ABSTRACT Moral status is a vexing topic. Linked for so long to the unending debates about ensoulment and the morality of abortion, it has recently resurfaced in the embryonic stem cell controversy. In this new context, it should benefit from new insights originating in recent scientific advances. We believe that the recently observed capability of somatic cells to return to a pluripotential state (a capability we propose to name ‘reversed potency’) in a controlled manner requires us to modify the traditional (...) concept of moral status and to consider it as referring not only to intrinsic properties (like ‘to possess reason’ or ‘to be a person’), but also to extrinsic or relational ones. (shrink)

Dieses Buch ist ein Klassiker der philosophischen Anthropologie und Arnold Gehlens wichtigstes Buch. Es fasst Gehlens Modell vom Menschen als eines auf Handlung und kulturelle Kompensation angewiesenen und sich damit eigentatig von der ihn bedrohenden Umwelt entlastenden "Mangelwesens" gultig zusammen. Auch wurde in "Der Mensch" 1950 erstmals Gehlens Institutionenlehre skizziert, die er aus der Revision seiner ursprunglichen Theorie "oberster Fuhrungssysteme" entwickelte. Gehlens Hauptwerk war "ohne Zweifel der fortgeschrittenste Versuch, die Philosophische Anthropologie an die Erkenntnisse empirischer Disziplinen zu binden". Diese (...) Ausgabe bringt die textkritische Edition der Kritischen Gesamtausgabe mit dem Text der 4. Auflage von 1950, der die letzte tiefgreifende Umarbeitung darstellt, die Gehlen an dem erstmals 1940 erschienenen Text vornahm. (shrink)

In their paper “Deflating the neuroenhancement bubble”, more precisely in their section entitled “How New is Neuroenhancement?”, Lucke and colleagues argue that neuroenhancement is nothing new to our epoch by demonstrating that the use of psychoactive stimulants in the 19th and 20th centuries was already common. The purpose of our comment is to show that the current bubble surrounding neuroenhancement in particular, and enhancement in general, is a recasting of an even older speculative engagement that can be traced back from (...) the 16th to the 18th centuries. As a consequence, there is a high risk that bioethicists might not have captured or found new conceptual challenges related to current enhancement debate. As well, by ignoring issues related to ancient debate, we argue that modern bioethicists risk spending effort on speculative ethics. (shrink)

Moral status is a vexing topic. Linked for so long to the unending debates about ensoulment and the morality of abortion, it has recently resurfaced in the embryonic stem cell controversy. In this new context, it should benefit from new insights originating in recent scientific advances. We believe that the recently observed capability of somatic cells to return to a pluripotential state (a capability we propose to name 'reversed potency') in a controlled manner requires us to modify the traditional concept (...) of moral status and to consider it as referring not only to intrinsic properties (like 'to possess reason' or 'to be a person'), but also to extrinsic or relational ones. (shrink)

In this book, Arnold Davidson elaborates a method for considering the history of concepts and the nature of scientific knowledge, a method he calls "historical epistemology." He applies this to the history of sexuality, with consequences for our understanding of desire, abnormality, and sexuality.

Most people will agree that if my brain were made to have within it precisely the same pattern of activity that is in it now but through artificial means, as in its being fed all its stimulation through electrodes as it sits in a vat, an experience would result for me that would be subjectively indistinguishable from that I am now having. In ‘The Story of a Brain’ I ask whether the same subjective experience would be maintained in variations like (...) these: The hemispheres are in different vats but interacting with each other through radio transmission. Smaller chunks - and eventually the individual neurons - are interacting in this way. The hemispheres or the smaller chunks undergo internally the same pattern of activity but without interacting with each other. (shrink)

From social media to search engines to Wikipedia, the internet is thoroughly embedded in how we produce, locate, and share knowledge around the world. Who Should We Be Online? provides an account of online knowledge that takes seriously the role of sexist, racist, transphobic, colonial, and capitalist forms of oppression. Frost-Arnold argues against analyzing internet users as a collection of identical generic people with smartphones. The novel epistemology developed in this book recognizes that we are differently embodied beings interacting (...) within systems of dominance. Our social identities and global inequalities shape who we are, who we can be online, and what we know. Tackling problems of online content moderation, fake news, and hoaxes, Frost-Arnold shows that oppressive online structures and practices help fuel ignorance. But she also reveals how the internet provides opportunities for marginalized people and activists to share knowledge online. Drawing on feminist accounts of objectivity, veritistic social epistemology, epistemologies of ignorance, virtue epistemology, and the epistemic injustice literature, this book argues for a social epistemology that values truth and objectivity, while recognizing that inequalities shape our collective ability to attain these goals. Timely and interdisciplinary, Who Should We Be Online? weaves together internet studies scholarship from across the humanities, social sciences, and computer science. Presenting case studies of moderators, imposters, tricksters, fakers, and lurkers, this book both explains the problems with our current internet ecosystem and imagines liberatory online futures. (shrink)

For some decades, the concept of human dignity has been widely discussed in bioethical literature. Some authors think that this concept is central to questions of respect for human beings, whereas others are very critical of it. It should be noted that, in these debates, dignity is one component of a long-lasting and widespread conceptual construct used to support a stance on the ethical question of the moral status of an action or being. This construct has been used from Modernity (...) onward to condemn slavery and torture as violations of human dignity. In spelling it out, we can come to a better understanding of what “dignity” means and become aware that there exists a quite useful place for this notion in our ethical thought, albeit a modest one. (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 4, Page 12-13, April 2012.

As elsewhere, the ethical debate on embryonic stem cell research in Central Europe, especially Germany and Switzerland, involves controversy over the status of the human embryo. There is a distinctive Kantian flavor to the standard arguments however, and we show how they often embody a set of misunderstandings and argumentative shortcuts we term "embryological Kantianism." We also undertake a broader analysis of three arguments typically presented in this debate, especially in official position papers, namely the identity, continuity, and potentiality arguments. (...) It turns out that these arguments do not support the strong, quasi-personal status accorded to the embryos in these official opinions. (shrink)

Recently at the J. Craig Venter Institute, a microorganism has been created through synthetic biology. In the future, more complex living beings will very probably be produced. In our natural environment, we live amongst a whole variety of beings. Some of them have moral status — they have a moral importance and we cannot treat them in just any way we please —; some do not. When it becomes possible to create artificially living beings who naturally possess moral status, will (...) this artificiality modify their status? Many people contend that it will, but I am not of the same mind and will develop three arguments against it. (shrink)

Public health agencies regularly survey randomly selected anonymous students to track drug use, sexual activities, and other risk behaviors. Students are unidentifiable, but a recent project that i...

I critically examine Nietzsche’s argument in The Will to Power that all the detailed events of the world are repeating infinite times (on account of the merely finite possible arrangements of forces that constitute the world and the inevitability with which any arrangement of force must bring about its successors). Nietzsche celebrated this recurrence because of the power of belief in it to bring about a revaluation of values focused wholly on the value of one’s endlessly repeating life. Belief in (...) recurrence would bring joy to those who had achieved excellence in this life and crush those who had not. I point out, however, that this significance of recurrence must be spoiled by the consideration that within each of the long cycles of recurrence there would have to be, as well, countless variations of this life. And I consider the issue of personal identity within such recurrences. Is it the same person or merely resembling but distinct persons in the recurrences or the variations? If it is the same person in precise recurrences, should the subjectively identical experience be thought of as really additional for that person? (shrink)

I argue that a certain type of naturalist should not accept a prominent version of the no-miracles argument (NMA). First, scientists (usually) do not accept explanations whose explanans-statements neither generate novel predictions nor unify apparently disparate established claims. Second, scientific realism (as it appears in the NMA) is an explanans that makes no new predictions and fails to unify disparate established claims. Third, many proponents of the NMA explicitly adopt a naturalism that forbids philosophy of science from using any methods (...) not employed by science itself. Therefore, such naturalistic philosophers of science should not accept the version of scientific realism that appears in the NMA. (shrink)

The idea that simplicity matters in science is as old as science itself, with the much cited example of Ockham's Razor, 'entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem': entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity. A problem with Ockham's razor is that nearly everybody seems to accept it, but few are able to define its exact meaning and to make it operational in a non-arbitrary way. Using a multidisciplinary perspective including philosophers, mathematicians, econometricians and economists, this 2002 monograph examines simplicity (...) by asking six questions: what is meant by simplicity? How is simplicity measured? Is there an optimum trade-off between simplicity and goodness-of-fit? What is the relation between simplicity and empirical modelling? What is the relation between simplicity and prediction? What is the connection between simplicity and convenience? The book concludes with reflections on simplicity by Nobel Laureates in Economics. (shrink)

I provide an account of the cognitive attitude of trust that explains the role trust plays in the planning of rational agents. Many authors have dismissed choosing to trust as either impossible or irrational; however, this fails to account for the role of trust in practical reasoning. A can have therapeutic, coping, or corrective reasons to trust B to ${\phi}$ , even in the absence of evidence that B will ${\phi}$ . One can choose to engage in therapeutic trust to (...) inspire trustworthiness, coping trust to simplify one’s planning, or corrective trust to avoid doing a testimonial injustice. To accommodate such types of trust, without accepting doxastic voluntarism, requires an account of the cognitive attitude of trust broader than belief alone. I argue that trust involves taking the proposition that someone will do something as a premise in one’s practical reasoning, which can be a matter of believing or accepting the proposition. I defend this account against objections that it (i) provides insufficient rational constraints on trust, (ii) conflates trust and pretense of trust, and (iii) cannot account for the rationality of back-up planning. (shrink)

During the academic year 1940-1941, several giants of analytic philosophy congregated at Harvard, holding regular private meetings, with Carnap, Tarski, and Quine. Carnap, Tarski, and Quine at Harvard allows the reader to act as a fly on the wall for their conversations. Carnap took detailed notes during his year at Harvard. This book includes both a German transcription of these shorthand notes and an English translation in the appendix section. Carnap’s notes cover a wide range of topics, but surprisingly, the (...) most prominent question is: If the number of physical items in the universe is finite, what form should scientific discourse take? This question is closely connected to an abiding philosophical problem: What is the relationship between the logico-mathematical realm and the material realm? Carnap, Tarski, and Quine’s attempts to answer this question involve issues central to philosophy today.This book focuses on three such issues: nominalism, the unity of science, and analyticity. In short, the book reconstructs the lines of argument represented in these Harvard discussions, discusses their historical significance (especially Quine’s break from Carnap), and relates them when possible to contemporary treatments of these issues. (shrink)

Containing the debate between Michel Foucault and Noam Chomsky on epistemology and politics, this book also features the most significant essays by the most important French thinkers who influenced and were influenced by Foucault. Foucault's teachers, colleagues, and collaborators take up his major claims, from his first to final works, and provide us with the authoritative context in which to understand Foucault's writings. This volume also includes several important works by Foucault previously unpublished in English. The other contributors are Georges (...) Canguilhem, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Pierre Hadot, Michel Serres, and Paul Veyne. Here for the first time is the French Foucault. This volume offers lucid and important texts that will appeal to students and professors at every level of study. It is essential reading for all scholars of twentieth-century philosophy and critical theory. (shrink)

Since anonymous agents can spread misinformation with impunity, many people advocate for greater accountability for internet speech. This paper provides a veritistic argument that accountability mechanisms can cause significant epistemic problems for internet encyclopedias and social media communities. I show that accountability mechanisms can undermine both the dissemination of true beliefs and the detection of error. Drawing on social psychology and behavioral economics, I suggest alternative mechanisms for increasing the trustworthiness of internet communication.

"These sixteen essays by Arnold Isenberg "bring wide-ranging connoiseurship, intricate analysis, and epigrammatic literacy to bear on a number of glib and fuzzy oppositions between form and content, description and interpretation, ...

The idea that simplicity matters in science is as old as science itself, with the much cited example of Ockham's Razor, 'entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem': entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity. A problem with Ockham's razor is that nearly everybody seems to accept it, but few are able to define its exact meaning and to make it operational in a non-arbitrary way. Using a multidisciplinary perspective including philosophers, mathematicians, econometricians and economists, this 2002 monograph examines simplicity (...) by asking six questions: what is meant by simplicity? How is simplicity measured? Is there an optimum trade-off between simplicity and goodness-of-fit? What is the relation between simplicity and empirical modelling? What is the relation between simplicity and prediction? What is the connection between simplicity and convenience? The book concludes with reflections on simplicity by Nobel Laureates in Economics. (shrink)

Gehlen's core idea in Man is that humans have unique properties which distinguish them from all other species: 1. world-openness, a concept originally coined by Max Scheler, which describes the ability of humans to adapt to various environments (as contrasted with animals, which can only survive in environments which match their evolutionary specialisation). This gives us 2. the ability to shape our environment according to our intentions, and it comprises a view of language as a way of acting (Gehlen was (...) one of the first proponents of speech act theory), Human beings are also marked 3. by an excess of impulses and by 4. the ability of self-control. These properties allow us (again in contrast to all other animals) 5. to create our own (for example cultural) environments. Gehlen's philosophy has influenced many contemporary German thinkers in a range of disciplines, including Peter L. Berger, Thomas Luckmann and Niklas Luhmann in sociology, and Hans Blumenberg in philosophy. (shrink)

Ignorance of one’s privileges and prejudices is an epistemic problem. While the sources of ignorance of privilege and prejudice are increasingly understood, less clarity exists about how to remedy ignorance. In fact, the various causes of ignorance can seem so powerful, various, and mutually reinforcing that studying the epistemology of ignorance can inspire pessimism about combatting socially constructed ignorance. I argue that this pessimism is unwarranted. The testimony of members of oppressed groups can often help members of privileged groups overcome (...) their ignorance. This paper argues that a particular type of speaker’s trust—hopeful trust—can motivate hearers to become cognizant of their privilege and prejudice. I argue that hopeful trust is a powerful way of eliciting trust-responsiveness that can be an effective mechanism for challenging privilege and prejudice. To make this case, I draw on case studies of online attempts to challenge ignorance. While the problems of testimonial injustice, defensi... (shrink)

A thoughtful meditation on the role of meaning and purpose in the development of technology.

In this 1992 book, Professor Koslow advances an account of the basic concepts of logic. A central feature of the theory is that it does not require the elements of logic to be based on a formal language. Rather, it uses a general notion of implication as a way of organizing the formal results of various systems of logic in a simple, but insightful way. The study has four parts. In the first two parts the various sources of the general (...) concept of an implication structure and its forms are illustrated and explained. Part 3 defines the various logical operations and systematically explores their properties. A generalized account of extensionality and dual implication is given, and the extensionality of each of the operators, as well as the relation of negation and its dual, are given substantial treatment because of the novel results they yield. Part 4 considers modal operators and studies their interaction with logical operators. By obtaining the usual results without the usual assumptions this new approach allows one to give a very simple account of modal logic minus the excess baggage of possible world semantics. (shrink)

Imagine that you and a duplicate of yourself are lying unconscious, next to each other, about to undergo a complete step-by-step exchange of bits of your bodies. It certainly seems that at no stage in this exchange of bits will you have thereby switched places with your duplicate. Yet it also seems that the end-result, with all the bits exchanged, will be essentially that of the two of you having switched places. Where will you awaken? I claim that one and (...) the same person possesses both bodies, occupies both places and will experience both awakenings, just as a person whose brain has been bisected must at once experience both of the unconnected fields of awareness, even though each of these will falsely appear to him as the entirety of his experience. I also claim that the more usual apparent boundaries of persons are as illusory as those in brain bisection; personal identity remains unchanged through any variation or multiplication of body or mind. In all conscious life there is only one person - I - whose existence depends merely on the presence of a quality that is inherent in all experience - its quality of being mine, the simple immediacy of it for whatever is having experience. One powerful argument for this is statistical: on the ordinary view of personhood it is an incredible coincidence for you (though not for others) that out of 200,000,000 sperm cells the very one required on each occasion for your future existence was first to the egg in each of the begettings of yourself and all your ancestors. The only view that does not make your existence incredible, and that is not therefore (from your perspective) an incredible view, is that any conscious being would necessarily have been you anyway. It is a consequence that self-interest should extend to all conscious organisms. (shrink)

Les attaques que Feyerabend a dirigées depuis un certain temps contre les conceptions dominantes de la rationalité scientifique, celles des inductivistes et de Popper principalement, sont intimement liées à sa manière d'envisager l'opposition entre le réalisme scientifique et l'instrumentalisme, c'est-à-dire entre deux thèses concernant les rapports de la rèalité et de la connaissance scientifique. C'est ce dernier point que nous aimerions aborder ici, dans le projet d'y apporter un certain nom-bre de clarifications, qui permettront aussi de montrer que les difficultés (...) que Feyerabend a cru trouver recemment dans la position realiste, et qui ont provoqué une modification de ses conceptions, viennent de ce qu'il n'a pas vu toute l'importance de certaines distinctions. (shrink)

We determine the exact bounds for the length of an arbitrary reduction sequence of a term in the typed λ-calculus with β-, ξ- and η-conversion. There will be two essentially different classifications, one depending on the height and the degree of the term and the other depending on the length and the degree of the term.

Modern scientific knowledge is increasingly collaborative. Much analysis in social epistemology models scientists as self-interested agents motivated by external inducements and sanctions. However, less research exists on the epistemic import of scientists’ moral concern for their colleagues. I argue that scientists’ trust in their colleagues’ moral motivations is a key component of the rationality of collaboration. On the prevailing account, trust is a matter of mere reliance on the self-interest of one’s colleagues. That is, scientists merely rely on external compulsion (...) to motivate self-interested colleagues to be trustworthy collaborators. I show that this self-interest account has significant limitations. First, it cannot fully account for trust by relatively powerless scientists. Second, reliance on self-interest can be self-defeating. For each limitation, I show that moral trust can bridge the gap—when members of the scientific community cannot rely on the self-interest of their colleagues, they rationally place trust in the moral motivations of their colleagues. Case studies of mid-twentieth-century industrial laboratories and exploitation of junior scientists show that such moral trust justifies collaboration when mere reliance on the self-interest of colleagues would be irrational. Thus, this paper provides a more complete and realistic account of the rationality of scientific collaboration. (shrink)

Foreword by Students' Committee.--Signatures of the Graduate Faculty members.--Faculty foreword.--Introduction: The life and the political philosophy of Arnold Brecht.--Relative and absolute justice.--The rise of relativism in political and legal philosophy.--The search for absolutes in political and legal philosophy.--The myth of is and ought.--The impossible in political and legal philosophy.--The latent place of God in twentieth-century political theory.--Bibliography of books and articles by Arnold Brecht (p. [161]-174)--Biographical summary of Arnold Brecht.

Foreword by Students' Committee.--Signatures of the Graduate Faculty members.--Faculty foreword.--Introduction: The life and the political philosophy of Arnold Brecht.--Relative and absolute justice.--The rise of relativism in political and legal philosophy.--The search for absolutes in political and legal philosophy.--The myth of is and ought.--The impossible in political and legal philosophy.--The latent place of God in twentieth-century political theory.--Bibliography of books and articles by Arnold Brecht (p. [161]-174)--Biographical summary of Arnold Brecht.

Aesthetic sensibility rests on perceptual experience and characterizes not only our experience of the arts but our experience of the world. _Sensibility and Sense_ offers a philosophically comprehensive account of humans' social and cultural embeddedness encountered, recognized, and fulfilled as an aesthetic mode of experience. Extending the range of aesthetic experience from the stone of the earth's surface to the celestial sphere, the book focuses on the aesthetic as a dimension of social experience. The guiding idea of pervasive interconnectedness, both (...) social and environmental, leads to an aesthetic critique of the urban environment, the environment of daily life, and of terrorism, and has profound implications for grounding social and political values. The aesthetic emerges as a powerful critical tool for appraising urban culture and political practice. (shrink)

Fodor argued that in contrast to input systems which are informationally encapsulated, general intelligence is unencapsulated and hence non-modular; for this reason, he suggested, prospects for understanding it are not bright. It is argued that an additional property, primitive functionality, is required for non-modularity. A functionally primitive computational model for quantifier scoping, limited to some scoping influences, is then motivated, and an implementation described. It is argued that only such a model can be faithful to intuitive scope preferences. But it (...) is also argued that an extended model which includes all scoping influences is a hopeless prospect from a developmental perspective. Fodor's views are concluded to have some independent support: quantifier scoping is a mental ability parasitic on general intelligence that is non-modular though in a revised sense, warranting pessimism about our ability of model it. (shrink)

Biotechnologies – synthetic biology in particular – are sometimes blamed for playing God or manifesting hubris, that is, for evincing the vicious attitude of transcending the limits of human agency. In trying to create living organisms, we would adopt an attitude that is immoral for human beings. In this article, I want to show that this blame is unwarranted. I distinguish two aspects of the argument, which claims that it is impossible for human beings to create life and immoral to (...) attempt it. I argue that if we adopt a conception of what life consists of in agreement with the scientific world view, there is no place for hubris. Finally, I maintain that even if we accept a non-scientific conception of life (a vitalist or a supernatural one), we are not in a position to formulate the blame against synthetic biologists because what they do cannot contravene this vitalist or supernaturalist view. (shrink)

From social media to search engines to Wikipedia, the internet is thoroughly embedded in how we produce, locate, and share knowledge around the world. Who Should We Be Online? provides an account of online knowledge that takes seriously the role of sexist, racist, transphobic, colonial, and capitalist forms of oppression. Frost-Arnold argues against analyzing internet users as a collection of identical generic people with smartphones. The novel epistemology developed in this book recognizes that we are differently embodied beings interacting (...) within systems of dominance. Our social identities and global inequalities shape who we are, who we can be online, and what we know. -/- Tackling problems of online content moderation, fake news, and hoaxes, Frost-Arnold shows that oppressive online structures and practices help fuel ignorance. But she also reveals how the internet provides opportunities for marginalized people and activists to share knowledge online. Drawing on feminist accounts of objectivity, veritistic social epistemology, epistemologies of ignorance, virtue epistemology, and the epistemic injustice literature, this book argues for a social epistemology that values truth and objectivity, while recognizing that inequalities shape our collective ability to attain these goals. Timely and interdisciplinary, Who Should We Be Online? weaves together internet studies scholarship from across the humanities, social sciences, and computer science. Presenting case studies of moderators, imposters, tricksters, fakers, and lurkers, this book both explains the problems with our current internet ecosystem and imagines liberatory online futures. (shrink)

Without access to Michel Foucault’s courses, it was extremely difficult to understand his reorientation from an analysis of the strategies and tactics of power immanent in the modern discourse on sexuality (1976) to an analysis of the ancient forms and modalities of relation to oneself by which one constituted oneself as a moral subject of sexual conduct (1984). In short, Foucault’s passage from the political to the ethical dimension of sexuality seemed sudden and inexplicable. Moreover, it was clear from his (...) published essays and interviews that this displacement of focus had consequences far beyond the specific domain of the history of sexuality. Security, Territory, Population (Foucault, 2007) contains a conceptual hinge, a key concept, that allows us to link together the political and ethical axes of Foucault’s thought. Indeed, it is Foucault’s analysis of the notions of conduct and counter-conduct in his lecture of 1 March 1978 that seems to me to constitute one of the richest and most brilliant moments in the entire course. It is astonishing, and of profound significance, that the autonomous sphere of conduct has been more or less invisible in the history of modern (as opposed to ancient) moral and political philosophy. This article argues that a new attention should be given to this notion, both in Foucault’s work and more generally. (shrink)

In On What We Mean, Arnold Chien discusses the meaning of a speaker, a notion we use in everyday conversation. Speaker's meaning is a fundamental notion of pragmatics, i.e. the study of the relation between words and speakers. Yet everyday speaker's meaning has not been systematically studied in philosophy or linguistics. Chien's approach to these issues is to take a speaker's meaning as an answer to "what do you (s/he) mean" (WDYM) questions. He then analyzes WDYM-questions in terms of (...) Bas van Fraassen's analysis of why-questions, according to which, a question consists of a set of parameters whose values vary according to the context. The constraints on speaker's meanings are analyzed in terms of certain constraints on answers to WDYM-questions. The account is extended to metaphor, understood to be a kind of conceptual indeterminacy. (shrink)