In two experiments, we demonstrate that intentional action intuitions vary as a function of whether one brings about or observes an event. In experiment 1a (N?=?38), participants were less likely to judge that they intended (M?=?2.53, 7 point scale) or intentionally (M?=?2.67) brought about a harmful event compared to intention (M?=?4.16) and intentionality (M?=?4.11) judgments made about somebody else. Experiments 1b and 1c confirmed and extended this pattern of actor-observer differences. Experiment 2 suggested that these actor-observer differences are not likely (...) to occur when participants are asked to ?imagine? being an actor. We argue that these results challenge the substantial philosophical and empirical reliance on hypothetical thought examples about intentional action. Our data offer new and necessary methodological avenues for understanding folk intentional action intuitions. (shrink)

Wolfson's systematic presentation of the philosophy of Spinoza has long been a classic. It is with pride that we make it available again in a one-volume edition.

Wolfson's systematic presentation of the philosophy of Spinoza has long been a classic. It is with pride that we make it available again in a one-volume edition.

According to material plenitude, every material object coincides with an abundance of other material objects that differ in the properties they have essentially and accidentally. Although this kind of plenitude is becoming increasingly popular, it isn't clear how to make sense of the view beyond its slogan form. As I argue, it turns out to be extraordinarily difficult to do so: straightforward attempts are either inconsistent or fail to capture the target idea. Making progress requires us to engage in more (...) delicate metaphysics than we might have expected and, along the way, reveals substantive constraints on the material world. In this article, I argue that any attempt to develop a coherent version of plenitude is subject to two under-appreciated challenges, and I develop a version of plenitude (global plenitude) capable of overcoming both. (shrink)

Our paper explores the complex place-based relations of cross-sector partnerships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous partners. We draw on a longitudinal in-depth case study of the Bundian Way, an Indigenous-led cross-sector partnership of over 40 organisations. Through practices of listening to history and walking ‘on Country’, the non-Indigenous partners and our team came to appreciate the indivisibility of place and time and bear witness to the intergenerational trauma of colonially imposed divisions. By combining a 45-day place-based ethnography with a 36-month participant (...) observation and repeated interviews with the Advisory Committee members, we explain how non-Indigenous members of the cross-sector partnership came to realise, and reverse, these place-time divisions. We contribute to an ethics of custodianship by first contrasting, and then combining, Indigenous and Western ways of knowing place through time. (shrink)

Purpose – This paper aims to examine the primary fundamental rights concerns related to biometrics and their use in automated border controls, as well as how these issues converge in the European Commission’s Smart Borders proposal. Design/methodology/approach – This paper draws on extensive background research and qualitative in-depth interviews conducted in 2013 for the European Union FP-7 project “FastPass – A harmonized, modular reference system for all European automatic border crossing points”. Findings – The Smart Borders proposal not only compounds (...) the individual concerns related to the use of biometrics in border controls and automatisation thereof, but also has serious issues of its own, premier among which is the imposition of a two-tier border control system. Social implications – The paper is a catalyst for open debate on the fundamental questions of how we got to this point and where do we want to go. It questions the process by which the increased use of IT in border controls has become the norm and policy trend in Europe, and discusses where the limits could be drawn from a fundamental rights perspective. In particular, it warns against the institutionalisation of a two-tier border control system among third-country nationals. Originality/value – Little attention is given to the fundamental rights concerns raised for EU and non-EU citizens as related to biometrics and their use in ABCs, and how these issues are reproduced in the Smart Borders proposal. The paper fills this gap by taking a bottom-up approach: examining the implications of individual elements of the proposal to see their impact on the broader policy. (shrink)

Material Plenitude is the view that there is an abundance of coincident objects wherever there is any material object. Although plenitude has garnered increased attention from metaphysicians in recent years, it has yet to be well‐understood beyond its slogan from. The goal of this article is to explore a few places for puzzlement about plenitude; in particular, how we ought to motivate and formulate the target view. I'll suggest along the way that an investigation of plenitude is not merely of (...) interest in its own right, but can provide valuable insights into abundant ontologies more generally. (shrink)

In his recent book, Daniel Korman contrasts ontological conservatives with permissivists and eliminativists about ontology. Roughly speaking, conservatives admit the existence of ‘ordinary objects' like trees, dogs, and snowballs, but deny the existence of ‘extraordinary objects', like composites of trees and dogs. Eliminativists, on the other hand, deny many or all ordinary objects, while permissivists accept both ordinary and extraordinary objects. Our aim in this paper is to outline some of our reasons for being drawn to permissivism, as well as (...) some of our misgivings about conservative metaphysics. In the first section, we discuss a tempting epistemic line of argument against conservatism. This isn’t a line of argument we find especially promising. Our most basic complaint against conservatism is not that conservatism has poor epistemic standing even if true, but instead that conservatism is weird. We develop this thought in the second part of the paper. In the final section we discuss some larger methodological issues about the project of ontology. (shrink)

In this long-awaited volume, on which he worked for twenty years, Mr. Wolfson describes the body of doctrine known as the Kalam.

Radically permissive ontologies like mereological universalism and material plenitude are typically motivated by concerns about arbitrariness or anthropocentrism: it would be objectionably arbitrary, the thought goes, to countenance only those objects that we ordinarily take there to be. Despite the prevalence of this idea, it isn't at all clear what it is for a theory to be “objectionably arbitrary,” or what follows from a commitment to avoiding arbitrariness in metaphysics. This paper aims to clarify both questions, and examines whether arguments (...) from arbitrariness really are the proper foundations for one or both varieties of ontological permissivism. I argue that these considerations (even when made more precise) are far less successful at motivating radical forms of permissivism than we often take them to be. To do better, permissivists must either supply a much more developed metaphysics of material objects, or a controversial (but tempting) conception of what we're doing when we do metaphysics. (shrink)

In the face of the puzzles of material constitution, some philosophers have been moved to posit a distinction between an object's matter and its form. A familiar difficulty for contemporary hylomorphism is to say which properties are eligible as forms: for example, it seems that it would be intolerably arbitrary to say that being statue shaped is embodied by some material object, but that other complex shape properties aren't. Anti-arbitrariness concerns lead quickly to a plenitudinous ontology. The usual complaint is (...) that the super-abundance of material objects is too extraordinary to accept, but I want to raise a different worry: I argue that the most natural way of developing this picture is already inconsistent. I show that a simple version of plenitudinous hylomorphism is subject to a Russellian argument, but argue that we cannot treat the problem straightforwardly as an instance of Russell's Paradox of Sets. (shrink)

v. 1. The philosophy of the Kabbalah.--v. 2. The philosophy of Spinoza.

In his monumental Philosophy of the Kalam the late Harry Wolfson--truly the most accomplished historian of philosophy in our century--examined the early medieval system of Islamic philosophy. He studies its repercussions in Jewish thought in this companion book--an indispensable work for all students of Jewish and Islamic traditions. Wolfson believed that ideas are contagious, but that for beliefs to catch on from one tradition to another the recipients must be predisposed, susceptible. Thus he is concerned here not so much with (...) the influence of Islamic ideas as with Jewish elaboration, adaptation, qualification, and criticism of them. To this end he examines passages reflecting Kalam views by a wide variety of Jewish thinkers, including Isaac Israeli, Judah Halevi, Abraham ibn Ezra, and Maimonides. As always in Wolfson's work, two aspects are apparent: the special dimensions of Jewish thought as well as its relation to other traditions. And as always his prose is both graceful and precise. (shrink)

Fairchild (2019) advertised the humility of material plenitude, arguing that despite the profligate ontology of coincident objects it entails, the best version of plenitude is one that takes no stand on a range of nearby questions about modality and coincidence. Roughly, the thought is that plenitude says only that there are coincident objects corresponding to every consistent pattern of essential and accidental properties. Plenitude says (or should say) nothing about which patterns those might be, and so should be compatible with (...) any reasonable hypothesis about which combinations of properties it is possible for something to have. I argued in the earlier paper that a particular formulation of the target view (Global Plenitude) has exactly that virtue. But, unfortunately, Global Plenitude turns out not to be very humble at all. Global Plenitude is incompatible with an exceptionally compelling hypothesis about coincidence: that there are some things which coincide, but might not have. Scandal ensues. (shrink)

This paper outlines a defense of hybrid contingentism: that it is contingent which individuals there are, but not contingent what properties there are. Critics pursue two main lines of complaint. First, that the hybrid contingentist’s treatment of haecceitistic properties is metaphysically mysterious, and second, that hybrid contingentism involves an unjustified asymmetry in the associated modal logic. I suggest that these complaints may be too quick, at least in the setting of higher-order metaphysics. It is not at all obvious whether and (...) to what extent we should expect particular "symmetries" across the orders, and so whether (as Williamson (2013) argues) “the default preference is for a uniform metaphysics, on which being is contingent at all orders or none.”. (shrink)

The authors of these papers vary in age, nationality and professional background. They share a belief that all too often older people are not treated justly or fairly, and also a belief that this is particularly true with regard to a proper respect for their dignity as people and a proper allocation of medical and social resources. Their papers, in various ways, give evidence as to what is happening and arguments, based on philosophical ethics, as to why it is wrong. (...) The authors also have a range of proposals, backed by argument and evidence, and drawing on factual material as well as philosophical argument, as to what could be done to improve the situation. This is a book for anyone, whether themselves elderly, looking after an older person, professionally involved in working with older people, or simply realising that one day they will be old, who wants to learn about what is wrong with the present situation and how it might be made better. (shrink)

Recent developments in artificial intelligence based on neural nets—deep learning and large language models which together I refer to as NEWAI—have resulted in startling improvements in language handling and the potential to keep up with changing human knowledge by learning from the internet. Nevertheless, examples such as ChatGPT, which is a ‘large language model’, have proved to have no moral compass: they answer queries with fabrications with the same fluency as they provide facts. I try to explain why this is, (...) basing the argument on the sociology of knowledge, particularly social studies of science, notably ‘studies of expertise and experience’ and the ‘fractal model’ of society. Learning from the internet is not the same as socialisation: NEWAI has no primary socialisation such as provides the foundations of human moral understanding. Instead, large language models are retrospectively socialised by human intervention in an attempt to align them with societally accepted ethics. Perhaps, as technology advances, large language models could come to understand speech and recognise objects sufficiently well to acquire the equivalent of primary socialisation. In the meantime, we must be vigilant about who is socialising them and be aware of the danger of their socialising us to align with them rather than vice-versa, an eventuality that would lead to the further erosion of the distinction between the true and the false giving further support to populism and fascism. (shrink)

As self-conscious curators and critics of moral history, the early Confucians are relevant to the contemporary debate over the fate of memorials dedicated to morally flawed individuals. They provide us with a pragmatic justification that is distinct from those utilized in the current debate, and in many respects superior to the alternatives. In addition to supplying this curative philosophic resource, the early Confucian practices of ancestral memorialization suggest preventative measures we might adopt to minimize the chances of establishing divisive and (...) oppressive memorials in the future. (shrink)

A collection of anecdotes that articulate the inspirations behind the development of the Frank/Suzuki Performance Aesthetics, an actor training system.

Artificial Intelligence is at a turning point, with a substantial increase in projects aiming to implement sophisticated forms of human intelligence in machines. This research attempts to model specific forms of intelligence through brute-force search heuristics and also reproduce features of human perception and cognition, including emotions. Such goals have implications for artificial consciousness, with some arguing that it will be achievable once we overcome short-term engineering challenges. We believe, however, that phenomenal consciousness cannot be implemented in machines. This becomes (...) clear when considering emotions and examining the dissociation between consciousness and attention in humans. While we may be able to program ethical behavior based on rules and machine learning, we will never be able to reproduce emotions or empathy by programming such control systems—these will be merely simulations. Arguments in favor of this claim include considerations about evolution, the neuropsychological aspects of emotions, and the dissociation between attention and consciousness found in humans. Ultimately, we are far from achieving artificial consciousness. (shrink)

This paper aims to clarify the relationship between consciousness and attention through theoretical considerations about evolution. Specifically, we will argue that the empirical findings on attention and the basic considerations concerning the evolution of the different forms of attention demonstrate that consciousness and attention must be dissociated regardless of which definition of these terms one uses. To the best of our knowledge, no extant view on the relationship between consciousness and attention has this advantage. Because of this characteristic, this paper (...) presents a principled and neutral way to settle debates concerning the relationship between consciousness and attention, without falling into disputes about the meaning of these terms. A decisive conclusion of this approach is that extreme views on the relationship between consciousness and attention must be rejected, including identity and full dissociation views. There is an overlap between the two within conscious attention, but developing a full understanding of this mechanism requires further empirical investigations. (shrink)

'Mass terms', words like water, rice and traffic, have proved very difficult to accommodate in any theory of meaning since, unlike count nouns such as house or dog, they cannot be viewed as part of a logical set and differ in their grammatical properties. In this study, motivated by the need to design a computer program for understanding natural language utterances incorporating mass terms, Harry Bunt provides a thorough analysis of the problem and offers an original and detailed solution. An (...) extension of classical set theory, Ensemble Theory, is defined, and this provides the conceptual basis of a framework for the analysis of natural language meaning which Dr Bunt calls Two-level model-theoretic semantics. The validity of the framework is convincingly demonstrated by the formal analysis of a fragment of English including sentences with quantified and modified mass terms. Separate chapters of the book are devoted to an axiomatic definition of Ensemble Theory and a detailed discussion of its status as a mathematical formalism. (shrink)

Written nearly fifty years ago, at a time when the world was still wrestling with the concepts of Marx and Lenin, 'The Illusion of the Epoch' is the perfect resource for understanding the roots of Marxism-Leninism and its implications for philosophy, modern political thought, economics, and history. As Professor Tim Fuller has written, this "is not an intemperate book, but rather an effort at a sustained, scholarly argument against Marxian views." Far from demonising his subject, Acton scrupulously notes where Marx's (...) account of historical and economic events and processes is essentially accurate. However, Acton also points out that Marx is generally right about things that were already widely known and accepted in his own time and indeed had been long understood in the nineteenth century. On the other hand, Acton shows that in many cases Marx either is simply wrong or has stated his views so as to render his theories immune to disproof. Acton also explains why the embodiment of Marxist-Leninist theory in an actual social order would require coercive support if it were not, sooner or later, to collapse of its own contradictions. (shrink)

Optogenetics is being optimistically presented in contemporary media for its unprecedented capacity to control cell behavior through the application of light to genetically modified target cells. As such, optogenetics holds obvious potential for application in a new generation of invasive medical devices by which to potentially provide treatment for neurological and psychiatric conditions such as Parkinson's disease, addiction, schizophrenia, autism and depression. Design of a first-in-human optogenetics experimental trial has already begun for the treatment of blindness. Optogenetics trials involve a (...) combination of highly invasive genetic and electronic interventions that results in irreversible and permanent modifications of an individual's nervous system. Given its novelty, its uncertain benefit to patients, and its unique risk profile of irreversible physiological alteration, optogenetics requires a reassessment of the ethical challenges for protecting human participants in clinical trials, particularly at formative stages of clinical evaluation. This study explores the evolving ethical issues surrounding optogenetics’ potential harm to participants within trial design, especially focusing on whether Phase 1 trials should incorporate efficacy as well as safety endpoints in ways that are fair and respectful to research trial participants. (shrink)

Multisensory stimulation has been shown to alter the sense of body-ownership. Given that perceived similarity between one’s own body and those of others is crucial for social cognition, we investigated whether multisensory stimulation can lead participants to experience ownership over a hand of different skin colour. Results from two studies using introspective, behavioural and physiological methods show that, following synchronous visuotactile stimulation, participants can experience body-ownership over hands that seem to belong to a different racial group. Interestingly, a baseline measure (...) of implicit racial bias did not predict whether participants would experience the RHI, but the overall strength of experienced body-ownership seemed to predict the participants’ post-illusion implicit racial bias with those who experienced a stronger RHI showing a lower bias. These findings suggest that multisensory experiences can override strict ingroup/outgroup distinctions based on skin colour and point to a key role for sensory processing in social cognition. (shrink)