This paper introduces the concept of business-related conspiracy theories. Drawing on Aristotelian virtue ethics and undertaking a narratological and ethical analysis of 28 BrCTs found online, I emphasize that BrCTs are narratives with structures rooted in other latent macro- and meta-narratives, including centuries-old myths. In particular, I reconstruct the fictional world of BrCTs – one in which CSR and social contracts have failed – before identifying eight different types of actors as which people can morally situate themselves in their relationships (...) with business. Finally, I elaborate on the actors’ performances and their use of external and legitimate forces to end the story. The paper concludes with a discussion of potential future research to help combat BrCTs, as well as a call for the critical study of political CSR. (shrink)

At a time when it is critically important to preserve natural resources and reduce the amount of man-made pollution, this article explores other potentials for materialism in today’s market economies. Based on a two-year ethnography in Poland, we learn from simplifiers who denounce current materialism—while remaining inside the market—about what materialism could potentially become. Our study shows that materialism can take on other less studied but more eco-friendly expressions. In particular, we highlight an alternate expression of materialism, which we call (...) “appreciative materialism”. Appreciative materialism still ascribes a great deal of importance to objects in the lives of consumers but does so through the voluntary non-possession and/or non-accumulation of these objects, as well as a caring ethics that extends to non-humans. These findings call not only for the refinement of scales to measure materialism but also for a revision of the role of materialism in our lives. They suggest that, in order to trigger more sustainable practices, policymakers and managers should put greater emphasis on appreciative materialism. (shrink)

Business Ethics, the Environment & Responsibility, Volume 31, Issue 2, Page 508-523, April 2022.

This pioneering book demonstrates the crucial importance of Wittgenstein's philosophy of mathematics to his philosophy as a whole. Marion traces the development of Wittgenstein's thinking in the context of the mathematical and philosophical work of the times, to make coherent sense of ideas that have too often been misunderstood because they have been presented in a disjointed and incomplete way. In particular, he illuminates the work of the neglected 'transitional period' between the Tractatus and the Investigations.

A leading idea of cultural evolutionary theory is that for human cultures to undergo evolutionary change, cultural transmission must generally serve as a high-fidelity copying process. In analogy to genetic inheritance, the high fidelity of human cultural transmission would act as a safeguard against the transformation and loss of cultural information, thus ensuring both the stability and longevity of cultural traditions. Cultural fidelity would also serve as the key difference-maker between human cumulative cultures and non-human non-cumulative traditions, explaining why only (...) us humans, with our uniquely high-fidelity transmission capabilities, are capable of evolving and sustaining complex traditions. But what does it mean for cultural transmission to be more or less faithful? This article has two objectives. The first is to clarify the meaning and uses of the concept of cultural fidelity and to evaluate their explanatory import. I argue that cultural evolutionists use several fidelity concepts (episodic, propensity, and generalized fidelity), concepts that I will define and clarify. The second objective is to challenge the explanatory significance of a general notion of fidelity (generalized fidelity) as being both explanatorily meaningful and operationalizable. I conclude that if fidelity is to serve as an explanation of the key differences between human cumulative cultures and non-human non-cumulative traditions, then the concept will have to be redesigned and rely on different assumptions. 1Introduction 2Generalized Fidelity 2.1The need for an explanatory concept of fidelity 2.2Three conditions for a general notion of cultural fidelity 3Episodic Fidelity 3.1Measuring episodic fidelity 3.2The relevance problem 3.3Explanatory pluralism 3.4The incommensurability of fidelity metrics 4Propensity Fidelity 5Fidelity as an Explanatory Concept 5.1Explaining cultural stability 5.2Explaining human distinctiveness 6Conclusion. (shrink)

In this short paper we analyse some paradoxical aspects of France’s Foucauldian heritage: while several French scholars claim the COVID-19 pandemic is a perfect example of what Foucault called biopolitics, popular reaction instead suggests a biopolitical failure on the part of the government; One of these failures concerns the government’s inability to produce reliable biostatistical data, especially regarding health inequalities in relation to COVID-19. We interrogate whether Foucaldianism contributed, in the past as well today, towards a certain myopia in France (...) regarding biostatistics and its relation to social inequalities in health. One might ask whether this very data could provide an appropriate response to the Foucauldian question: What kind of governance of life is the pandemic revealing to us? (shrink)

John Cook Wilson (1849–1915) was Wykeham Professor of Logic at New College, Oxford and the founder of ‘Oxford Realism’, a philosophical movement that flourished at Oxford during the first decades of the 20th century. Although trained as a classicist and a mathematician, his most important contribution was to the theory of knowledge, where he argued that knowledge is factive and not definable in terms of belief, and he criticized ‘hybrid’ and ‘externalist’ accounts. He also argued for direct realism in perception, (...) criticizing both empiricism and idealism, and argued for a moderate nominalist view of universals as being in rebus and only ‘apprehended’ by their particulars. His influence helped swaying Oxford away from idealism and, through figures such as H. A. Prichard, Gilbert Ryle, or J. L. Austin, his ideas were also to some extent at the origin of ‘moral intuitionism’ and ‘ordinary language philosophy’ which defined much of Oxford philosophy until the second half of the twentieth-century. Nevertheless, his name and legacy were all but forgotten for generations after World War II. Still, his views on knowledge are with us today, being in part at work in the writings of philosophers as diverse as John McDowell, Charles Travis, and Timothy Williamson. (shrink)

Bringing Pierre Bourdieu to Science and Technology Studies Content Type Journal Article Pages 263-273 DOI 10.1007/s11024-011-9174-2 Authors Mathieu Albert, Wilson Centre and Department of Psychiatry, Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto, 200 Elizabeth Street , Eaton-South 1-581, Toronto, ON M5G 2C4, Canada Daniel Lee Kleinman, Department of Community and Environmental Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 348 Agricultural Hall 1450 Linden Drive, Madison, WI 53706, USA Journal Minerva Online ISSN 1573-1871 Print ISSN 0026-4695 Journal Volume Volume 49 Journal Issue Volume 49, (...) Number 3. (shrink)

This paper reviews the hole argument as an argument against spacetime substantivalism. After a careful presentation of the argument itself, I critically review possible responses.

Longtemps objet de prédilection des hitoriens de l'économie européenne, la croissance médiévale n'est plus au centre de leurs préoccupations. En la replaçant dans une perspective de long terme, du XIe au XVe siècle, et en s'interrogeant sur ce qui en elle relève proprement des processus de développement ou des dynamiques conjoncturelles, il est possible de replacer au centre du débat historique un moment essentiel de construction de l'économie-monde européenne. L'article insiste en particulier sur l'importance des processus sociaux de promotion des (...) activités productives et des groupes de travailleurs: ils ont rendu possible une intensification du travail, rémunérée par un ensemble complexe de mécanismes de redistribution des richesses qui sont l'une de créations originales des sociétés médiévales. (shrink)

What is morality? How many moral values are there? And what are they? According to the theory of morality-as-cooperation, morality is a collection of biological and cultural solutions to the problems of cooperation recurrent in human social life. This theory predicts that there will be as many different types of morality as there are different types of cooperation. Previous research, drawing on evolutionary game theory, has identified at least seven different types of cooperation, and used them to explain seven different (...) types of morality: family values, group loyalty, reciprocity, heroism, deference, fairness and property rights. Here we explore the conjecture that these simple moral ‘elements’ combine to form a much larger number of more complex moral ‘molecules’, and that as such morality is a combinatorial system. For each combination of two elements, we hypothesise a candidate moral molecule, and successfully locate an example of it in the professional and popular literature. These molecules include: fraternity, blood revenge, family pride, filial piety, gavelkind, primogeniture, friendship, patriotism, tribute, diplomacy, common ownership, honour, confession, turn taking, restitution, modesty, mercy, munificence, arbitration, mendicancy, and queuing. These findings indicate that morality – like many other physical, biological, psychological and cultural systems – is indeed a combinatorial system. Thus morality-as-cooperation provides a principled and powerful theory, that explains why there are many moral values, and successfully predicts what they will be; and it generates a systematic framework that has the potential to explain all moral ideas, possible and actual. Pursuing the many implications of this theory will help to place the study of morality on a more secure scientific footing. (shrink)

High-fidelity cultural transmission, rather than brute intelligence, is the secret of our species’ success, or so many cultural evolutionists claim. It has been selected because it ensures the spread, stability and longevity of beneficial cultural traditions, and it supports cumulative cultural change. To play these roles, however, fidelity must be a causally-efficient property of cultural transmission. This is where the grain problem comes in and challenges the explanatory potency of fidelity. Assessing the degree of fidelity of any episode or mechanism (...) of cultural transmission always depends upon an investigator’s choice of grain of description at which cultural traditions are being studied. The fidelity of cultural transmission then appears to be relative to the granularity at which one approaches cultural variation, and since there is a multiplicity of grains of description by which the same tradition can be studied, there results a multiplicity of measures of fidelity for a same event or mechanism of cultural transmission. If this is correct, because fidelity is always relative to the grain of description dictated by the local and specific research interests of the investigator, then there seems to be no fact of the matter as to whether cultural transmission is faithful or not, independently from a researcher’s framework of analysis. The aims of this paper are to offer a conceptual clarification of the grain problem in cultural evolution, to assess its causes, to unpack its epistemological implications, and to examine its reach and consequences for a science of cultural evolution. (shrink)

The question of justice in Western philosophy finds its humble beginnings in the interplay of life and death. I am referring here to Plato’s Apology. The Apology is not only a text tracing the fate of the great philosopher Socrates by recounting his final speech before the judges of Athens, but it is also a text that, on a more subtle level, announces the advent of a promising justice that is birthed from death, or, to be more precise, from a (...) specific kind of death. Socrates, here, develops a justice that does not surge from the defence of one’s determination as a singular accused, or from the reconciliation of the criminal singularity into the ethical social body through pardon or punishment, but which rather derives from a negation, a radical annihilation of the category of pure singularity. Socrates does not defend himself as an accused who is determinately and definitively singular, but rather affirms the fact that, in some sense, there is no such singular to be defended, that he is not even one (οὐδείς), less than one, nothing. It is, precisely, in this affirmation of a negative, in this opening of a chasm, that a radically other conception of justice and its relation to the singular is subtly proposed. By pushing the singular to the margins of its possibility, by challenging, bending, pushing the question of the singular and its defence to its outmost limit, Socrates redeploys justice not as a remedying balance, but as the abysmal economy of the bottomless question, a fall into the void, in which life, death, the singular and justice co-incide to burst all definitive determination, substantial opposition and the possibility of establishing a firm ground for any such categories to hold as such. In gradually shedding off the substantial presuppositions of his singularity (knowledge, self-relation and relation to others), he unleashes a modality of the singular which deploys a kind of justice, a wholly other justice, which has shaken the tradition ever since, and, as this article will seek to show, reverberates again in what Jacques Derrida called deconstruction. (shrink)

Detecting sensitive information considering privacy is a relevant issue on Online Social Networks (OSNs). It is often difficult for users to manage the privacy associated with their posts on social networks taking into account all the possible consequences. The aim of this work is to provide information about the sensitivity of the content of a publication when a user is going to share it in OSN. For this purpose, we developed a privacy-assistant agent that detects sensitive information. Based on this (...) information, the agent provides a message through a nudge mechanism warning about the possible risks of sharing the message. To avoid being annoying, the agent also considers the user’s previous behaviour (e.g. if he previously ignored certain nudges) and adapts the messages it sends to give more relevance to those categories that are more important to the user from the point of view of the privacy risk. This agent was integrated into the social network Pesedia. We analysed the performance of different models to detect a set of sensitive categories (i.e. location, medical, drug/alcohol, emotion, personal attacks, stereotyping, family and association details, personal details and personally identifiable information) in a dataset of tweets in Spanish. The model that obtained the best results (i.e. F1 and accuracy) and that was finally integrated into the privacy-assistant agent was transformer-based. (shrink)

Depuis un peu plus d’une décennie, on assiste dans le domaine de la francophonie à un intérêt croissant des chercheurs pour la constitution de grands corpus de français parlé, si bien que le retard par rapport aux autres langues comme l’anglais, l’espagnol ou le néerlandais, que regrettaient Bilger & Blanche-Benveniste (1999), est en train de se réduire. De nombreuses publications visant à présenter les différentes bases de données existantes (Bruxelles, Mondada, Simon & Traverso, 2009) ou à...

Reuben Louis Goodstein (1912-1985) foi aluno de Wittgenstein em Cambridge de1931 a 1934. Neste artigo, faço uma breve descrição de seu trabalho na lógica matemática,no qual se percebe a influência das idéias de Wittgenstein, inclusive a substituição,em seu cálculo equacional, da indução matemática por uma regra de unicidade de umafunção definida por uma função recursiva. Esse último aspecto se encontra no Big Typescriptde Wittgenstein. Também mostro que as idéias fundamentais do cálculo equacionalpodem ser encontradas não apenas no período intermediário, mas, (...) in nuce, nas observaçõessobre matemática do Tractatus Logico-philosophicus. A partir disso, procuro desenvolverum argumento contra uma leitura corrente daquele livro, o assim chamado “NovoWittgenstein”. Outra conexão entre Goodstein e Wittgenstein se encontra na rejeição dateoria da quantificação; na parte final do artigo, recorro às observações críticas de Goodsteinsobre a Lei do Terceiro Excluído (que também incluem uma crítica a Brouwer e à suarejeição “pela metade” dessa lei) para lançar luz sobre as observações do próprioWittgenstein a esse respeito. (shrink)

Despite its importance in the history of philosophy, the work of the Spanish thinker Averro"es (1126-1198) has been left largely unexplored in this century. This book is the only general account of Averro"es' philosophy in English. Leaman analyzes his thought and influence, particularly his metaphysics and theory of meaning, arguing that while his work belongs within the cultural and political context of medieval Islam, it remains of considerable philosophical and historical significance.

The work of Jürgen Habermas has long been regarded as central to the development of social and political theory and philosophy in the late 20th century. With the publication of his latest book Between Facts and Norms, Habermas has signalled the importance of exploring modern legal theory to our understanding of democratic society. Habermas, Modernity, and Law brings together leading scholars from around the world to provide a clear introduction to this key development in Habermas's work. With chapters ranging from (...) the possibility of valid law to discourse ethics and human rights, the contributors successfully integrate a broad range of Habermas's writings with his most recent thoughts on the place of the law in contemporary theory. Habermas, Modernity, and Law provides a fascinating overview to the work of Habermas and will be particularly valuable to students and professionals in the fields of European philosophy and social, political, and legal theory. (shrink)

Physiologists and historians are still debating what conceptually differentiates each of the three major modern theories of regulation: the constancy of the milieu inte´rieur, homeostasis and allostasis. Here I propose that these models incarnate two distinct regimes of politization of the life sciences.This perspective leads me to suggest that the historicization of physiological norms is intrinsic to the allostatic model, which thus divides it fundamentally from the two others. I analyze the allostatic model in the light of the Canguilhemian theory, (...) showing how the former contributed to the development of a critical epistemology immune to both naturalist essentialism and social constructivism. With a unique clarity in the history of physiology, allostasis gives us a model of the convergence of historical epistemology and scientific practice. As such it played a key role in codifying the epistemological basis of certain current research programs that, in the fields of social epidemiology and feminist neuroscience, promote what we name here a critical physiology. (shrink)

The music in here--. Music as body ; Music as mind ; Music as heart ; Feeling mind, thinking heart -- --out there--. Music as life ; Music as story ; Music as mirror -- --and everywhere--. Music on the Zen elevator ; The enlightened listener ; Living the waves.

There is now an awakening to and recognition of the emotionally complex lives of some non-human animals. While their forms of consciousness may vary, some are indeed conscious and deserve political consideration. What that political consideration ought to be is the central topic of this article. First, I argue that interspecies justice must be understood in terms of the relationships that foster individual flourishing of all concerned. The obstacles to such flourishing are the five faces of oppression famously identified by (...) Iris Marion Young: exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence. By extending Young’s concept of the social group to intra- and interspecies groups, we become more attuned to differences between and among species. Theorizing the existence of interspecies groups brings forward new avenues to explore oppression and simultaneously theorize its opposite – interspecies justice. Second, I argue that a positive theory of interspecies flourishing can be developed on the basis of Marx’s materialist philosophy and reclamation of species-being. Though Marx uses humanist language throughout the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, attention to his methodological commitments reveals that some non-human animals can no longer be excluded from the capability of flourishing and species-being. Some non-human animals are conscious, act purposefully, and labor creatively and must be included in our circle of moral and political concern. (shrink)

A Polish space is not always homeomorphic to a computably presented Polish space. In this article, we examine degrees of non-computability of presenting homeomorphic copies of compact Polish spaces. We show that there exists a $\mathbf {0}'$ -computable low $_3$ compact Polish space which is not homeomorphic to a computable one, and that, for any natural number $n\geq 2$, there exists a Polish space $X_n$ such that exactly the high $_{n}$ -degrees are required to present the homeomorphism type of $X_n$. (...) Along the way we investigate the computable aspects of Čech homology groups. We also show that no compact Polish space has a least presentation with respect to Turing reducibility. (shrink)

According to Clifford Geertz, the purpose of anthropology is not to explain culture but to explicate it. That should cause us to rethink our relationship with machine learning. It is, we contend, perfectly possible that machine learning algorithms, which are unable to explain, and could even be unexplainable themselves, can still be of critical use in a process of explication. Thus, we report on an experiment with anthropological AI. From a dataset of 175K Facebook comments, we trained a neural network (...) to predict the emoji reaction associated with a comment and asked a group of human players to compete against the machine. We show that a) the machine can reach the same accuracy as the players, b) it fails in roughly the same ways as the players, and c) easily predictable emoji reactions tend to reflect unambiguous situations where interpretation is easy. We therefore repurpose the failures of the neural network to point us to deeper and more ambiguous situations where interpretation is hard and explication becomes both necessary and interesting. We use this experiment as a point of departure for discussing how experiences from anthropology, and in particular the tension between formalist ethnoscience and interpretive thick description, might contribute to debates about explainable AI. (shrink)

The use of physical models of molecular structures as research tools has been central to the development of biochemistry and molecular biology. Intriguingly, it has received little attention from scholars of science. In this paper, I argue that these physical models are not mere three-dimensional representations but that they are in fact very special research tools: they are cognitive augmentations. Despite the fact that they are external props, these models serve as cognitive tools that augment and extend the modeler’s cognitive (...) capacities and performance in molecular modeling tasks. This cognitive enhancement is obtained because of the way the modeler interacts with these models, the models’ materiality contributing to the solving of the molecule’s structure. Furthermore, I argue that these material models and their component parts were designed, built and used specifically to serve as cognitive facilitators and cognitive augmentations. (shrink)

We present the inconsistency-adaptive deontic logic DP r , a nonmonotonic logic for dealing with conflicts between normative statements. On the one hand, this logic does not lead to explosion in view of normative conflicts such as O A ∧ O ∼A, O A ∧ P ∼A or even O A ∧ ∼O A. On the other hand, DP r still verifies all intuitively reliable inferences valid in Standard Deontic Logic (SDL). DP r interprets a given premise set ‘as normally (...) as possible’ with respect to SDL. Whereas some SDL-rules are verified unconditionally by DP r , others are verified conditionally. The latter are applicable unless they rely on formulas that turn out to behave inconsistently in view of the premises. This dynamic process is mirrored by the proof theory of DP r. (shrink)

Plagiarism is a crime against academy. It deceives readers, hurts plagiarized authors, and gets the plagiarist undeserved benefits. However, even though these arguments do show that copying other people’s intellectual contribution is wrong, they do not apply to the copying of words. Copying a few sentences that contain no original idea (e.g. in the introduction) is of marginal importance compared to stealing the ideas of others. The two must be clearly distinguished, and the ‘plagiarism’ label should not be used for (...) deeds which are very different in nature and importance. (shrink)

Introduction: The role of animals in philosophies of man -- Part I: What's wrong with animal rights? -- The right to remain silent -- Part II: Animal pedagogy -- You are what you eat : Rousseau's cat -- Say the human responded : Herder's sheep -- Part III: Difference worthy of its name -- Hair of the dog : Derrida's and Rousseau's good taste -- Sexual difference, animal difference : Derrida's sexy silkworm -- Part IV: It's our fault -- The (...) beaver's struggle with species-being : De Beauvoir and the praying mantis -- Answering the call of nature : Lacan walking the dog -- Part V: Estranged kinship -- The abyss between humans and animals : Heidegger puts the bee in being -- Strange kinship : Merleau-Ponty's sensuous stickleback -- Stopping the anthropological machine : Agamben's tick-tocking tick -- Psychoanalysis and the science of kinship -- Psychoanalysis as animal by-product : Freud's zoophilia -- Animal abjects, maternal abjects : Kristeva's strays -- Conclusion: Sustainable ethics. (shrink)

This paper presents the first possible world semantics for concessive conditionals (i.e., even if A, C conditionals) constructed in a compositional way. First, the meaning of if is formalized through a semantics that builds on the proposal given by Stalnaker (1968). A major difference from Stalnaker’s approach is that irrelevant conditionals (i.e., conditionals where the antecedent and the consequent have no connection) are false in this new setting. Second, the meaning of even is analyzed through a formal semantics based on (...) the notion of scale. This analysis overcomes the problems arising in standard approaches, in which even is analyzed with the help of pragmatic presuppositions. Finally, the two particles are combined in order to provide a formal analysis of even if. This theory predicts the major phenomena concerning the behavior of concessive conditionals and without any call to pragmatic explanations. More generally, this approach creates the possibility of a compositional analysis of other conditionals such as if then or only if forms. (shrink)