Assume we could someday create artificial creatures with intelligence comparable to our own. Could it be ethical use them as unpaid labor? There is very little philosophical literature on this topic, but the consensus so far has been that such robot servitude would merely be a new form of slavery. Against this consensus I defend the permissibility of robot servitude, and in particular the controversial case of designing robots so that they want to serve human ends. A typical objection to (...) this case draws an analogy to the genetic engineering of humans: if designing eager robot servants is permissible, it should also be permissible to design eager human servants. Few ethical views can easily explain even the wrongness of such human engineering, however, and those few explanations that are available break the analogy with engineering robots. The case turns out to be illustrative of profound problems in the field of population ethics. (shrink)

I propose a conceptual framework for emotions according to which they are best understood as the feedback mechanism a creature possesses in virtue of its function to learn. More specifically, emotions can be neatly modeled as a measure of harmony in a certain kind of constraint satisfaction problem. This measure can be used as error for weight adjustment (learning) in an unsupervised connectionist network.

Argument“How should a modern artist react to the atomic age?” Time magazine posed this question in 1952 to open a review of an exhibition of paintings inspired by the “explosion of the atomic bomb” and by the “discovery of nuclear energy.” The energetic paintings of the Italian Spatial Movement were, according to Time, “almost as explosive as the bomb itself.” “Explosiveness” was a defining feature of much 1950s art, whose main impulse, gestural abstraction, has previously been understood as the urgent (...) expression of the artist's subjectivity. This paper argues that explosiveness in art can also be seen as an “expression” of the realities of the nuclear era. Postwar artists were ambivalent about the explosive forces, both liberating and devastating, that lay within the atom. Toward the end of the 1950s, no longer content merely to represent atomic disintegration, some artists went so far as to propose the outright self-destruction of the work of art as the only fitting means of expression in the atomic age.One must – and this is not an exaggeration – keep in mind that we are living in the atomic age, where everything material and physical could disappear from one day to another, to be replaced by nothing but the ultimate abstraction imaginable.– Yves Klein 1958. (shrink)

Metaphysics: 5 Questions is a collection of short interviews based on 5 questions presented to some of the most influential and prominent philosophers in the field. We hear their views on metaphysics, the aim, the scope, the future direction of research and how their work fits in these respects. Interviews with Lynne Rudder Baker, Helen Beebee, Thomas Hofweber, Hugh Mellor, Peter Menzies, Stephen Mumford, Daniel Nolan, Eric T.Olson, L. A. Paul, Lorenz B. Puntel, Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra, Gideon Rosen, Jonathan Schaffer, (...) Peter Simons, Barry Smith, Michael Tooley, Peter van Inwagen, Dean Zimmerman. (shrink)

Through the criminal justice system so-called dangerous offenders are, besides the offence that they are being convicted of and sentenced to, also punished for acts that they have not done but that they are believe to be likely to commit in the future. The aim of this paper is to critically discuss whether some adherents of retributivism give a plausible rationale for punishing offenders more harshly if they, all else being equal, by means of predictions are believed to be more (...) dangerous than other offenders. While consequentialism has no problem, at least in principle, with this use of predictions most retributivists have been opponents of punishing offenders on the basis of predictions. How can an offender deserve to be punished for something that he has not done? But some retributivists like Anthony Duff and Stephen Morse have argued in favor of punishing offenders who are considered to be dangerous in the future more harshly than non-dangerous offenders. After having reconstructed their arguments in detail, it will be argued that both Duff’s and Morse’s attempts to give a retributivistic justification have several shortcomings. (shrink)

The good in nature and humanity brings together 20 leading thinkers and writers - including Ursula Goodenough, Lynn Margulis, Dorion Sagan, Carl Safina, David Petersen, Wendell Berry, Terry Tempest Williams, and Barry Lopez - to examine the divide between faith and reason, and to seek a means for developing an environmental ethic that will help us confront two of our most imperiling crises: global environmental destruction and an impoverished spirituality. The book explores the ways in which science, spirit, and (...) religion can guide the experience and understanding of our ongoing relationship with the natural world and examines how the integration of science and spirituality can equip us to make wiser choices in using and managing the natural environment. The book also provides compelling stories that offer a narrative understanding of the relations among science, spirit, and nature. Grounded in the premise that neither science nor religion can by itself resolve the prevailing malaise of environmental and moral decline, contributors seek viable approaches to averting environmental catastrophe and, to achieving a more harmonious relationship with the natural world. (shrink)

It is widely agreed that obsessive-compulsive disorder involves irrationality. But where in the complex of states and processes that constitutes OCD should this irrationality be located? A pervasive assumption in both the psychiatric and philosophical literature is that the seat of irrationality is located in the obsessive thoughts characteristic of OCD. Building on a puzzle about insight into OCD (Taylor 2022), we challenge this pervasive assumption, and argue instead that the irrationality of OCD is located in the emotions that are (...) characteristic of OCD, such as anxiety or fear. In particular, we propose to understand the irrationality of OCD as a matter of harboring recalcitrant emotions. We argue that this account not only solves the puzzle about insight, but also makes better sense of how OCD sufferers experience and describe their condition and helps explain some otherwise puzzling features of compulsive behavior. (shrink)

A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes is a popular-science book on cosmology (the study of the origin and evolution of the universe) by British physicist Stephen Hawking. It was first published in 1988. Hawking wrote the book for readers who have no prior knowledge of the universe and people who are interested in learning.

A comprehensive reassessment of the concept of mimesis in the history of ancient Greek aesthetics and philosophy of art, with particular attention to Plato, Aristotle, Hellenistic philosophy, and neoplatonism. There is also a wide-ranging review of arguments pro and contra the idea of artistic mimesis from the Renaissance to modern literar theory. The book challenges standard accounts in numerous respects and builds a new dialectical model with which to make sense of the entire history of mimeticist thinking in aesthetics.

In a recent paper in this journal, Carter and Peterson raise two distinctly epistemological puzzles that arise for anyone aspiring to defend the precautionary principle. The first puzzle trades on an application of epistemic contextualism to the precautionary principle; the second puzzle concerns the compatibility of the precautionary principle with the de minimis rule. In this note, I argue that neither puzzle should worry defenders of the precautionary principle. The first puzzle can be shown to be an instance of the (...) familiar but conceptually harmless challenge of adjudicating between relevant interests to reach assessments of threats when applying the precautionary principle. The second puzzle can be shown to rely on a subtle but crucial misrepresentation of the relevant probabilities at play when applying the precautionary principle. (shrink)

Aboutness has been studied from any number of angles. Brentano made it the defining feature of the mental. Phenomenologists try to pin down the aboutness-features of particular mental states. Materialists sometimes claim to have grounded aboutness in natural regularities. Attempts have even been made, in library science and information theory, to operationalize the notion. But it has played no real role in philosophical semantics. This is surprising; sentences have aboutness-properties if anything does. Aboutness is the first book to examine through (...) a philosophical lens the role of subject matter in meaning. A long-standing tradition sees meaning as truth-conditions, to be specified by listing the scenarios in which a sentence is true. Nothing is said about the principle of selection--about what in a scenario gets it onto the list. Subject matter is the missing link here. A sentence is true because of how matters stand where its subject matter is concerned. Stephen Yablo maintains that this is not just a feature of subject matter, but its essence. One indicates what a sentence is about by mapping out logical space according to its changing ways of being true or false. The notion of content that results--directed content--is brought to bear on a range of philosophical topics, including ontology, verisimilitude, knowledge, loose talk, assertive content, and philosophical methodology. Written by one of today's leading philosophers, Aboutness represents a major advance in semantics and the philosophy of language. (shrink)

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) gehort zu den grossten Geistern, die je auf Erden gelebt haben. Der vorliegende Band versucht eine Verbindungslinie zwischen seiner Rechtsphilosophie und seiner Religionsphilosophie herzustellen, indem er Pascals Gedanken uber die Gerechtigkeit zu seiner beruhmten Lehre von den drei Ordnungen ins Verhaltnis setzt. ".

This first volume of the new Brill series "Ancient Philosophy & Religion" offers analyses of Platonic philosophy and piety, the emergence of a common religio-philosophical discourse in Antiquity, the place of Jesus among ancient philosophers, and responses of pagan philosophers to Christianity from the second century to Late Antiquity.

Wilhelm von Humboldts Rechtsphilosophie ist bei weitem nicht so bekannt wie seine Sprachphilosophie oder gar seine Rolle als Bildungsreformer. Der Autor untersucht zu diesem Zweck Humboldts "Ideen zu einem Versuch, die Grenzen der Wirksamkeit des Staates zu bestimmen".

Astonishingly, despite the vast amount of scholarship on Machiavelli, no study exists on his theory of legislation, which runs through his celebrated work The Prince, the three-volume Discourses on Livy, the History of Florence, and many of his shorter writings. Jens Petersen's work fills this gap and applies his insights to contemporary legislation.

In Return to Reason, Stephen Toulmin argues that the potential for reason to improve our lives has been hampered by a serious imbalance in our pursuit of ...

Standard epistemology takes it for granted that there is a special kind of value: epistemic value. This claim does not seem to sit well with act utilitarianism, however, since it holds that only welfare is of real value. I first develop a particularly utilitarian sense of “epistemic value”, according to which it is closely analogous to the nature of financial value. I then demonstrate the promise this approach has for two current puzzles in the intersection of epistemology and value theory: (...) first, the problem of why knowledge is better than mere true belief, and second, the relation between epistemic justification and responsibility. (shrink)

The growing literature on philosophical thought experiments has so far focused almost exclusively on the role of thought experiments in confirming or refuting philosophical hypotheses or theories. In this paper we draw attention to an additional and largely ignored role that thought experiments frequently play in our philosophical practice: some thought experiments do not merely serve as means for testing various philosophical hypotheses or theories, but also serve as facilitators for conceiving and articulating new ones. As we will put it, (...) they serve as ‘heuristics for theory discovery’. Our purpose in the paper is two-fold: to make a case that this additional role of thought experiments deserves the attention of philosophers interested in the methodology of philosophy; to sketch a tentative taxonomy of a number of distinct ways in which philosophical thought experiments can aid theory discovery, which can guide future research on this role of thought experiments. (shrink)

Giambattista Vico gilt als Begründer der Kulturwissenschaft, obwohl er Jurist war und Rhetorik lehrte. Der Autor führt die juristische Provenienz mit Vicos kulturgeschichtlichen Entdeckungen zusammen und begründet diese in Verbindung mit jener. Durch diese Rückbesinnung auf Vicos Theorie kann womöglich auch die Rechtswissenschaft als Kulturwissenschaft begriffen werden.

Most of us want to have children. We want them to be healthy and have a good start in life. One way to achieve this goal is to use preimplantation genetic diagnosis . PGD enables people engaged in the process of in vitro fertilisation to acquire information about the genetic constitution of an early embryo. On the basis of this information, a decision can be made to transfer embryos without genetic defects to the uterus and terminate those with genetic defects.1However, (...) is it morally acceptable to use PGD to reduce the probability of children with severe genetic diseases being born? Is the current routine use of PGD in public healthcare services to select against severe genetic diseases like anencephaly, spina bifida, cystic fibrosis and Down’s syndrome morally acceptable?These are complex questions involving a range of difficult ethical issues—for instance, critical discussions about the morality of embryo research and embryo termination.2 They also involve awkward conceptual issues concerning such matters as the meaning of words such as “disability”3 and “severe” in “severe genetic diseases”,4 which will not be discussed here.In this paper I examine an argument which aims to show that efforts to prevent the birth of severely disabled children using PGD are morally unacceptable. Essentially, this argument appeals to our concern for disabled people and the belief that PGD, through a slippery slope process, will have bad consequences for them. I conclude that the argument is problematic for a number of reasons. But before I examine the argument itself, it will be helpful to separate two types of slippery slope argument since these involve different kinds of reasoning.TWO TYPES OF ARGUMENTMany of the arguments against PGD point to the bad consequences it can be expected to have for disabled people. Central to all these …. (shrink)

Stephen Hetherington's prominent career within epistemology has been a series of distinctive, bold, varied and provocative arguments and ideas. Bringing together Hetherington's unique body of writing for the first time, this collection features previously published as well as new material that link his approaches to key issues including knowledge, justification, fallibility, scepticism and the Gettier Problem. Advancing our understanding of the systemic nature of Hetherington's thinking, Stephen Hetherington on Epistemology presents his distinctive perspective on some of philosophy's central (...) questions about knowledge - an inviting blend of forensic detail and 'big picture' proposals. (shrink)

Frames, i.e., recursive attribute-value structures, are a general format for the decomposition of lexical concepts. Attributes assign unique values to objects and thus describe functional relations. Concepts can be classified into four groups: sortal, individual, relational and functional concepts. The classification is reflected by different grammatical roles of the corresponding nouns. The paper aims at a cognitively adequate decomposition, particularly, of sortal concepts by means of frames. Using typed feature structures, an explicit formalism for the characterization of cognitive frames is (...) developed. The frame model can be extended to account for typicality effects. Applying the paradigm of object-related neural synchronization, furthermore, a biologically motivated model for the cortical implementation of frames is developed. Cortically distributed synchronization patterns may be regarded as the fingerprints of concepts. (shrink)

Body checking, characterized by the repeated visual or physical inspection of particular parts of one’s own body (e.g. thighs, waist, or upper arms) is one of the most prominent behaviors associated with eating disorders, particularly Anorexia Nervosa (AN). In this paper, we explore the explanatory potential of the Recalcitrant Fear Model of AN (RFM) in relation to body checking. We argue that RFM, when combined with certain plausible auxiliary hypotheses about the cognitive and epistemic roles of emotions, is able to (...) explain key characteristics of body checking, including how body checking behavior becomes habitual and compulsive. (shrink)

The alien invasive Red King Crab in the Barents Sea represents both a threat, via ecosystem impacts, and a gain as a revenue source from food sales. Uncertainties exist regarding the ecological impacts but debate in Norway has also emphasised the economic benefits to marginalised fisher communities. This paper reports on a Q-methodology study involving key stakeholders to probe the extent to which divisions exist between different groups. While divisions are indeed found and two groupings identified, these are not as (...) clear as suggested by the lines typically portrayed in the media and elsewhere -, i.e. economic gains versus ecological preservation. Stakeholder groups reported here generally agreed that biodiversity concerns should be central and that further invasion was undesirable due to potential impacts on ecosystem services. (shrink)

Das Buch zeichnet Schopenhauers individualistisches Rechtsdenken nach und verteidigt seinen methodischen Individualismus namentlich gegen Carl Schmitt. Soweit ersichtlich erstmals wird Schopenhauers Idee der ewigen Gerechtigkeit der Kritik Friedrich Nietzsches gegenübergestellt.

Inquiry is an aim-directed activity, and as such governed by instrumental normativity. If you have reason to figure out a question, you have reason to take means to figuring it out. Beliefs are governed by epistemic normativity. On a certain pervasive understanding, this means that you are permitted – maybe required – to believe what you have sufficient evidence for. The norms of inquiry and epistemic norms both govern us as agents in pursuit of knowledge and understanding, and, on the (...) surface, they do so in harmony. Recently, however, Jane Friedman (2020) has pointed out that they are in tension with each other. In this paper, I aim to resolve this tension by showing that reasons for acts of inquiry – zetetic reasons – and epistemic reasons for belief can both be understood as flowing from the same general normative principle: the transmission principle for instrumental reasons. The resulting account is a version of epistemic instrumentalism that offers an attractive unity between zetetic and epistemic normativity. (shrink)