What are active materials? This book aims to introduce and redefine conceptions of matter by considering materials as entities that ‘sense’ and respond to their environment. By examining the modeling of, the experiments on, and the construction of these materials, and by developing a theory of their structure, their collective activity, and their functionality, this volume identifies and develops a novel scientific approach to active materials. Moreover, essays on the history and philosophy of metallurgy, chemistry, biology, and materials science provide (...) these various approaches to active materials with a historical and cultural context. The interviews with experts from the natural sciences included in this volume develop new understandings of ‘active matter’ and active materials in relation to a range of research objects and from the perspective of different scientific disciplines, including biology, physics, chemistry, and materials science. These insights are complemented by contributions on the activity of matter and materials from the humanities and the design field. Discusses the mechanisms of active materials and their various conceptualizations in materials science. Redefines conceptions of active materials through interviews with experts from the natural sciences. Contextualizes, historizes, and reflects on different notions of matter/materials and activity through contributions from the humanities. A highly interdisciplinary approach to a cutting-edge research topic, with contributions from both the sciences and the humanities. (shrink)

Acknowledgments 1. Culture Is Essential 2. Culture Exists 3. Culture Evolves 4. Culture Is an Adaptation 5. Culture Is Maladaptive 6. Culture and Genes Coevolve 7. Nothing about Culture Makes Sense except in the Light of Evolution.

In the fiftieth anniversary of this book’s first release, Winch’s argument remains as crucial as ever. Originally published in 1958, _The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy_ was a landmark exploration of the social sciences, written at a time when that field was still young and had not yet joined the Humanities and the Natural Sciences as the third great domain of the Academy. A passionate defender of the importance of philosophy to a full understanding of (...) 'society' against those who would deem it an irrelevant 'ivory towers' pursuit, Winch draws from the works of such thinkers as Ludwig Wittgenstein, J.S. Mill and Max Weber to make his case. In so doing he addresses the possibility and practice of a comprehensive 'science of society'. (shrink)

First published in 1990. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

My response to Joel Katzav’s original article looks at potentially competing claims about perspectivism, psychology, and our understanding of concrete experience. De Laguna offers an early example of pluralism when conceiving of psychology, biology, physiology, and other sciences as essentially different perspectives abstracted from our experience of the world. Each science serves as a single perspective on experience, one that may shed light on our experience and behaviour from a particular standpoint, but does not represent ‘the real’ over and above (...) all perspectives. While remaining generally consistent throughout her career, I argue de Laguna’s exploration and endorsement of behaviourism—especially as it concerns emotion and affect—pushes her a bit closer to reductionism than originally intended. I explore this issue not by simply pointing out the potential inconsistency in her work, but by focusing on whether perspectivism makes sense in light of redundancies and complications between theoretical perspectives. (shrink)

War is almost always conducted with various restrictions in the form of rules, rituals, and taboos. Many of the norms that regulate warfare can be found in the tradition of just war. This tradition seeks to provide a middle ground between an unrealistic (at least for politicians) pacifism that does not even allow war in self-defence and a too realistic realism that claims there is no place for ethics in war. The tradition of just war does not have the force (...) of law; it provides, above all, a vocabulary to discuss war in moral terms. At the same time, the tradition does have an impact: it forms the basis of humanitarian law and the Geneva Conventions. Just like with laws, it is recognised here that imperfect adherence to these principles does not necessarily diminish their validity. Most proponents of the tradition believe that the principles of just war, even though some date back centuries, are sufficiently general to be applicable to contemporary conflicts, such as the Russo-Ukrainian War. If we apply the norms of the just war tradition to the current situation in Ukraine, we see that Russia is waging an unjust war in an unjust manner. (shrink)

This book considers the question: to what extent does it make sense to qualify technical artefacts as moral entities? The authors’ contributions trace recent proposals and topics including instrumental and non-instrumental values of artefacts, agency and artefactual agency, values in and around technologies, and the moral significance of technology. The editors’ introduction explains that as ‘agents’ rather than simply passive instruments, technical artefacts may actively influence their users, changing the way they perceive the world, the way they act in the (...) world and the way they interact with each other. This volume features the work of various experts from around the world, representing a variety of positions on the topic. Contributions explore the contested discourse on agency in humans and artefacts, defend the Value Neutrality Thesis by arguing that technological artefacts do not contain, have or exhibit values, or argue that moral agency involves both human and non-human elements. The book also investigates technological fields that are subject to negative moral valuations due to the harmful effects of some of their products. It includes an analysis of some difficulties arising in Artificial Intelligence and an exploration of values in Chemistry and in Engineering. The Moral Status of Technical Artefacts is an advanced exploration of the various dimensions of the relations between technology and morality. (shrink)

Leadership and ethics are habitually treated as related to separate spheres. It would be better, perhaps, if leadership and ethics were treated as belonging to a single domain. Ethics is an aspect of leadership and not a separate approach that exists alongside other approaches to leadership such as the trait approach, the situational approach, etc. This holds especially true for the military, one of the few organizations that can legitimately use violence. Today, most militaries opt for a character-based approach for (...) the ethics education of their leaders and espouse leadership theories that want leaders to be strong and visionary. Both the role of character and leadership are increasingly questioned, however, on the basis that situational factors are more influential than leadership and character. A closer look suggests that an interactionist perspective, with leadership, character, and the situation interplaying, is more accurate. It is still good leadership that keeps soldiers from crossing the line between the lawful use of force and excessive violence. (shrink)

Perceptual constancies have been studied by psychologists for decades, but in recent years, they have also become a major topic in the philosophy of mind. One reason for this surge of interest is Tyler Burge’s (2010) influential claim that constancy mechanisms mark the difference between perception and mere sensitivity, and thereby also the difference between organisms with genuine representational capacities and ‘mindless’ beings. Burge’s claim has been the subject of intense debate. It is becoming increasingly clear, however, that we cannot (...) hope to settle this debate (as well as related debates in the philosophy of mind) without a clear and substantive theoretical account of what perceptual constancies are. In the first part of this paper, I argue that the standard definitions in the literature fall short of providing such an account. Still, as I aim to show in the second part of the paper, by taking a closer look at some of the paradigm examples, it is possible to construct a plausible general account of perceptual constancies that is both clear and substantive, and that can serve as a firm foundation for settling debates like the dispute about Burge’s ‘constancy mechanism criterion’ for perception. (shrink)

A good part of the early literature on deliberative democracy has focused on moral arguments for or against deliberative democracy. These arguments have typically been divided into instrumental and non‐instrumental arguments. More recently, there has been an epistemic turn in the literature on deliberative democracy. The main question under debate is no longer whether we have moral reasons to make our political decisions in deliberative democratic fashion, but whether or not we have epistemic reasons to do so. Epistemic arguments for (...) and against deliberative democracy can also be divided instrumental and non‐instrumental arguments. My chapter on the epistemology of deliberative democracy will give an overview over this new debate. (shrink)

This book examines the religious, social, and political thought of Simone Weil in the context of the rigorous philosophical thinking out of which it grew. It also explores illuminating parallels between these ideas and ideas that were simultaneously being developed by Ludwig Wittgenstein. Simone Weil developed a conception of the relation between human beings and nature which made it difficult for her to explain mutual understanding and justice. Her wrestling with this difficulty coincided with a considerable sharpening of her religious (...) sensibility, and led to a new concept of the natural and social orders involving a supernatural dimension, within which the concepts of beauty and justice are paramount. Professor Winch provides a fresh perspective on the complete span of Simone Weil's work, and discusses the fundamental difficulties of tracing the dividing line between philosophy and religion. (shrink)

This chapter states the contrast between presumptivism about testimonial warrant (often called anti-reductionism) and strict reductionism (associated with Hume) about testimonial warrant. Presumptivism sees an analogy with modest foundationalism about perceptual warrant. Strict reductionism denies this analogy. Two theoretical frameworks for these positions are introduced to better formulate the most popular version of persumptivism, a competence reliabilist account. Seven arguments against presumptivism are then stated and critiqued: (1) The argument from reliability; (2) The argument from reasons; (3) the argument from (...) positive reasons; (4) the argument from negative reasons; (5) the argument from agency; (6) the argument from psychological force; and (7) the argument from gullibility. If presumptivm is false, it is not for any of these arguments. (shrink)

Tyler Burge famously argues in his 1993 paper "Content Preservation" that it is not only a priori true that we enjoy a prima facie warrant to take what others assert as true, but also that there our warrant to believe what we are told in certain special cases is a priori. So just as our warrant for believing certain mathematical truths might be a priori, so too there are cases of belief through testimony that are a priori. Then in a (...) 2013 Postscript to "Content Preservation" he took it all back. All of Burge's ideas and arguments for and against are interesting and important, and deepen our understanding of testimony, comprehension, warrant, and the a priori. But his ideas and arguments are hard to understand. This paper explains all of ideas and arguments, both for and against, in a clear and comprehensive way. Along the way, Anna-Sara Malmgren's interpretation and criticism of Burge's position is also expounded and criticized. (shrink)

Business Ethics: A European Review, EarlyView.

This article develops a method for investigating the consequences of algorithmic systems according to the documents that specify their design constrains. As opposed to reverse engineering algorithms to identify how their logic operates, the article proposes to design or "forward engineer" algorithmic systems in order to theorize how their consequences are informed by design constraints: the specific problems, use cases, and presuppositions that they respond to. This demands a departure from algorithmic reformism, which responds to concerns about the consequences of (...) algorithmic systems by proposing to make algorithms more transparent or less biased. Instead, by investigating algorithmic systems according to documents that specify their design constraints, we identify how the consequences of algorithms are presupposed by the problems that they propose to solve, the types of solutions that they enlist to solve these problems, and the systems of authority that these solutions depend on. To accomplish this, this article develops a methodological framework for researching the process of designing algorithmic systems. In doing so, it proposes to move beyond reforming the technical implementation details of algorithms in order to address the design problems and constraints that underlie them. (shrink)

Superficially, citizenship appears relatively simple: a legal status denoting political membership. However, critical citizenship studies scholars suggest that citizenship is first and foremost a political practice. When non-citizens, such as irregularised migrants, constitute themselves as citizens through their actions, irrespective of legal status, these practices of citizenship have transformational potential because they are extra-legal. Yet, there is an ambivalence here: rights-claiming migrants tend to frame their key demands within the terms of the law often by calling for the regularisation of (...) their status. This article addresses this ambivalence by adopting a ‘deconstructive method’ to investigate the legal dimensions of citizenship as sites of theoretical and political intervention. It is argued that practices of rights-claiming by irregularised migrants are important to grasp because they mobilise the paradoxes inherent to the fact that universal rights are enshrined in the constitutional texts of modern citizenship in order to generate new legal meanings and horizons of justice. This hypothesis is explored through a series of illustrative examples of rights-claiming taking place within and beyond the formal confines of legal orders. In so doing, the article sets out a novel conceptual framework for analysing how migrants’ claims to justice strategically negotiate citizenship in its legal form. (shrink)

According to our folk theory of lying, liars leak observable cues of their insincerity, observable cues that make it easy to catch a liar in real time. Various prominent social epistemologists rely on the correctness of our folk theory as empirically well-confirmed when building their normative accounts of the epistemology of testimony. Deception detection research in communication studies, however, has shown that our folk-theory is mistaken. It is not empirically well-confirmed but empirically refuted. Michaelian (2010) and Shieber (2012) have already (...) discussed some of this literature and its relevance for epistemology, especially for the most worked out reliance on our folk theory by Elizabeth Fricker (1994, 2016, 2017a, 2024). Fricker (2016) raises a reasonable objection to their presentations of the research: is the research ecologically valid? Do the experiments in the lab carry over to real life? This chapter conveys the methodology of the research, defends its ecological validity, and addresses further research on the nature and frequency of lies in ordinary life. Social epistemologists stand to gain from understanding the nuts and bolts of deception detection research and its findings. The chapter concludes with a detailed examination of Fricker’s relilance on folk theory in her “local reductionist” epistemology of testimony. Further areas of research relevant to social epistemology are listed. (shrink)

This paper examines Margaret Cavendish’s ecological views and argues that, in the Appendix to her final published work, Grounds of Natural Philosophy (1668), Cavendish is defending a normative account of the way that humans ought to interact with their environment. On this basis, we argue that Cavendish is committed to a form of what, for the purposes of this paper, we will call ‘deep ecology,’ where that is understood as the view that humans ought to treat the rest of nature (...) as something of intrinsic value. (shrink)

The paper proposes a radical change of focus for understanding the fundamental purpose and value of literary interpretation. It criticises an orthodox view in analytical philosophy of literature, according to which theories of meaning in the philosophy of language, in particular Gricean or speech act or other pragmatic theories, offer the most illuminating way to grasp the relevant principles of interpretation. The argument here is that the application of such theories in this context is not just wrong in detail (this (...) or that theory needs revising) but wrong in principle. The focus is wrong. The importation of philosophy of language distorts the essential character of interpretation, which should be seen as involving not so much meaning as value, not individual sentences but whole works, not obsessed with authorial intention but focused on the protocols of reading. (shrink)

abstract: Taking a cue from Carilyn Chen's book about the Americanization of Taiwanese immigrant Buddhists, Getting Saved in America: Taiwanese Immigration and Religious Experience (2009), this essay narrates the process by which Vietnamese Catholics are "Americanized." Compared with the Taiwanese Buddhists, Vietnamese Catholics had the advantage of being members of a global Church, were from the beginning incorporated into the American Catholic Church, thereby enjoying the many benefits that this institutional incorporation brought with it, and were cared for pastorally by (...) their own clergy. On the other hand, because of their obligation to strict adherence to the legal structures of the Catholic Church, Vietnamese American Catholics were not free to innovate institutionally as they saw fit, as were their Buddhist counterparts. The essay ends with observations on the Americanization of Vietnamese American Buddhists. (shrink)

Left libertarianism is a theory of justice that is committed to full self-ownership and to an egalitarian sharing of the value of natural resources. It is, I shall suggest, a promising way of capturing the liberal egalitarian values of liberty, security, equality, and prosperity.

The historian Ibn Khaldūn (d. 1406) is most often treated by historians of philosophy as part of the story of political philosophy in the Islamic world. While this is perfectly legitimate, it may be misleading when it comes to the question of the method he proposes for the historian. This paper argues that that method is in fact based on a different branch of (Aristotelian) science: natural philosophy. After rendering this proposition initially plausible by noting frequent references to "nature" in (...) the _Muqaddima_, the paper discusses a number of parallels between natural philosophy and history as Ibn Khaldūn conceives it. Ultimately it is suggested that this method is legitimated insofar as history is for Ibn Khaldūn a study of human nature. (shrink)

Raimon Panikkar: A Companion to his Life and Thought is a guide to the life, work and thought of Raimon Panikkar, a self-professed Buddhist-Christian-Hindu philosopher and theologian. A man of deep and wide learning and an extremely prolific author, Panikkar is equally at home in various religious and cultural traditions and embodies in himself the ideals of intercultural, intrareligious, and interreligious dialogues. This book explicates Panikkar’s basic vision of life as the harmonious rhythm of divinity, humanity, and the cosmos, which (...) he terms "cosmotheandrism," and shows how it permeates and illumines his articulations of the central Christian doctrines. Given the complexity and difficulty of Panikkar’s thought this book is a welcome companion for a course on Panikkar and for a general reader who wishes to understand one of the most profound and orginal thinkers of our time. (shrink)

This paper examines the significance of Epicureanism for Nietzsche’s critique of Christian monotheism and his subsequent attempt to reanimate a kind of this-worldly, affirmative religiosity of immanence. After a brief overview of the pivotal role that Epicurus’ thought plays in the death of God, I focus on Epicurus’ own residual conception of the gods and the ways in which Nietzsche strategically retrieves it and puts it use in his writing. Nietzsche juxtaposes the distant, serene, indifferent Epicurean gods with the omniscient, (...) intrusive, jealous and needy God of middle-Eastern monotheisms. One might say that they constitute a ‘halfway house’ of sorts between Christianity and Nietzsche’s new Dionysian religion of the earth. But they also figure prominently in his own conflicted desire to intervene in the aleatory course of natural history and legislate the the future of humanity: Nietzsche finds he cannot simply look down with “the mocking and aloof eyes” of an Epicurean god upon the degeneration and diminution of the human being under Christian ascetic regimes of cultivation. Ultimately, Nietzsche fails to achieve the divine temperament of the Epicurean gods (looking down from afar on human ignorance, desire and suffering with a noble pathos of distance). Forthcoming 2022. (shrink)

Studies of patient decision‐making use many different measures to evaluate the quality of decisions and the decision‐making process, partly to determine whether the ethical goals of informed consent, patient autonomy, and shared decision‐making have been achieved. We describe these measures, grouped under three main approaches, and review their limitations, leading to three conclusions. First, no measure or combination of measures can provide a complete assessment of decision quality. Second, the quality of a decision is best characterized vaguely, for instance as (...) “good,” “satisfactory,” or “poor,” and these categorizations depend on qualitative judgments that go beyond quantitative measures. Third, bioethicists should focus on identifying and addressing poor or problematic decisions, rather than trying to incrementally increase decision quality, quantified by a measure. Decision‐quality measures can be useful in research and in advancing important goals of bioethics, as long as the challenges of defining and measuring decision quality are recognized. (shrink)

Metaphors of positions, spectrums, perspectives, viewpoints, and polarization reflect the same model, which treats beliefs—and the people who hold them—as points in space. This model is deeply rooted in quantitative research methods and influential traditions of Continental philosophy, and it is evident in some qualitative research. It can suggest that deliberation is difficult and rare because many people are located far apart ideologically, and their respective positions can be explained as dependent variables of factors like personality, partisanship, and demographics. An (...) alternative model treats a given person’s beliefs as connected by reasons to form networks. People disclose the connections among their respective beliefs when they discuss issues. This model offers insights about specific cases, such as discussions conducted on two US college campuses, which are represented here as belief-networks. The model also supports a more optimistic view of the public’s capacity to deliberate. (shrink)

While theories of rationality and decision making typically adopt either a single-powertool perspective or a bag-of-tricks mentality, the research program of ecological rationality bridges these with a theoretically-driven account of when different heuristic decision mechanisms will work well. Here we described two ways to study how heuristics match their ecological setting: The bottom-up approach starts with psychologically plausible building blocks that are combined to create simple heuristics that fit specific environments. The top-down approach starts from the statistical problem facing the (...) organism and a set of principles, such as the bias– variance tradeoff, that can explain when and why heuristics work in uncertain environments, and then shows how effective heuristics can be built by biasing and simplifying more complex models. We conclude with challenges these approaches face in developing a psychologically realistic perspective on human rationality. (shrink)

A philosophical examination of 'new wave' as a musical genre, focusing on its developmental history and relation to punk as well as its unique ethos and aesthetic. Forthcoming 2021.

This paper is mostly about the role of modal system S5 in conceivability arguments against, as well as in the defense of, different versions of physicalism. Jonathon VandenHombergh argued in a recent article that “[s]o far as the modal epistemology of reduction is concerned, therefore, it pays to go intrinsic.” His reasoning is that while the weaker, extrinsic version of reductive physicalism is vulnerable to conceivability arguments, the stronger, intrinsic, version is uniquely resistant to this type of challenge. To get (...) to this surprising conclusion, VandenHombergh claims that the standard strategies of preempting the Dualist’s reasoning rely on some premise(s) that the Dualist can do without: one such premise is axiom-scheme S5. I will argue that the use of S5 is legitimate in countering the Dualist, as she herself relies on it, not to secure the _validity_ of her arguments as VandenHombergh assumes, but rather, its _soundness_. I will also argue that this axiom-scheme is tacitly present in the auxiliary premises the stronger, intrinsic version of physicalism relies on: Kripke’s postulates about identity and non-identity statements. Indeed, this paper will forge an interesting and potentially important connection between Kripke’s postulates and modal system S5. (shrink)

The problem of value pluralism permeates modern political philosophy. Its presence can be felt even when it is not explicitly the central topic under investigation. Political thinkers such as Max Weber, Isaiah Berlin and Stuart Hampshire derive pessimistic, sometimes tragic, conclusions from their reflections upon pluralism."--Page 4 of cover.