St. Amand could count among his many feats the extraordinary achievement of social equilibrium. “The way he was in the midst of the rich and the poor,” his hagiographer marveled, “the poor saw him as a poor man, and the rich treated him as their better.” On a résumé of miracles performed and peoples converted, this accomplishment was no less impressive. Bishops in the post-Roman kingdoms of Gaul/Francia maintained an ongoing balancing act between seeking social and political distinction, on the (...) one hand, and fulfilling their obligation to defend the poor, on the other. Their authority increasingly depended upon both, even as it engendered a tension between elitism and inclusivity. To study bishops' choice of company is therefore to highlight the difficulty inherent in an ambitious pastoral and political positioning. Linked to the subject of the episcopal entourage, and to the issue of episcopal authority and its representation more generally, was a change in the culture of Merovingian government, for bishops were becoming more and more valuable to a monarchy that confronted new standards of responsibility toward its subjects. (shrink)

History is a potential tool for cognitive scientists interested in metacognitive categories like “creativity” and “innovation.” As a way of thinking, history suggests alternative accounts of the development of innovation and growth, for example. Life History Theory is one such account, but its roots in the Industrial Revolution make it a problematic tool for telling the history of that period.

How you can learn to focus like a monk without living like one Distraction isn’t a new problem. We’re also not the first to complain about how hard it is to concentrate. Early Christian monks beat us to it. They had given up everything to focus on God, yet they still struggled to keep the demons of distraction at bay. But rather than surrender to the meandering of their minds, they developed powerful strategies to improve their attention and engagement. How (...) to Focus is an inviting collection of their strikingly relatable insights and advice—frank, funny, sympathetic, and psychologically sophisticated. This wisdom is drawn from John Cassian’s fifth-century CE Collationes, one of the most influential manuals for monks from late antiquity. The Collationes follow Cassian and his friend Germanus as they travel around Egypt, asking a series of sage monks how they can make their minds stronger. In response, these monks offer a range of techniques for increasing focus, including setting goals, training the body, managing the memory, using mantras, taking breaks, consulting others—and, most of all, being honest about yourself. As Cassian and Germanus eventually realize, we can’t escape distraction—but we can learn how to confront it and, eventually, to concentrate. Featuring an engaging new translation by Jamie Kreiner and the original Latin on facing pages, How to Focus can help even the least monkish of us to train our attention on what matters most. (shrink)

Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (ChatGPT) has been a growing point of interest in medical education yet has not been assessed in the field of bioethics. This study evaluated the accuracy of ChatGPT-3.5 (April 2023 version) in answering text-based, multiple choice bioethics questions at the level of US third-year and fourth-year medical students. A total of 114 bioethical questions were identified from the widely utilised question banks UWorld and AMBOSS. Accuracy, bioethical categories, difficulty levels, specialty data, error analysis and character count (...) were analysed. We found that ChatGPT had an accuracy of 59.6%, with greater accuracy in topics surrounding death and patient–physician relationships and performed poorly on questions pertaining to informed consent. Of all the specialties, it performed best in paediatrics. Yet, certain specialties and bioethical categories were under-represented. Among the errors made, it tended towards content errors and application errors. There were no significant associations between character count and accuracy. Nevertheless, this investigation contributes to the ongoing dialogue on artificial intelligence’s (AI) role in healthcare and medical education, advocating for further research to fully understand AI systems’ capabilities and constraints in the nuanced field of medical bioethics. (shrink)

The problem of the empirical basis is one of the most prominent difficulties within the Popperian tradition. Some claim that Popper’s anti-inductivism and antipsychologism lead to the concession that science has no empirical basis. Recent commentators have focused on this problem in Popper’s methodology. However, the problem also arises in a peculiar way in the thought of two underdiscussed members of the Popperian tradition: William Bartley and Paul Feyerabend. In this article, I aim to accomplish three primary goals. First, I (...) argue that defenses of Popper’s solution to the problem of the empirical basis fail to address the deeper issues that have been pointed out by Popper’s critics. Second, I show how, despite Bartley’s efforts, he also succumbs to a modified version of the problem of the empirical basis. However, Bartley’s later work in evolutionary epistemology provides a more sensible response to the problem. Finally, I show how the problem arises in two distinct senses within Feyerabend’s methodology. I show how Feyerabend accidentally dissolves one sense of the problem and then provide a proposal for remedying the second version of the problem. (shrink)

In 21 CE, a series of localized movements broke out in Gallia Comata due to heavy debts among provincials according to Tacitus. Modern scholars have long argued that the indebtedness occurred because of rising interest rates, resulting from dwindling currency in circulation after decades of free-spending following Augustus’ victory at Actium, and that Gallic communities were subjected to an additional tribute to support the wars of Germanicus (14–16 CE), which continued unabated after the wars and pushed Gauls beyond their means. (...) These claims are misguided, however, in that there is no certain evidence of a special tax to support Germanicus’ wars and that the argument for a dwindling circulation of currency in Gaul falters under closer inspection. Rather, the pressing statal and military needs imposed on communities in Gallia Comata after 9 CE on top of routine exactions could significantly increase burden levels levied on provincial populations, thus contributing to rising debts. Through examining how Roman logistics and conscription operated in this period, it is possible to trace how populations were impacted by such demands and which communities were most heavily affected by them, too. Individually, the impact of each factor is unlikely to have been burdensome enough to have caused large-scale resistance, it is only the cumulative effect that these explanations had on top of routine Roman extraction schemes that could create the conditions for this revolt. This paper argues that in extraordinary circumstances, such as the period after the Varian Disaster for Gallia Comata, the costs of supporting military campaigns places real short-term strains on local economies, which creates the conditions for revolt. The benefit of this approach is that it may explain other episodes of anti-fiscal resistance that broke out during or within a decade of wars in neighboring regions. (shrink)

In an era of increasing medical costs and cries for health care reform in the United States, the pharmaceutical industry has come under intense scrutiny. Ethical issues are inherent in the pharmaceutical marketplace, and there is a need to address the moral rights and responsibilities of drug manufacturers consumers, health care professionals, and governmental agents in the production, distribution, regulation, and use of these products. A dual market system protecting individual rights to access and autonomy without placing an undue strain (...) on societal resources would provide an adequate and equitable framework for an ethical pharmaceutical industry. (shrink)

The past thirty years have seen a surge of empirical research into political decision making and the influence of framing effects — the phenomenon that occurs when different but equivalent presentations of a decision problem elicit different judgments or preferences. During the same period, political philosophers have become increasingly interested in democratic theory, particularly in deliberative theories of democracy. Unfortunately, the empirical and philosophical studies of democracy have largely proceeded in isolation from each other. As a result, philosophical treatments of (...) democracy have overlooked recent developments in psychology, while the empirical study of framing effects has ignored much contemporary work in political philosophy. In Framing Democracy, Jamie Terence Kelly bridges this divide by explaining the relevance of framing effects for normative theories of democracy. -/- Employing a behavioral approach, Kelly argues for rejecting the rational actor model of decision making and replacing it with an understanding of choice imported from psychology and social science. After surveying the wide array of theories that go under the name of democratic theory, he argues that a behavioral approach enables a focus on three important concerns: moral reasons for endorsing democracy, feasibility considerations governing particular theories, and implications for institutional design. Finally, Kelly assesses a number of methods for addressing framing effects, including proposals to increase the amount of political speech, mechanisms designed to insulate democratic outcomes from flawed decision making, and programs of public education. -/- The first book to develop a behavioral theory of democracy, Framing Democracy has important insights for democratic theory, the social scientific understanding of political decision making, economics, and legal theory. (shrink)

In this work, Jamie Mayerfeld undertakes a careful inquiry into the meaning and moral significance of suffering. Understanding suffering in hedonistic terms as an affliction of feeling, he claims that it is an objective psychological condition, amenable to measurement and interpersonal comparison, although its accurate assessment is never easy. Mayerfeld goes on to examine the content of the duty to prevent suffering and the weight it has relative to other moral considerations. He argues that the prevention of suffering is (...) morally more important than the promotion of happiness, and that the duty to relieve suffering is much stronger than most of us acknowledge. (shrink)

Jamie Dow presents an original treatment of Aristotle's views on rhetoric and the passions, and the first major study of Aristotle's Rhetoric in recent years. He attributes to Aristotle a normative view of rhetoric and its role in the state, and ascribes to him a particular view of the kinds of cognitions involved in the passions.

In this comprehensive tour of the long history and philosophy of expertise, from ancient Greece to the 20th century, Jamie Carlin Watson tackles the question of expertise and why we can be skeptical of what experts say, making a valuable contribution to contemporary philosophical debates on authority, testimony, disagreement and trust. His review sketches out the ancient origins of the concept, discussing its early association with cunning, skill and authority and covering the sort of training that ancient thinkers believed (...) was required for expertise. Watson looks at the evolution of the expert in the middle ages into a type of "genius" or "innate talent", moving to the role of psychological research in 16th-century Germany, the influence of Darwin, the impact of behaviorism and its interest to computer scientists, and its transformation into the largely cognitive concept psychologists study today. (shrink)

In Wisdom in Love : Kierkegaard and the Ancient Quest for Emotional Integrity , Rick Furtak argues that emotions are cognitive phenomena to be understood in terms of the relation between subject and object. Furtak uses his conception of emotion to argue that love is the source of meaning and value in human life. This paper places Kierkegaard's views, and the role love plays in them, in his historical context. I argue that Furtak's approach fails to account for the subtle (...) and complex role religious love plays in Kierkegaard's thought, and ultimately leaves him at odds with Kierkegaard methodologically and metaphysically. (shrink)

Kaum ein anderer Begriff wird unterschiedlicher, ja gegensätzlicher verwendet als der Gottesbegriff. Nicht immer behaupten Gläubige, was Atheisten leugnen, und nicht immer bestreiten Atheisten, wozu sich Gläubige bekennen. Diese radikale Umstrittenheit des Gottesbegriffs stellt die Frage nach dem "wahren Antlitz Gottes", nach dem Verständnis dessen, was das Wort "Gott" wirklich bedeutet. Laesst sich überhaupt nachvollziehbar benennen, was dieses Wort meint, oder entzieht sich seine Bedeutung nicht jedem menschlichen Verstäendnis? Was heisst es denn, wenn wir sagen, Gott sei Person, allmächtig, allwissend, (...) gätig, dreifaltig? Worauf müssen wir achten, wenn wir über Gott reden, damit wir uns nichts vormachen? Das Buch hilft zu erkennen, auf welchen Gottesbegriff Verlass ist, so dass wir unser Leben darauf setzen können. (shrink)

Priority pluralism, perdurantism and that temporal gunk – where some interval of time is gunky iff every interval of it has a proper subinterval – is at least metaphysically possible, are three commonly held views in contemporary metaphysics. However, there cannot be a temporally gunky world where objects perdure, and where there are mereological simples. Given that – as I will argue – pluralists should be committed to atomism, and cannot plausibly revise their view to accommodate temporal gunk if they (...) are perdurantists, pluralism is incompatible with the combination of temporal gunk and perdurantism. Therefore, priority pluralism, perdurantism and the possibility of temporal gunk are jointly incompatible, and at least one of these views must be false. Subsequently, it means that at least one of the following views must be true: priority monism or metaphysical infinitism; endurantism; and/or that time is atomistic. The triad's inconsistency, then, has some interesting metaphysical implications. (shrink)

The most public-facing forms of contemporary Darwinism happily promote its worldview ambitions. Popular works, by the likes of Richard Dawkins, deflect associations with eugenics and social Darwinism, but also extend the reach of Darwinism beyond biology into social policy, politics, and ethics. Critics of the enterprise fall into two categories. Advocates of Intelligent Design and secular philosophers (like Mary Midgley and Thomas Nagel) recognise it as a worldview and argue against its implications. Scholars in the rhetoric of science or science (...) communication, however, typically take the view that Darwinism isn't a worldview, but a scientific theory, which has been improperly embellished by some; they uphold the distinction between is and ought and argue that science is restricted to the former. This prompts an is–ought problem on another level. I catalogue the ways in which Darwinism plainly is a worldview and why commentators' beliefs that it ought not to be distorts their analysis. Hence, it is their own worldview that precludes them from accepting Darwinism's worldview implications. (shrink)

Recent philosophical literature has turned its attention towards assessments of how to judge scientific proposals as worthy of further inquiry. Previous work, as well as papers contained within this special issue, propose criteria for pursuitworthiness (Achinstein, 1993; Whitt, 1992; DiMarco & Khalifa, 2019; Laudan, 1977; Shan, 2020; Šešelja et al., 2012). The purpose of this paper is to assess the grounds on which pursuitworthiness demands can be legitimately made. To do this, I propose a challenge to the possibility of even (...) minimal criteria of pursuitworthiness, inspired by Paul Feyerabend. I go on to provide a framework for identifying the contexts in which pursuitworthiness criteria may promote the efficiency of scientific inquiry. I then spell out some implications this framework has for values and pursuit. (shrink)

Amongst intellectuals and activists, neoliberalism has become a potent signifier for the kind of free-market thinking that has dominated politics for the past three decades. Forever associated with the conviction politics of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the free-market project has since become synonymous with the 'Washington consensus' on international development policy and the phenomenon of corporate globalization, where it has come to mean privatization, deregulation, and the opening up of new markets. But beyond its utility as a protest slogan (...) or buzzword as shorthand for the political-economic Zeitgeist, what do we know about where neoliberalism came from and how it spread? Who are the neoliberals, and why do they studiously avoid the label? Constructions of Neoliberal Reason presents a radical critique of the free-market project, from its origins in the first half of the 20th Century through to the recent global economic crisis, from the utopian dreams of Friedrich von Hayek through the dogmatic theories of the Chicago School to the hope and hubris of Obamanomics. The book traces how neoliberalism went from crank science to common sense in the period between the Great Depression and the age of Obama. Constructions of Neoliberal Reason dramatizes the rise of neoliberalism and its uneven spread as an intellectual, political, and cultural project, combining genealogical analysis with situated case studies of formative moments throughout the world, like New York City's bankruptcy, Hurricane Katrina, and the Wall Street crisis of 2008. The book names and tracks some of neoliberalism's key protagonists, as well as some of the less visible bit-part players. It explores how this adaptive regime of market rule was produced and reproduced, its logics and limits, its faults and its fate. (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 56–58 Nechvatal, Joseph, Immersion Into Noise , Open Humanities Press, 2011, 267 pp, $23.99 (pbk), ISBN 1-60785-241-1. As someone who’s knowledge of “art” mostly began with the domestic (Western) and Japanese punk and noise scenes of the late 80’s and early 90’s, practices and theories of noise fall rather close to my heart. It is peeking into the esoteric enclaves of weird music and noise that helped me understand what I think I might like art to be: (...) A way of learning about the world through perturbation—exploration by incitement and speculation of possible conditions. What I have always loved about artistic investigations influenced by noisy aesthetics or sensibilities is that they can be simultaneously transcendent and absurd, amusing and revelatory, singular and pluralistic, mindless and intensely penetrating. The provocative friction that noise brings to bear on aesthetic experience, artistic practice, and “the” Art World acts as a kind of impulse response, proposing new energies while revealing underlying structure; noise signals are a simultaneous synthesis and analysis of spaces, subjects and relations. About two weeks prior to Christmas 2011, Joseph Nechvatal was generous enough to spend some time with me at 39 Quai des Grands Augustins, Paris . We each had one glass of red wine, briefly discussed common acquaintances, shared points of interest, and his published writings. We also, I recall, disagreed lightheartedly about how much contemporary relevance the ideas of telematic-artist Roy Ascott have for today’s art-and-technology practitioner (Joseph > Jamie). After the encounter, I read through a PDF version of Immersion Into Noise Joseph was kind enough to send me ( the HTML version is here ). A number of points of entry into cultures of “noise” are available these days. There are the acoustic-spatial approaches of thinkers like Douglas Kahn, Brandon LaBelle and Salome Voegelin; the techno-cultural musicologies of Jonathan Sterne and David Toop; the political writings of Jacques Attali, former adviser to President François Mitterrand, in his Noise: The Political Economy of Music (spoiler alert: It’s not really about music). Enter the new writings of one Joseph Nechvatal, with his invitation of an Immersion Into Noise . Nechvatal has been active for over 20 years in on- and off-line discussions of art, technology, virtuality, as well as his own set of art-theoretical departures and terminologies. A practicing artist, and instructor at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, Immersion Into Noise , is Nechvatal’s third published volume. His writings, broadly, address a concern with the possibilities of a synthesis between the biological and the virtual, and the contemporary artistic resonances that these possibilities suggest. Nechvatal’s project is to try to name contemporary currents of artistic practice within our technologized culture. He comes at this through art history, post-modern philosophy, anthropology and consciousness studies. Portions of Immersion Into Noise have appeared in his PhD dissertation, as well as online art publications like Zing Magazine . An open-access publication, and part of the impressive and heartening activities of the Open Humanities Press, Nechvatal’s book is a somewhat unexpected addition to the Critical Climate Change series edited by Tom Cohen of SUNY University and Claire Colebrook of Penn State. Other titles in the series have address themes of post-globalism and cultures of threat. Joseph Nachvetal’s title is the first to focus entirely on art history, art practice and aesthetics. It is awkward to too easily fit Nechvatal’s writings in with the aforementioned burgeoning canon of cultural and artistic practice in, and writings on, noise (Russolo, Schaeffer, Cage and Yves Klein through to Kahn, LaBelle, Voegelin, et. al). Immersion Into Noise is not primarily an examination of sound-noise or phenomenologies of sound, and the relativist, non-objectivist possibilities arising therefrom in social, public, and exhibition art practices. Although Nechvatal makes mention of sonic practice and experience (his own encounter in 1968 with the technological complex was set in motion at a Jimi Hendrix concert at the Chicago Coliseum), he does so only by way of introducing a broader concept of “art-noise.” The noise-scape can envelope various kinds of involvement in all kinds of art, by artists, audiences, and distributed amalgams of all of these. Midway through the book, we are offered characteristics of an “immersive noise vision theory.” This theory, leading to an even more syncretic thinking about the art experience, is sketched out through further reference to the author’s personal observation, as well as his art-historical research and notes. Personal examples take on the reflex of a kind of art-noise-travel-writing, as Nechvatal visits Ryoji Ikeda’s Datamatics [ver 2.0] installation at the Centre Pompidou, Paris), hears Cecil Taylor at Alice Tully Hall in New York, spends time with the cave paintings of Lascaux, France, and explores the Wagner-inspired Venus Grotto of Linderhof, Bavaria, to name a few. These site-events, to varying degrees, are renderings of noise-art’s potential to “place us back into a ritual position by dragging art down into the felt 360° noise-perspective of the enthusiastic and participatory.” (p.103) The arc of the ideas proposed here position immersiveness, saturation and “scopic all-over tension” as most productively foundational to noise art, or art-noise. An itinerary from the most ancient of artistic expressions (cave drawings) to the most digital of presentations is charted (Ikeda’s minimal/maximal bitwise works for synchronized audio and visual projection). The harsh sonic onslaught of Masami Akita (a.k.a. Merzbow), is, under this analysis, not so far from colossal denseness of the churches of the High Baroque (Nechvatal visits the Rosario Chapel in Santo Domingo Church, Puebla, Mexico). And there is much more here, eaten up by noise: A rethinking of the work of Duchamp, Jackson Pollock, Nicolas Schöffler (whom Nechvatal names the true “the Father of Cybernetic Art”) and the Happenings of Alan Kaprow, all as art-noise in their own right. Each of these artists and moments demonstrate techniques of destabilization, immersiveness, frame-breaking and “all-over fullness and fervor.” Here is writing on art and art history that is as ambitious as it is promising: “wildly visionary,” Nechvatal states as in conclusion. Self-admittedly far-reaching to the point of verging on totalization, we are asked to consider that the moments, spaces, arts and artists Nechvatal appreciates in the book all derive from an increasingly prevalent “noise consciousness.” Along the way we gain an appreciation of noise as a productive and proactive tension in art, rather than an unwanted signal or unwelcome intrusion. Most promising here for me are Nechvatal’s revealing descriptions of the potential for noise to make manifest the material-perceptual framework of individual and collective art experience. How might we allow what we have been repeatedly taught is our contemporary condition of “information overload” to transform itself into a calm, warm, sympathetic kind of inundation. Treatment of experience in this way, dissolves boundaries between the bodily, informational, material and technical complexes that make up our world, and is the promise of a radical, if momentary, Immersion Into Noise. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this wide-ranging interview, Bob Jessop discusses the development of, and many of the main themes in, his work over the last fifty years. He explains how he became interested in realism and Marxism; and he describes the various influences on his highly influential theory of the state. The discussion explores his strategic-relational approach, his thoughts on regulation theory, variegated capitalism, post-disciplinarity, cultural political economy and his ‘spatial-turn’, as well as neoliberalism, contemporary events and looming problems of climate change (...) and crisis. (shrink)

This investigation is motivated by the lack of scholarship examining the content of what firms are communicating to various stakeholders about their commitment to socially responsible behaviors. To address this query, a qualitative study of the legal, ethical and moral statements available on the websites of Forbes Magazine''s top 50 U.S. and top 50 multinational firms of non-U.S. origin were analyzed within the context of stakeholder theory. The results are presented thematically, and the close provides implications for social responsibility among (...) managers of global organizations as well as researchers interested in business ethics. (shrink)

The essays gathered here recommend the work of Ernest Bloch as a challenge to older models of historical materialism and utopian emancipation and give specific examples of how Bloch's work can contribute to current debates about utopia, nationalism, collective memory, and the complex relationship between ideology and everyday life.

Curiosity is widely acknowledged as a crucial aspect of children’s development and as an important part of the learning process, with prior research showing associations between curiosity and achievement. Despite this evidence, there is little research on the development of curiosity or on promoting curiosity in school settings, and measures of curiosity promotion in the classroom are absent from the published literature. This article introduces the Curiosity in Classrooms Framework coding protocol, a tool for observing and coding instructional practices that (...) support the promotion of curiosity. We describe the development of the framework and observation instrument and the results of a feasibility study using the protocol, which gives a descriptive overview of curiosity-promoting instruction in 35 elementary-level math lessons. Our discussion includes lessons learned from this work and suggestions for future research using the developed observation tool. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper investigates how pronouns were used by UK government speakers to allocate responsibility to themselves and others in all 92 daily televised COVID-19 briefings that were held between March and June 2020. We identified the referent for every use of the first-person plural pronoun (1PL) as ‘inclusive’, ‘exclusive’, or 'ambiguous' and analysed the transitivity patterns in which these pronouns act as Participants. We argue that the UK government uses the inherent ambiguity of this pronoun to strategically mitigate their (...) own responsibility for controlling the spread of the virus, while increasing the amount of responsibility to the general public. In doing so, we propose a transparent and replicable systematic method for identifying the referents of pronouns, which may be useful to other discourse analysts faced with the challenging task of pronoun resolution. (shrink)

Social scientific evidence suggests that labor migration can increase resilience to climate change. For that reason, some have recently advocated using labor migration policy as a tool for climate adaptation. This paper engages with the normative question of whether, and under what conditions, states may permissibly use labor migration policy as a tool for climate adaptation. I argue that states may use labor migration policy as a tool for climate adaptation and may even have a duty to do so, subject (...) to two moral constraints. First, states must also provide acceptable alternative options for adaptation so that the vulnerable are not forced to sacrifice their morally important interests in being able to remain where they are. Second, states may not impose restrictive terms on labor migrants to make accepting greater numbers less costly for themselves because doing so unfairly shifts the costs of adaptation onto the most vulnerable. (shrink)

The principles of autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice are well established ethical principles in health research. Of these principles, justice has received less attention by health researchers. The purpose of this article is to broaden the discussion of health research ethics, particularly the ethical principle of justice, to include societal considerations — who and what are studied and why? — and to critique current applications of ethical principles within this broader view. We will use a feminist intersectional approach in the (...) context of health disparities research to firmly establish inseparable links between health research ethics, social action, and social justice. The aim is to provide an ethical approach to health disparities research that simultaneously describes and seeks to eliminate health disparities. (shrink)

Although business and society scholars have sought to demonstrate that corporate social performance (CSP) leads to corporate financial performance (CFP), a complete model of the pathway from CSP to CFP has not been substantiated. One suggestion is that certain indicators of CSP are noticed by stakeholders, who then act in ways that ultimately affect the firm's CFP. The present study focused on the first step in this path: identifying the factors that initially lead a stakeholder group to target a particular (...) firm. Existing theory from the literature on the environmental movement, stakeholder theory, and CSP fostered the development of eight propositions regarding corporate environmental performance. Case studies of five environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) are used to address the propositions. The case studies also supply additional insight into ENGO targeting of particular firms, unrelated to the propositions, thereby facilitating the development of a theoretical model. (shrink)

According to the Principle of Techno-Geek Proportionality, for every million times a nerd gets excited about “the latest thing” the world might change once. Central bank digital currency (CBDC) may be that once. There is nothing new about digital money, but there may be many profoundly new things about CBDC. This is especially so for “retail” CBDC – that is, CBDC freely available to the public rather than “wholesale” CBDC, which is restricted to some registered users and central bank systems. (...) At the moment, the vast majority of money in existence takes the form of deposits at Santander, Barclays and the other commercial banks. As the Bank of England makes clear, most of this is originally produced when a bank extends a loan and creates a sum as a deposit which the borrower can then spend. This money flows around our payments system and the money supply, albeit there is more to money supply than just this, grows as cumulative debt grows and shrinks as debt is paid down. In the UK (and equivalents apply in any modern economy that has commercial banks), though we rarely think about it, since the money is denominated in s and the central bank essentially guarantees that it will exchange at par for central bank money, most of what we think of as money is really Santander or Barclays etc. credit units. Retail CBDC could change this state of affairs and the issues are sufficient to require public debate – not only regarding the scope of the technology but also the role and adequacy of central banks. This, in turn, provides an opportunity to discuss the nature of process. (shrink)

In this report, the phenomenology of two blind users of a sensory substitution device – “The vOICe” – that converts visual images to auditory signals is described. The users both report detailed visual phenomenology that developed within months of immersive use and has continued to evolve over a period of years. This visual phenomenology, although triggered through use of The vOICe, is likely to depend not only on online visualization of the auditory signal but also on the users’ previous (albeit (...) distant) experience of veridical vision (e.g. knowledge of shapes and visual perspective). Once established, the sensory substitution mapping between the auditory and visual domains is not confined to when the device is worn and, thus, may constitute an example of acquired synaesthesia. (shrink)

The problem of religious disagreement between epistemic peers is a potential threat to the epistemic justification of one’s theistic belief. In this paper, I develop a response to this problem which draws on the central epistemological thesis of skeptical theism concerning our inability to make proper judgements about God’s reasons for permitting evil. I suggest that this thesis may extend over to our judgements about God’s reasons for self-revealing, and that when it does so, it can enable theists to remain (...) steadfast amid disagreement with epistemic peers who hold a contrary theistic belief (i.e., atheistic belief). For if we’re unable to make proper judgements about God’s reasons for self-revealing, then for all we know, God has some reason for not revealing Himself to our apparent epistemic peer. Thus, their epistemic credentials needn’t provide reason to reduce one’s confidence to such a degree as to no longer uphold one’s theistic belief. (shrink)

Future Politics confronts the most important question of our time: how will digital technology change society?

Mathematical investigation, when done well, can confer understanding. This bare observation shouldn’t be controversial; where obstacles appear is rather in the effort to engage this observation with epistemology. The complexity of the issue of course precludes addressing it tout court in one paper, and I’ll just be laying some early foundations here. To this end I’ll narrow the field in two ways. First, I’ll address a specific account of explanation and understanding that applies naturally to mathematical reasoning: the view proposed (...) by Philip Kitcher and Michael Friedman of explanation or understanding as involving the unification of theories that had antecedently appeared heterogeneous. For the second narrowing, I’ll take up one specific feature (among many) of theories and their basic concepts that is sometimes taken to make the theories and concepts preferred: in some fields, for some problems, what is counted as understanding a problem may involve finding a way to represent the problem so that it (or some aspect of it) can be visualized. The final section develops a case study which exemplifies the way that this consideration – the potential for visualizability – can rationally inform decisions as to what the proper framework and axioms should be. The discussion of unification (in sections 3 and 4) leads to a mathematical analogue of Goodman’s problem of identifying a principled basis for distinguishing grue and green. Just as there is a philosophical issue about how we arrive at the predicates we should use when making empirical predictions, so too there is an issue about what properties best support many kinds of mathematical reasoning that are especially valuable to us. The issue becomes pressing via an examination of some physical and mathematical cases that make it seem unlikely that treatments of unification can be as straightforward as the philosophical literature has hoped. Though unification accounts have a grain of truth (since a phenomenon (or cluster of phenomena) called “unification” is in fact important in many cases) we are far from an analysis of what “unification” is.. (shrink)

continent. 1.1 (2011):26. As perhaps all things do, digital graphics provide ground for our clambering attempts to interrelate the ideal and the real. Computational “3D models” don’t actually model any thing. They are assumed imitative, but in contemporary production, these are vectorized thought- objects, prototypes of notions and design ideals. The photographic image on the other hand, as a pipeline of indexical pixels, is the apogee of our attempts to describe and represent the world outside. 65,536 levels of red, green (...) and blue, rendered into and out of the real world of electrons, photons and “live-action.” But synthetic thought-vectors are often found pushing their way into divergent, pixelated visual realities. And sometimes when pixels fall asleep, they dream of renders into flawless artificiality. In Guy Schofield's “Sleepers” all are dreaming: the vectors, the pixels and you. (shrink)

Most previous research on self-disclosure (SD) focused on its perceived retrospective aspects using self-report questionnaires. Few studies investigated actual SD as reflected in interpersonal interaction. We propose a comprehensive approach that combines new objective and dynamic measures of SD that evaluate situated SD with the traditional measures that evaluate stable SD properties. As SD is essentially verbal, we build on linguistic parameters for assessing actual SD, including acoustic features such as intonation and fluency, and verbal features such as the particular (...) choice of words. Critically, the new measures highlight SD here and now and may reveal transient situational factors that affect it, such as the dynamics of interpersonal interaction. Based on these measures, we propose a 3-dimensional evaluation that can portray different profiles of SD and offer a better prediction of SD behavior in different situations. The theoretical and clinical implications of the proposed approach are discussed. (shrink)