Tourism to sites of war, conflict, terror and violence is hugely popular. All manner of tours and visits are organised worldwide, every day, to both current and historic conflict sites. Some are once-in-a-lifetime events, such as tours of current conflict sites in the Middle East or to the battlegrounds of World War II, some are routine family visits, such as day trips to local castles. Some visits focus on war and battles themselves, others focus on sites that were the centres (...) of conflict in a broader sense, such as notorious prisons or torture chambers. What strikes us is the absence of sustained, critical attention to conflict tourism from philosophers. This paper narrows matters into a more manageable form. We focus on the idea of tourist visits to conflict heritage sites, some of which are adapted for mass, regular, safe tourism. In this chapter we have three aims: first, to raise awareness of the phenomena and show they merit sustained philosophical interest; second, to outline some relevant philosophical questions; third, to offer some initial responses to these questions. Our overall claim, voiced at various intervals, is that one can, at most, develop general, defeasible ideas both about the phenomena and about what one should do. (shrink)

The European Union Commission’s whitepaper on Artificial Intelligence proposes shaping the emerging AI market so that it better reflects common European values. It is a master plan that builds upon the EU AI High-Level Expert Group guidelines. This article reviews the masterplan, from a culture cycle perspective, to reflect on its potential clashes with current societal, technical, and methodological constraints. We identify two main obstacles in the implementation of this plan: the lack of a coherent EU vision to drive future (...) decision-making processes at state and local levels and the lack of methods to support a sustainable diffusion of AI in our society. The lack of a coherent vision stems from not considering societal differences across the EU member states. We suggest that these differences may lead to a fractured market and an AI crisis in which different members of the EU will adopt nation-centric strategies to exploit AI, thus preventing the development of a frictionless market as envisaged by the EU. Moreover, the Commission aims at changing the AI development culture proposing a human-centred and safety-first perspective that is not supported by methodological advancements, thus taking the risks of unforeseen social and societal impacts of AI. We discuss potential societal, technical, and methodological gaps that should be filled to avoid the risks of developing AI systems at the expense of society. Our analysis results in the recommendation that the EU regulators and policymakers consider how to complement the EC programme with rules and compensatory mechanisms to avoid market fragmentation due to local and global ambitions. Moreover, regulators should go beyond the human-centred approach establishing a research agenda seeking answers to the technical and methodological open questions regarding the development and assessment of human-AI co-action aiming for a sustainable AI diffusion in the society. (shrink)

Biological evolution provides a creative fount of complex and subtle adaptations, often surprising the scientists who discover them. However, because evolution is an algorithmic process that transcends the substrate in which it occurs, evolution’s creativity is not limited to nature. Indeed, many researchers in the field of digital evolution have observed their evolving algorithms and organisms subverting their intentions, exposing unrecognized bugs in their code, producing unexpected adaptations, or exhibiting outcomes uncannily convergent with ones in nature. Such stories routinely reveal (...) creativity by evolution in these digital worlds, but they rarely fit into the standard scientific narrative. Instead they are often treated as mere obstacles to be overcome, rather than results that warrant study in their own right. The stories themselves are traded among researchers through oral tradition, but that mode of information transmission is inefficient and prone to error and outright loss. Moreover, the fact that these stories tend to be shared only among practitioners means that many natural scientists do not realize how interesting and lifelike digital organisms are and how natural their evolution can be. To our knowledge, no collection of such anecdotes has been published before. This paper is the crowd-sourced product of researchers in the fields of artificial life and evolutionary computation who have provided first-hand accounts of such cases. It thus serves as a written, fact-checked collection of scientifically important and even entertaining stories. In doing so we also present here substantial evidence that the existence and importance of evolutionary surprises extends beyond the natural world, and may indeed be a universal property of all complex evolving systems. (shrink)

There has been an excellent series of formative articles centring on Bernard Stiegler (1952-2020) as an inspiration to pedagogical thought; this is a summative article written from the perspective of after his death. Stiegler argued that education is ontologically crucial to human development, wherein technics or the ‘not-experienced-condition(s)-necessary-for-experience’ are crucial to humanity’s ability to create its own existence. Technics make possible the technologies underpinning contemporary Anthropocentric existence. While entropy poses the cosmological threat of death to life, technics supports negentropy (...) or the collecting and marshalling of energy opposed to entropy. Education is a crucial means of social negentropy, however all human agency is characterized by the pharmakon of more entropy or increased negentropy. The tension is inevitable in the pharmakon between on the one side, care and cure; and on the other, poison and death. In this article, we ask: ‘Given his suicide, what sort of pharmakon was Stiegler for himself and for us?’1 The authorial “I,” ‘Bernard Stiegler’ is no longer a living critic of social entropy or of proletarization and ‘technoscience’; what do we now make of his oeuvre for education? We will point to his inversions and purposeful mis-interpretations of Heidegger and Derrida as crucial to his oeuvre. Stiegler’s phenomenal being has ended; what technics have been strengthened and specifically: ‘What now of education?’. (shrink)

Ethical questions are often associated with practical dilemmas: questions in morality, in other words. This volume, by contrast, asks questions about morality: what it is, and to what it owes its precarious authority over us. The focus on metaethics is sustained throughout, via a wide range of philosophical perspectives. Distinguished luminaries who include R. M. Hare and Bernard Williams address keenly debated issues such as what constitutes morality in politics; the relationship between education and ethical standards; and whether or (...) not morality can indeed be defined at all. As Nikhil Krishnan writes in his elegant Foreword, 'The plain-speaking, essayistic grace of these essays, speaks nevertheless of the possibility of moral philosophy, written with an eye to a listener, very possibly not a professional philosopher, who has the right to say, ''This is all very well, your neat little theory, but it doesn't ring true. Things are more complicated than that.'''. (shrink)

State-reduction and the notion of actuality are compared to passage through time and the notion of the present; already in classical relativity the latter give rise to difficulties. The solution proposed here is to treat both tense and value-definiteness as relational properties or facts as relations; likewise the notions of change and probability. In both cases essential characteristics are absent: temporal relations are tenselessly true; probabilistic relations are deterministically true. The basic ideas go back to Everett, although the technical development (...) makes use of the decoherent histories theory of Griffiths, Omnès, and Gell-Mann and Hartle. Alternative interpretations of the decoherent histories framework are also considered. (shrink)

How can we articulate the intimate demand of the spiritual life and the struggle for solidarity? These two issues have often been treated separately; in _Simone Weil: Attention to the Real_, however, Robert Chenavier explores the work of Simone Weil and demonstrates how she brought them together in a single movement of thought. "Our time has a unique mission, calling for the creation of a civilization based on the spirituality of work," she wrote near the end of her short (...) life. Her experience as a militant and the call of the divine nurtured in her writing an intense and unwavering defense of this new civilization, backed by her personal sense of intellectual, moral, and political responsibility. Originally published in French in 2009, _Simone Weil: __Attention to the Real_ leads the reader through her earliest writing as a perceptive social critic to her work on spirituality and materialism, and finally to her extraordinary concept of decreation, produced before her death at the age of thirty-four. "To an exceptional degree," Chenavier says, "the life of Simone Weil, her personality, her commitment, and her reflection form one single whole." Chenavier argues that Weil's vocation took on a very original form in the history of philosophical thought. He is especially concerned with Weil's philosophical writings on the concept of work, which remain relevant today, and which provide an important key to her thinking throughout her life. Bernard Doering's superb translation brings to English readers Chenavier's succinct account of Simone Weil's life and an illuminating introduction to her philosophical thought. "Bernard Doering has crafted a very fine translation of Robert Chenavier's comprehensive but brief introduction to Simone Weil's philosophical project. It provides an excellent English introduction to the social philosophy of Simone Weil, with due attention to her understanding of the importance of work in learning to attend to the real. Doering's translation will be of interest to both a religious and secular readership, both inside and outside the academy." —_Lawrence Schmidt, University of Toronto_. (shrink)

Esta é a biografia de Gildo Marçal Brandão. A obra apresenta não só seus escritos, mas também informações biográficas, imagens, entrevistas e relatos de vários momentos considerados memoráveis da participação de Gildo no debate intelectual e político. Combinando trabalho meticuloso, os organizadores do presente volume têm o mérito de fazer tudo isso, uma vez que foram reunidos textos inéditos ou esparsos de Gildo, registros fotográficos, depoimentos de sua esposa - Simone Coelho - prefácios de dois de seus mais próximos (...) amigos e interlocutores, Denis Bernardes e Brasílio Sallum, e um encarte com sua última entrevista. (shrink)

New philosophical essays on love by a diverse group of international scholars. Topics include contributions to the ongoing debate on whether love is arational or if there are reasons for love, and if so what kind; the kinds of love there may be ; whether love can explain the difference between nationalism and patriotism; whether love is an necessary component of truly seeing others and the world; whether love, like free will, is “fragile,” and may not survive in a deterministic (...) world; and whether or not love is actually a good thing or may instead be a force opposed to morality. Key philosophers discussed include Immanuel Kant, Iris Murdoch, Bernard Williams, Harry Frankfurt, J. David Velleman, Niko Kolodny, Thomas Hurka, Bennett Helm, Alfred Mele and Derk Pereboom. Essays also touch on the treatment of love in literature and popular culture, from Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair to Spike Jonze’s movie her. (shrink)

Tous ceux qui s’intéressent à la vie et à l’œuvre de Descartes connaissent l’épisode rapporté par Adrien Baillet dans sa Vie de monsieur Descartes et évoqué par Descartes lui-même dans une lettre à son ami Villebressieu en 1631 : vers la fin des années 1620, le jeune Descartes participa à Paris chez le nonce apostolique, le cardinal Guidi di Bagno, à une « assemblée de personnes savantes et curieuses », parmi lesquelles le cardinal de Berulle et Mersenne. L’orateur était..

This article examines Nietzsche’s influence on analytic philosophy, focusing on the field of analytic ethics. It presents some key rationales motivating his re-evaluation of values and, in particular, his critique of modern morality. To demonstrate his influence on the work of Charles Taylor, Alasdair Macintyre, and Bernard Williams, the role of Nietzsche’s genealogical method in his re-evaluative project is considered. This is followed by a discussion of Nietzsche’s critique of the value of moral values and its relation to similar (...) objections developed by more recent morality critics. (shrink)

La pleine reconnaissance de l’existence du problème de la subjectivation sexuée ou colonisée conduit nécessairement à rendre relatif celui de la subjectivation dite « neutre ». Pourtant, le propre de la conscience dominante est de masquer son propre caractère de domination. Comment forcer la subjectivité dominante à se dévoiler? Nous proposons d’associer la description phénoménologique à une méthode de traduction depuis les expériences des dominé-e-s vers la reconstruction des expériences des dominant-e-s en tant que tel-les. Pour cela, nous partirons, dans (...) une perspective intersectionnelle, des travaux phénoménologiques de Simone de Beauvoir et de Frantz Fanon.The full recognition of the problem of sexual or colonized subjectivation necessarily leads to question the neutrality of “normal subjectivity.” Yet the dominant consciousness tends to mask its own character of domination. How to force dominant subjectivity to reveal itself? We propose to associate the phenomenological description with a method of translation from the experiences of the dominated-ones to the reconstruction of the experiences of the dominants as such. For that, we will rely, in an intersectional perspective, on the phenomenological work of Simone de Beauvoir and Frantz Fanon. (shrink)

Contents: "Analysis of Claude Bernard's Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine," "Two Unpublished Chapters from She Came to Stay," "Pyrrhus and Cineas," "A Review of The Phenomenology of Perception by Maurice Merleau-Ponty," "Moral Idealism and Political Realism," "Existentialism and Popular Wisdom," "Jean-Paul Sartre," "An Eye for an Eye," "Literature and Metaphysics," "Introduction to an Ethics of Ambiguity," "An Existentialist Looks at Americans," and "What is Existentialism?".

In an essay on the modern idea of political equality, Bernard Williams contrasts what he calls ‘the human point of view’ with a point of view marked by what he calls a ‘technical or professional attitude’. While the latter is concerned with conspicuous structures of someone’s life that might be by occupied by another, the former concerns an attitude towards a singular person, what Wittgenstein calls ‘an attitude towards a soul’ – an attitude characteristically exemplified in the relation to (...) the other who is a friend. It is the one who is in view under such a singularising gaze that seems to be lost as soon as we start counting others, counting our friends. The paper explores the general haunting of the modern-Western idea of all people’s equality by the hazy spectre of what is disclosed by this singularising gaze, and asks how we might organise a response politically to the in each case unique and singular relation to the unique and singular other we call the friend – the one who is both altogether other and my equal. (shrink)

An essential addition to the Stone Reader series, Question Everything is a groundbreaking collection of philosophical essays from some of our foremost thinkers and storytellers. When The Stone Reader-a landmark collection of 133 essays from the New York Times' award-winning philosophy column-first published, in 2015, the world urgently needed insight and wisdom, and for many, the book served as a bulwark of reason against the rising tide of post-fact rhetoric. Now, as disinformation continues to run rampant and our rights are (...) increasingly called into question, editors Peter Catapano and Simon Critchley contend that philosophy in the public sphere is more crucial than ever. Like The Stone Reader and its sequel, Modern Ethics in 77 Arguments, Question Everything delivers the contrarian views, sound arguments, and creative approaches to traditional opinion-writing that loyal readers of the series have come to expect. Its essays, however, are not organized by traditional categories like ethics or epistemology, but thematically by question, thirteen of them in all-the first twelve like the hours of a clock, ticking us through the tumultuous time in which these pieces were written, from late 2015 to 2021, with the last speculating into an uncertain future. The volume begins with the most fundamental of questions: What does it mean to be human? There, contemporary thinkers from Martha Nussbaum to Bernard-Henri Lévy explore the essence of who we are as a species. The next question-Is democracy possible?-interrogates our social and political ideals. While Malka Older calls into question the viability of our institutions, philosophers Gary Gutting and Alex Rosenberg reassess the meaning of patriotism. And onward, with more timeless struggles: What is happiness? Does life have meaning? Finally, it asks, Is this the end of the world as we know it? Now what? While its foundation and core consists of the work of professional scholars and philosophers, Question Everything also features a number of prominent artists and thinkers who may never appear on a philosophy syllabus, including, among others, novelist Elena Ferrante, actor Cate Blanchett, filmmaker Errol Morris, musician Sonny Rollins, and artist Ai Weiwei, all of whom offer insights shaped by decades of devotion to and practice of their crafts. Designed both for immediate gratification and long-term use, Question Everything, with an introduction by Catapano, is not only an essential addition to a much-loved series, but an act of resistance, "a product," as Catapano writes, "of the spirit of agitation and inquiry that has been integral to the human enterprise from the beginning of recorded history.". (shrink)

In December 1924 when Simone de Beauvoir almost certainly wrote her essay analyzing Claude Bernard's "Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine," a classic text in the philosophy of science, she was a 16 yr old student in a senior-level philosophy class at a private Catholic girls' school. Given the popular conception of existentialism as anti science, Beauvoir's early interest in science, reflected in her baccalaureate successes as well as her paper on Bernard, may be surprising. But (...) her enthusiasm for Bernard is unmistakable. We have identified three themes in Beauvoir's essay that reappear in her later work, including the valuing of philosophical doubt. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:What Is Deviated Transcendency? Woolf's The Waves as a Textbook CaseSimon De Keukelaere (bio)The Waves, more than any of Virginia Woolf's other novels, conveys the complexities of human experience.—Kate FlintHumankind—according to mimetic theory—is not (as Marx thought) homo economicus but rather homo religiosus. Mensonge Romantique et Vérité Romanesque, Girard's first essay (1961), evocatively opens with a saying by Max Scheler: "L'homme possède ou un Dieu ou une idole" (Man (...) has either a God or an idol). If we may believe Girard, the Enlightenment profoundly misunderstood human beings because it naively assumed that doing away with "ancient superstitions" would fully liberate them: "denial of God does not eliminate transcendency but diverts it from the au-delà to the endeçà " (Girard 1965, 59).What has all this to do with Virginia Woolf's secular art? René Girard's "transcendance déviée," the diverted or deviated transcendency––which we may also want to term idolatry––is beautifully and transparently depicted in one of Woolf's most enigmatic and experimental novels. In The Waves, the portrayal of human desire as mimetic, imitated, is so crystal clear that––once noticed—it can hardly be overlooked any longer. Perhaps even more interesting for mimetic theory is the fact that Woolf (just as Proust did before her) brings into play the language of the sacred when rendering the mimetic nature of human longing. Neither of these two aspects of The Waves (the obsessively mimetic nature of desire and the use of the religious metaphor) have been fully unraveled by Woolf's critics.The purpose of this article is to make obvious the value of Virginia Woolf's (poetic) language for mimetic scholars and to show how deviated transcendency can be made visible and (above all) intelligible through great secular literature. The study of literature is vital to the humanities, not for some frivolous, outdated reasons, but because great literature can, sometimes [End Page 195] more effectively than many erudite studies, convey the complexities of human experience.It would no doubt be unjustifiable to foist Girard's mimetic thesis on Woolf's novel without clear support from the text, but I believe The Waves provides such backing. The outline of the present article is as follows. I first argue that the characters in Woolf's novel really are interdividuals rather than individuals, since mimetic desire plays an important role in them. I subsequently focus on a typically metaphysical illusion that goes along with mimetic desire, that is, the apparent self-sufficiency or divine autonomy of the Other. Then I show how the religious metaphor is consistently linked with the first-mentioned issue and that a form of distorted mysticism is to be recognized throughout the novel. Finally I examine how in The Waves deviated transcendency is depicted as a road toward Death in exactly the same way as Girard does in his Mensonge Romantique et Vérité Romanesque (1961).The Interdividual and Her Mimetic DesireMimetic theory is deeply involved with the problem of selfhood, the paradoxical nature of subjectivity. According to René Girard we are not individuals but interdividuals. The ambiguous nature of the Self is a recurrent theme in Woolf's novels too, and especially in The Waves, it seems. As Lisa Marie Lucenti remarks: "Many critics seem to agree that subjectivity, for Woolf, is no simple matter, but they disagree on the significance, expression and forms of its intricacies. The most productive theories for reading Woolf are those which allow for a large measure of variation and ambiguity both between and within individual subjects" (1998, 34). The problematic nature of the Self challenges the critic, since the very concept of character is turned into a conundrum, rather than a useful instrument with which to analyze the novel. To speak of separated characters, of individuals (in-divisus) with regard to The Waves is particularly difficult. So, for example, at the end of the novel Bernard (one of the six "voices" or "characters" whose lives are recounted) states: "I am many people; I do not altogether know who I am—Jinny, Susan, Neville, Rhoda or Louis; or how to distinguish my life from theirs... (shrink)

The focus of this paper is two-fold. First, similarities generated from six semantic models were compared to human ratings of paragraph similarity on two datasets—23 World Entertainment News Network paragraphs and 50 ABC newswire paragraphs. Contrary to findings on smaller textual units such as word associations (Griffiths, Tenenbaum, & Steyvers, 2007), our results suggest that when single paragraphs are compared, simple nonreductive models (word overlap and vector space) can provide better similarity estimates than more complex models (LSA, Topic Model, (...) SpNMF, and CSM). Second, various methods of corpus creation were explored to facilitate the semantic models’ similarity estimates. Removing numeric and single characters, and also truncating document length improved performance. Automated construction of smaller Wikipedia-based corpora proved to be very effective, even improving upon the performance of corpora that had been chosen for the domain. Model performance was further improved by augmenting corpora with dataset paragraphs. (shrink)

For centuries the common and scholarly visions of the interior of the human body were dominated by humoral and anatomical representations. At the end of the nineteenth century two innovations modified these representations: Röntgen's X-rays (1895) and Claude Bernard's theory of the internal environment (milieu intérieur, 1867). This latter model became a central paradigm for thinking about the living body at the beginning of the twentieth century. This paper shows how Bernard's theory provided a new scientific, microscopic, physiological, (...) aquatic and homeostatic vision of the interior of the body. The paper then discusses the well known film Fantastic Voyage (1966) by Richard Fleisher, arguing that it marks a similar watershed in popular representations of the human body. Combining scientific transposition and various effects of mise-en-scène that mobilize classic forms of the imaginary, Fleisher's film (and the books and TV series that followed), contributed to changing the vision of the interior of the body. This image was no longer that of the cadaver cut into pieces on the dissection table. The vision was of living processes, embodied in warm functioning flesh, permitting a physiological vision of the integral body to emerge alongside the classic anatomical one. (shrink)

Chapitre 1. Sport et domination capitaliste (Patrick Vassort) -- Chapitre 2. Sport, anthropofacture et conformisme généralisé (Clément Hamel) -- Chapitre 3. Le sport contre les femmes (Ronan David) -- Chapitre 4. Le sport ou la fin de l'espace vécu (Simon Maillard) -- Chapitre 5. Propagande sportive et colonisation du quotidien (Fabien Lebrun) -- Chapitre 6. Le sport: une entreprise d'uniformisation et de déculturation. L'exemple des JO de Pékin (Bernard Allain) -- Chapitre 7. Le sport contre la culture et l'éducation (...) (Camille Dal et Nicolas Oblin). (shrink)