This article proposes three states in an actor-network and a global/local distinction among actants. This theoretical framework is applied to two invention networks: one created by an inventor of solar heating systems and another created by a designer who wanted to create an environmentally sustainable furniture fabric. Both solar inventor and fabric designer wanted to develop technologies that would improve the environment and also make money. The article concludes by considering whether invention networks that intend to turn “good into gold” (...) have to evolve a shared representation or whether it is sufficient for a new design to serve as a boundary object for actants. (shrink)

This article presents a framework for practitioners who may be interested in maintaining adaptive stability of sociotechnical networks. The framework is developed from assembling several concepts that are useful for assessing and for drawing on appropriate moral reasoning strategies as sociotechnical networks are designed, constructed, and adapted. One such strategy involves the ability to assess degrees of perspective sharing and trading relationships in networks using moral imagination. The article uses the case of the design of an environmentally sustainable fabric to (...) illustrate these strategic concepts. The framework also draws on other examples of cases in which sociotechnical networks have become destabilized to illustrate instances in which the framework may have been useful for decreasing a tendency for destabilization. (shrink)

At the forefront of international concerns about global legislation and regulation, a host of noted environmentalists and business ethicists examine ethical issues in consumption from the points of view of environmental sustainability, economic development, and free enterprise.

This critique of the edition of the anonymous early medieval commentary on Matthew published in CCSL 108F in 2003 explains that there is no evidence for an Irish origin of the work. Furthermore, the apparatus fontium in the edition is largely deceptive. Cette critique de l’édition du commentaire anonyme de Matthieu, daté du haut moyen âge, publié dans le Corpus Christianorum Series Latina , explique qu’il n’y a aucune évidence d’une origine irlandaise de l’œuvre. De plus, l’apparat des sources (...) est largement trompeur. Diese im Jahre 2003 in CCSL 108F veröffentlichte Kritik der Ausgabe des anonymen, frühmittelalterlichen Kommentars des Matthäusevangeliums belegt, dass ein irischer Ursprung dieses Werkes mehr als fraglich ist. Darüber hinaus ist das Quellenregister dieser Ausgabe ziemlich enttäuschend. (shrink)

Abstract:Although the idea of intellectual property (IP) rights—proprietary rights to what one invents, writes, paints, composes or creates—is firmly embedded in Western thinking, these rights are now being challenged across the globe in a number of areas. This paper will focus on one of these challenges: government-sanctioned copying of patented drugs without permission or license of the patent owner in the name of national security, in health emergencies, or life-threatening epidemics. After discussing standard rights-based and utilitarian arguments defending intellectual property (...) we will present another model. IP is almost always a result of a long history of scientific or technological development and numbers of networks of creativity, not the act of a single person or a group of people at one moment in time. Thus thinking about and evaluating IP requires thinking about IP as shared rights. A network approach to IP challenges a traditional model of IP. It follows that the owner of those rights has some obligations to share that information or its outcomes. If that conclusion is applied to the distribution of antiretroviral drugs, what pharmaceutical companies are ethically required to do to increase access to these medicines in the developing world will have to be reanalyzed from a more systemic perspective. (shrink)

Ned O'Gorman's Politics for Everybody is, at its core, a defense of politics for our polarized times. In an accessible and impassioned style, O'Gorman argues for a political middle ground, which is not aligned with any particular party or ideology, but which embraces the worth, value, and importance of politics itself. Inspired by Hannah Arendt, O'Gorman shows how political thinking is rooted in common sense and everyday experiences, and is rooted in all of us, even and especially (...) when politics is the last thing we want to talk about. Resisting the deadening of political experience by the bombast of contemporary media, the impoverishment of public discourse, and the low-minded violence of smear campaigns, O'Gorman calls for a purer, simpler relation to politics, one that does justice to the virtues of open, honest exchange, which can be critical without being hateful. Politics for Everybody is, in short, a defense of the dignity of politics in the age of its infamy, and a plea for the notion that to give politics a thinking chance, we must take it more seriously, not write it off. (shrink)

Examines the history and the consequences of living in the contemporary culture of forgetfulness.

Introduction The contemporary study of society is fired by our quest for scientific truth. The very spirit of our age is tangible evidence ...

Chronicling the emergence of an international society in the 1920s, Daniel Gorman describes how the shock of the First World War gave rise to a broad array of overlapping initiatives in international cooperation. Though national rivalries continued to plague world politics, ordinary citizens and state officials found common causes in politics, religion, culture and sport with peers beyond their borders. The League of Nations, the turn to a less centralized British Empire, the beginning of an international ecumenical movement, international (...) sporting events and audacious plans for the abolition of war all signaled internationalism's growth. State actors played an important role in these developments and were aided by international voluntary organizations, church groups and international networks of academics, athletes, women, pacifists and humanitarian activists. These international networks became the forerunners of international NGOs and global governance. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Imperfect Men in Perfect Societies:Human Nature in UtopiaGorman BeauchampIUtopists view man as a product of his social environment. Nothing innate in the psychic make-up of man—no inherent flaw in his nature, no inheritance of original sin—prevents his being perfected, or at least radically ameliorated, once the social structure that shapes character can be properly reordered. Utopists, in short, deny that there is such a thing as "human nature"—if, as (...) John Plamenatz suggests, to say that something is human nature is just another way of saying that it cannot be changed.1 To accept the psychic constitution of man as fixed, immutable, is anathema to utopists, who agree rather with Ortega y Gasset: "Man has no nature. What he has is history."2 The social conditions that have obtained historically, that is to say, have made man what he has been—anything but utopian; but if man's history could be changed, so could his "nature." The idea of Progress, so pervasive in the West from the seventeenth century on, lends some credence to this contention. W. D. Howells's Altrurians, their creator notes, "get some sad amusement out of the fact that the capitalist world believes human nature cannot be changed, though cannibalism and slavery and polygamy have all been extirpated in the so-called Christian countries, and these things were once human nature, which is always changing...."3 Utopia is merely a means, then, of imaginatively expediting, directing, culminating the historically progressive creation of a morally exemplary race of men.The environmentalist psychology espoused by utopists springs from one of two anterior assumptions (although in the creation of many fictional idola the distinction between them is often blurred). The first [End Page 280] assumption is formulated most famously by Rousseau in the Discourse on Inequality: that "man is naturally good, and only by his institutions is he made bad."4 The second assumption is formulated most famously by Locke in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding: that the mind—and by extension the character—is a tabula rasa that takes impression from the stimuli exerted by the external world and thus is neither innately good or bad, but plastic, malleable.5 An intriguing conflation of these two theories operates, for instance, in the psyche of the monster in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. In the long middle section of the book, where the monster's side of the story is presented sympathetically, his character develops in a text-book demonstration of Lockean psychology; yet, at the same time, this lumbering tabula rasa quivers with enough benevolence (the implausible provenance of which mystifies) to put most saints to shame. He becomes evil and destructive only after being persecuted unmercifully for his misshapen appearance.6 Indeed, the criminal career of Mary Shelley's monster rehearses the common utopian argument that society's injustice to man (or monster) is the source of his crimes. "With our present state of society," writes James Casey in A New Moral World (1885), "we manufacture criminals and then punish them for being so."7 H. G. Wells, in A Modern Utopia (1905), concurs: "Crime and bad lives are the measure of the State's failure, all crime in the end is the crime of the community."8 And both are but restating the charge of Sir Thomas More's Raphael Hytholoday, leveled several centuries earlier in the original Utopia (1519): "If you allow people to be badly brought up and their habits to be corrupted little by little from childhood and if you then punish them for crimes to which their early training has disposed them, what else is this, I ask, but first making them thieves and then punishing them for it?"9 Evil deeds, then, to reiterate the utopist's point, result not from some vicious mole in human nature, but from the malfunctioning of society itself. Utopia, by contrast, is—or theoretically ought to be—a world without crime.Rousseau's concept of the innate goodness of man and the evil of his institutions most often informs primitivist models of utopia, exotic worlds inhabited by noble savages uncorrupted by civilization. The idealized Indians of Montaigne's essay... (shrink)

This paper answers several open questions around structures with o‐minimal open core. We construct an expansion of an o‐minimal structure by a unary predicate such that its open core is a proper o‐minimal expansion of. We give an example of a structure that has an o‐minimal open core and the exchange property, yet defines a function whose graph is dense. Finally, we produce an example of a structure that has an o‐minimal open core and definable Skolem functions, but is not (...) o‐minimal. (shrink)

MacIntyre argues that management embodies emotivism, and thus is inherently amoral and manipulative. His claim that management is necessarily Weberian is, at best, outdated, and the notion that management aims to be neutral and value free is incorrect. However, new forms of management, and in particular the increased emphasis on leadership which emerged after MacIntyre’s critique was published, tend to support his central charge. Indeed, charismatic and transformational forms of leadership seem to embody emotivism to a greater degree than do (...) more Weberian, bureaucratic forms of management; hence, MacIntyre’s central contention about our emotivistic culture seems to be well founded. Having criticised the details but defended the essence of MacIntyre’s critique of management, this paper sketches a MacIntyrean approach to management and leadership by highlighting the affinities between MacIntyre’s political philosophy and Greenleaf’s concept of servant leadership. (shrink)

There is no consensus on how to define substance, but one popular view is that substances are entities that are independent in some sense or other. E. J. Lowe’s version of this approach stresses that substances are not dependent on other particulars for their identity. I develop the meaning of this proposal, defend it against some criticisms, and then show that others do require that the theory be modified.

Beneath the stylized violence and thrilling car crashes, the Mad Max films consider universal questions about the nature of human life, order and anarchy, justice and moral responsibility, society and technology, and ultimately, human redemption. In Mad Max and Philosophy, a diverse team of political scientists, historians, and philosophers investigates the underlying themes of the blockbuster movie franchise, following Max as he attempts to rebuild himself and the world. -/- This book guides you through the barren wastelands of a post-apocalyptic (...) future as you explore ethics and politics in The Wasteland, the importance of costumes and music, humankind's relationship with nature, commerce, gender, religion, madness, and more. (shrink)

The first edition of The Scientific Background to Modern Philosophy took the dialogue of science and philosophy from Aristotle through to Newton. This second edition adds eight chapters, taking the dialogue through the Enlightenment and up to Darwin. This anthology is an attempt to help bridge the gap between the history of science and the history of philosophy.

This paper initiates analytic inquiry into the metaphysics of masculinity. I argue that individual masculinities (such as ‘clone masculinity’ and ‘incel masculinity’) are distinct homeostatic property cluster kinds related to gender structures via processes of adherence, failed-adherence, selective adherence, and/or reinterpretation with respect to male-coded social norms.

The notion that business organizations are akin to Aristotelian political communities has been a central feature of research into virtue ethics in business. In this article, I begin by outlining this “community thesis” and go on to argue that psychological research into the “just world fallacy” presents it with a significant challenge. The just world fallacy undermines our ability to implement an Aristotelian conception of justice, to each as he or she is due, and imperils the relational equality required for (...) shared participation in communities. In the final section, I offer a description of what Aristotelian community might look like within organizations, and some suggestions about how it may be possible to resist the challenge posed by the just world fallacy. (shrink)

A probability distribution is regular if it does not assign probability zero to any possible event. While some hold that probabilities should always be regular, three counter-arguments have been posed based on examples where, if regularity holds, then perfectly similar events must have different probabilities. Howson and Benci et al. have raised technical objections to these symmetry arguments, but we see here that their objections fail. Howson says that Williamson’s “isomorphic” events are not in fact isomorphic, but Howson is speaking (...) of set-theoretic representations of events in a probability model. While those sets are not isomorphic, Williamson’s physical events are, in the relevant sense. Benci et al. claim that all three arguments rest on a conflation of different models, but they do not. They are founded on the premise that similar events should have the same probability in the same model, or in one case, on the assumption that a single rotation-invariant distribution is possible. Having failed to refute the symmetry arguments on such technical grounds, one could deny their implicit premises, which is a heavy cost, or adopt varying degrees of instrumentalism or pluralism about regularity, but that would not serve the project of accurately modelling chances. (shrink)

In this chapter, we follow Edward Craig?s advice: ask what the concept of knowledge does for us and use our findings as clues about its application conditions. What a concept does for us is a matter of what we can do with it, and what we do with concepts is deploy them in thought and language. So, we will examine the purposes we have in attributing knowledge. This chapter examines two such purposes, agent evaluation and informant-suggestion, and brings the results (...) to bear on an important debate about the application conditions of the concept of knowledge?the debate between contextualists and their rivals. (shrink)

Recent research on the evolution of religion has focused on whether religion is an unselected by-product of evolutionary processes or if it is instead an adaptation by natural selection. Adaptive hypotheses for religion include direct fitness benefits from improved health and indirect fitness benefits mediated by costly signals and/or cultural group selection. Herein, I propose that religious denominations achieve indirect fitness gains for members through the use of ecologically arbitrary beliefs, rituals, and moral rules that function as recognition markers of (...) cultural inheritance analogous to kin and species recognition of genetic inheritance in biology. This recognition signal hypotheses could act in concert with either costly signaling or cultural group selection to produce evolutionarily altruistic behaviors within denominations. Using a cultural phylogenetic analysis, I show that a large set of religious behaviors among extant Christian denominations supports the prediction of the recognition signal hypothesis that characters change more frequently near historical schisms. By incorporating demographic data into the model, I show that more-distinctive denominations, as measured through dissimilar characteristics, appear to be protected from intrusion by nonmembers in mixed-denomination households, and that they may be experiencing greater biological growth of their populations even in the present day. (shrink)

Gareth Matthews suggests that we can better understand the nature of philosophical inquiry if we recognize the central role played by perplexity. The seminal representation of philosophical perplexity is in Plato's dialogues; Matthews examines the intriguing shifts in Plato's attitude to perplexity and suggests that these may represent a course of philosophical development that philosophers follow even today.

An important theme in recent experimental philosophy is that certain judgements (e.g. our judgements involving intentional action and causation) exhibit a kind of normative penetration whereby, in spite of a not-obviously-normative subject matter, they turn out to be sensitive to, and co-vary with, our normative attitudes in interesting and surprising ways. We present the results of several new experimental studies that suggest that our judgements about feasibility also appear to exhibit this kind of normative penetration in at least some cases; (...) that the best explanation of it involves attributing to subjects a certain kind of extensional error that results from conflating the question at hand with another question that is more salient given their normative attitudes; and that these conclusions have significant, though not straightforward, implications for our understanding of both normative penetration and feasibility, respectively. (shrink)

I distinguish two ways of explaining our capacity for ‘transparent’ knowledge of our own present beliefs, perceptions, and intentions: an inferential and a reflective approach. Alex Byrne (2011) has defended an inferential approach, but I argue that this approach faces a basic difficulty, and that a reflective approach avoids the difficulty. I conclude with a brief sketch and defence of a reflective approach to our transparent self-knowledge, and I show how this approach is connected with the thesis that we must (...) distinguish between a kind of self-knowledge that is of oneself as agent and another kind that is of oneself as patient. (shrink)

A widely cited roadblock to bridging ecological psychology and enactivism is that the former identifies with realism and the latter identifies with constructivism, which critics charge is subjectivist. A pragmatic reading, however, suggests non-mental forms of constructivism that simultaneously fit core tenets of enactivism and ecological realism. After advancing a pragmatic version of enactive constructivism that does not obviate realism, I reinforce the position with an empirical illustration: Physarum polycephalum (a slime mold), a communal unicellular organism that leaves slime trails (...) that form chemical barriers that it avoids in foraging explorations. Here, environmental building and sensorimotor engagement are part of the same process with P. polycephalum coordinating around self-created, affordance-bearing geographies, which nonetheless exist independently in ways described by ecological realists. For ecological psychologists, affordances are values, meaning values are external to the perceiver. I argue that agent-enacted values have the same status and thus do not obviate ecological realism or generate subjectivism. The constructivist-realist debate organizes around the emphasis that enactivists and ecological theorists respectively place on the inner constitution of organisms vs. the structure of environments. Building on alimentary themes introduced in the P. polycephalum example and also in Gibson’s work, I go on to consider how environment, brain, visceral systems, and even bacteria within them enter perceptual loops. This highlights almost unfathomable degrees of mutually modulating internal and external synchronization. It also shows instances in which internal conditions alter worldly configurations and invert values, in Gibson’s sense of the term, albeit without implying subjectivism. My aim is to cut across the somatic focus of enactive constructivism and the external environment-oriented emphasis of ecological realism and show that enactivism can enrich ecological accounts of value. (shrink)

Imagine I hold up a Granny Smith apple for all to see. You would thereby gain justified beliefs that it was green, that it was apple, and that it is a Granny Smith apple. Under classical foundationalism, such simple visual beliefs are mediately justified on the basis of reasons concerning your experience. Under dogmatism, some or all of these beliefs are justified immediately by your experience and not by reasons you possess. This paper argues for what I call the looks (...) view of the justification of simple visual beliefs. According to the looks view, such beliefs are mediately justified on the basis of reasons concerning how the relevant things look. Unlike under classical foundationalism, under the looks view as I develop it, these reasons are public. They are public with respect to both their content and possession: with respect to content, they are not about ourselves and our experiences, and with respect to their possession, many people can have the very same looks-related reasons. (shrink)

Subjectivism about normativity (SN) is the view that norms are never intrinsic to things but are instead always imposed from without. After clarifying what SN is, I argue against it on the basis of its implications concerning intentionality. Intentional states with the mind-to-world direction of fit are essentially norm-subservient, i.e., essentially subject to norms such as truth, coherence, and the like. SN implies that nothing is intrinsically an intentional state of the mind-to-world sort: its being such a state is only (...) a status relative to the imposition of a norm. If one rejects this view of mind-to-world states, then one has grounds for rejecting SN itself. If one accepts it, an infinite regress arises that makes it impossible for norms to be imposed, which means that SN has undermined itself. (shrink)

Research that involves the creation of animals with human-derived parts opens the door to potentially valuable scientific and therapeutic advances, yet invokes unsettling moral questions. Critics and champions alike stand to gain from clear identification and careful consideration of the strongest ethical objections to this research. A prevailing objection argues that crossing the human/nonhuman species boundary introduces inexorable moral confusion (IMC) that warrants a restriction to this research on precautionary grounds. Though this objection may capture the intuitions of many who (...) find this research unsettling, it relies on mistaken views of both biology and moral standing, ultimately distorting the morally relevant facts. We critically examine IMC, identify mistaken essentialist assumptions, and reframe ethical concerns. The upshot is a stronger line of objection that encourages a more inclusive and productive ethical discourse. (shrink)

Shared agency is a distinctive kind of sociality that involves interdependent planning, practical reasoning, and action between participants. Philosophical reflection suggests that agents engage in this form of sociality when a special structure of interrelated psychological attitudes exists between them, a set of attitudes that constitutes a collective intention. I defend a new way to understand collective intention as a combination of individual conditional intentions. Revising an initial statement of the conditional intention account in response to several challenges leads to (...) a specification of the properties these intentions need to have in order to be genuine commitments. I then show how a structure of conditional intentions with these properties settles a collection of agents on engaging in social interactions that display all the features typically associated with shared agency. (shrink)

The phrase ‘trading zone’ is often used to denote any kind of interdisciplinary partnership in which two or more perspectives are combined and a new, shared language develops. In this paper we distinguish between different types of trading zone by asking whether the collaboration is co-operative or coerced and whether the end-state is a heterogeneous or homogeneous culture. In so doing, we find that the voluntary development of a new language community—what we call an inter-language trading zone—represents only one of (...) four possible configurations. In developing this argument we show how different modes of collaboration result in different kinds of trading zone, how different kinds of trading zone may be ‘nested’ inside each other and discuss how a single collaboration might move between different kinds of trading zone over time. One implication of our analysis is that interactional expertise is a central component of at least one class of trading zone.Keywords: Trading zones; Interactional expertise; Interdisciplinarity; Creole. (shrink)

The notion of common ground is important for the production of referring expressions: In order for a referring expression to be felicitous, it has to be based on shared information. But determining what information is shared and what information is privileged may require gathering information from multiple sources, and constantly coordinating and updating them, which might be computationally too intensive to affect the earliest moments of production. Previous work has found that speakers produce overinformative referring expressions, which include privileged names, (...) violating Grice’s Maxims, and concluded that this is because they do not mark the distinction between shared and privileged information. We demonstrate that speakers are in fact quite effective in marking this distinction in the form of their utterances. Nonetheless, under certain circumstances, speakers choose to overspecify privileged names. (shrink)

_Zoographies_ challenges the anthropocentrism of the Continental philosophical tradition and advances the position that, while some distinctions are valid, humans and animals are best viewed as part of an ontological whole. Matthew Calarco draws on ethological and evolutionary evidence and the work of Heidegger, who called for a radicalized responsibility toward all forms of life. He also turns to Levinas, who raised questions about the nature and scope of ethics; Agamben, who held the "anthropological machine" responsible for the horrors (...) of the twentieth century; and Derrida, who initiated a nonanthropocentric ethics. Calarco concludes with a call for the abolition of classical versions of the human-animal distinction and asks that we devise new ways of thinking about and living with animals. (shrink)

Ageing causes progressive decline in metabolic, behavioural, and physiological functions, leading to a reduced health span. The extracellular matrix (ECM) is the three‐dimensional network of macromolecules that provides our tissues with structure and biomechanical resilience. Imbalance between damage and repair/regeneration causes the ECM to undergo structural deterioration with age, contributing to age‐associated pathology. The ECM ‘Ageing Across the Life Course’ interdisciplinary research network (ECMage) was established to bring together researchers in the United Kingdom, and internationally, working on the emerging field (...) of ECM ageing. Here we report on a consultation at a joint meeting of ECMage and the Medical Research Council / Versus Arthritis Centre for Integrated Research into Musculoskeletal Ageing, held in January 2023, in which delegates analysed the key questions and research opportunities in the field of ECM ageing. We examine fundamental biological questions, enabling technologies, systems of study and emerging in vitro and in silico models, alongside consideration of the broader challenges facing the field. (shrink)

Recent develops in AI technology have led to increasingly sophisticated forms of video manipulation. One such form has been the advent of deepfakes. Deepfakes are AI-generated videos that typically depict people doing and saying things they never did. In this paper, I demonstrate that there is a close structural relationship between deepfakes and more traditional fake barn cases in epistemology. Specifically, I argue that deepfakes generate an analogous degree of epistemic risk to that which is found in traditional cases. Given (...) that barn cases have posed a long-standing challenge for virtue-theoretic accounts of knowledge, I consider whether a similar challenge extends to deepfakes. In doing so, I consider how Duncan Pritchard’s recent anti-risk virtue epistemology meets the challenge. While Pritchard’s account avoids problems in traditional barn cases, I claim that it leads to local scepticism about knowledge from online videos in the case of deepfakes. I end by considering how two alternative virtue-theoretic approaches might vindicate our epistemic dependence on videos in an increasingly digital world. (shrink)

This paper argues that a class of popular views of collective intention, which I call “quasi-psychologism”, faces a problem explaining common intuitions about collective action. Views in this class hold that collective intentions are realized in or constituted by individual, mental, participatory intentions. I argue that this metaphysical commitment entails persistence conditions that are in tension with a purported obligation to notify co-actors before leaving a collective action attested to by participants in experimental research about the interpersonal normativity of collective (...) action. I then explore the possibilities open to quasi-psychologists for responding to this research. (shrink)

A common objection to divine command meta-ethics is the horrendous deeds objection. Critics object that if DCM is true, anything at all could be right, no matter how abhorrent or horrendous. Defenders of DCM have responded by contending that God is essentially good: God has certain character traits essentially, such as being loving and just. A person with these character traits cannot command just anything. In recent discussions of DCM, this ‘essential goodness response’ has come under fire. Critics of DCM (...) have offered various objections to the essential goodness response. This paper responds to these critics. I examine and refute six such objections: the objection from counterpossibles, the objection from omnipotence, the objection from requirements of justice, the objection from God’s moral grounding power, the objection from evil and indifferent deities, and the epistemological objection. I will maintain that despite all that has been said about the horrendous deeds objection in recent analytic philosophy, the horrendous deeds argument is still a bad argument. (shrink)