This paper examines several philosophical issues related to emerging technologies in sport and leisure. There are a range of technologies that will likely be offered to boost performance in sport, ranging from prosthetic devices and cyborg-like implants to gene therapy and enhancement. Computer generated simulations are already in use in work and leisure, and are expected to be pervasive in the future. Technological developments such as these present a challenge to some of the traditional assumptions and cherished beliefs not only (...) about the nature of sport and leisure and how they should be conducted, but also about the very nature of reality and what it means to be human. It is hoped that this paper can shed some light on the challenges and possibilities facing sport and leisure in the upcoming high-tech future. (shrink)

While philosophy of sport clings for life, sport in Austalasia has undergone a significant transformation since the early 1990s. Sport is now considered 'more than a game'. That is, elite, high-performance sport is now big business that is also perceived as a powerful instrument for the expression of national identity and pride. This has resulted in a growing scientific and manaagement focus in university level sport, exercise and physcial education related courses (McKay et al. 1990). This reflects a similar trend (...) in universities in North America and the U.K. (shrink)

African (Bantu) philosophy conceptualizes morality through ubuntu, which emphasizes the role of community in producing moral agents. This community is characterized by practices that respond to and value interdependence, such as care, cooperation, and respect for elders and ancestral knowledge. While there have been attributions of morality to nonhuman animals in the interdisciplinary animal morality debate, this debate has focused on Western concepts. We argue that the ubuntu conception of morality as a communal practice applies to some nonhuman animals. African (...) elephant communities are highly cooperative and structured around elders; they alloparent, protect their communities, mourn their dead, and pass on cultural knowledge between generations. Identifying these as important moral practices, ubuntu provides a theoretical framework to expand our ethical concern for elephants to their communities. In practice, this will deepen our understanding of the wrongness of atrocities like culling for population management or trophy hunting. (shrink)

I discuss the relationship between different versions of the equivalence principle in general relativity, among them Einstein's equivalence principle, the weak equivalence principle, and the strong equivalence principle. I show that Einstein's version of the equivalence principle is intimately linked to his idea that in GR gravity and inertia are unified to a single field, quite like the electric and magnetic field had been unified in special relativistic electrodynamics. At the same time, what is now often called the strong equivalence (...) principle, related to the local validity of special relativity, can also be found in Einstein's writings, albeit by a different name and clearly separated from what he calls the equivalence principle. I discuss both the development of Einstein's thoughts on the different versions of the equivalence principle, their relationship to the relativity principle, as well as later reflections and variants proposed. (shrink)

Edited by two leading restorative justice scholars from the West and East, this unique e-book bridges a gap in the literature by bringing together new evidence on the application of restorative practices in educational settings. The book has two aims. First, it builds a bridge between the restorative justice world in the East with that of the West. The volume demonstrates how similar the theoretical and practical experiences are in the two sides of the world. It presents us with evidence (...) of what works in policy, research and practice and allows us to make comparisons for the future. Secondly, the book challenges restorative justice which is often seen through the narrow lenses of the criminal justice system. -/- ------ -/- “It is arrogant indeed to think that schools in the west have all the answers and we are somehow more advanced in our thinking and practice. The scope of the chapters in this book travails many of the issues that face schools and systems everywhere. This book is highly recommended for anyone practicing, studying or legislating restorative justice in educational settings. Restorative practice is who we are, not what we do!”. Margaret Thorsborne, Restorative practitioner, trainer, facilitator and author. (shrink)

I describe how relativistic field theory generalizes the paradigm property of material systems, the possession of mass, to the requirement that they have a mass–energy–momentum density tensor T µ associated with them. I argue that T µ does not represent an intrinsic property of matter. For it will become evident that the definition of T µ depends on the metric field g µ in a variety of ways. Accordingly, since g µ represents the geometry of spacetime itself, the properties of (...) mass, stress, energy, and momentum should not be seen as intrinsic properties of matter, but as relational properties that material systems have only in virtue of their relation to spacetime structure. (shrink)

Refinements in Darwin’s theory of the origin of a moral sense create a framework equipped to organize and integrate contemporary theory and research on morality. Morality originated in deferential, cooperative, and altruistic ‘‘social instincts,’’ or decision-making strategies, that enabled early humans to maximize their gains from social living and resolve their conflicts of interest in adaptive ways. Moral judgments, moral norms, and conscience originated from strategic interactions among members of groups who experienced confluences and conflicts of interest. Moral argumentation buttressed (...) by moral reasoning is equipped to generate universal and impartial moral standards. Moral beliefs and standards are products of automatic and controlled information-processing and decision making mechanisms. To understand how people make moral decisions, we must understand how early evolved mechanisms in the old brain and recently evolved mechanisms in the new brain are activated and how they interact. Understanding what a sense of morality is for helps us understand what it is. (shrink)

An outline of the material covered in courses on Formal and Informal Logic. The outline includes chapters on mathematical approaches to logic as well as on fallacies, deduction and induction, probability, and other major topics. Logic is traditionally taught by means of problem solving exercises, so the subject is well suited to a Schaum's Outline approach.

While early optimists have seen online discussions as potential spaces for deliberation, the reality of many online spaces is characterized by incivility and irrationality. Increasingly, AI tools are considered as a solution to foster deliberative discourse. Against the backdrop of previous research, we show that AI tools for online discussions heavily focus on the deliberative norms of rationality and civility. In the operationalization of those norms for AI tools, the complex deliberative dimensions are simplified, and the focus lies on the (...) detection of argumentative structures in argument mining or verbal markers of supposedly uncivil comments. If the fairness of such tools is considered, the focus lies on data bias and an input–output frame of the problem. We argue that looking beyond bias and analyzing such applications through a sociotechnical frame reveals how they interact with social hierarchies and inequalities, reproducing patterns of exclusion. The current focus on verbal markers of incivility and argument mining risks excluding minority voices and privileges those who have more access to education. Finally, we present a normative argument why examining AI tools for online discourses through a sociotechnical frame is ethically preferable, as ignoring the predicable negative effects we describe would present a form of objectionable indifference. (shrink)

Dennis Schulting offers a thoroughgoing, analytic account of the first half of the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories in the B-edition of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason that is different from existing interpretations in at least one important aspect: its central claim is that each of the 12 categories is wholly derivable from the principle of apperception, which goes against the current view that the Deduction is not a proof in a strict philosophical sense and the standard reading that (...) in the Deduction Kant only gives an account of the global applicability of the categories to experience. This novel approach enables a reappraisal of Kant's controversial claim that transcendental self-consciousness is not only a necessary condition of objective experience but also sufficient for it. The book provides an extensive analysis of Kant's theory of transcendental apperception and also explains why the argument of the Transcendental Deduction is both a regressive and a progressive argument. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 10, October 2020, Page 44-47.

There's no doubt that reproductive technologies can transform lives for the better. Infertile couples and single, lesbian, gay, intersex, and transgender people have the potential to form families in ways that would have been inconceivable years ago. Yet we are concerned about the widespread commercialization of certain egg‐freezing programs, the messages they propagate about motherhood, the way they blur the line between care and experimentation, and the manipulative and exaggerated marketing that stretches the truth and inspires false hope in women (...) of various ages. We argue that although reproductive technology, and egg freezing in particular, promise to improve women's care by offering more choices to achieve pregnancy and childbearing, they actually have the potential to be disempowering. First, commercial motives in the fertility industry distort women's medical deliberations, thereby restricting their autonomy; second, having the option to freeze their eggs can change the meaning of women's reproductive choices in a way that is limiting rather than liberating. (shrink)

Discussions of metaphysical grounding have recently found their way into general jurisprudence. It is becoming increasingly common to frame the debate between positivism and antipositivism as a disagreement about what facts metaphysically ground legal facts. In this article we critically evaluate this grounding turn. First, we argue that articulating the debate about the nature of law in terms of grounding holds the promise of recasting it in a common vocabulary. Second, we argue that this comes at a cost: framing the (...) debate in this way obscures a range of further disagreements that cannot be usefully analyzed in terms of metaphysical grounding. We conclude that grounding may give us a clearer picture of what we already knew, while obfuscating a number of important questions to which it cannot, and is not intended to, provide answers. (shrink)

In 2011, bioethicists turned their attention to the question of whether prisoners on death row ought to be allowed to be organ donors. The discussion began with a provocative anti‐procurement article by Arthur Caplan and prompted responses from an impressive lineup of commentators. In the 10 years since, the situation for death‐row inmates seeking to donate has hardly changed: U.S. prison authorities consistently refuse to allow death‐row procurement. We believe that it is time to revisit the issue. While Caplan's commentators (...) rebutted his narrow contention that organ procurement would undermine the goals of deterrence and retribution, none of them attempted to make a positive, nonconsequentialist case for organ donation as a right of death‐row inmates. That is the task we take up in this paper. After sketching and briefly defending a theory of punishment, we show how denial of organ donation is inconsistent with punishment's basic logic. (shrink)

Self-care apps are booming. Early iterations of this technology focused on tracking health and fitness routines, but recently some developers have turned their attention to the cultivation of character, basing their conceptual resources on the Hellenistic tradition (Stoic Meditations™, Stoa™, Stoic Mental Health Tracker™). Those familiar with the final writings of Michel Foucault will notice an intriguing coincidence between the development of these products and his claims that the Hellenistic tradition of self-cultivation has much to offer contemporary life. In this (...) article, I explore Foucault’s cryptic remarks on this topic, and argue that today’s self-care developers can improve future products by paying attention to the Hellenistic exercises of self-cultivation he identifies as especially important. (shrink)

This paper asks how the intensity of individual local eParticipation affects users’ perception of democratically valuable effects. Drawing on participatory and deliberative theory literature we extract four participatory effects- internal political efficacy, common good orientation, tolerance, and legitimacy. Furthermore, the paper examines which cognitive factors may moderate the relationship between intensity of participation and perception of participatory effects. Drawing on online survey data from 670 citizens engaged in public budgeting online consultations on the local level, the conducted path analysis shows (...) that intensity of participation seems to foster the perception of common good orientation and tolerance. The other perceptions of participatory effects were not influenced by participation intensity. Findings on moderating factors indicate that the beneficial effects of online participation were not distributed unequally among participants. In conclusion, the research presents evidence for an optimistic view on local eParticipation that is able to promote democratically valuable user experiences. (shrink)

Digital contact tracing is used in different countries to help contain the COVID-19 pandemic. It raises challenging empirical and ethical questions due to its complexity and widespread effects calling for a broader approach in ethical evaluation. However, existing approaches often fail to include all relevant value perspectives or lack reference to empirical data on the artifact in question. In this paper, we describe the development of an interdisciplinary framework to analyze digital contact tracing from an empirical and ethical perspective. Starting (...) with an analysis of methodological tensions in the attempt to analyze digital contact tracing, we, firstly, set out three methodological premises regarding (a) a specific view of technology, (b) a fruitful normative perspective, and (c) ways to gather empirical knowledge about the object under investigation. Secondly, we inspect consequences of these premises to develop our research methodology. In doing so, we argue for a postphenomenological perspective on technology, solidarity as an important concept to guide the ethical perspective, and an empirical approach based on qualitative social science research and the concept of affordances. We illustrate these considerations by referring to our analysis of the German Corona-Warn-App as an instance of contact tracing based on the Exposure Notification Framework by Google and Apple. We then discuss the implications of using such a framework, including considerations concerning future developments of technologies similar to or inspired by the current concepts of contact tracing. (shrink)

It is often claimed that relativity theory falls short of giving an account of 'the flow of time' and 'the arrow of time'. Some claim that hence either one or both of these concepts do not correspond to objective reality, others infer that relativity theory is wrongfully 'spatialising' time. I investigate of our normal conception of time is enduring in relativity, even in the absence of a clear representation of flow. It is shown that the conformal structure of spacetime allows (...) for a clear distinction between past, present and future, and that the class of temporally orientable spacetimes allows for an 'arrow of time'. Finally, I briefly discuss the class of Friedmann universes, to which our universe seems to belong, and which is indeed temporally orientable. German Es wird häufig behauptet, dass die Relativitätstheorie keine adäquate Beschreibung des , Zeitflusses' und des , Zeitpfeils' enthalte. Einige ziehen daraus die Schlussfolgerung, dass beiden Konzepten nichts in der objektiven Realität entspreche, andere ziehen den Schluss, dass die Relativitätstheorie die Zeit fälschlicherweise , verräumliche'. Ich untersuche, wie viel von unserer althergebrachten Zeitvorstellung in der Relativitätstheorie überdauert, selbst in der Abwesenheit einer klaren Repräsentation von , Zeitfluss'. Ich zeige, dass die konforme Struktur der Raumzeit eine klare Unterscheidung von Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft erlaubt, und dass die Klasse der zeitlich orientierbaren Raumzeiten die Repräsentation einer , Zeitpfeils' durchaus erlaubt. Schließlich diskutiere ich kurz die Klasse der Friedmann Raumzeiten, zu welcher unser Universum zu gehören scheint, und welches tatsächlich zeitlich orientierbar ist. (shrink)

Wenn in philosophischen Kontexten von Erziehung die Rede ist, werden gegenwärtig zumeist Fragen philosophischer Teildisziplinen diskutiert. Die angewandte Ethik etwa widmet sich dem besonderen Abhängigkeitsverhältnis zwischen Lehrerinnen und Lehrern auf der einen sowie Schülerinnen und Schülern auf der anderen Seite, während die politische Philosophie sich beispielsweise damit befasst, welchen Stellenwert der verpflichtende Religionsunterricht in einem säkularen Staat haben kann und darf. Obwohl solche Fragen zweifellos wichtig sind, gerät dabei doch leicht aus dem Blick, dass Philosophie und Erziehung bereits auf eine (...) sehr viel grundlegendere Weise miteinander verwoben sind, die der Aufteilung der Philosophie in verschiedene Disziplinen vorausgeht. (shrink)

Der Band geht den zahlreichen Verbindungslinien von Erziehung und Philosophie in Geschichte und Gegenwart nach. Neben exemplarischen Auseinandersetzungen mit einzelnen Denker: innen von Seneca über Locke und Rousseau bis hin zu Jaspers und Foucault stehen grundlegende Aspekte möglicher Überschneidungen und Kontinuitäten zwischen Erziehungsphilosophie, philosophischer Pädagogik, Anthropologie und anderen Teil- oder Fachdisziplinen im Mittelpunkt der Beiträge. Ergänzt wird der Band durch tentative Ausblicke auf die Zukunft der Erziehungsphilosophie unter den sich verändernden Vorzeichen globaler Herausforderungen.

Genetic cancer predisposition testing in the paediatric population poses unique ethical dilemmas. Using the hypothetical example of a teenager with cancer with a high probability of having an underlying cancer predisposition syndrome, we discuss the ethical considerations that affect the decision-making process. Because legally these decisions are made by parents, genetic testing in paediatrics can remove a child’s autonomy to preserve his or her own ‘open future’. However, knowledge of results confirming a predisposition syndrome can potentially be beneficial in modifying (...) treatment and surveillance plans and enabling at-risk family members to obtain cascade testing for themselves. Considering virtue ethics to envision the best characters of the patient, parents and healthcare providers can guide them to the better choice to test or not to test, with the ultimate goal of achieving the best outcome for survival andeudaimonia, human flourishing reliably sought out. (shrink)

This essay attempts to describe contemporary Catholic sponsored health care in the United States and to describe the purpose and structure of these particular Christian charitable organizations within the broader society. As health care has become more complex, critics claim that there is not a need for Catholic sponsored health care any longer. The author attempts to evaluate critically whether Catholic health care has a place in contemporary society. He reviews some salient biblical, ecclesial, and justice teachings of the Church (...) to demonstrate why religious institutional presence is still needed. The author reviews contemporary health care structures to show how this is accomplished. He also uncovers additional issues which need to be addressed in order for these charitable institutions to carry on the ministry of the Church, to shape social structures, and to proclaim the reign of God. (shrink)

Although rational choice theory has enjoyed only modest predictive success, it provides a powerful explanatory mechanism for social processes involving strategic interaction among individuals and it stimulates interesting empirical inquiries. Rather than present competing theories to compare against rational choice, Don Green and Ian Shapiro have merely alluded to alternative explanatory variables such as culture, institutions, and social norms, without showing either how these factors can be incorporated into a more powerful theory, or how they are inconsistent with rational choice (...) theory. It is likely that any eventual theory of the origin and maintenance of social institutions, norms, and values will have to reserve a central place for rational action. (shrink)

Can a bomb ever be "clean"? Are we relieved to be warned that there will be an " odor " when once we were told that something would "stink"? Or, to put it another way, when is a euphemism a mark of good taste and when is it a sign of verbal obfuscation? To answer such questions, D.J. Enright invited sixteen distinguished writers to ponder and explore the ubiquitous phenomenon of euphemism. The result is a delightful and provocative collection that (...) not only includes general reflections on euphemism and its history but also treats such specific categories as sex, death, and other natural functions; politics; the language of the great Christian texts; euphamisms spoken to and by children; the law; medicine; office life; and the jargon of official spokesmen, military communiques, and tyrants. Such writers as Diane Johnson, Robert Nisbet, John Gross, Robert Burchfield, and Joseph Epstein bring a variety of perspectives and sensibilities to bear on these topics. Because euphemisms are so intimate and integral to our thinking, any study of them is bound to throw light on the human condition, both past and present. In these essays, humor jostles horror and the homely alternates with the farfetched. Taken together they form an eloquent and often amusing testament to the richness of the subject. About the Author: D.J. Enright is a noted English poet and critic. He recently compiled and edited The Oxford Book of Death. (shrink)

Who can still keep a secret in a world in which everyone and everything are connected by technology aimed at charting and cross-referencing people, objects, movements, behaviour, relationships, tastes and preferences? The possibilities to keep a secret have come under severe pressure in the information age. That goes for the individual as well as the state. This development merits attention as secrecy is foundational for individual freedom as well as essential to the functioning of the state. Building on Simmel’s work (...) on secrecy, this paper argues that the individual’s secrets should be saved from the ever-expanding digital transparency. The legitimate function of state secrecy in turn needs rescuing from a culture of secrecy and over-classification that has exploded in recent years. Contrary to popular expectation, the digital revolution adds another layer of secrecy that is increasingly hidden behind the facade of the ‘big usable systems’ we work and play with every day. Our dependence on information systems and their black-boxed algorithmic analytical core leads to a certain degree of Weberian enchantment that may increase the disconnect between the system, user and object. (shrink)

Richly informed by readings of Heidegger, Derrida, and Blanchot, the author argues that the notion of responsibility at the heart of Levinas's notion of ethics is intimately dependent upon his account of death.

The idea that respect for persons comprises the core of morality has long been associated with Kant and the ethics of the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. In particular, the second formulation of the categorical imperative , the Formula of Humanity as an End-in-itself – ‘So act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means’ – is often glossed (...) as enjoining us to respect persons as such. On what I think may fairly be called the received view, the injunction to respect persons as such is thus, for Kant, co-extensive with morality itself. (shrink)

The implications of game theory models of the evolution of strategies of exchange are explored with respect to the evolution of moral dispositions. I argue that dispositions to practice tit for tat strategies could have evolved, but the moral behaviours to which they give rise do not fare well on criteria of morality. Inasmuch as the strategy implicit in the Golden Rule is unconditional, it could not have evolved in environments containing strategies that exploit it. However, dispositions to invoke conditional (...) principles such as those that prescribe that people cooperate with those they observe cooperating and shun those they observe behaving selfishly, could have been selected in some conditions and may have given rise to the evolution of indirect reciprocity. The key to the evolution of morality is discrimination in favour of cooperators and against cheaters and selfish individualists. The limitations of game theory in the explanation of human morality are acknowledged. (shrink)