeply mathematized, and science is crucial for any naturalist perspective. But mathematics seems to provide a counterexample both to methodological and ontological naturalism. To face this problem, some authors tried to naturalize (...) mathematics by relying on evolutionism. But several difficulties arise when we try to do this. This chapter suggests that, in order to naturalize mathematics, it is better to take the method of mathematics to be the analytic method, rather than the axiomatic method, and thus conceive of mathematical knowledge as plausible knowledge. (shrink)

There are three main accounts of scientific progress: 1) the epistemic account, according to which an episode in science constitutes progress when there is an increase in knowledge; 2) the semantic account, according to which progress is made when the number of truths increases; 3) the problem-solving account, according to which progress is made when the number of problems that we are able to solve increases. Each of these accounts has received several criticisms in the last decades. Nevertheless, some authors (...) think that the epistemic account is to be preferred if one takes a realist stance. Recently, Dellsén proposed the noetic account, according to which an episode in science constitutes progress when scientists achieve increased understanding of a phenomenon. Dellsén claims that the noetic account is a more adequate realist account of scientific progress than the epistemic account. This paper aims precisely at assessing whether the noetic account is a more adequate realist account of progress than the epistemic account. (shrink)

Recent work in AI ethics has come to bear on questions of responsibility. Specifically, questions of whether the nature of AI-based systems render various notions of responsibility inappropriate. While substantial attention has been given to backward-looking senses of responsibility, there has been little consideration of forward-looking senses of responsibility. This paper aims to plug this gap, and will concern itself with responsibility as moral obligation, a particular kind of forward-looking sense of responsibility. Responsibility as moral obligation is predicated on the (...) idea that agents have at least some degree of control over the kinds of systems they create and deploy. AI systems, by virtue of their ability to learn from experience once deployed, and their often experimental nature, may therefore pose a significant challenge to forward-looking responsibility. Such systems might not be able to have their course altered, and so even if their initial programming determines their goals, the means by which they achieve these goals may be outside the control of human operators. In cases such as this, we might say that there is a gap in moral obligation. However, in this paper, I argue that there are no “gaps” in responsibility as moral obligation, as this question comes to bear on AI systems. I support this conclusion by focusing on the nature of risks when developing technology, and by showing that technological assessment is not only about the consequences that a specific technology might have. Technological assessment is more than merely consequentialist, and should also include a hermeneutic component, which looks at the societal meaning of the system. Therefore, while it may be true that the creators of AI systems might not be able to fully appreciate what the consequences of their systems might be, this does not undermine or render improper their responsibility as moral obligation. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Pruss proves the validity of the rule beta-2 relative to Lewis’s semantics for counterfactuals, which is a significant step forward in the debate about the consequence argument. Yet, we believe there remain intuitive counter-examples to beta-2 formulated with the actuality operator and rigidified descriptions. We offer a novel and two-dimensional formulation of the Lewisian semantics for counterfactuals and prove the validity of a new transfer rule according to which a new version of the consequence argument can (...) be formulated. This new transfer rule is immune to the counter-examples involving the actuality operator and rigidified descriptions. However, we show that counter-examples to this new rule can also be generated, demanding that the Lewisian semantics be generalized for higher dimensions where counter-examples can always be generated. (shrink)

Focused on city-scale automation, and using self-driving cars (SDCs) as a case study, this article reflects on the role of AI—and in particular, computer vision systems used for mapping and navigation—as a catalyst for urban transformation. Urban research commonly presents AI and cities as having a one-way cause-and-effect relationship, giving undue weight to AI’s impact on cities and overlooking the role of cities in shaping AI. Working at the intersection of data science and social research, this paper aims to counter (...) this trend by exploring the reverse perspective: how do cities affect the development, and expose the present limits, of SDCs? The contribution of this paper is threefold. First, by comparing urban and nonurban environments and thoroughly examining the relationship between computer vision and city-specific sociality and form, it defines machine autonomy/automation as a function of the sociotechnical milieu in which an AI system operates. Second, and related, the paper problematizes the notion of SDCs as autonomous technologies and the role it plays in envisioning contending policy arrangements and technical solutions for achieving full driving automation. Finally, the article offers insight into a materialist and spatialized understanding of AI—namely, not as an abstract quality susceptible to replication within discrete machines, but rather as a distributed property emerging through embodied interactions among a multiplicity of agents (human, non-human, and technological) within/with their environments. (shrink)

Populism is widely thought to be in tension with liberal democracy. This article clarifies what exactly is problematic about populism from a liberal–democratic point of view and goes on to develop normative standards that allow us to distinguish between more and less legitimate forms of populism. The point of this exercise is not to dismiss populism in toto; the article strives for a more subtle result, namely, to show that liberal democracy can accommodate populism provided that the latter conforms to (...) particular discursive norms. What the article calls a ‘liberal ethics of populism’ turns out to be closely bound up with a broader ethics of peoplehood, understood as a way of articulating who ‘the people’ are in a way that is compatible with liberal–democratic principles of political justification. Such an ethics, concludes the article, inevitably has a much wider audience than populist political actors: its addressees are all those who seek legitimately to exercise power in the name of the people. (shrink)

In a recent article, P. Roger Turner and Justin Capes argue that no one is, or ever was, even partly morally responsible for certain world-indexed truths. Here we present our reasons for thinking that their argument is unsound: It depends on the premise that possible worlds are maximally consistent states of affairs, which is, under plausible assumptions concerning states of affairs, demonstrably false. Our argument to show this is based on Bertrand Russell’s original ‘paradox of propositions’. We should then opt (...) for a different approach to explain world-indexed truths whose upshot is that we may be morally responsible for some of them. The result to the effect that there are no maximally consistent states of affairs is independently interesting though, since this notion motivates an account of the nature of possible worlds in the metaphysics of modality. We also register in this article, independently of our response to Turner and Capes, and in the spirit of Russell’s aforementioned paradox and many other versions thereof, a proof of the claim that there is no set of all true propositions one can render false. (shrink)

It is a widely held principle that no one is able to do something that would require the past to have been different from how it actually is. This principle of the fixity of the past has been presented in numerous ways, playing a crucial role in arguments for logical and theological fatalism, and for the incompatibility of causal determinism and the ability to do otherwise. I will argue that, assuming bivalence, this principle is in conflict with standard views about (...) knowledge and the semantics for ‘actually’. I also consider many possible responses to the argument. (shrink)

Populist movements have become key players in European politics. These movements are readily criticized by journalists or political rivals, yet none of the common objections to populism seems to arrest their success. This article turns to normative political theory to cultivate sensitivity to problems arising from some existing arguments against populism, and to explore possible alternatives. It offers a critical reading of prototypical liberal and conservative arguments against populism, and proposes that the principles of solidarity and procedure provide good grounds (...) for a sustainable critique of populism. (shrink)

Popular sovereignty requires that citizens perceive themselves as being able to act and implement decisions, and that they are de facto causally connected to mechanisms of decision making. I argue that the two most common understandings of the exercise of popular sovereignty—which center on direct decision making by the people as a whole and the indirect exercise of democratic agency by elected representatives, respectively—are inadequate in this respect, and go on to suggest a complementary account that stresses the central role (...) of internally democratic and participatory political parties in actualising popular sovereignty, drawing on the democratic theory of Hans Kelsen. (shrink)

Populism is widely thought to be in tension with liberal democracy. This article clarifies what exactly is problematic about populism from a liberal–democratic point of view and goes on to develop...