In this article, we first offer a model of design knowledge types and their interrelationships in value sensitive design. Then we demonstrate that value sensitive design is a formative framework, which provides a shaping influence on practice, enables creative appropriation, and supports theory and method development.

In this article, we report on eight grand challenges for value sensitive design, which were developed at a one-week workshop, Value Sensitive Design: Charting the Next Decade, Lorentz Center, Leiden, The Netherlands, November 14–18, 2016. A grand challenge is a substantial problem, opportunity, or question that motives sustained research and design activity. The eight grand challenges are: Accounting for Power, Evaluating Value Sensitive Design, Framing and Prioritizing Values, Professional and Industry Appropriation, Tech policy, Values and Human Emotions, Value Sensitive Design (...) and Intelligent Algorithms, and Value Tensions. Each grand challenge consists of a discussion of its importance and a set of tractable key questions. (shrink)

In this article, we introduce the Special Issue, Value Sensitive Design: Charting the Next Decade, which arose from a week-long workshop hosted by Lorentz Center, Leiden, The Netherlands, November 14–18, 2016. Forty-one researchers and designers, ranging in seniority from doctoral students to full professors, from Australia, Europe, and North America, and representing a wide range of academic fields participated in the workshop. The first article in the special issue puts forward eight grand challenges for value sensitive design to help guide (...) and shape the field. It is followed by 16 articles consisting of value sensitive design nuggets—short pieces of writing on a new idea, method, challenge, application, or other concept that engages some aspect of value sensitive design. The nuggets are grouped into three clusters: theory, method, and applications. Taken together the grand challenges and nuggets point the way forward for value sensitive design into the next decade and beyond. (shrink)

A key philosophical feature of Peter Jackson’s film interpretation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is its use of fantasy to inspire a “recovery” of the actual or, in other words, a reawakening to the beauty of nature and the many possible ways of living in healthier ecological relation to the world. Though none of these ways is perfectly achieved, this pluralistic view is demonstrated in the various lifeways of Hobbits, Elves, Men, and Ents. All of the positive (...) relationships embodied in the films—to trees, mountains, horses, and vegetable gardens—involve loving care and attention, receiving nourishment and livelihood without instrumentalization, or reducing nature to mere resource. The films also vividly display a variety of ugly and destructive ways of using the land to accrue power and wealth. These noxious ways, specifically because they actively destroy the lands that they use, always need more. They will thus eventually annihilate the beautiful ways of being if they are not actively resisted. Some of those who would rather be tending their own trees, gardens, or horses or even wandering in the wild forests must therefore turn their attention to struggle and resistance instead. This is a struggle full of grief, and at times even verging on despair, but it is marked by the refusal to give up hope. Indeed, what Jackson and Tolkien have to say about hope is as important in responding to the ecological crisis as anything they have to say about nature, inasmuch as they help to remind us that even in our own times, “there is still hope.”. (shrink)

Drawing on ten years of research on the unpublished Wittgenstein papers, Stern investigates what motivated Wittgenstein's philosophical writing and casts new light on the Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations. The book is an exposition of Wittgenstein's early conception of the nature of representation and how his later revision and criticism of that work led to a radically different way of looking at mind and language. It also explains how the unpublished manuscripts and typescripts were put together and why they often provide (...) better evidence of the development of his ideas than can be found in his published writing. In doing so, the book traces the development of a number of central themes in Wittgenstein's philosophy, including his conception of philosophical method, the picture theory of meaning, the limits of language, the application of language to experience, his treatment of private language, and what he called the "flow of life." Arguing that Wittgenstein's views are often much more simple (and more radical) than we have been led to believe, Wittgenstein on Mind and Language provides an overview of the development of Wittgenstein's philosophy and brings to light aspects of his philosophy that have been almost universally neglected. (shrink)

In this new introduction to a classic philosophical text, David Stern examines Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. He gives particular attention to both the arguments of the Investigations and the way in which the work is written, and especially to the role of dialogue in the book. While he concentrates on helping the reader to arrive at his or her own interpretation of the primary text, he also provides guidance to the unusually wide range of existing interpretations, and to the reasons (...) why the Investigations have inspired such a diversity of readings. Following closely the text of the Investigations and meant to be read alongside it, this survey is accessible to readers with no previous background in philosophy. It is well-suited to university-level courses on Wittgenstein, but can also be read with profit by students in other disciplines. (shrink)

Well-known social psychologist David G. Myers addresses why Americans can have so many social problems--reflecting a deep spiritual poverty--at a time when material wealth is at record levels. 32 illustrations.

Although the importance of spirituality is increasingly recognized in clinical medicine, spirituality is rarely mentioned in the practice, literature, or training programs of global health. To understand the role of spirituality in global health practice and identify factors that influence and limit its expression, I initiated conversations and informal interviews with more than 300 global health leaders, students, and practitioners during 2010-2014. Four spiritual themes or challenges emerged: compassion at a distance; dichotomous thinking; conspiracy of silence; and compulsion to save (...) the world. Practitioners expressed strong interest in bringing spirituality more fully into global health discourse, which could help the field realize its potential. (shrink)

Originally conceived as a forty-page conclusion to Hacker’s twenty years of work on the monumental four-volume Analytical Commentary on the Philosophical Investigations, this book “rapidly assumed a life of its own”. A major contribution to the history of analytic philosophy, this substantial volume delivers even more than the title promises. The eight chapters are best approached as a six-chapter book, itself some 220 pages long, on Wittgenstein’s contribution to twentieth-century philosophy, followed by a two-chapter, 120-page epilogue about how and why (...) his influence has waned. The first six chapters provide an encyclopedic summary of the fruits of Hacker’s research on Wittgenstein’s writing, an immensely learned account of British philosophy from the turn of the century to the 1970s, and a detailed account of Wittgenstein’s reception by Oxford, Cambridge, and the Vienna Circle. The book’s closing chapters, “Post-positivism in the United States and Quine’s Apostasy” and “The Decline of Analytic Philosophy,” polemically argue that Quine’s philosophy, and the post-Quinean naturalism prevalent in Anglo-American philosophy today, amount to such a decisive break with the analytic tradition, as Hacker conceives of it, that they should not be counted as “analytic.”. (shrink)

Jerome Wakefield has argued that a disorder is a harmful dysfunction. This paper develops how Wakefield should construe harmful in his harmful dysfunction analysis. Recently, Neil Feit has argued that classic puzzles involved in analyzing harm render Wakefield’s HDA better off without harm as a necessary condition. Whether or not one conceives of harm as comparative or non-comparative, the concern is that the HDA forces people to classify as mere dysfunction what they know to be a disorder. For instance, one (...) can conceive of cases where simultaneous disorders prevent each other from being, in any traditional sense, actually harmful; in such cases, according to the HDA, neither would be a disorder. I argue that the sense of harm that Wakefield should employ in the HDA is dispositional, similar to the sense of harm used when describing a vile of poison: “Be careful! That’s poison. It’s harmful.” I call this harm in the damage sense. Using this sense of harm enables the HDA to avoid Feit’s arguments, and thus it should be preferred to other senses when analyzing harmful dysfunction. (shrink)

Semiotic objections to markets urge us not to place a good on the market because of the message that doing so would send. Brennan and Jaworski reject them on the grounds that either the contingent semiotics of a market can be changed or the weakness of semiotic reasons allows them to be ignored. The scope of their argument neglects the impure semiotic objections that claim that the message a market sends causes, constitutes, or involves a nonsemiotic wrong. These are the (...) most compelling class of semiotic objections and are the kind actually advanced in the literature. Rather than focusing on the necessity or contingency of a market's semiotics, we should instead attend to a semiotic objection's most important feature: its purity or impurity. (shrink)

This edition of G. E. Moore's notes taken at Wittgenstein's seminal Cambridge lectures in the early 1930s provides, for the first time, an almost verbatim record of those classes. The presentation of the notes is both accessible and faithful to their original manuscripts, and a comprehensive introduction and synoptic table of contents provide the reader with essential contextual information and summaries of the topics in each lecture. The lectures form an excellent introduction to Wittgenstein's middle-period thought, covering a broad range (...) of philosophical topics, ranging from core questions in the philosophy of language, mind, logic, and mathematics, to illuminating discussions of subjects on which Wittgenstein says very little elsewhere, including ethics, religion, aesthetics, psychoanalysis, and anthropology. The volume also includes a 1932 essay by Moore critiquing Wittgenstein's conception of grammar, together with Wittgenstein's response. A companion website offers access to images of the entire set of source manuscripts. (shrink)

Drawing on recent work on the nature of the numbering system of the _Tractatus_ and Wittgenstein’s use of that system in his composition of the _Prototractatus_, the paper sets out the rationale for the online tool called__ __ The University of Iowa Tractatus Map. The map consists of a website with a front page that links to two separate subway-style maps of the hypertextual numbering system Wittgenstein used in his _Tractatus_. One map displays the structure of the published _Tractatus_; the (...) other lays out the structure of the _Prototractatus_. The site makes available the full text of the German and the two canonical English translations.__ __While we envisage the map as a tool that we would like a wide variety of readers to find helpful, we argue that our website amounts to a radically new edition of Wittgenstein’s early masterpiece, with far-reaching implications for the interpretation of that text. In particular, we claim that our visually compelling presentation of the book’s overall structure delivers on Wittgenstein’s cryptic claim in a letter to his publisher that it is the numbers that “make the book surveyable and clear”. (shrink)

There are some things money literally cannot buy. Invariably transformable goods are such things because when they are exchanged for money, they become something else. These goods are destroyed rather than transferred in monetary exchanges. They mark out an impassable limit beyond which money and the market cannot reach. They cannot be for sale, in the strongest and most literal sense. Variably transformable goods are similar. They can be destroyed when offered or exchanged for money, but they differ in their (...) ability to sometimes emerge from financial transactions intact. -/- Analyzing transformable goods reveals informative and surprising results. Like other goods and commodities, they are agent relative, defined by the way particular agents value them. Inside the same transaction, a good could be transformable for one agent and not another, depending on how and what these agents value in the transaction. Applying this conceptual framework can reveal otherwise obscure facets of existing and future debates about the ethics and limits of markets. To demonstrate this, the framework is here applied to Richard Titmuss’s arguments about markets in blood, clarifying and illuminating some of his most confusing claims. Applying this framework to other debates may reveal even more striking results. (shrink)

The paper maps out and responds to some of the main areas of disagreement over the nature of Wittgenstein’s philosophy: (1) Between defenders of a “two Wittgensteins” reading (which draws a sharp distinction between early and late Wittgenstein) and the opposing “one Wittgenstein” interpretation. (2) Among “two-Wittgensteins” interpreters as to when the later philosophy emerged, and over the central difference between early and late Wittgenstein. (3) Between those who hold that Wittgenstein opposes only past philosophy in order to do philosophy (...) better and those who hold that Wittgenstein aimed to bring an end to philosophy and teach us to get by without a replacement. It is shown that each of these debates depends on some deeply un-Wittgensteinian, and quite mistaken, assumptions. It is concluded that Wittgenstein’s most polished writing, most notably in Philosophical Investigations I §§ 1–425, is best understood as a kind of Pyrrhonism which aims to subvert philosophical theorizing, by means of a polyphonic dialogue. Because this delicate balance between philosophical questions and their dissolution is not achieved in most of his other published and unpublished writings, we should be very cautious when using the theories and methods we find in those other writings as a guide to reading the Philosophical Investigations. (shrink)

In the debates concerning the ethics of human enhancement through biological or technological modifications, there have been several appeals to the concept of human dignity, both by those favouring such enhancement and by those opposing it. The result is the phenomenon of ‘dignity talk', where opposing sides both appeal to the concept of human dignity to ground their arguments resulting in a moral impasse. This article examines the use of the concept of human dignity in the enhancement debates and reveals (...) that the problem of dignity talk arises because proponents of various positions tend to ground human dignity in different features of the human individual. These features include species-membership, possession of a particular capacity, a sense of self-worth, and moral behaviour. The article proposes a solution to this problem by appealing to another feature of human beings, namely their being-in-relationship-over-time. Doing so enables us to understand dignity as a concept that affirms the worth of human individuals as complex, multidimensional wholes, rather than as isolated features. Consequently, the concept of human dignity can serve both a descriptive and a normative function in the enhancement debates. At a descriptive level, asking what advocates of a position mean when they refer to human dignity will reveal what aspects of being human they deem to be most valuable. The debate can then focus on these values. The normative function, although it cannot proscribe or prescribe all enhancement, approves only those enhancements that contribute to the flourishing of human individuals as multidimensional wholes. (shrink)

This paper uses a semiotic, performative theory of language and post-colonial theory to argue that nursing's representations of ‘multiculturalism’ need to be grounded in a theory of whiteness, an historicized understanding of how ethnic/cultural differences come to be represented in the ways they are and informed by Foucault's notions of power/knowledge. Using nursing education and ‘cultural compentency’ as examples, the paper draws on a range of literatures to suggest more critical and politically productive ways of approaching difference from within nursing's (...) largely white interpretive framework. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: What is Practice Theory? What is a Practice? Being‐in‐the‐World and Practical Holism Two Philosophers and an Antiphilosophy: Kripkenstein, Winchgenstein, and Therapeutic Quietism Winchgensteinian Practice Theory From Winchgenstein to Frankenstein Investigating Practices Note.

Examining the significance of Kant's account of "rational faith," this study argues that he profoundly revises his account of the human will and the moral philosophy of it in his later religious writings.

The "standard account" of Wittgenstein’s relations with the Vienna Circle is that the early Wittgenstein was a principal source and inspiration for the Circle’s positivistic and scientific philosophy, while the later Wittgenstein was deeply opposed to the logical empiricist project of articulating a "scientific conception of the world." However, this telegraphic summary is at best only half-true and at worst deeply misleading. For it prevents us appreciating the fluidity and protean character of their philosophical dialogue. In retrospectively attributing clear-cut positions (...) to Wittgenstein and his interlocutors, it is very easy to read back our current understanding of familiar distinctions into a time when those terms were used in a much more open-ended way. The paper aims to to provide a broader perspective on this debate, starting from the protagonists’ understanding of their respective positions. Too often, the programmatic statements about the nature of their work that are repeated in manifestoes, introductions, and elementary textbooks have occupied center stage in the subsequent secondary literature. Consequently, I focus on a detailed examination of a turning point in their relationship. That turning point is Wittgenstein's charge, in the summer of 1932, that a recently published paper of Carnap's, "Physicalistic Language as the Universal Language of Science", made such extensive and unacknowledged use of Wittgenstein's own ideas that Wittgenstein would, as he put it in a letter to Schlick, "soon be in a situation where my own work shall be considered merely as a reheated version or plagiarism of Carnap’s." While the leading parties in this dispute shared a basic commitment to the primacy of physicalistic language, and the view that all significant languages are translatable, there was a remarkable lack of mutual understanding between them, and deep disagreement about the nature of the doctrines they disputed. Three quarters of a century later, we are so much more conscious of the differences that separated them than the points on which they agreed that it takes an effort of historical reconstruction to appreciate why Wittgenstein once feared that his own work would be regarded as a pale shadow of Carnap’s. (shrink)

Ruth Macklin argued that dignity is nothing more than respect for persons or their autonomy. During the COVID-19 pandemic, difficult decisions are being made about the allocation of scarce resources. Respect for autonomy cannot justify rationing decisions. Justice can be invoked to justify rationing. However, this leaves an uncomfortable tension between the principles. Dignity is not a useless concept because it is able to account for why we respect autonomy and for why it can be legitimate to override autonomy in (...) times of critical care resource shortages. Dignity affirms the worth of the human individual as a meaning-making embodied subject, who is always in relationship to others, the world, time, and transcendence, and who realizes their dignity through their moral behaviour. Such an understanding means people should be helped to make morally right decisions about their own treatment, which may include forgoing potentially beneficial treatment for the good of others. Respect for dignity does not require fulfilling the morally wrong choices of one who insists on treatment at the expense of others. Dignity also protects the discretion of clinicians to make decisions appropriate to their competence by prohibiting the application of broad-based criteria such as age. (shrink)

Human illusions and the Biblical call to hope.

In this fascinating new collection of essays, contemporary historians examine the ways earlier historians have framed, written, and "made" the Jewish past. Probing the ideology and methodology of their professional predecessors, American and Israeli historians offer new perspectives on some of the central figures of twentieth-century Jewish historiography, including Gershom Scholem, S. D. Goitein, Yitzhak Baer, Elias Bickermann, and Cecil Roth, as well as the Israeli "New Historians." Although the lives and work of these scholars differ in many ways, Jewish (...) historians have recurrently confronted the challenges posed by assimilation, antisemitism, and various forms of nationalism. Through their critical examinations of the construction of the Jewish past, the contributors to this volume develop important insights into current attitudes toward the dominant canons and ideals of historical scholarship and the future of historiography. They shine new light on the formation of a historical worldview and the "making" of history. (shrink)

Wittgenstein's 'middle period' is often seen as a transitional phase connecting his better-known early and later philosophies. The fifteen essays in this volume focus both on the distinctive character of his teaching and writing in the 1930s, and on its pivotal importance for an understanding of his philosophy as a whole. They offer wide-ranging perspectives on the central issue of how best to identify changes and continuities in his philosophy during those years, as well as on particular topics in the (...) philosophy of mind, religion, ethics, aesthetics, and the philosophy of mathematics. The volume will be valuable for all who are interested in this formative period of Wittgenstein's development. (shrink)

This book attempts to provide an ethical foundation with which to address the question, 'Should we spread life beyond Earth?' It examines the material conditions of the solar system, the limits of consciousness, the limits of society, and the long term possibilities of sending human life out into the universe. The author delineates the ethical criteria of sentient life and considers justifications of space travel for the purpose of human expansion. Duemler gives special attention to the utilitarian explanation which concludes (...) that if life did [gnyad throughout the solar system, or even the galaxy, then this would serve to increase the amount of sentient life and, if life in the new world is a balanced positive, is therefore a positive event. Three main issues, drawing upon both science and philosophy, fall at the center of the discussion: supporting evidence not based on questionable dogma nor requiring huge intuitive leaps of faith; it must square with natural selection and have biological plausibility; and it must have inherent value, not requiring underlying conditions for a judgement to pass. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 8, August 2020, Page 96-98.

Locke’s property rights are now usually understood to be both fundamental and strictly negative. Fundamental because they are thought to be basic constraints on what we may do, unconstrained by anything deeper. Negative because they are thought to only protect a property holder against the claims of others. Here, I argue that this widespread interpretation is mistaken. For Locke, property rights are constrained by the deeper ‘fundamental law of nature,’ which involves positive obligations to those in need and confines the (...) right to excess property within circumstances where it is not needed to preserve human life. (shrink)

The current coronavirus pandemic presents the greatest healthcare crisis in living memory. Hospitals across the world have faced unprecedented pressure. In the face of this tidal wave of demand for limited healthcare resources, how are clinicians to identify patients most likely to benefit? Should age or frailty be discriminators? This paper seeks to analyse the current evidence-base, seeking a nuanced approach to pandemic decision-making, such as admission to critical care.