In a hyper-consuming society, what questions should we ask ourselves as we survey the increasingly crowded planet on which we find ourselves? What are the moral effects of living amid unprecedented material plenty? With David Crocker, Lisa Newton, and Judith Lichtenberg.

In a hyper-consuming society, what questions should we ask ourselves as we survey the increasingly crowded planet on which we find ourselves? What are the moral effects of living amid unprecedented material plenty? With David Crocker, Lisa Newton, and Judith Lichtenberg.

One of the most talked-about scholarly works of the past fifty years, Judith Butler’s _Gender Trouble_ is as celebrated as it is controversial. Arguing that traditional feminism is wrong to look to a natural, 'essential' notion of the female, or indeed of sex or gender, Butler starts by questioning the category 'woman' and continues in this vein with examinations of 'the masculine' and 'the feminine'. Best known however, but also most often misinterpreted, is Butler's concept of gender as a (...) reiterated social _performance _rather than the expression of a prior reality. Thrilling and provocative, few other academic works have roused passions to the same extent. (shrink)

One of the most talked-about scholarly works of the past fifty years, Judith Butler’s _Gender Trouble_ is as celebrated as it is controversial. Arguing that traditional feminism is wrong to look to a natural, 'essential' notion of the female, or indeed of sex or gender, Butler starts by questioning the category 'woman' and continues in this vein with examinations of 'the masculine' and 'the feminine'. Best known however, but also most often misinterpreted, is Butler's concept of gender as a (...) reiterated social _performance _rather than the expression of a prior reality. Thrilling and provocative, few other academic works have roused passions to the same extent. (shrink)

Ever since feminist theory introduced the distinction between sex and gender, the question of what it means to be a woman has preoccupied feminist thought. In ____Gender__ ____Trouble ____ Judith Butler questions whether it is possible to "be" a woman at all or, for that matter, any gender.

With the same intellectual courage with which she addressed issues of gender, Judith Butler turns her attention to speech and conduct in contemporary political life, looking at several efforts to target speech as conduct that has become subject to political debate and regulation. Reviewing hate speech regulations, anti-pornography arguments, and recent controversies about gay self-declaration in the military, Judith Butler asks whether and how language acts in each of these cultural sites.

With the same intellectual courage with which she addressed issues of gender, Judith Butler turns her attention to speech and conduct in contemporary political life, looking at several efforts to target speech as conduct that has become subject to political debate and regulation. Reviewing hate speech regulations, anti-pornography arguments, and recent controversies about gay self-declaration in the military, Judith Butler asks whether and how language acts in each of these cultural sites.

Schopenhauer is famously abusive toward his philosophical contemporary and rival, Friedrich William Joseph von Schelling. This chapter examines the motivations for Schopenhauer’s immoderate attitude and the substance behind the insults. It looks carefully at both the nature of the insults and substantive critical objections Schopenhauer had to Schelling’s philosophy, both to Schelling’s metaphysical description of the thing-in-itself and Schelling’s epistemic mechanism of intellectual intuition. It concludes that Schopenhauer’s substantive criticism is reasonable and that Schopenhauer does in fact avoid Schelling’s errors: (...) still, the vehemence of the abuse is best perhaps explained by the proximity of their philosophies, not the distance. Indeed, both are developing metaphysics of will with full and conflicted awareness of the Kantian epistemic strictures against metaphysics. In view of this, Schopenhauer is particularly concerned to mark his own project as legitimate by highlighting the manner in which he avoids Schelling’s errors. (shrink)

Many nonhuman animals have the emotional capacities to form caring relationships that matter to them, and for their immediate welfare. Drawing from care ethics, we argue that these relationships also matter as objectively valuable states of affairs. They are part of what is good in this world. However, the value of care is precarious in human-animal interactions. Be it in farming, research, wildlife ‘management’, zoos, or pet-keeping, the prevention, disruption, manipulation, and instrumentalization of care in animals by humans is ubiquitous. (...) We criticize a narrow conception of welfare that, in practice, tends to overlook non-experiential forms of harm that occur when we interfere with caring animals. Additionally, we point out wrongs against caring animals that are not just unaccounted for but denied by even an expansive welfare perspective: The instrumentalization of care and caring animals in systems of use can occur as a harmless wrong that an approach purely focused on welfare may, in fact, condone. We should therefore adopt an ethical perspective that goes beyond welfare in our dealings with caring animals. (shrink)

In The Realm of Rights Judith Thomson provides a full-scale, systematic theory of human and social rights, bringing out what in general makes an attribution of ...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 31.4 (2001) 22-40 [Access article in PDF] Giving an Account of Oneself Judith Butler In recent years, the critique of poststructuralism, itself loquacious, has held that the postulation of a subject who is not self-grounding undermines the possibility of responsibility and, in particular, of giving an account of oneself. Critics have argued that the various critical reconsiderations of the subject, including those that do away with the (...) theory of the subject altogether, cannot provide the basis for an account of responsibility, that if we are, as it were, divided, ungrounded, or incoherent from the start, it will be impossible to ground a notion of personal or social responsibility on the basis of such a view. I would like to try to rebut this view in what follows, and to show how a theory of subject-formation that acknowledges the limits of self-knowledge can work in the service of a conception of ethics and, indeed, of responsibility. If the subject is opaque to itself, it is not therefore licensed to do what it wants or to ignore its relations to others. Indeed, if it is precisely by virtue of its relations to others that it is opaque to itself, and if those relations to others are precisely the venue for its ethical responsibility, then it may well follow that it is precisely by virtue of the subject's opacity to itself that it sustains some of its most important ethical bonds.In all the talk about the social construction of the subject, we have perhaps overlooked the fact that the very being of the self is dependent not just on the existence of the Other—in its singularity, as Levinas would have it, though surely that—but also on the possibility that the normative horizon within which the Other sees and listens and knows and recognizes is also subject to a critical opening. This opening calls into question the limits of established regimes of truth, where a certain risking of the self becomes, as Levinas claims, the sign of virtue [see Foucault]. Whether or not the Other is singular, the Other is recognized and confers recognition through a set of norms that govern recognizability. So whereas the Other may be singular, if not radically personal, the norms are to some extent impersonal and indifferent, and they introduce a disorientation of perspective for the subject in the midst of recognition as an encounter. For if I understand myself to be conferring recognition on you, for instance, then I take seriously that the recognition comes from me. But in the moment that I realize that the terms by which I confer recognition are not mine alone, that I did not singlehandedly make them, then I am, as it were, dispossessed by the language that I offer. In a sense, I submit to a norm of recognition when I offer recognition to you, so that I am both subjected to that norm and the agency of its use.As Hegel would have it, recognition cannot be unilaterally given. In the moment that I give it, I am potentially given it, and the form by which I offer it is one that potentially is given to me. In this sense, one might say, I can never offer it, in the Hegelian sense, as a pure offering, since I am receiving it, at least potentially and structurally, in the moment, in the act, of giving. We might ask, as Levinas surely has, what kind of gift this is that returns to me so quickly, that never really leaves my hands. Is it the case that recognition consists, as it does for Hegel, in a reciprocal act whereby I recognize that [End Page 22] the Other is structured in the same way that I am, and I recognize that the Other also makes, or can make, this very recognition of sameness? Or is there perhaps an encounter with alterity here that is not reducible to sameness? If it is the latter, how are we to understand this alterity? On the one hand, the Hegelian Other is always found outside, or at least... (shrink)

In this paper, we make the case that a person who is considering or has already made a decision that appears seriously harmful to that person should in some cases be judged incapable of making that...

Dichotomous thinking about mental phenomena is abundant in philosophy. One particularly tenacious dichotomy is between “automatic” and “controlled” processes. In this characterization automatic and unintelligent go hand in hand, as do non-automatic and intelligent. Accounts of skillful action have problematized this dichotomous conceptualization and moved towards a more nuanced understanding of human agency. This binary thinking is, however, still abundant in the philosophy of joint action. Habits and skills allow us agentic ways of guiding complex action routines that would otherwise (...) overwhelm our reflective capacities. In this paper, I look at how theories of skill, habit, and know-how in individual action can inform a non-dichotomous account of joint action. I argue that a fuller understanding of joint agency has to understand not only group know-how, but also the role of attention and the highly integrated types of control that allow agents to act together. (shrink)

Dichotomous thinking about mental phenomena is abundant in philosophy. One particularly tenacious dichotomy is between “automatic” and “controlled” processes. In this characterization automatic and unintelligent go hand in hand, as do non-automatic and intelligent. Accounts of skillful action have problematized this dichotomous conceptualization and moved towards a more nuanced understanding of human agency. This binary thinking is, however, still abundant in the philosophy of joint action. Habits and skills allow us agentic ways of guiding complex action routines that would otherwise (...) overwhelm our reflective capacities. In this paper, I look at how theories of skill, habit, and know-how in individual action can inform a non-dichotomous account of joint action. I argue that a fuller understanding of joint agency has to understand not only group know-how, but also the role of attention and the highly integrated types of control that allow agents to act together. (shrink)

Vulnerability and resistance have often been seen as opposites, with the assumption that vulnerability requires protection and the strengthening of paternalistic power at the expense of collective resistance. Focusing on political movements and cultural practices in different global locations, including Turkey, Palestine, France, and the former Yugoslavia, the contributors to Vulnerability in Resistance articulate an understanding of the role of vulnerability in practices of resistance. They consider how vulnerability is constructed, invoked, and mobilized within neoliberal discourse, the politics of war, (...) resistance to authoritarian and securitarian power, in LGBTQI struggles, and in the resistance to occupation and colonial violence. The essays offer a feminist account of political agency by exploring occupy movements and street politics, informal groups at checkpoints and barricades, practices of self-defense, hunger strikes, transgressive enactments of solidarity and mourning, infrastructural mobilizations, and aesthetic and erotic interventions into public space that mobilize memory and expose forms of power. Pointing to possible strategies for a feminist politics of transversal engagements and suggesting a politics of bodily resistance that does not disavow forms of vulnerability, the contributors develop a new conception of embodiment and sociality within fields of contemporary power. -/- Contributors. Meltem Ahiska, Athena Athanasiou, Sarah Bracke, Judith Butler, Elsa Dorlin, Basak Ertür, Zeynep Gambetti, Rema Hammami, Marianne Hirsch, Elena Loizidou, Leticia Sabsay, Nükhet Sirman, Elena Tzelepis. (shrink)

_The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere_ represents a rare opportunity to experience a diverse group of preeminent philosophers confronting one pervasive contemporary concern: what role does—or should—religion play in our public lives? Reflecting on her recent work concerning state violence in Israel-Palestine, Judith Butler explores the potential of religious perspectives for renewing cultural and political criticism, while Jürgen Habermas, best known for his seminal conception of the public sphere, thinks through the ambiguous legacy of the concept of (...) "the political" in contemporary theory. Charles Taylor argues for a radical redefinition of secularism, and Cornel West defends civil disobedience and emancipatory theology. Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan VanAntwerpen detail the immense contribution of these philosophers to contemporary social and political theory, and an afterword by Craig Calhoun places these attempts to reconceive the significance of both religion and the secular in the context of contemporary national and international politics. (shrink)

In my contribution to this volume, I (BHS) comment on on the stultifying rhetoric of contemporary analytic moral theory as illustrated in Judith Jarvis Thomson's Tanner Lectures, with particular reference to Thomson's anxieties about the moral relativism exhibited by college freshman and to her efforts--quite strained, in my view, and inevitably unsuccessful--to demonstrate the existence of objective judgments in matters of morality and taste .

While human rights law has evolved to provide guidance to governments in realizing human rights in public health emergencies, the COVID-19 pandemic has challenged the foundations of human rights in global health governance. Public health responses to the pandemic have undermined international human rights obligations to realize the rights to health and life, human rights that underlie public health, and international assistance and cooperation. As governments prepare for revisions of global health law, new opportunities are presented to harmonize global health (...) law and human rights law, strengthening rights-based governance to respond to future threats. (shrink)

Amsterdam University Press is a leading publisher of academic books, journals and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our aim is to make current research available to scholars, students, innovators, and the general public. AUP stands for scholarly excellence, global presence, and engagement with the international academic community.

A major international consultancy firm identified ‘AI ethicist’ as an essential position for companies to successfully implement artificial intelligence (AI) at the start of 2019. It declares that AI ethicists are needed to help companies navigate the ethical and social issues raised by the use of AI. Top 5 AI hires companies need to succeed in 2019. The view that AI is beneficial but nonetheless potentially harmful to individuals and society is widely shared by the industry, academia, governments, and civil (...) society organizations. Accordingly and in order to realize its benefits while avoiding ethical pitfalls and harmful consequences, numerous initiatives have been established to a) examine the ethical, social, legal and political dimensions of AI and b) develop ethical guidelines and recommendations for design and implementation of AI. (shrink)

Internationale markten zijn de afgelopen decennia sterk mondiaal ontwikkeld en veel bedrijven zijn in deze geglobaliseerde context uitgegroeid tot belangrijke, quasi-politieke spelers. Deze stormachtige economische ontwikkelingen bieden kansen en welvaart aan velen, maar kennen echter ook schaduwzijden, van milieubelasting tot belastingontwijking. In deze bundel verkennen de auteurs het idee van de ‘open samenleving’ om vat te krijgen op deze nieuwe realiteit. De open samenleving naar het ideaal van Popper, waarin mensen de vrijheid hebben om hun mening uit te drukken, initiatief (...) te nemen, en elkaar tegen te spreken, wordt gezien als de grondslag voor vrijheid, welvaart, en vooruitgang. Deze bundel onderzoekt of de toegenomen openheid van markten de open samenleving als politiek ideaal dichterbij heeft gebracht. De auteurs werpen vanuit verschillende perspectieven een kritisch licht op de bedreigingen die voortvloeien uit mondiale markten en de toegenomen macht van ondernemingen. Ze stellen óók de vraag of het gedachtegoed van de open samenleving inspiratie kan bieden bij het tegengaan van die bedreigingen. Kunnen nieuwe vormen en interpretaties van ‘openheid’ worden gevonden, die tegenwicht bieden tegen de excessen van de vrijemarkteconomie? (shrink)

This is the text of The Lindley Lecture for 1976, given by Judith Jarvis Thomson, an American philosopher.

The phenomenon of contract cheating presents, potentially, a serious threat to the quality and standards of Higher Education around the world. There have been suggestions, cited below, to tackle the problem using legal means, but we find that current laws are not fit for this purpose. In this article we present a proposal for a specific new law to target contract cheating, which could be enacted in most jurisdictions.We test our proposed new law against a number of issues that would (...) need to be considered before any legal approach could be successful; would changing the legal status of contract cheating make it less likely to happen? Could this be achieved in a specific way? If so, who should actually be prosecuted and what offence are they committing? Would it actually address the causes of contract cheating? We suggest some answers to these questions, but then also identify a number of unintended potential consequences. We therefore additionally consider whether a legal approach is possible or even desirable.We conclude that a legal approach to contract cheating is possible, and, on balance, appropriate. Using UK law as an example, we offer a specific suggestion to lawmakers, around the world, for how this might be achieved, and conclude that the most successful approach would be to focus largely on a law targeting the providers of contract cheating, in particular commercial services. (shrink)

Deeply understood, democracy is more than a "formal" institutional framework for which America provides the model, acting as a preferable alternative to the modern totalitarian regimes that have distorted social life around the world. At its core, as John Dewey understood, democracy is a realistic ideal, a desired and desirable future possibility that is yet-to-be. In this period of global crises in differing cultures, a shared environment, and an increasingly globalized political economy, this book provides a clear contemporary articulation of (...) deep democracy that can guide an evolutionary deepening of democratic institutions, of habits of the heart, and of the processes of education and social inquiry that support them. (shrink)

Aristotle offers a conception of the private and its relationship to the public that suggests a remedy to the limitations of liberalism today, according to Judith A. Swanson. In this fresh and lucid interpretation of Aristotle's political philosophy, Swanson challenges the dominant view that he regards the private as a mere precondition to the public. She argues, rather, that for Aristotle private activity develops virtue and is thus essential both to individual freedom and happiness and to the well-being of (...) the political order. Swanson presents an innovative reading of the Politics which revises our understanding of Aristotle's political economy and his views on women and the family, slavery, and the relation between friendship and civic solidarity. She examines the private activities Aristotle considers necessary to a complete human life--maintaining a household, transacting business, sustaining friendships, and philosophizing. Focusing on ways Aristotle's public invests in the private through law, rule, and education, she shows how the public can foster a morally and intellectually virtuous citizenry. In contrast to classical liberal theory, which presents privacy as a shield of rights protecting individuals from one another and from the state, Aristotle, Swanson argues, presents privacy as opportunity or duty to pursue excellence. She concludes that for Aristotle a regime can attain self-sufficiency only by bringing about a dynamic equilibrium between the public and the private. The Public and the Private in Aristotle's Political Philosophy engages both long-standing and contemporary debates surrounding the interpretation of Aristotle. It will be essential reading for scholars and students of political philosophy, political theory, classics, intellectual history, and the history of women. (shrink)

_Business Ethics and the Natural Environment_ examines the present status of relations between corporate enterprise and the natural environment in the world today. •Discusses such questions as: What obligations does a corporation have toward the environment? To respect entities unprotected by law? To care about future generations? •Argues that environmentally-friendly business practices yield dividends exceeding expectations, and that the competitive firm of the 21st century will follow “green” standards •Provides a background in ethics, a survey of business ethics, an account (...) of environmental philosophy, an overview of environmental legal issues, and an account of the problems associated with globalization. (shrink)

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Von Schelling (1775-1854) was a colleague of Hegel, Holderlin, Fichte, Goethe, Schlegel, and Schiller. Always a champion of Romanticism, Schelling advocated a philosophy which emphasized intuition over reason, which maintained aesthetics and the creative imagination to be of the highest value. At the same time, Schelling's concerns for the self and the rational make him a major precursor to existentialism and phenomenology. Schelling has exercised a subterranean influence on modern thought. His diverse writings have not given rise (...) to a system or school of thought; rather, individual philosophers have been influenced by the resonance of his ideas and their influence on contemporary ideas and movements. The New Schelling brings together a wide-ranging set of essays which elaborate the connections between Schelling and other thinkers - such as Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Sartre, Deleuze, and Lacan - and argue for the unexpected modernity of Schelling's work. (shrink)

This paper argues for Kantian “universalism,” according to which the subject of empirical cognition is not merely individual, but universal. In the first section, I consider the limitations of Hume’s individualist view of the subject of judgment, which is able to explain how another person exerts power over my judgments, but cannot explain how what she says can challenge or support my judgments. In the second section, I argue that Kant’s universalism accounts for the possibility of rational support both among (...) different judgments in me, and among judgments of different subjects. The third section looks at the consequences of universalism for Kant’s account of testimony. I argue that on Kant’s view, it does not matter whether I learn something from my own experience or from your experience. Testimony thus does not emerge in Kant’s philosophy as a significant topic. In the fourth section, I argue that the enlightenment project of overcoming prejudice and acquiring wisdom makes it imperative that knowledge be not only universally shareable, but also actually shared among members of an epistemic community. (shrink)

In the contemporary world, voices are caught up in fundamentally different realms of discourse, practice, and culture: between sounding and nonsounding, material and nonmaterial, literal and metaphorical. In The Voice as Something More, Martha Feldman and Judith T. Zeitlin tackle these paradoxes with a bold and rigorous collection of essays that look at voice as both object of desire and material object. Using Mladen Dolar’s influential A Voice and Nothing More as a reference point, The Voice as Something More (...) reorients Dolar’s psychoanalytic analysis around the material dimensions of voices—their physicality and timbre, the fleshiness of their mechanisms, the veils that hide them, and the devices that enhance and distort them. Throughout, the essays put the body back in voice. Ending with a new essay by Dolar that offers reflections on these vocal aesthetics and paradoxes, this authoritative, multidisciplinary collection, ranging from Europe and the Americas to East Asia, from classics and music to film and literature, will serve as an essential entry point for scholars and students who are thinking toward materiality. (shrink)

_Business Ethics and the Natural Environment_ examines the present status of relations between corporate enterprise and the natural environment in the world today. •Discusses such questions as: What obligations does a corporation have toward the environment? To respect entities unprotected by law? To care about future generations? •Argues that environmentally-friendly business practices yield dividends exceeding expectations, and that the competitive firm of the 21st century will follow “green” standards •Provides a background in ethics, a survey of business ethics, an account (...) of environmental philosophy, an overview of environmental legal issues, and an account of the problems associated with globalization. (shrink)

Wittgenstein: A Way of Seeing examines two related and neglected aspects of Wittgenstein's work: his conception of philosophy and his search for a style to embody his revolutionary practice. The landscapes of Wittgenstein's texts are surrealistically flat--no theories, arguments, or conclusions, nor chapter headings, notes, or narrative structures. Genova explores Wittgenstein's early style of logical poetics with its emphasis on elucidation and critique and his later rhetoric of grammatical reminders with its turn to therapy. She shows how Wittgenstein appropriated Kant (...) and then Freud to present distinctive visions of the nature of philosophy, namely as clarification in the Tractatus and as performance in the I nvestigations , and how Wittgenstein shows how language, logic and the world take care of themselves. _. (shrink)

Contributors: Steven M. Cahn, James W. Nickel, J. L. Cowan, Paul W. Taylor, Michael D. Bayles, William A. Nunn III, Alan H. Goldman, Paul Woodruff, Robert A. Shiver, Judith Jarvis Thomson, Robert Simon, George Sher, Robert Amdur, Robert K. Fullinwider, Bernard R. Boxhill, Lisa H. Newton, Anita L. Allen, Celia Wolf-Devine, Sidney Hook, Richaed Waaserstrom, Thomas E. Hill, Jr., John Kekes.

Parfois déconsidérée, au cours du XXe siècle, parce que pensée comme la simple écume de processus historiques et sociaux plus profonds, la notion d'événement semble avoir, depuis, bénéficié d'un évident retour en grâce au sein des sciences humaines et sociales - en histoire et en philosophie au premier chef, mais aussi en sociologie, en anthropologie, en linguistique ou en psychanalyse. La référence à l'événement, très utilisée aujourd'hui, donne cependant lieu à des investissements multiples, suppose différentes manières d'articuler le temps et (...) l'histoire, met en jeu des conceptions non équivalentes de la subjectivité, et sous-tend des compréhensions de la rationalité très diverses. Mobilisant tour à tour les analyses de Fernand Braudel et de Reinhart Koselleck, de Jacques Rancière et de Michel Foucault, d'Henri Bergson et de Gilles Deleuze, de Walter Benjamin et d'Hannah Arendt, de Sigmund Freud et de Claude Lévi-Strauss, les essais qui composent ce volume explorent la cartographie complexe et variée des questionnements que la notion contribue à faire émerger et à nourrir."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Because autonomy is regarded as central to modern bioethics; there is a considerable focus on the criteria by which autonomy may be judged. The most significant criterion used in day-to-day practic...

‘Romanticism’ is one of the more hotly contested terms in the history of ideas. There is a singular lack of consensus as to its meaning, unity, and historical extension, and many attempts to fix the category of romanticism very quickly become blurry. As a result, the great historian of ideas, Arthur Lovejoy, famously concludes that: ‘the word ‘romantic’ has come to mean so many things that, by itself, it means nothing. It has ceased to perform the function of a verbal (...) sign’ But his pessimistic advice has not stopped scholars from trying to define romanticism. If anything, it has brought renewed vigour to the determination with which critics try to pinpoint the term. There are several approaches to take, for those who attempt to do so. One class of critics tries to enumerate the features shared by the authors and texts generally considered romantic. An alternative approach would try to identify the fundamental unity that informs romanticism and gives rise to the empirical commonalities. But what would this essential feature be? Both of these approaches take an external perspective on romanticism, seeing it as the object of inquiry. An alternative approach, which we will pursue, looks at romantic subjects, and romanticism as a self-constituting category, rather than merely as an externally imposed one. In other words, we will take as basic neither an (empirical) array of candidate properties constituting romanticism, nor a supposed underlying (rationalist) essence from which properties can be derived, but rather we will focus on how the romantics themselves took up the idea of romanticism and transformed it into a self-conscious movement. We will treat the question of romanticism with respect to England, but above all Germany. Although romantic movements arose and flourished elsewhere in Europe (and in France in particular), German and English romanticism were uniquely theoretically sophisticated and philosophically nuanced. (shrink)

The notion of trustworthy AI has been proposed in response to mounting public criticism of AI systems, in particular with regard to the proliferation of such systems into ever more sensitive areas of human life without proper checks and balances. In Europe, the High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence has recently presented its Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI. To some, the guidelines are an important step for the governance of AI. To others, the guidelines distract effort from genuine AI regulation. (...) In this chapter, we engage in a critical discussion of the concept of trustworthy AI by probing the concept both on theoretical and practical grounds, assessing its substance and the feasibility of its intent. We offer a concise overview of the guidelines and their vision for trustworthy AI and examine the conceptual underpinnings of trustworthy AI by considering how notions of 'trust' and 'trustworthiness' have been discussed in the philosophical literature. We then discuss several epistemic obstacles and moral requirements when striving to achieve trustworthy AI in practice before concluding with an argument in support of the establishment of a trustworthy AI culture that respects and protects foundational values. (shrink)

The Cambridge Critical Guides series offers cutting-edge research volumes on some of the most important works of philosophy. Each volume presents newly-commissioned essays by an international team of contributors, and will appeal to a scholarly and graduate-level audience. One of the themes that this volume brings out is the endurance and contemporary relevance of some of Schopenhauer’s most pressing concerns. In a sense, he is right to be ahistorical: is it not this reaching out of its time that makes a (...) work a classic, eternal even? Principal among these concerns of course is the question of how to respond as plagues overwhelm us (which is Schopenhauer’s description of existence in a normal state, the plague of existence rather than a plague within existence). His famous answer involves the negation of the will, the ascetic denial and rejection of desire. Of course, this response is more striking than it is clear, and several of the essays tackle the question of what is meant, entailed, and achieved by negation of the will. (shrink)

The amygdala is a hub in brain networks that supports social life and fear processing. Compared with other apes, humans have a relatively larger lateral nucleus of the amygdala, which is consistent with both the self-domestication and the cooperative breeding hypotheses of human evolution. Here, we take a comparative approach to the evolutionary origin of the relatively larger lateral amygdala nucleus in humans. We carry out phylogenetic analysis on a sample of 17 mammalian species for which we acquired single amygdala (...) nuclei volumetric data. Our results indicate that there has been convergent evolution toward larger lateral amygdala nuclei in both domesticated and cooperatively breeding mammals. These results suggest that changes in processing fearful stimuli to reduce fear-induced aggression, which are necessary for domesticated and cooperatively breeding species alike, tap into the same neurobiological proximate mechanism. However, humans show changes not only in processing fearful stimuli but also in proactive prosociality. Since cooperative breeding, but not domestication, is also associated with increased proactive prosociality, a prominent role of the former during human evolution is more parsimonious, whereas self-domestication may have been involved as an additional stepping stone. (shrink)