The study of eye movements is a common way to non-invasively understand and analyze human behavior. However, eye-tracking techniques are very hard to scale, and require expensive equipment and extensive expertise. In the context of web browsing, these issues could be overcome by studying the link between the eye and the computer mouse. Here, we propose new analysis methods, and a more advanced characterization of this link. To this end, we recorded the eye, mouse, and scroll movements of 151 participants (...) exploring 18 dynamic web pages while performing free viewing and visual search tasks for 20 s. The data revealed significant differences of eye, mouse, and scroll parameters over time which stabilize at the end of exploration. This suggests the existence of a task-independent relationship between eye, mouse, and scroll parameters, which are characterized by two distinct patterns: one common pattern for movement parameters and a second for dwelling/fixation parameters. Within these patterns, mouse and eye movements remained consistent with each other, while the scrolling behaved the opposite way. (shrink)

What proper role should considerations of risk, particularly to research subjects, play when it comes to conducting research on human enhancement in the military context? We introduce the currently visible military enhancement techniques (1) and the standard discussion of risk for these (2), in particular what we refer to as the ‘Assumption’, which states that the demands for risk-avoidance are higher for enhancement than for therapy. We challenge the Assumption through the introduction of three categories of enhancements (3): therapeutic, preventive, (...) and pure enhancements. This demands a revision of the Assumption (4), alongside which we propose some further general principles bearing on how to balance risks and benefits in the context of military enhancement research. We identify a particular type of therapeutic enhancements as providing a more responsible path to human trials of the relevant interventions than pure enhancement applications. Finally, we discuss some possible objections to our line of thought (5). While acknowledging their potential insights, we ultimately find them to be unpersuasive, at least provided that our proposal is understood as fully non-coercive towards the candidates for such therapeutic enhancement trials. (shrink)

According to a common philosophical intuition, the deep nature of things is hidden from us, and the world as we know it through perception and science is, just like a dream, shadows, or a computer simulation, somehow shallow and lacking in reality. This “intuition of unreality” clashes with a strong, but perhaps more naive, intuition to the effect that the world as we know it seems perfectly real. Shadows, dreams, or informational structures appear too unreal to be identical to the (...) world as we know it! This clash between the two intuitions forms the basis of the “problem of reality.” In the late nineteenth century psychiatrists encountered patients they referred to as “metaphysician doubters” who constantly questioned the reality of the world. This essay draws on studies of these patients in order to reject, and indeed diagnose, the intuition of unreality and recent metaphysical doctrines drawing on it, such as structuralism, digitalism, and virtual realism. (shrink)

This text examines some parallels between Walter Benjamin’s “critique of violence” and the theory of violence proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Whatever the differences between these two approaches, they both share an important common feature, defining the violence of state and law in terms of a “violence which presupposes itself”. This circular structure of the concept of violence renders utterly problematic the attempts to envisage a wholly other, revolutionary form of violence, which could be opposed to that of (...) the state or its law. Benjamin’s hypothesis of a divine violence which breaks the circle of the mythical one, as well as the Deleuzo-Guattarian concept of the war machine, have been devised in order to come to terms with this situation. However, these concepts are not intended to serve as a basis for the legitimation of possible acts of counter-violence. What they assert is rather the fundamental and irreducible unavailability of the event in the sphere of social struggles, where our actions can neither be calculated in advance as to their results nor be ultimately justified. (shrink)

Ovaj tekst nastoji da nijansira dihotomiju izmedju pojmova istorije i pravde koja je uobicajena u interpretaciji Hobzovog misljenja. Hobzov kriticki stav prema istoriji objasnjava se njegovom polemikom protiv nasledja klasicne antike, koja stoji u vezi s njegovim projektom stroge nauke o moralu i politici. Medjutim, Hobzovo shvatanje pravde ne moze se zasnovati bez izvesnih faktickih, empirijskih elemenata; ono se ne svodi na neku cisto racionalnu konstrukciju. Ovi elementi otvaraju Hobzovo misljenje prema problematici stvarne istorije; za Hobza, najvazniji predstavnici takve vrste (...) istorije su Tukidid i Tacit. Konacno, istorijska dimenzija Hobzovog misljenja dopusta nam da kod njega prepoznamo i jedan siri pojam pravde, koji probija granice pravde koja proizlazi iz ugovora. (shrink)

Depersonalization is a pathological condition consisting in a deep modification of the way things appear to a subject, leading him to feel estranged from his body, his actions, his thoughts, his mind and even from himself. In this article, I argue that the study of depersonalization raises three challenges for recent theories of the sense of bodily ownership. These challenges—which I call the centrality challenge, the dissociation challenge and the grounding challenge— thwart most of these theories and suggest that the (...) sense of bodily ownership hinges on a phenomenal mark of mineness that can not be accounted for in terms of our sensory, interoceptive, agentive, cognitive or affective dispositions and that is psychologically primitive. In short: that mineness is first. (shrink)

This collection of six essays centers on Professor Koyre's great theme: the relative importance of metaphysics and observation, with controlled experiment a kind of marriage between the two. Professor Koyre's thesis might be summed up as a claim that when one is seeking to explain the scientific revolution, attention must be concentrated on the philosophical outlook of the scientist and away from speculative theories. At the time of his death, Alexandre Koyre was a professor at the Ecole Pratique des (...) Hautes Etudes (Sorbonne) and a memeber of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. (shrink)

In a previous article on cosmological arguments, I have put forward a few examples of complete infinite and circular explanations, and argued that complete non-wellfounded explanations such as these might explain the present state of the world better than their well-founded theistic counterparts (Billon, 2021). Although my aim was broader, the examples I gave there implied merely causal explanations. In this article, I would like to do three things: • Specify some general informative conditions for complete and incomplete non-wellfounded causal (...) explanations that can be used to assess candidate explanations and to generate new examples of complete non-wellfounded explanations. • Show that these conditions, which concern chains of causal explanations, easily generalize to chains of metaphysical, grounding explanations and even to chains involving other “determination relations” such as supervenience. • Apply these general conditions to the recent debates against the existence of nonwellfounded chains of grounds and show, with a couple of precise examples, that the latter can be complete, and that just like in the case of causal explanations, non-wellfoundedness can in fact be an aset rather than a liability. (shrink)

Patients suffering from depersonalization complain of feeling detached from their body, their mental states, and actions or even from themselves. In this chapter, I argue that depersonalization consists in the lack of a phenomenal feature that marks my experiences as mine, which is usually called “mineness,” and that the study of depersonalization constitutes a neglected yet incomparable probe to assess empirically the scope, role, and even the nature of mineness. Here is how I will proceed. After describing depersonalization (§2) and (...) arguing that it involves a lack of mineness (§3) I will confront a series of objections (§4). I will then spell out what depersonalization can teach us about the scope of mineness (§5), about its role and psychological function (§6) and even about its nature (§7). (shrink)

Computational reproducibility possesses its own dynamics and narratives of crisis. Alongside the difficulties of computing as an ubiquitous yet complex scientific activity, computational reproducibility suffers from a naive expectancy of total reproducibility and a moral imperative to embrace the principles of free software as a non-negotiable epistemic virtue. We argue that the epistemic issues at stake in actual practices of computational reproducibility are best unveiled by focusing on software as a pivotal concept, one that is surprisingly often overlooked in accounts (...) of reproducibility issues. Software is not only about designing and coding but also about maintaining, supporting, distributing, licensing, and governance; it is not only about developers but also about users. We focus on openness debates among computational chemists involved in molecular modeling software packages as empirical grounding for our argument. We then identify and analyse four epistemic characteristics as key to the role of software in computational reproducibility. (shrink)

. Computational chemistry grew in a new era of “desktop modeling,” which coincided with a growing demand for modeling software, especially from the pharmaceutical industry. Parameterization of models in computational chemistry is an arduous enterprise, and we argue that this activity leads, in this specific context, to tensions among scientists regarding the epistemic opacity transparency of parameterized methods and the software implementing them. We relate one flame war from the Computational Chemistry mailing List in order to assess in detail the (...) relationships between modeling methods, parameterization, software and the various forms of their enclosure or disclosure. Our claim is that parameterization issues are an important and often neglected source of epistemic opacity and that this opacity is entangled in methods and software alike. Models and software must be addressed together to understand the epistemological tensions at stake. (shrink)

Using emotional film clips is one of the most popular and effective methods of emotion elicitation. The main goal of the present study was to develop and test the effectiveness of a new and comprehensive set of emotional film excerpts. Fifty film experts were asked to remember specific film scenes that elicited fear, anger, sadness, disgust, amusement, tenderness, as well as emotionally neutral scenes. For each emotion, the 10 most frequently mentioned scenes were selected and cut into film clips. Next, (...) 364 participants viewed the film clips in individual laboratory sessions and rated each film on multiple dimensions. Results showed that the film clips were effective with regard to several criteria such as emotional discreteness, arousal, positive and negative affect. Finally, ranking scores were computed for 24 classification criteria: Subjective arousal, positive and negative affect (derived from the PANAS; Watson & Tellegen, 1988), a positive and a negative affect scores derived from the Differential Emotions Scale (DES; Izard et al., 1974), six emotional discreteness scores (for anger, disgust, sadness, fear, amusement and tenderness), and 15 “mixed feelings” scores assessing the effectiveness of each film excerpt to produce blends of specific emotions. In addition, a number of emotionally neutral film clips were also validated. The database and editing instructions to construct the film clips have been made freely available in a website. (shrink)

According to what we will call subjectivity theories of consciousness, there is a constitutive connection between phenomenal consciousness and subjectivity: there is something it is like for a subject to have mental state M only if M is characterized by a certain mine-ness or for-me-ness. Such theories appear to face certain psychopathological counterexamples: patients appear to report conscious experiences that lack this subjective element. A subsidiary goal of this chapter is to articulate with greater precision both subjectivity theories and the (...) psychopathological challenge they face. The chapter’s central goal is to present two new approaches to defending subjectivity theories in the face of this challenge. What distinguishes these two approaches is that they go to great lengths to interpret patients’ reports at face value – greater length, at any rate, than more widespread approaches in the extant literature. (shrink)

This paper focuses on one particular case that connects climate justice and climate economics. Its contribution is twofold. First, it aims at providing a sound normative foundation for carbon pricing mechanisms around the notions of a ‘right to energy’, the ‘duty not-to-harm’ and an argument for ‘restricted compensation’. Second, it identifies the normative elements from theories of climate justice that should guide the design of market-based instruments for climate change mitigation. This will cast light on the particular moral relevance of (...) the act of internalizing a negative externality and of the funds generated by putting a price on carbon. (shrink)

Depersonalization consists in a deep modification of the way things appear to a subject, leading him to feel estranged from his body, his actions, his thoughts, and his mind, and even from himself. Even though, when it was discovered at the end of the 19th century, this psychiatric condition was widely used to probe certain aspects of bodily awareness, and more specifically the sense of bodily ownership (SBO), it has been strangely neglected in contemporary debates. In this chapter, I argue (...) that because of three specific features, depersonalization raises some important challenges for current theories of the SBO. The first feature — call it “generality” — is that depersonalization does not only affect the sense of bodily ownership but also, typically, the sense of ``mental ownership’’ (SMO), the sense of agency or ``action ownership’’ (SOA), and the subject’s core sense of herself (CSS), that is, her awareness of herself as an I. The second feature is that except for the symptoms of depersonalization, depersonalized patients are hard to distinguish, psychologically, from normal subjects. This makes it hard to find psychological features that might explain their condition. The last feature, call it “fundamentality” is that the psychological features that do seem abnormal among depersonalized patients seem more likely to be explained by depersonalization than to explain it. These three features raise three challenges — the centrality challenge, the dissociation challenge, and the grounding challenge. Taken together, I will argue, these challenges suggest that the SBO depends on a form of phenomenal “mineness” that would mark my mental states as mine and that cannot be accounted for in sensorimotor, cognitive, or even affective terms. A phenomenal mineness that indeed seems to be psychologically primitive, and only accountable in neurophysiological terms. (shrink)

Natural modalities are often analysed from an abstract point of view where they are associated with putative laws of nature. However, the way possibilities are represented in physics is more complex. Lagrangian mechanics, for instance, involves two different layers of modalities: kinematical and dynamical possibilities. This paper examines the status of these two layers, both in the classical and quantum case. The quantum case is particularly problematic: we identify four possible interpretive options. The upshot is that a close inspection of (...) the way possibilities are represented in physics could lead to new ways of thinking about natural modalities. (shrink)

Several advocates of the lively field of “metaphysics of science” have recently argued that a naturalistic metaphysics should be based solely on current science, and that it should replace more traditional, intuition-based, forms of metaphysics. The aim of the present paper is to assess that claim by examining the relations between metaphysics of science and general metaphysics. We show that the current metaphysical battlefield is richer and more complex than a simple dichotomy between “metaphysics of science” and “traditional metaphysics”, and (...) that it should instead be understood as a three dimensional “box”, with one axis distinguishing “descriptive metaphysics” from “revisionary metaphysics”, a second axis distinguishing a priori from a posteriori metaphysics, and a third axis distinguishing “commonsense metaphysics”, “traditional metaphysics” and “metaphysics of science”. We use this three-dimensional figure to shed light on the project of current metaphysics of science, and to demonstrate that, in many instances, the target of that project is not defined with enough precision and clarity. (shrink)

The text focuses on reflecting on the role of modern university in a man intellectual development, starting from Nietzsche’s ideas. By drawing up some of the main methodological and philosophical concepts of the German philosopher, the text highlights a series of aspects on the Humboldian nature of current universities – a state of tension under the political, economic and social factors. Thus, the classic concepts of Bildung and Kultur specific to the XIX-century University are analyzed in relation with the crisis (...) that marked the Prussian state of Bismarck period. Higher education being available to the masses is a current problem Nietzsche didn’t avoid to call „savageness” and „decline” of the higher educational system. The purpose of the text is to point out if Nietzsche’s ideas can be still applied nowadays. (shrink)

In this paper, we put forward a new account of emergence called “transformational emergence”. Such an account captures a variety of emergence that can be considered as being diachronic and weakly ontological. The fact that transformational emergence actually constitutes a genuine form of emergence is motivated. Besides, the account is free of traditional problems surrounding more usual, synchronic versions of emergence, and it can find a strong empirical support in a specific physical phenomenon, the fractional quantum Hall effect, which has (...) long been touted as a paradigmatic case of emergence. (shrink)

This article discusses the acquisition of a physical impairment/disability through voluntary body modification, or transability. From the perspectives of critical genealogy and feminist intersectional analysis, the article considers the ability and cis*/trans* axes in order to question the boundaries between trans and transabled experience and examines two assumptions impeding the conceptualization of their placement on the same continuum: 1) trans studies assumes an able-bodied trans identity and able-bodied trans subject of analysis; and 2) disability studies assumes a cis* disabled identity. (...) The perception of transsexuality and transability as mutually exclusive phenomena results from a nonintersectional analysis of transsexuality as an issue of sex/gender, but not of ability, and of transability as an issue of ability, but not of sex/gender. Difficulty recognizing continuities between these phenomena thus stems from an ableist interpretation of sex/gender and a cisnormative* interpretation of ability. This article aims to: 1) enrich intersectional analysis in trans and disability studies and transability scholarship; 2) complicate disability studies, in which disabilities are often presumed to be “involuntary,” and encourage the decentering of a cis* subject; 3) encourage trans studies to decenter an able-bodied subject; and 4) advocate for increased dialogue and the creation of alliances between trans and disability studies and movements. (shrink)

This chapter addresses the claim that, as new types of neurointervention get developed allowing us to enhance various aspects of our mental functioning, we should work to prevent the use of such interventions from ever becoming the “new normal,” that is, a practice expected—even if not directly required—by employers. The author’s response to that claim is that, unlike compulsion or most cases of direct coercion, indirect coercion to use such neurointerventions is, per se, no more problematic than the pressure people (...) all find themselves under to use modern technological devices like computers or mobile phones. Few people seem to believe that special protections should be introduced to protect contemporary Neo-Luddites from such pressures. That being said, the author acknowledges that separate factors, when present, can indeed render indirect coercion to enhance problematic. The factors in question include lack of safety, fostering adaptation to oppressive circumstances, and having negative side effects that go beyond health. Nonetheless, the chapter stresses that these factors do not seem to be necessary correlates of neuroenhancement. (shrink)

Cet article propose une analyse croisée du discours médical sur la masturbation et sur la lecture en France au XVIIIe siècle. Son but est d’interroger la construction de la définition « naturalisante » des qualités attribuées à l’un et l’autre sexe. A partir de traités physiologiques sur les maladies des femmes, la réflexion porte sur trois points principaux. Pourquoi la lecture et la masturbation sont-ils devenus des problèmes médicaux? Comment un médecin neutralise-t-il le danger, pour une femme, de lire un (...) traité sur un sujet tel que la masturbation? Comment le discours sur la lecture et la masturbation fonctionne-t-il comme système discriminant entre les sexes? (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper puts forward a normative framework to differentiate between the climate-related responsibilities of different countries in the aftermath of the Paris Agreement. It offers reasons for applying the chief moral principles of ‘historical responsibility’ and ‘capacity’ to climate finance instead of climate change mitigation targets. This will provide a normative basis to realize the goal of climate change mitigation while allowing for developing and newly industrialized countries to develop economically and offer an account of the distributive principles that can (...) regulate climate finance. This is a real-world interpretation of the 1992 UNFCCC principle of ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’ that takes into account the progress accomplished at the COP21 in Paris and offers a solution to the still unsolved problem of differentiated responsibilities. This paper offers an application of this proposal to the Green Climate Fund. (shrink)

Patients suffering from the Cotard syndrome can deny being alive, having guts, thinking or even existing. They can also complain that the world or time have ceased to exist. In this article, I argue that even though the leading neurocognitive accounts have difficulties meeting that task, we should, and we can, make sense of these bizarre delusions. To that effect, I draw on the close connection between the Cotard syndrome and a more common condition known as depersonalisation. Even though they (...) are not delusional, depersonalised patients seem to have experiences that are quite similar to those of Cotard patients. I argue that these experiences are essentially characterised by a lack of subjective character and of two other structural features of experience, which I call ‘the present character’ and ‘the actual character’. Cotard's nihilistic delusions simply consist in taking these anomalous experiences at face value. (shrink)

This paper offers an overview of the prospects and ethics of using AI to achieve human enhancement, and more broadly what we call intellectual augmentation (IA). After explaining the central notions of human enhancement, IA, and AI, we discuss the state of the art in terms of the main technologies for IA, with or without brain-computer interfaces. Given this picture, we discuss potential ethical problems, namely inadequate performance, safety, coercion and manipulation, privacy, cognitive liberty, authenticity, and fairness in more detail. (...) We conclude that while there are very significant technical hurdles to real human enhancement through AI, and significant ethical problems, there are also significant benefits that may realistically be achieved in ways that are consonant with a rights-based ethics as well. We also highlight the specific concerns that apply particularly to applications of AI for "sheer" IA (more realistic in the near term), and to enhancement applications, respectively. (shrink)

The concept of genidentity has been proposed as a way to better understand identity through time, especially in physics and biology. The genidentity view is utterly anti-substantialist in so far as it suggests that the identity of X through time does not presuppose whatsoever the existence of a permanent “core” or “substrate” of X. Yet applications of this concept to real science have been scarce and unsatisfying. In this paper, our aim is to show that a well-defined concept of functional (...) genidentity can be crucial to shed light on identity through time in classical physics and especially in biology. Finally, we show that understanding identity on the basis of continuity suggests a move towards an ontology of processes. (shrink)

This is a commentary on Andrea Lavazza and Murilo Vilaça's article "Human Extinction and AI: What We Can Learn from the Ultimate Threat" (Lavazza & Vilaça, 2024). I discuss the potential concern that their proposal to create artificial successors to "insure" against the tragedy of human extinction might mean being too quick to accept that catastrophic prospect as inevitable, rather than single-mindedly focusing on avoiding it. I also consider the question of the value that we might reasonably assign to such (...) a future of artificial successors under the assumption that they do not enjoy phenomenal consciousness. (shrink)

A radical new interpretation of liberalism, viewing it not merely as a political philosophy or set of political precepts, but as a personal orientation and way of living.

In this article I interpret John Rawls’s concept of the original position as a spiritual exercise. In addition to the standard interpretation of the original position as an expository device to select principles of justice for the fundamental institutions of society, I argue that Rawls also envisages it as a “spiritual exercise”: a voluntary personal practice intended to bring about a transformation of the self. To make this argument, I draw on the work of Pierre Hadot, a philosopher and classicist, (...) who introduced the idea of spiritual exercises as central to ancient and modern conceptions of philosophy. By reading Rawls alongside Hadot, this article portrays Rawls as a thinker deeply concerned with the question of how subjects can lead more just and fulfilling lives. It also proposes that the original position as a spiritual exercise can help defend liberalism as a social and political doctrine. (shrink)

One of the twentieth century’s most brilliant and unconventional thinkers, Alexandre Kojève was a Russian émigré to France whose lectures on Hegel in the 1930s galvanized a generation of French intellectuals. Although Kojève wrote a great deal, he published very little in his lifetime, and so the ongoing rediscovery of his work continues to present new challenges to philosophy and political theory. Written in 1931 but left unfinished, Atheism is an erudite and open-ended exploration of profound questions of estrangement, (...) death, suicide, and the infinite that demonstrates the range and the provocative power of Kojève’s thought. Ranging across Heidegger, Buddhism, Christianity, German idealism, Russian literature, and mathematics, Kojève advances a novel argument about freedom and authority. He investigates the possibility that there is not any vantage point or source of authority—including philosophy, science, or God—that is outside or beyond politics and the world as we experience it. The question becomes whether atheism—or theism—is even a meaningful position since both affirmation and denial of God’s existence imply a knowledge that seems clearly outside our capacities. Masterfully translated by Jeff Love, this book offers a striking new perspective on Kojève’s work and its implications for theism, atheism, politics, and freedom. (shrink)

Prvi deo ovog rada, objavljen u prethodnom broju casopisa, bio je posvecen razmatranju religijskog porekla dvojnosti 'duha' i 'slova', a zatim i pitanju njenog znacenja u kontekstu filozofije ranog nemackog idealizma. Ovaj, drugi i zakljucni deo rada usredsredjuje se na eticke implikacije tog pitanja, posto je suprotstavljanje 'duha2 Kantovog sistema njegovom 'slovu', uz cesta pozivanja na novozavetno ispunjenje mojsijevskog zakona ljubavlju i verom predstavljalo jednu od osnovnih strategija kriticara Kantove teorije morala. Krajnja konsekvenca ovog pravca kritike Kanta lezi u ukidanju (...) autoriteta transcendentne moralne norme. Ovaj korak, kojim se istovremeno ponistava autoritet teksta kao takvog, a time i stav komentara kao literarnog zanra moze se uociti vec u Hegelovim mladalackim teoloskim spisima, u kojima se zastupa ukidanje transcendencije moralnog zakona njegovim inkorporiranjem u slobodnu subjektivnost koja egzistira u zajednici verujucih hriscana. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to shed light on different aspects of the hermeneutical problem in post-Kantian philosophical 'constellation'. In this domain, the problem of the relationship between the text and its commentary is theorized in terms of the antithesis between 'Spirit' and 'Letter', which clearly has religious roots. Therefore, the first part of the paper examines the historical origins of this antithesis, as well as its application in philosophical discussions which developed by the end of the 18th century (...) about the problem of finding the 'true' interpretation to Kant's philosophy. The second part of the text, which is to be published in the next issue of this review, brings the duality of spiritual and literal interpretation into closer connection with the topics of Kant's moral philosophy. Namera ovog rada je da osvetli razlicite aspekte hermeneutickog problema u poslekantovskoj filozofskoj 'konstelaciji'. U ovom podrucju, problem odnosa izmedju teksta i komentara postavlja se u terminima antiteze izmedju 'duha' i 'slova', koja ima prepoznatljive religijske korene. Zato prvi deo rada istrazuje istorijsko poreklo ove antiteze, kao i njenu primenu u filozofskim diskusijama koje su se krajem 18. veka razvile povodom problema pronalazenja 'pravog' tumacenja Kantove filozofije. U drugom delu rada, koji ce biti objavljen u sledecem broju casopisa, dvojnost duhovnog i doslovnog tumacenja dovodi se u uzu vezu sa tematikom Kantove teorije morala. (shrink)