This paper makes a conceptual inquiry into the notion of ‘publics’, and forwards an understanding of this notion that allows more responsible forms of decision-making with regards to technologies that have localized impacts, such as wind parks, hydrogen stations or flood barriers. The outcome of this inquiry is that the acceptability of a decision is to be assessed by a plurality of ‘publics’, including that of a local community. Even though a plurality of ‘publics’ might create competing normative demands, its (...) acknowledgment is necessary to withstand the monopolization of the process of technology appraisal. The paper presents four ways in which such an appropriation of publicness takes place. The creation of dedicated ‘local publics’, in contrast, helps to overcome these problems and allows for more responsible forms of decision-making. We describe ‘local publics’ as those in which stakeholders from the different publics that are related to the process of technology implementation are brought together, and in which concerns and issues from these publics are deliberated upon. The paper will present eight conditions for increasing the effectiveness of such ‘local publics’. (shrink)

This paper presents a qualitative study investigating the application of physiotherapists’ professional ethics in practice with respect to touch, intimacy, and corporeality during therapy, based on the experiences of elderly patients. As the relationship in a physiotherapy session is multidimensional, the study considered three levels: physical contact, verbal contact, and the conditions in which the therapy took place. The aim of this study was to find out what values are of importance to older people during a physiotherapy session, with emphasis (...) on the categories of touch, corporeality, and intimacy. The studied group consisted of sixteen male and female physiotherapy patients aged between sixty-six and ninety-two years. The study was conducted according to the grounded theory methodology. The research material consisted of transcriptions of free targeted interviews, which were subjected to a process of coding and analysis. As a result of data analyses, three superior categories have been identified—safety, anxiety, interpersonal relationship—and three a priori categories stemming from the characteristic features of the study area—touch, corporeality, and intimacy. The a priori categories did not appear independently in statements made by the respondents, but instead seemed to be components of superior categories. The most important values indicated by the respondents concerned the interpersonal relationship with their physiotherapist and the feeling of safety and care. In terms of touch, corporeality, and intimacy, the respondents indicated, among others, the importance of predictability, a sense of security, privacy, and acceptance of the body. (shrink)

In this article, we present results from a literature review of intrinsic, instrumental, and relational values of nature conducted for the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, as part of the Methodological Assessment of the Diverse Values and Valuations of Nature. We identify the most frequently recurring meanings in the heterogeneous use of different value types and their association with worldviews and other key concepts. From frequent uses, we determine a core meaning for each value type, which is (...) sufficiently inclusive to serve as an umbrella over different understandings in the literature and specific enough to help highlight its difference from the other types of values. Finally, we discuss convergences, overlapping areas, and fuzzy boundaries between different value types to facilitate dialogue, reduce misunderstandings, and improve the methods for valuation of nature's contributions to people, including ecosystem services, to inform policy and direct future research. © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Institute of Biological Sciences. (shrink)

Merker et al.'s critique calls for a deeper analysis of panpsychism. In principle, the concept of integrated information can be applied to photodiodes and subatomic particles, but I suggest the main obstacle is the lack of any evidence to confirm the presence of consciousness. Also MRW's perspectivalist theory illustrates the difficulties in synthesizing a full-fledged theory of consciousness.

Republic is the central work of the Western world's most famous philosopher. Essentially an inquiry into morality, Republic also contains crucial arguments and insights into many other areas of philosophy. It is also a literary masterpiece: the philosophy is presented for the most part for the ordinary reader, who is carried along by the wit and intensity of the dialogue and by Plato's unforgettable images of the human condition. This new, lucid translation by Robin Waterfield is complemented by full explanatory (...) notes and an up-to-date critical introduction. (shrink)

Cognitive Stylistics or Poetics has emerged as a powerful framework for the analysis of literary works due to the fact that it provides us with tools stemming from bodily experience which aim at universality. This proposal attempts to shed additional light on the analysis of the characters and settings carried out by Freeman (1995) by making use of some recent developments within the framework of Cognitive Linguistics, especially in connection with metonymy and image-schemas. It lends further support to the thesis (...) that Cognitive Poetics is endowed with explanatory power since it accounts both for the processes of generation and understanding of literary texts. (shrink)

This article is dedicated to the issue of achieving consensus in tabletop role-playing games and also addresses the question of how exactly play­ers gain power over the interpretation of events within a tabletop RPG. A tabletop role-playing game presupposes that its participants constantly articulate statements which shift the current configuration of in-game elements and also play the role of being artistic descriptions of said shifts. The alternation and interplay of performative and descriptive statements, their convolution and also the fact that, (...) in tabletop RPGs, unlike in the majority of the rest of the games known to humanity, the same words from natural languages are used both in order to produce a shift in abstract, symbolic structure of a game, and to artistically describe said shift, all lead to the situation where participants cannot tell a proper symbolic system of a given game from other symbolic systems which this game refers to. In this article, we propose an analytical model of a tabletop RPG which would make it possible to draw stricter borderlines between a given RPG’s fictional world and its inner symbolic structure. Furthermore, it would allow us to formulate a clearer question regarding the structures of power produced while playing an RPG, and what exactly players gain control over while playing it. Moreover, this model would enable us to explore in detail the processes of the individual and collective interpretation of events in a tabletop RPG, and classify facts within said interpretation in relation to whether they are held to be objectively or subjectively true. (shrink)

"The availability of a paperback version of Boyle's philosophical writings selected by M. A. Stewart will be a real service to teachers, students, and scholars with seventeenth-century interests. The editor has shown excellent judgment in bringing together many of the most important works and printing them, for the most part, in unabridged form. The texts have been edited responsibly with emphasis on readability.... Of special interest in connection with Locke and with the reception of Descarte's Corpuscularianism, to students of the (...) Scientific Revolution and of the history of mechanical philosophy, and to those interested in the relations among science, philosophy, and religion. In fact, given the imperfections in and unavailability of the eighteenth-century editions of Boyle’s works, this collection will benefit a wide variety of seventeenth-century scholars." --Gary Hatfield, University of Pennsylvania. (shrink)

The article analyzes the implementation of an online educational module and its impact on the organization of the classroom’s interaction order. The latter is institutionally constrained by the presence of a goal and the distribution of roles between teacher and students. The introduction of a digital learning platform adds a technological context to the institutional setting. The article considers technologies as possessing communicative affordances — opportunities for action made possible or delimited through their use. Technologies bring new interactive resources to (...) the process of ed­ucation and can affect the organization of the classroom’s interaction order. Using multimodal conversation analysis, we analyzed video recordings of the telemediated interaction of Russia-based students and teachers within a gamified online educational module. We investigate a case in which a student’s correct answer is nevertheless corrected by the teacher. We dem­onstrate that the teacher initiates the correction because they are guided by the ordering of the game elements within the interface. Based on a detailed analysis of the teacher’s mouse movement in relation to ongoing turns-at-talk, we show that this orientation is sustained by all participants. The work contributes to classroom interaction studies and affordance theory and develops the methodology of multimodal transcription for mediated contexts. The primary result of the study is an empirical demonstration that the relevance of technological affordances for interactants is situation­ally produced, and that this process is associated with the interweaving of the institutional and technical context of interaction. The conclusion discusses the relationship between affordances and institutional norms. (shrink)

The issue of wrongful disability arises when parents face the choice whether to produce a child whose life will be unavoidably flawed by a serious disease or disorder (Down syndrome, for example, or Huntington’s disease) yet clearly worth living. The authors of From Chance to Choice claim, with certain restrictions, that the choice to produce such a child is morally wrong. They then argue that an intuitive moral approach––a “person-affecting” approach that pins wrongdoing to the harming of some existing or (...) future person––cannot account for that wrong since the choice to produce such a child cannot, under the logic of the nonidentity problem, harm that child. The authors propose that we supplement the person-affecting approach with an “impersonal” principle that takes the form of their well-known principle N. In this paper, I argue that the authors are mistaken to suppose that a plausibly articulated person-affecting approach cannot account for the wrong of wrongful disability. We can retain an intuitive, comparative, “worse for” account of harm and still identify serious harms imposed by the choice of wrongful disability. In particular, I argue that harm, both to the impaired child and to others, comes not in the form of that procreative choice’s procreative effect but rather in the form of its many distributive effects. I also argue that the rare, residual case in which a person-affecting approach would approve of the choice of wrongful disability does not function as a counterexample to that approach. As a separate matter, I address legal claims for wrongful disability, which are closely akin to claims for wrongful life. The legal claim is brought by the impaired child, not against the parents, but rather against health care providers whose negligent failure to diagnose or inform parents of an increased risk of a genetic or congenital impairment results in the birth of the impaired child. The authors’ treatment of the moral wrong that is done as impersonal in nature suggests that courts are correct to dismiss any such claim. Once we identify harm, however, the person-affecting approach can identify a clear foundation in the law for the wrongful disability claim. (shrink)

Some have objected to the laboratory cloning of human preembryos on the grounds that the procedure would violate the dignity of and respect owed to human preembryos. Others have argued that human cloning ought be permitted if it will predictably benefit, or at least not burden, individuals who are, unlike the human preembryo, clearly entitled to our respect and concern. Taking this latter position, the legal theorist John A. Robertson has argued that, since cloning does not harm anyone who is (...) clearly entitled to our respect and concern, it should be permitted. In particular, the offspring of cloning, he argues, cannot be genuinely harmed by cloning, since they owe their very existence to the cloning procedure. In this paper, I argue that cloning coupled with its related procedures does in fact place the flesh and blood human offspring of cloning at risk of genuine harm. I thus provide a basis for questioning the moral permissibility of cloning and its related technologies without implying that the human preembryo has dignity or is owed respect. (shrink)

The expertise defense is the best-known response by armchair philosophers to the challenge posed by experimental philosophers regarding the trustworthiness of intuitions. In a series of recent experiments, Experimental philosophers have recently focused on professional philosophers, claiming that, contrary to what the expertise defense assumes, philosophers’ intuitions are no less susceptible to the influence of irrelevant factors (the direct strategy). Additionally, drawing from literature on expertise, they contend that, unlike other domains of expertise, practice does not improve philosophers’ intuitions (the (...) indirect strategy). In this paper, adopting a skill-based perspective on expertise, my primary objective is to defend the expertise defense against both direct and indirect strategies. Based on the skill-based account, I present three arguments against the direct strategy by challenging its power, scope and methodology. Furthermore, borrowing empirical findings from recent literature on expertise, I argue against the indirect strategy that four skills that constitute philosophical expertise regarding thought experiments can be improved through various forms of practice, including deliberate practice. However, my moderate defense departs from typical versions of the expertise defense since I argue that while recent experiments by experimental philosophers cannot undermine the expertise defense, they provide valuable insights into philosophical expertise. (shrink)

Problems concerning future populations help us better understand what it is for one possible future, or world, to be morally better than another. The repugnant conclusion challenges traditional forms of consequentialism, including utilitarianism. A key issue is whether, per the traditional view, we make things morally better by creating additional people whose lives are worth living and by creating nonidentical better-off people in place of less well-off but distinct people. Or can we, instead, make things morally better only by making (...) things better for some particular person or another? Is the structure of morality aggregative in nature or instead person-affecting in nature? While the latter, non-traditional view may tempt us, it also seems to give rise to the nonidentity problem and various inconsistency objections. Can those problems be resolved? Questions raised by Parfit and others decades ago remain unsettled today but as critical as ever. (shrink)