A major strategy in the creation of sustainable economies is the establishment of alternative market institutions, such as fair trade and local market systems. However, the dynamics of these alternative markets are poorly understood. What are the rules of behavior by which these markets function? How do these markets maintain their separate identity as “alternative”: apart from the conventional (“free”) market system? Building on Lyson’s notion of civic agriculture, we argue that alternative markets maintain themselves through civic engagement. However, we (...) argue that the civically-engaged practices of alternative markets are poorly understood. We seek, therefore, to begin a conversation about the everyday forms of civic engagement in alternative practice and to do this we introduce a few useful conceptual tools. Building upon ideas in science studies about the collaboration of scientists (Hess, Alternative pathways in science and industry, 2007) we argue that civic markets have their own “market fields” and “modes of governance” (Bulkeley et al., Environment and Planning A 39:2733–2753, 2007), their own fields of social interaction in which rules of behavior become stabilized and determine how the market works. The creation of a social field also requires the demarcation of boundaries, referred to in the science studies literature as “boundary work” (Gieryn, Cultural boundaries of science: Credibility on the line, 1999). We apply the idea of boundary work to understand how alternative market actors maintain boundaries between alternative and conventional markets. Finally, studies of collaboration in science have often centered on the object created through these interactions, an object that is partially material and partially a product of knowledge, what (Rheinberger, Toward a history of epistemic things: Synthesizing proteins in the test tube, 1997) calls an “epistemic object.” We use this idea to understand that the creation of alternative objects of exchange, such as organic food, are epistemic objects in that they combine both particular materialities and particular ways of knowing. Using these concepts, we will carry out a close analysis of the mode of governance in the national organic market, looking specifically a recent governance crisis in organic agriculture known as the Harvey lawsuit. (shrink)

It is hypothesised and argued that “the four principles of medical ethics” can explain and justify, alone or in combination, all the substantive and universalisable claims of medical ethics and probably of ethics more generally. A request is renewed for falsification of this hypothesis showing reason to reject any one of the principles or to require any additional principle(s) that can’t be explained by one or some combination of the four principles. This approach is argued to be compatible with a (...) wide variety of moral theories that are often themselves mutually incompatible. It affords a way forward in the context of intercultural ethics, that treads the delicate path between moral relativism and moral imperialism. Reasons are given for regarding the principle of respect for autonomy as “first among equals”, not least because it is a necessary component of aspects of the other three. A plea is made for bioethicists to celebrate the approach as a basis for global moral ecumenism rather than mistakenly perceiving and denigrating it as an attempt at global moral imperialism. (shrink)

In tackling emergentist Marxism in depth, this well-written volume demonstrates that critical realism and materialist dialectics are indispensable to theorizing the functioning of complex social and physical systems. Author Sean Creaven investigates Marxâes dialectics of being and consciousness, forces and relations of production, base and superstructure, class structure and class conflict, and demonstrates how they allow the social analyst to conceptualize geo-history as embodying a tendential evolutionary directionality, rather than as simply random or indeterminate in terms of its outcomes. (...) For those interested in social and political theory, Marxism and communism and contemporary social theory, this outstanding volume is an in important read and a valuable resource. (shrink)

In this paper I develop an account of member obligation: the obligations that fall on the members of an obligated collective in virtue of that collective obligation. I use this account to argue that unorganized collections of individuals can constitute obligated agents. I argue first that, to know when a collective obligation entails obligations on that collective’s members, we have to know not just what it would take for each member to do their part in satisfying the collective obligation, but (...) also what they should do if they cannot do their part because others will not do theirs. I go on to argue (contra recent proposals) that it is not good enough for members in this situation to reasonably believe that others will not do their part. Rather, for a member of an obligated collective to permissibly escape doing her part in a collective obligation, she must both reasonably doubt that others will do their part and stand ready to act in case others do as well. -/- This necessary condition for collective obligation points the way to plausible sufficient conditions – conditions that, I argue, allow unstructured collectives to bear obligations. For (a) if a collective’s members are individually obligated to be ready to do their part, in a given collective action, and (b) if that individual readiness makes it sufficiently likely that the collective will in fact act, then it is hard to see what could block an attribution of collective obligation. In particular, in that case there ought to be no additional objection that there is no existing, organized “agent” on which the obligation might fall. For agents are, simply, things that can act. To be able to act is just to be able to succeed by trying. Unstructured collectives try to do something, I argue, when each member acts on their willingness to do their part in that thing if others do theirs; sometimes they succeed, producing a collective action. Some unstructured collectives, therefore, can succeed by trying; therefore, they can act; therefore they are agents. (shrink)

What makes something a part of my body, for moral purposes? Is the body defined naturalistically: by biological relations, or psychological relations, or some combination of the two? This paper approaches this question by considering a borderline case: the status of prostheses. I argue that extant accounts of the body fail to capture prostheses as genuine body parts. Nor, however, do they provide plausible grounds for excluding prostheses, without excluding some paradigm organic parts in the process. I conclude by suggesting (...) that embodiment is moralized all the way down: to be a body part is to be the sort of thing that ought to be protected, in a certain way, by social practices. (shrink)

Emotional hardcore and other music genres featuring screamed vocals are puzzling for the appreciator. The typical fan attaches appreciative value to musical screams of emotional pain all the while acknowledging it would be inappropriate to hold similar attitudes towards their sonically similar everyday counterpart: actual human screaming. Call this the screamed vocals problem. To solve the problem, I argue we must attend to the anti-sublimating aims that get expressed in the emotional hardcore vocalist’s choice to scream the lyrics. Screamed vocals (...) help us see the value in rejecting (a) restrictive social norms of emotional expressiveness and (b) restrictive artistic norms about how one ought to express or represent pain in art, namely that if one is going to do so they must ensure the pain has been ‘beautified’. In developing this second point I argue that emotional hardcore is well-suited (though not individually so) for putting pressure on longstanding views in the history of aesthetics about the formal relationship between art and human pain. (shrink)

Study of Nyayabindu of Dharmakirti, 7th cent. and its commentary Nyayabindutika of Dharmottara.

ABSTRACT:Organizations constitute morally-complex environments, requiring organization members to possess levels of moral courage sufficient to promote their ethical action, while refraining from unethical actions when faced with temptations or pressures. Using a sample drawn from a military context, we explored the antecedents and consequences of moral courage. Results from this four-month field study demonstrated that authentic leadership was positively related to followers’ displays of moral courage. Further, followers’ moral courage fully mediated the effects of authentic leadership on followers’ ethical and (...) pro-social behaviors. Theoretical and practical implications for further integrating the work on moral courage, authentic leadership and ethics are discussed. (shrink)

A provocative close reading revealing a radical, proto-phenomenological Socrates.

Some modern cosmological models predict the appearance of Boltzmann Brains: observers who randomly fluctuate out of a thermal bath rather than naturally evolving from a low-entropy Big Bang. A theory in which most observers are of the Boltzmann Brain type is generally thought to be unacceptable, although opinions differ. I argue that such theories are indeed unacceptable: the real problem is with fluctuations into observers who are locally identical to ordinary observers, and their existence cannot be swept under the rug (...) by a choice of probability distributions over observers. The issue is not that the existence of such observers is ruled out by data, but that the theories that predict them are cognitively unstable: they cannot simultaneously be true and justifiably believed. (shrink)

A non-technical introduction to quantum mechanics, the Everett interpretation, and the emergence of spacetime.

The concept of alienation: Hegelian themes in modern social thought -- Creative activity and alienation in Hegel and Marx -- The concept of labour -- The individual and society -- Freedom and the "realm of necessity" -- Alienation as a critical concept -- Private property and communism -- The division of labour and its overcoming -- Marx's concept of communism.

We have a much better understanding of physics than we do of consciousness. I consider ways in which intrinsically mental aspects of fundamental ontology might induce modifications of the known laws of physics, or whether they could be relevant to accounting for consciousness if no such modifications exist. I suggest that our current knowledge of physics should make us skeptical of hypothetical modifications of the known rules, and that without such modifications it’s hard to imagine how intrinsically mental aspects could (...) play a useful explanatory role. Draft version of a paper submitted to Journal of Consciousness Studies, special issue responding to Philip Goff’s Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness. (shrink)

This book provides an account of the nature of time, especially time's arrow and the role of entropy, at a semi-popular level. Special attention is given to statistical mechanics, the past hypothesis, and possible cosmological explanations thereof.

I discuss "Poetic Naturalism" -- there is only one world, the natural world, but there are many ways of talking about it -- both as a general concept, and how it accounts for our actual world. I talk about emergence, fundamental physics, entropy and complexity, the origins of life and consciousness, and moral constructivism.

edited by Tuija Takala and Matti Häyry, welcomes contributions on the conceptual and theoretical dimensions of bioethics.

I defend the extremist position that the fundamental ontology of the world consists of a vector in Hilbert space evolving according to the Schrödinger equation. The laws of physics are determined solely by the energy eigenspectrum of the Hamiltonian. The structure of our observed world, including space and fields living within it, should arise as a higher-level emergent description. I sketch how this might come about, although much work remains to be done.

Promoting respect for the four principles remains of great practical importance in ordinary medicineThe following are four “scenarios” with brief outlines of how Raanan Gillon has analysed them using the “four principles” approach. These are the four cases that the commentators were asked to analyse.Professor Gillon has for many years advocated the use of the Beauchamp and Childress four principles approach as a widely and interculturally acceptable method for medical ethics analysis . At present there seems to be (...) a backlash by some bioethicists against this approach, with among others, adherents of feminist ethics, narrative ethics, virtue ethics, and various varieties of regional ethics claiming to offer better approaches to medical ethics.At Raanan Gillon’s request this special issue of the Journal of Medical Ethics is intended to focus on this aspect of his work, with a view not only to discussing the issue of how different approaches to medical ethics are and/or are not compatible with the four principles approach but also to make clear to JME readers what alternative ethics analysis method is preferred and used by the various commentators.THE “STANDARD” JEHOVAH’S WITNESS CASEIn the first scenario, that of the “standard” Jehovah’s Witness case, a competent adult patient loses a massive amount of blood from a blood vessel bleeding in an acute duodenal ulcer. The best chance of …. (shrink)

Disconnecting a patient from artificial life support, on their request, is often if not always a matter of letting them die, not killing them—and sometimes, permissibly doing so. Stopping a patient’s heart on request, by contrast, is a kind of killing, and rarely if ever a permissible one. The difference seems to be that procedures of the first kind remove an unwanted external support for bodily functioning, rather than intervening in the body itself. What should we say, however, about cases (...) at the boundary—procedures involving items that seem bodily in some respects, but not others? When, for instance, does deactivating an implanted device like a pacemaker count as killing, and when as letting die? Contra existing proposals, I argue that the boundaries of the body for this purpose are not drawn at the boundaries of the self, or (if this is different) the human organism. Nor should we determine when we are killing and when we are letting die by deferring to existing practices for distinguishing ongoing from completed treatment. Rather, I argue that whether something (organic or inorganic) counts as body part for purposes of this distinction depends on the results of a normative analysis of the particular character of our rights in it—particularly, whether and in what way these rights ought to be alienable. I conclude by arguing that there are likely good reasons to recognize distinctively “bodily” rights and restrictions in at least some implantable devices. (shrink)

The World Medical Association (WMA), the global representation of the medical profession, first adopted the International Code of Medical Ethics (ICoME) in 1949 to outline the professional duties of physicians to patients, other physicians and health professionals, themselves and society as a whole. The ICoME recently underwent a major 4-year revision process, culminating in its unanimous adoption by the WMA General Assembly in October 2022 in Berlin. This article describes and discusses the ICoME, its revision process, the controversial and uncontroversial (...) issues, and the broad consensus achieved among WMA constituent members, representing over 10 million physicians worldwide. The authors analyse the ICoME, including its response to contemporary changes and challenges like ethical plurality and globalisation, in light of ethical theories and approaches, reaching the conclusion that the document is a good example of international ethical professional self-regulation. (shrink)

Cosmological models that invoke a multiverse - a collection of unobservable regions of space where conditions are very different from the region around us - are controversial, on the grounds that unobservable phenomena shouldn't play a crucial role in legitimate scientific theories. I argue that the way we evaluate multiverse models is precisely the same as the way we evaluate any other models, on the basis of abduction, Bayesian inference, and empirical success. There is no scientifically respectable way to do (...) cosmology without taking into account different possibilities for what the universe might be like outside our horizon. Multiverse theories are utterly conventionally scientific, even if evaluating them can be difficult in practice. (shrink)

This article asks whether personal ventilators should be redistributed to maximize lives saved in emergency condition, like the COVID-19 pandemic. It begins by examining extant claims that items like ventilators are literally parts of their user’s bodies. Arguments in favor of incorporation for ventilators fail to show that they meet valid sufficient conditions to be body parts, but arguments against incorporation also fail to show that they fail to meet clearly valid necessary conditions. Further progress on this issue awaits clarification (...) of difficult normative, conceptual, and metaphysical questions about the possible boundaries of a person’s body. Rather than relying solely on incorporation arguments, we propose an argument against reallocation from widely accepted anti-discrimination principles. Possession of a personal ventilator is an obvious marker of disability identity; thus, reallocating ventilators from those that already possess them discriminates on the basis of a stigmatized trait – a paradigm case of presumptively wrongful discrimination. This discrimination claim, taken together with uncertainty about the bodily status of ventilators, yields a strong presumption against personal ventilator reallocation. (shrink)

Technological measures meant to change sexual orientation are, we have argued elsewhere, deeply alarming, even and indeed especially if they are safe and effective. Here we point out that this in part because they produce a distinctive kind of ‘clinical collective action problem’, a sort of dilemma for individual clinicians and researchers: a treatment which evidently relieves the suffering of particular patients, but in the process contributes to a practice that substantially worsens the conditions that produce this suffering in the (...) first place. We argue that the role obligations of clinicians to relieve the suffering of their patients put them in a poor position to solve this problem, though they can take measures to avoid complicity in the harms that would result from widespread use of individually safe and effective reorientation biotechnology. But in the end the medical community as a whole still seems obligated to provide these measures, if they become technologically feasible. Medical researchers are in a better position to prevent the harms that would result if reorientation techniques were safe, effective and widely available. We argue that the harms attendant on the development of safe and effective re-orientation techniques give researchers reason to avoid ‘applied‘ research aimed at developing these techniques, and to be careful in the conduct of basic orientation research which might be applied in this way. (shrink)

In the revised and updated edition of this popular book, Sean Burke shows how the attempt to abolish the author is fundamentally misguided and philosophically ...

Graduate-level textbook in general relativity.

This paper argues for Serious Distributive Egalitarianism – the view that some material inequalities are seriously objectionable as such; not merely, say, because such inequalities tend to generate inequalities in status. Social justice requires equality, I argue, because basic social institutions produce important goods and are produced in turn by the relevantly equal contributions of all those that comply with them. E.g., basic social institutions make it much easier to produce cooperatively than it would be in their absence; therefore, these (...) institutions produce, among other things, opportunities to participate in particular productive enterprises. But basic social institutions are themselves produced, in large part, by the compliance of those subject to them; these subjects, therefore, contribute to the production of the goods that basic institutions produce. This gives (at least) every compliant subject of basic social institutions a claim on these goods. And, I argue that, though some do contribute more to the maintenance of basic institutions than others, those who contribute more are too responsible for the fact that others contribute less to point to the consequences of this difference as a reason they should get greater returns. I conclude that all subjects of basic social institutions have equally forceful and forcefully equal claims on the goods these institutions produce; claims that render inequalities in the Distribution of these goods Seriously objectionable as such. (shrink)

In this issue of the journal “Lee Elder”,1 a pseudonymous dissident Jehovah's Witness , previously an Elder of that faith and still a JW, joins the indefatigable Dr Muramoto2–5 in arguing that even by their own religious beliefs based on biblical scriptures JWs are not required to refuse potentially life-saving blood transfusions. Just as the “official” JW hierarchy has accepted that biblical scriptures do not forbid the transfusion or injection of blood fractions so too JW theology logically can and should (...) permit the transfusion of whole blood when this is medically required.Few doctors would argue that they should override the adequately autonomous decisions of Jehovah's Witnesses to refuse blood transfusions even if they are likely to die as a result of such transfusions. However, there is a case to be made for doctors asking such patients to reflect on their potentially fatal refusal of blood and for drawing to these patients' attention the reasoning of members of their own faith that justifies acceptance of potentially life-saving blood transfusions. What is that case? Simply that doctors' primary professional duty to try to benefit the health of their patients entails trying to save their patients' lives when and if doing so will benefit their patients' health. Of course this is not an absolute duty overriding all other duties; in particular if patients who are adequately autonomous to do so refuse such life-prolonging treatment doctors must generally accept such refusal, however sadly. This editorial endorses that view in the case of adequately autonomous legally competent JWs. (In another paper in this issue of the journal Professor Shimon Glick argues that ethics committees should be empowered—as they now are in Israel—to override even competent refusals of life-prolonging treatment where the committee judges that …. (shrink)

In recent years, policy debates in the United States have focused heavily on rising healthcare costs and what measures can be taken to ensure greater provision of healthcare to individuals of limited means. Much of the rhetoric on this subject has taken on an explicitly moral character, and one common sentiment is that healthcare is or should be viewed as a basic human right. However, the notion of a right to healthcare has not been well articulated, and critics have failed (...) to distinguish between legal and moral rights. Additionally, there are numerous problems inherent to viewing healthcare as a basic human right-many of which are in direct conflict with distinctly American conceptualizations of rights. The present paper reviews the debate over “rights”-both legal and natural-to healthcare, and argues that problems associated with natural rights arguments render them severely compromised. Instead, market systems commonly accepted in American society may be better suited to reducing healthcare costs and increasing access to services in the United States. (shrink)

What responsibility does an author bear for his legacy? Do 'catastrophic' misreadings of authors, as we have seen with totaliatarian readings of Plato and fascist interpretations of Nietzsche, testify to authorial recklessness? These and other questions are the starting point for a new theory of authorial ethics. Continuing the mission of the 'returned author' begun in his pioneering book The Death and Return of the Author, Burke recommends the 'law of genre' as a contract drawn up between author and reader (...) to establish ethical responsibility. Criticism, under this contract, becomes an ethical realm and realm of the ethical. -- Back cover. (shrink)

This textbook presents a clear exploration of the historical developments and ideas that give modern thinking its distinctive shape. It guides students through the rival standpoints on jurisprudence from the origins of Western jurisprudential thought and the classical tradition to the emergence of 'modern' political thought. Chapters on Hart, Fuller, Rawls, Dworkin and Finnis lead the reader systematically through the terrain of modern legal philosophy, tracing the issues back to fundamental questions of philosophy, and indicating lines of criticism that result (...) in a fresh and original perspective on the subject. The third edition includes a new chapter on feminist legal scholarship and non-Western approaches. Praise for the previous editions: 'An ideal starting place for anyone interested in, or studying, legal philosophy... Its simple but ambitious aim to provide a concise and accessible guide is easily achieved.' (Student Law Journal) 'A decent choice for an introductory course on jurisprudence, or for a serious student who wishes to study on his or her own.' (Canadian Law Library). (shrink)

This paper argues that disabled people can be healthy. I argue, first, following the well-known ‘social model of disability’, that we should prefer a usage of ‘disabled’ which does not imply any kind of impairment that is essentially inconsistent with health. This is because one can be disabled only because limited by false social perception of impairment and one can be, if impaired, disabled not because of the impairment but rather only because of the social response to it. Second, I (...) argue that it is often wrong to use the term ‘healthy’ in a way that makes health inconsistent with any degree whatsoever of health-relevant bodily dysfunction. Whether someone is ‘healthy’ properly-so-called depends on standards of health presupposed in conversational context. Sometimes, I argue, these standards are or ought to be lax enough to allow some people with some health deficits still to count as ‘healthy’ per se. Taking inspiration from David Lewis and Mary Kate Mcgowan, I go on to argue that denying that someone is ‘healthy’ in a context typically succeeds in shifting going presuppositions to require standards strict enough to make that denial acceptable. And this, I conclude by arguing, often constitutes an abuse of conversational power. (shrink)

It seems natural to ask why the universe exists at all. Modern physics suggests that the universe can exist all by itself as a self-contained system, without anything external to create or sustain it. But there might not be an absolute answer to why it exists. I argue that any attempt to account for the existence of something rather than nothing must ultimately bottom out in a set of brute facts; the universe simply is, without ultimate cause or explanation.

We study the question of how to decompose Hilbert space into a preferred tensor-product factorization without any pre-existing structure other than a Hamiltonian operator, in particular the case of a bipartite decomposition into "system" and "environment." Such a decomposition can be defined by looking for subsystems that exhibit quasi-classical behavior. The correct decomposition is one in which pointer states of the system are relatively robust against environmental monitoring (their entanglement with the environment does not continually and dramatically increase) and remain (...) localized around approximately-classical trajectories. We present an in-principle algorithm for finding such a decomposition by minimizing a combination of entanglement growth and internal spreading of the system. Both of these properties are related to locality in different ways. This formalism could be relevant to the emergence of spacetime from quantum entanglement. (shrink)

We study the conservation of energy, or lack thereof, when measurements are performed in quantum mechanics. The expectation value of the Hamiltonian of a system changes when wave functions collapse in accordance with the standard textbook treatment of quantum measurement, but one might imagine that the change in energy is compensated by the measuring apparatus or environment. We show that this is not true; the change in the energy of a state after measurement can be arbitrarily large, independent of the (...) physical measurement process. In Everettian quantum theory, while the expectation value of the Hamiltonian is conserved for the wave function of the universe, it is not constant within individual worlds. It should therefore be possible to experimentally measure violations of conservation of energy, and we suggest an experimental protocol for doing so. (shrink)

The Pneumatist school of medicine has the distinction of being the only medical school in antiquity named for a belief in a part of a human being. Unlike the Herophileans or the Asclepiadeans, their name does not pick out the founder of the school. Unlike the Dogmatists, Empiricists, or Methodists, their name does not pick out a specific approach to medicine. Instead, the name picks out a belief: the fact that pneuma is of paramount importance, both for explaining health and (...) disease, and for determining treatments for the healthy and sick. In this paper, we re-examine what our sources say about the pneuma of the Pneumatists in order to understand what these physicians thought it was and how it shaped their views on physiology, diagnosis and treatment. (shrink)

We provide a derivation of the Born Rule in the context of the Everett (Many-Worlds) approach to quantum mechanics. Our argument is based on the idea of self-locating uncertainty: in the period between the wave function branching via decoherence and an observer registering the outcome of the measurement, that observer can know the state of the universe precisely without knowing which branch they are on. We show that there is a uniquely rational way to apportion credence in such cases, which (...) leads directly to the Born Rule. Our analysis generalizes straightforwardly to cases of combined classical and quantum self-locating uncertainty, as in the cosmological multiverse. (shrink)

It is commonplace in discussions of modern cosmology to assert that the early universe began in a special state. Conventionally, cosmologists characterize this fine-tuning in terms of the horizon and flatness problems. I argue that the fine-tuning is real, but these problems aren't the best way to think about it: causal disconnection of separated regions isn't the real problem, and flatness isn't a problem at all. Fine-tuning is better understood in terms of a measure on the space of trajectories: given (...) reasonable conditions in the late universe, the fraction of cosmological histories that were smooth at early times is incredibly tiny. This discussion helps clarify what is required by a complete theory of cosmological initial conditions. (shrink)

Athenaeus of Attalia distinguishes two types of exercise or training (γυμνασία) that are required at each stage of life: training of the body and training of the soul. He says that training of the body includes activities like physical exercises, eating, drinking, bathing and sleep. Training of the soul, on the other hand, consists of thinking, education, and emotional regulation (in other words, 'philosophy'). The notion of 'training of the soul' and the contrast between 'bodily' and 'psychic' exercise is common (...) in the Academic and Stoic traditions Athenaeus is drawing from; however, he is the earliest extant medical author to distinguish these kinds of training and to treat them as equally important aspects of regimen. In this paper, I propose some reasons why he found this distinction useful, and I examine how he justified incorporating it into his writings on regimen, namely by attributing Plato's beliefs about regimen to Hippocrates, a strategy Galen would adopt well over a century later. (shrink)

In Morality & Mathematics, Justin Clarke-Doane argues that it is hard to imagine being "a realist about, for example, the standard model of particle physics, but not about mathematics." I try to explain how that seems very possible from the perspective of a physicist. What is real is the physical world; mathematics starts from descriptions of the natural world and extrapolates from there, but that extrapolation does not imply any independent reality. -/- Submitted to an Analysis Reviews symposium on Clarke-Doane's (...) Morality & Mathematics. (shrink)

The inspiration for this collective writing project began with a digital conference entitled ‘Knowledge Socialism, COVID-19 and the New Reality of Education’ held at Beijing Normal University. In this conference and through this article, multiple researchers spread across six continents have engaged in the collaborative task of outlining emerging innovations and alternative contingencies towards education, international collaboration, and digital reform in this time of global crisis. Trends associated with digital education, knowledge openness, peer production, and collective intelligence as articulated by (...) Michael A. Peters’ conception of Knowledge Socialism are given careful analysis and exploration. Some of the members of this collective endeavor to identify problems, others, begin to draw boxes around potential solutions. Overall, this article engages with real world challenges and innovations that look beyond dominant neoliberal trends in the knowledge economy to build bridges toward novel possibilities in this era of rapid digital change. (shrink)