Online research in philosophy

Though this paper is mostly about a sense of “profession” common in much of the West, it explains how the term might apply in any country (especially how the profession of engineering differs from the function, discipline, and occupation of engineering). To do that, I have to explain the connection between “profession” (in my preferred sense) and another hard-to-translate term, “code of ethics” (in the sense it has in the expression “code of engineering ethics”). To understand engineering (or any other occupation) as a profession is to adopt a certain conception of it, one neither old nor (yet) universal. With that conception in hand, it should be possible for social science to answer the question posed in the title.

This paper investigates the ethical issues surrounding the concept of Internet neutrality focusing specifically on the correlation between neutrality and fairness. Moving from an analysis of the many available definitions of Internet neutrality and the heterogeneity of the Internet infrastructure, the common assumption that a neutral Internet is also a fair Internet is challenged. It is argued that a properly neutral Internet supports undesirable situations in which few users can exhaust the majority of the available resources or in which specific types of applications and services cannot be developed or properly deployed. The solution offered to these shortcomings is based on (1) an environmental approach to the Internet, (2) the four guiding principles of Floridi’s Information Ethics and (3) a principle called ‘Information Diversity’. The paper is divided into six sections. Section 1 briefly presents the debate concerning the concepts of network and Internet neutrality. Section 2 poses a general and unifying definition of Internet neutrality based on the critical assessment of several domain-specific approaches to the problem of neutrality. Section 3 is dedicated to the analysis of the relationship between Internet neutrality and the ethical principle of fairness. Section 4 introduces Floridi’s Information Ethics, the definition of Information Diversity and an analysis of how they can be used to address the limitations of Internet neutrality. Section 5 summarises the ethics of Internet neutrality and Information Diversity defining their relationship. Section 6 reviews the arguments presented in the paper clarifying the foundational role played by Information Diversity and Information Ethics in Internet policy-making activity.

NOESIS, Cambridge Scholarly Press, 2005.

In this article, consultation via the Internet and the use of the Internet as a source of medical information is examined from an ethical point of view. It is argued that important ethical aspects of the clinical interaction, such as dialogue and trust will be difficult to realise in an Internet-consultation. Further, it is doubtful whether an Internet doctor will accept responsibility. However, medical information via the Internet can be a valuable resource for patients wanting to know more about their disease and, thus, it is a means to enhancing their autonomy.

The years of study on Husserl’s theory of intentionality have led to a number of non-equivalent interpretations. The present work attempts to investigate the most prominent of these by presenting both their advantages and difficulties. However, its key point is specifically the analysis of Husserl’s theory. This is made in several stages that are concerned with the relation between noesis and noema: whether it is one-to-one or many-to-one, the kind of transcendency and dependency between them, and whether noema supervenes on noesis. Moreover, Husserl’s theory is also examined in—usually ignored—instances of contradiction, nonsense and intentional conflict. The outcome is a fresh reading in which noema occurs as the possibly thinkable content capable of constituting multi-objective references and composed of pure X explained in terms of syntactic matter and form.