Broad in its geographic scope and yet grounded in original archival research, this book situates the inception of modern aesthetic theory – the philosophical analysis of art and beauty - in theological contexts that are crucial to explaining why it arose. Simon Grote presents seminal aesthetic theories of the German and Scottish Enlightenments as outgrowths of a quintessentially Enlightenment project: the search for a natural 'foundation of morality' and a means of helping naturally self-interested human beings transcend their (...) own self-interest. This conclusion represents an important alternative to the standard history of aesthetics as a series of preludes to the achievements of Immanuel Kant, as well as a reinterpretation of several canonical figures in the German and Scottish Enlightenments. It also offers a foundation for a transnational history of the Enlightenment without the French philosophes at its centre, while solidly endorsing historians' growing reluctance to call the Enlightenment a secularising movement. (shrink)

Among all the isms worthy of examination in any study of eighteenth-century German philosophy, Wolffianism is undoubtedly among the worthiest. Broadly defined as adherence to teachings of Christian...

Contrary to the view that Francis Hutcheson attempted to expound, defend, and further develop the philosophical system described in Shaftesbury's Characteristics, some contemporaries of Hutcheson considered Hutcheson's differences from Shaftesbury to be at least as profound as the similarities. The clearest descriptions of those differences can be found in William Leechman's preface to Hutcheson's 1755 System of Moral Philosophy, and more elaborately in a review of Hutcheson's System, probably by Hugh Blair, published in the 1755 Edinburgh Review. Examining Shaftesbury's and (...) Hutcheson's moral philosophies in light of these two descriptions reveals that Shaftesbury's defense of virtue as natural to human beings, while a plausible response to Locke, clearly did not escape Hutcheson's censure of Epicurean egoism. (shrink)

Together with Scottish Philosophy in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, edited by Gordon Graham, this volume inaugurates the series A History of Scottish Philosophy, published by Oxford University Press under Graham's general editorship. A collection of "collaborative studies by expert authors," the series is projected to "provide a comprehensive account of the Scottish philosophical tradition". In their introduction to this particular volume, however, editors Aaron Garrett and James A. Harris propose a more modest purpose. "It will be plain to the (...) reader," they acknowledge, "that we are not presenting here a comprehensive account of the philosophy of eighteenth-century Scotland". Leaving psychology... (shrink)

In the 1860s and 1870s the logic of Boole and the calculating machines of Babbage were key resources in W. S. Jevons’s attempt to construct a mechanical model of the mind, and both therefore played an important role in Jevons’s attempted revolution in economic theory. In this same period both Boole and Babbage were studied within the Cambridge Moral Sciences Tripos, but the Cambridge reading of Boole and Babbage was much more circumspect. Implicitly following the division of the moral sciences (...) into material and ‘real’ as established by the Rev. Grote, John Venn treated Boole’s logic as a purely formal science, while Alfred Marshall based his psychological model of the mechanical part of the human mind upon Babbage’s two-level machine. From the different perspectives of logic and psychology, Venn and Marshall did not simply incorporate their readings of Boole and Babbage, but also attempted to establish the limits to any mechanical explanation of the mind. This comparison of the attitudes to mental science of Jevons and Marshall provides a foundation from which the differing conceptions of economic theory of the two men can be established.Keywords: Alfred Marshall; Charles Babbage; George Boole; John Venn; Logic; Psychology. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Freud, Archaeology and Egypt: Religion, Materiality and the Cultural Critique of Origins SIMON GOLDHILL In memoriam John Forrester i. With a rhetoric that is as self-serving as it is historically false, scientific writers since the Second World War have insisted that Darwin’s evolutionary biology was the breakthrough that heralded the triumph of secularism and materialism, the very conditions of modernity: the Scientific Revolution. Darwin’s theorizing does have a (...) specific purchase on one crucial aspect of Judaeo-Christian thinking, for sure. Darwin’s theory of evolution challenged the perfection of man, made in God’s image, by proposing instead a theory of continuous and continuing change. The Bible insists on a moment of origin—bereshit, “In the beginning... ” [Genesis 1 1]—and the rabbinical and Christian commentators on this opening demand that creatio ex nihilo is an unchallengeable principle, in the face of the considerable challenge of repeated philosophical rejections of such an idea.1 The Gospel of Luke proclaims that it will narrate the genesis of Jesus and to this purpose opens with a genealogy from Abraham to Jesus, an unbroken line that grounds and authorizes the fulfilment of the messianic prophesy of Isaiah. In aggressive and precisely polemical contrast, Darwin exclaimed: “What an infinite number of generations, which the mind cannot grasp, must have succeeded each other in the long roll of years!.”2 Rather than listing a precise number of generations from Adam and Eve, as the Hebrew Bible and the Gospels would have us do, arion 28.3 winter 2021 76 freud, archaeology and egypt Darwin imagines a narrative for the human race without beginning and without end and without perfection. But when Darwin does this, it was already nothing new. Not only had books like Chambers’ Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation scandalously opened the door to a model of evolutionary change without divine providential causation, but also Charles Lyell’s seminal Principles of Geology back in the 1830s had already revealed this chasm of time.3 “In the economy of the world,” he wrote, “I can find no traces of a beginning, no prospect of an end”—and he had the facts in the ground to prove it.4 James Playfair, who helped popularize Lyell’s stunning discovery of the deep time of the earth, demonstrates an iconic reaction to Lyell’s science: “in the distance of this extraordinary perspective... [t]he mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time.”5 The abyss of past time makes the nineteenth-century scholar giddy, dizzy with an overload of imagination. It was geology, first of all, not biology that challenged the very ground on which Christian theories of time and human development stood. As Ruskin beautifully put it: “If only the Geologists would let me alone, I would do very well, but those dreadful Hammers! I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses.”6 But, more perhaps even than geology, the most challenging threat to the established intellectual and social understanding of things came from critical history. Ernest Renan, renegade Catholic, and one of the most influential and notorious writers on Christianity in the 19th century, was typical when he wrote “My faith has been destroyed by historical criticism, not by scholasticism nor by philosophy.”7 Critical history showed that the earliest stories, on which so much depended, were myths not history. The stories of earliest Greek history, as Grote argued, or Roman history, as Niebuhr had earlier demonstrated, were veined with legends and fantasies, and did not provide access to “wie es eigentlich gewesen hat,” to “what actually happened,” the watchword of empirical Simon Goldhill 77 historiography.8 As Bishop Wilberforce thundered in already too late anticipation, “The alarming question is... whether the human mind, which with Niebuhr has tasted blood in the slaughter of Livy, can be prevailed upon to abstain from falling next upon the Bible.”9 So, terrifyingly to the orthodox, the doubt which undermined Livy, did indeed focus sharply on the bible and even of the lives of the saints from a much later period. A series of horrifying books—Strauss or Renan on... (shrink)

Review of: Simon Grote, The Emergence of Modern Aesthetic Theory: Religion and Morality in Enlightenment Germany and Scotland, Cambridge University Press, 2017.

A review of Simon Grote's The Emergence of Modern Aesthetic Theory cambridge university press. 2017. pp. 308. £75.00..

Best known for his influential History of Greece, the historian and politician George Grote wrote this account of Plato's dialogues as a philosophical supplement to the History. First published in 1865 and written in dialogic form, Grote's account of Plato's works includes substantial footnotes and marginalia. This first volume focuses on Plato's early and transitional dialogues, all of which feature Socrates. It also includes a preface to the whole project which discusses the meaning and importance of philosophy itself, (...) and extensive introductory material on pre-Socratic philosophy, the life of Plato and history of the Platonic canon. With three volumes each running to over six hundred pages, Grote's scholarship is formidably comprehensive. The publication of Plato and the Other Companions of Sokrates confirmed him as one of the greatest authorities on Plato in the nineteenth century. (shrink)

This bestselling dictionary is written by one of the leading philosophers of our time, and it is widely recognized as the best dictionary of its kind. Comprehensive and authoritative, it covers every aspect of philosophy from Aristotle to Zen. With clear and concise definitions, it provides lively and accessible coverage of not only Western philosophical traditions, but also themes from Chinese, Indian, Islamic, and Jewish philosophy. New entries on philosophy of economics, social theory, neuroscience, philosophy of the mind, and moral (...) conceptions, bring this authoritative third edition up to date. It is the ideal introduction to philosophy for anyone with an interest in the subject, and it is an indispensable work of reference for students and teachers. (shrink)

Issues of reliability are claiming center-stage in the epistemology of machine learning. This paper unifies different branches in the literature and points to promising research directions, whilst also providing an accessible introduction to key concepts in statistics and machine learning---as far as they are concerned with reliability.

After a wave of breakthroughs in image‐based medical diagnostics and risk prediction models, machine learning (ML) has turned into a normal science. However, prominent researchers are claiming that another paradigm shift in medical ML is imminent—due to most recent staggering successes of large language models—from single‐purpose applications toward generalist models, driven by natural language. This article investigates the implications of this paradigm shift for the ethical debate. Focusing on issues like trust, transparency, threats of patient autonomy, responsibility issues in the (...) collaboration of clinicians and ML models, fairness, and privacy, it will be argued that the main problems will be continuous with the current debate. However, due to functioning of large language models, the complexity of all these problems increases. In addition, the article discusses some profound challenges for the clinical evaluation of large language models and threats to the reproducibility and replicability of studies about large language models in medicine due to corporate interests. (shrink)

Simon Critchley's first book, The Ethics of Deconstruction, was originally published to great acclaim in 1992. This edition contains three new appendices and a new preface where Critchley reflects upon the origins, motivation and reception of The Ethics of Deconstruction.

Gilles Deleuze’s engagements with mathematics, replete in his work, rely upon the construction of alternative lineages in the history of mathematics, which challenge some of the self imposed limits that regulate the canonical concepts of the discipline. For Deleuze, these challenges provide an opportunity to reconfigure particular philosophical problems – for example, the problem of individuation – and to develop new concepts in response to them. The highly original research presented in this book explores the mathematical construction of Deleuze’s philosophy, (...) as well as addressing the undervalued and often neglected question of the mathematical thinkers who influenced his work. -/- In the wake of Alain Badiou’s recent and seemingly devastating attack on the way the relation between mathematics and philosophy is configured in Deleuze’s work, Simon Duffy offers a robust defence of the structure of Deleuze’s philosophy and, in particular, the adequacy of the mathematical problems used in its construction. By reconciling Badiou and Deleuze’s seeming incompatible engagements with mathematics, Duffy succeeds in presenting a solid foundation for Deleuze’s philosophy, rebuffing the recent challenges against it. -/- Simon B. Duffy is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Yale-NUS College, Singapore, and Honorary Research Associate in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Sydney, Australia. He is the author of The Logic of Expression: Quality, Quantity, and Intensity in Spinoza, Hegel and Deleuze (2006). (shrink)

In recent years, a plethora of high-profile scientific publications has been reporting about machine learning algorithms outperforming clinicians in medical diagnosis or treatment recommendations. This has spiked interest in deploying relevant algorithms with the aim of enhancing decision-making in healthcare. In this paper, we argue that instead of straightforwardly enhancing the decision-making capabilities of clinicians and healthcare institutions, deploying machines learning algorithms entails trade-offs at the epistemic and the normative level. Whereas involving machine learning might improve the accuracy of medical (...) diagnosis, it comes at the expense of opacity when trying to assess the reliability of given diagnosis. Drawing on literature in social epistemology and moral responsibility, we argue that the uncertainty in question potentially undermines the epistemic authority of clinicians. Furthermore, we elucidate potential pitfalls of involving machine learning in healthcare with respect to paternalism, moral responsibility and fairness. At last, we discuss how the deployment of machine learning algorithms might shift the evidentiary norms of medical diagnosis. In this regard, we hope to lay the grounds for further ethical reflection of the opportunities and pitfalls of machine learning for enhancing decision-making in healthcare. (shrink)

I intend to argue that good friendship sometimes requires epistemic irresponsibility. To put it another way, it is not always possible to be both a good friend and a diligent believer.

Taking a medieval approach in content as well as in form—a compilation of lists—this volume creates a foundation for the study of the medieval mindset by establishing the terms and concepts that scholars would have had in a common at the time: an invaluable lingua franca. With a pedagogical appeal, this interdisciplinary book is a combination text, reference, and popular work that provides a fascinating intellectual history of the Middle Ages while complimenting the study of other works from that period.

In recent years, there has been a surge of high-profile publications on applications of artificial intelligence (AI) systems for medical diagnosis and prognosis. While AI provides various opportunities for medical practice, there is an emerging consensus that the existing studies show considerable deficits and are unable to establish the clinical benefit of AI systems. Hence, the view that the clinical benefit of AI systems needs to be studied in clinical trials—particularly randomised controlled trials (RCTs)—is gaining ground. However, an issue that (...) has been overlooked so far in the debate is that, compared with drug RCTs, AI RCTs require methodological adjustments, which entail ethical challenges. This paper sets out to develop a systematic account of the ethics of AI RCTs by focusing on the moral principles of clinical equipoise, informed consent and fairness. This way, the objective is to animate further debate on the (research) ethics of medical AI. (shrink)

In considering the debate about the meaning of ‘disease’, the positions are generally presented as falling into two categories: naturalist, e.g., Boorse, and normativist, e.g., Engelhardt and many others. This division is too coarse, and obscures much of what is going on in this debate. I therefore propose that accounts of the meaning of ‘disease’ be assessed according to Hare’s (1997) taxonomy of evaluative terms. Such an analysis will allow us to better understand both individual positions and their inter-relationships. Most (...) importantly, it will show that it is unlikely that there is a single unique disease-concept at issue. Rather, different authors are, for the most part, considering different concepts. (shrink)

This essay considers how scholarly approaches to the development of molecular biology have too often narrowed the historical aperture to genes, overlooking the ways in which other objects and processes contributed to the molecularization of life. From structural and dynamic studies of biomolecules to cellular membranes and organelles to metabolism and nutrition, new work by historians, philosophers, and STS scholars of the life sciences has revitalized older issues, such as the relationship of life to matter, or of physicochemical inquiries to (...) biology. This scholarship points to a novel molecular vista that opens up a pluralist view of molecularizations in the twentieth century and considers their relevance to current science. (shrink)

This paper considers John Doris, Stephen Stich, Alexandra Plakias, and colleagues’ recent attempts to utilize empirical studies of cross-cultural variation in moral judgment to support a version of the argument from disagreement against moral realism. Crucially, Doris et al. claim that the moral disagreements highlighted by these studies are not susceptible to the standard ‘diffusing’ explanations realists have developed in response to earlier versions of the argument. I argue that plausible hypotheses about the cognitive processes underlying ordinary moral judgment and (...) the acquisition of moral norms, when combined with a popular philosophical account of moral inquiry—the method of reflective equilibrium—undercut the anti-realist force of the moral disagreements that Doris et al. describe. I also show that Stich's recent attempt to provide further theoretical support for Doris et al.'s case is unsuccessful. (shrink)

If science fiction is a genre, then attempts to think about the nature of science fiction will be affected by one’s understanding of what genres are. I shall examine two approaches to genre, one dominant but inadequate, the other better, but only occasionally making itself seen. I shall then discuss several important, interrelated issues, focusing particularly on science fiction : what it is for a work to belong to a genre, the semantics of genre names, the validity of attempts to (...) define genres, and the connections between genre and normativity. One important but neglected clue to the nature of genres lies in the kinds of disagreements they generate over the assignment of works to genres. I conclude by explaining why these disagreements tell us something about the nature of genres, and discussing in some detail two famous cases of disagreement about whether some work or works are science fiction. (shrink)

This book, designed for high-level undergraduates, postgraduates and fellow researchers, introduces the reader to the main areas of metaethical work today. As we as introducing familiar positions and arguments, Kirchin argues clearly and engagingly for a set of distinctive and arresting views.

Philosophers have traditionally used thought-experiments in their endeavours to find a satisfactory account of the self and personal identity. Yet there are considerations from empirical psychology as well as related ones from philosophy itself that appear to completely undermine the method of thought-experiment. This paper focuses on both sets of considerations and attempts a defence of the method.

Various publications claim that medical AI systems perform as well, or better, than clinical experts. However, there have been very few controlled trials and the quality of existing studies has been called into question. There is growing concern that existing studies overestimate the clinical benefits of AI systems. This has led to calls for more, and higher-quality, randomized controlled trials of medical AI systems. While this a welcome development, AI RCTs raise novel methodological challenges that have seen little discussion. We (...) discuss some of the challenges arising in the context of AI RCTs and make some suggestions for how to meet them. (shrink)

Volume: 4 Publisher: London J. Murray Publication date: 1888 Subjects: Plato Socrates Philosophy, Ancient Notes: This is an OCR reprint.

Best known for his influential History of Greece, the historian and politician George Grote wrote this account of Plato's dialogues as a philosophical supplement to the History. First published in 1865 and written in dialogic form, Grote's account of Plato's works includes substantial footnotes and marginalia. This first volume focuses on Plato's early and transitional dialogues, all of which feature Socrates. It also includes a preface to the whole project which discusses the meaning and importance of philosophy itself, (...) and extensive introductory material on pre-Socratic philosophy, the life of Plato and history of the Platonic canon. With three volumes each running to over six hundred pages, Grote's scholarship is formidably comprehensive. The publication of Plato and the Other Companions of Sokrates confirmed him as one of the greatest authorities on Plato in the nineteenth century. (shrink)

In light of recent advances in machine learning for medical applications, the automation of medical diagnostics is imminent. That said, before machine learning algorithms find their way into clinical practice, various problems at the epistemic level need to be overcome. In this paper, we discuss different sources of uncertainty arising for clinicians trying to evaluate the trustworthiness of algorithmic evidence when making diagnostic judgments. Thereby, we examine many of the limitations of current machine learning algorithms (with deep learning in particular) (...) and highlight their relevance for medical diagnostics. Among the problems we inspect are the theoretical foundations of deep learning (which are not yet adequately understood), the opacity of algorithmic decisions, and the vulnerabilities of machine learning models, as well as concerns regarding the quality of medical data used to train the models. Building on this, we discuss different desiderata for an uncertainty amelioration strategy that ensures that the integration of machine learning into clinical settings proves to be medically beneficial in a meaningful way. (shrink)

There is much to learn from Durán and Jongsma’s paper.1 One particularly important insight concerns the relationship between epistemology and ethics in medical artificial intelligence. In clinical environments, the task of AI systems is to provide risk estimates or diagnostic decisions, which then need to be weighed by physicians. Hence, while the implementation of AI systems might give rise to ethical issues—for example, overtreatment, defensive medicine or paternalism2—the issue that lies at the heart is an epistemic problem: how can physicians (...) know whether to trust decisions made by AI systems? In this manner, various studies examining the interaction of AI systems and physicians have shown that without being able to evaluate their trustworthiness, especially novice physicians become over-reliant on algorithmic support—and ultimately are led astray by incorrect decisions.3–5 This leads to a second insight from the paper, namely that even if some AI system happens to be opaque, it is still not built on the moon. To assess its trustworthiness, AI developers or physicians have different sorts of higher order evidence at hand. Most importantly, …. (shrink)

Minds, Brains and Biology -- A Body of Knowledge -- Towards an Aesthetics of Behavior.

Many agents have failed to comply with their responsibilities to take the action needed to avoid dangerous anthropogenic climate change. This pervasive noncompliance raises two questions of nonideal political theory. First, it raises the question of what agents should do when others do not discharge their climate responsibilities. (the Responsibility Question) In this paper I put forward four principles that we need to employ to answer the Responsibility Question (Sections II-V). I then illustrate my account, by outlining four kinds of (...) action that should be undertaken (Section VI). Pervasive noncompliance also raises a second question: Given the lack of progress in combating climate change, should existing governance structures be maintained or changed (and if they should be changed, in what ways)? (the Governance Question). The paper briefly outlines a methodology for addressing this question and outlines what a nonideal response to the existing institutional structures would be (Section VII). It does so with reference to the Paris Agreement, and in particular the creation of a "global stocktake" (Article 14, Paris Agreement) and the "facilitative dialogue" (paragraph 20 of the ‘Adoption of the Paris Agreement’). The aim, then, is to set out an account of a nonideal theory of climate justice. (shrink)

Ethical discussions about Artificial Intelligence (AI) often overlook its potentially large impact on nonhuman animals. In a recent commentary on our paper about AI’s possible harms, Leonie Bossert argues for a focus not just on the possible negative impacts but also the possible beneficial outcomes of AI for animals. We welcome this call to increase awareness of AI that helps animals: developing and using AI to improve animal wellbeing and promote positive dimensions in animal lives should be a vital ethical (...) goal. Nonetheless, we argue that there is some value in focusing on technology-based harms in the context of AI ethics and policy discourses. A harms framework for AI can inform some of our strongest duties to animals and inform regulation and risk assessment impacts designed to prevent serious harms to humans, the environment, and animals. (shrink)

The term ‘cell’, in addition to designating fundamental units of life, has also been applied since the nineteenth century to technical apparatuses such as fuel and galvanic cells. This paper shows that such technologies, based on the electrical effects of chemical reactions taking place in containers, had a far-reaching impact on the concept of the biological cell. My argument revolves around the controversy over oxidative phosphorylation in bioenergetics between 1961 and 1977. In this scientific conflict, a two-level mingling of technological (...) culture, physical chemistry and biological research can be observed. First, Peter Mitchell explained the chemiosmotic hypothesis of energy generation by representing cellular membrane processes via an analogy to fuel cells. Second, in the associated experimental scrutiny of membranes, material cell models were devised that reassembled spatialized molecular processes in vitro. Cells were thus modelled both on paper and in the test tube not as morphological structures but as compartments able to perform physicochemical work. The story of cells and membranes in bioenergetics points out the role that theories and practices in physical chemistry had in the molecularization of life. These approaches model the cell as a ‘topology of molecular action’, as I will call it, and it involves concepts of spaces, surfaces and movements. They epitomize an engineer’s vision of the organism that has influenced diverse fields in today’s life sciences. (shrink)

We notice a number of interesting overlaps between the views on personhood of Ifeanyi Menkiti and Marya Schechtman. Both philosophers distance their views from the individualistic ones standard in western thought and foreground the importance of extrinsic or relational features to personhood. For Menkiti, it is ‘the community which defines the person as person’; for Schechtman, being a person is to have a place in person-space, which involves being seen as a person by others. But there are also striking differences. (...) Schechtman sees this aspect as expanding the scope of personhood to infants and those who are severely mentally disabled. Menkiti thinks that there is a line to be drawn at some point between those humans that are persons and those who are not. We consider the cases offered in questioning how the dispute between the two views should be resolved. (shrink)

The application of machine-learning technologies to medical practice promises to enhance the capabilities of healthcare professionals in the assessment, diagnosis, and treatment, of medical conditions. However, there is growing concern that algorithmic bias may perpetuate or exacerbate existing health inequalities. Hence, it matters that we make precise the different respects in which algorithmic bias can arise in medicine, and also make clear the normative relevance of these different kinds of algorithmic bias for broader questions about justice and fairness in healthcare. (...) In this paper, we provide the building blocks for an account of algorithmic bias and its normative relevance in medicine. (shrink)