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Purpose This paper aims to critically assess approaches to sex and gender in the Human Brain Project as a large information and communication technology project case study using intersectionality. Design/methodology/approach The strategy of the HBP is contextualised within the wider context of the representation of women in ICT, and critically reflected upon from an intersectional standpoint. Findings The policy underpinning the approach deployed by the HBP in response to these issues parallels Horizon 2020 wording and emphasises economic outcomes, productivity and (...) value, which aligns with other “equality” initiatives influenced by neoliberalised versions of feminism. Research limitations/implications Limitations include focussing on a single case study, the authors being funded as part of the Ethics and Society Subproject of the HBP, and the limited temporal period under consideration. Social implications The frameworks underpinning the HBP approach to sex and gender issues present risks with regard to the further entrenchment of present disparities in the ICT sector, may fail to acknowledge systemic inequalities and biases and ignore the importance of intersectionality. Shortcomings of the approach employed by the HBP up to March, 2018 included aspects of each of these risks, and replicated problematic understandings of sex, gender and diversity. Originality/value This paper is the first to use an intersectional approach to issues of sex and gender in the context of large-scale ICT research. Its value lies in raising awareness, opening a discursive space and presenting opportunities to consider and reflect upon potential, contextualised intersectional solutions to such issues. (shrink)

The role of power in healthcare can raise many ethical challenges. Power is ownership, whether given, ceded, or taken of another person’s autonomy. When a person has power over someone else, they can control or strongly influence the decision-making freedom of that person. From the principalist perspective1,2 of healthcare ethics, denying a person their freedom to choose, should only occur when justifying conditions related to beneficence and nonmaleficence are sufficiently satisfied. In healthcare, it is rare to be able to identify (...) situations where paternalism is justified. However, experience suggests that abusive power in healthcare is used too frequently without justifying criteria. (shrink)

Arthur C. Clarke once wrote that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguish able from magic. " The language of magic is evident in much of popular discourse about computers. A content analysis of Time magazine reporting on computers and related technologies over a ten-year period revealed that 36 percent of all these stories used explicitly magical or religious language. Together with a qualitative analysis of implic itly magical themes, the patterns in Time's reporting reveal how magic language was used as (...) one strategy to stabilize and close the technological frame of personal computers in the mid-1980s. (shrink)

Political theorists continue to be provoked by Giorgio Agamben’s disturbing diagnosis that ‘bare life’ – human life that is excluded from politics yet exposed to sovereign violence – is not a sign of the malfunction of modern politics but rather a revelation of how it actually functions. However, despite the enormous amount of attention this diagnosis has received, there has been relatively little discussion of Agamben’s proposed ‘cure’ for the problem that he diagnoses. In this article, I analyze the three (...) main concepts of Agamben’s positive philosophical program – ‘infancy,’ ‘potentiality,’ and ‘form-of-life’ – in order to show how he attempts to subvert the sovereignty of law over life with his idea of a life of habit in which life is sovereign over law. In addition to analyzing these concepts, I engage in an immanent critique of Agamben’s philosophy and contrast his vision of politics with those of other influential contemporary political theorists. I find that while Agamben’s philosophical program is almost undone by internal difficulties, it still radically challenges current theories of subjectivity, humanity, and community. (shrink)

This article suggests a new approach to understanding the self-formation of subjectivity in the work of Michel Foucault that emphasizes the influence of his mentor, the philosopher and historian of science Georges Canguilhem. I argue that Foucault adapts Canguilhem’s biological–epistemological notion of ‘error’ in order to achieve two things: to provide a notion of subjective self-formation compatible with the claims of his ‘archaeology of knowledge’ and ‘genealogy of power’, and to provide an alternative to the phenomenological theory of the subject. (...) The notion of ‘error’ accomplishes these goals because it posits that experience is the result of knowledge, not vice versa. To illustrate the notion of ‘erroneous’ subjectivity, I turn to two volumes edited by Foucault: I, Pierre Rivière, having slaughtered my mother, my sister and my brother… and Herculine Barbin; Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth- Century French Hermaphrodite. Both juxtapose ‘subjective’ accounts of ‘abnormal’ individuals with ‘objective’ documents written by judges, psychiatrists and medical professionals in order to show how ‘erroneous subjectivities’ may transgress epistemological limits and form new concepts. (shrink)

The interdisciplinary field of neurorobotics looks to neuroscience to overcome the limitations of modern robotics technology, to robotics to advance our understanding of the neural system’s inner workings, and to information technology to develop tools that support those complementary endeavours. The development of these technologies is still at an early stage, which makes them an ideal candidate for proactive and anticipatory ethical reflection. This article explains the current state of neurorobotics development within the Human Brain Project, originating from a close (...) collaboration between the scientific and technical experts who drive neurorobotics innovation, and the humanities and social sciences scholars who provide contextualising and reflective capabilities. This article discusses some of the ethical issues which can reasonably be expected. On this basis, the article explores possible gaps identified within this collaborative, ethical reflection that calls for attention to ensure that the development of neurorobotics is ethically sound and socially acceptable and desirable. (shrink)

A central figure in Victorian science, William Whewell held professorships in Mineralogy and Moral Philosophy at Trinity College, Cambridge, before becoming Master of the college in 1841. His mathematical textbooks, such as A Treatise on Dynamics, were instrumental in bringing French analytical methods into British science. This three-volume history, first published in 1837, is one of Whewell's most famous works. Taking the 'acute, but fruitless, essays of Greek philosophy' as a starting point, it provides a history of the physical (...) sciences that culminates with the mechanics, astronomy, and chemistry of 'modern times'. Volume 3 first covers the mechanico-chemical sciences, emphasizing the convergence of mechanical and chemical theories in discoveries pertaining to electricity, magnetism and thermodynamics. A section on chemistry surveys Becher and Stahl's phlogiston theory, Lavoisier's theory of oxygen, and Faraday's laws of electromagnetic induction. The volume also covers mineralogy, botany, zoology, and anatomy. (shrink)

Rahel Jaeggi argues that forms of life ought to be the main reference point for a critical theory of society because the internal normative structure of life forms allows for immanent critique. In this article, I extend her model by systematically considering the possibility of oppressive forms of life. Oppressive forms of life are clusters of practices in which subordinated groups are systematically excluded or disabled from participating in the social processes of interpretation through which the values and purposes of (...) those very practices are determined. The possibility of oppressive forms of life poses a challenge to the method of immanent critique because it seems that any such critique must rely on immanent norms that are at least partly constituted by interpretations and that can therefore be distorted by oppression. I argue that Jaeggi’s model of immanent critique can be extended to respond to that challenge, either by recovering a constitutive form of freedom within all forms of life or by consciously adopting a partisan stance in favour of oppressed and marginalised self-understandings. (shrink)

When we criticize social institutions and practices, what kinds of reasons can we offer for such criticism? Political philosophers often assume that we must rely on universal moral principles that are not necessarily connected to the particular social practices of our communities. Traditionally,continental critical theory has rejected this claim through its endorsement of the method of immanent critique. Immanent critique is a critique of social practices that draws on norms already present within these practices to demand social change, rather than (...) merely conservatively reproducing them. This book defends the claim that such a critique is not only possible, but also has politically powerful potential. Taking up recent developments in analytic collective intentionality theory and in the philosophy of language, the book argues that all social practices rest on structures of mutual recognition between persons that allow social theorists to reconstruct hidden norms present within these practices. Starting from a comprehensive critique of contemporary critical theory, the book also spells out the consequences of this line of thought for the practice of social critique, for the social sciences and for political philosophy. (shrink)

The link between the right to privacy and the right to democratic self-determination is often understood to imply that privacy rights have only instrumental value for democratic participation, and that they consist solely in the possibility to retreat from participation in a public. I examine three arguments for an internal link between both sets of rights: The right to privacy protects political public spheres from epistemic inequality, it protects groups in public from a loss of their deliberative autonomy and it (...) blocks the colonisation of deliberative publics by strategic action orientations. These arguments suggest a genuine political purpose of the right to privacy. (shrink)

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to provide a response to Christiansen's paper, Ellen Christiansen “From ‘ethics of the eye’ to ‘ethics of the hand’ by collaborative prototyping”,Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society, Vol. 12 No. 1.Design/methodology/approach– Reflection and critique of Christiansen's position.Findings– The paper raises questions about the conceptual basis, the realisation of participation and the conditions required for participative practice to be more broadly employed.Originality/value– It is an original response.

We tend to suppose that the ancient Greeks had primitive ideas of the self, of responsibility, freedom, and shame, and that now humanity has advanced from these to a more refined moral consciousness. Bernard Williams's original and radical book questions this picture of Western history. While we are in many ways different from the Greeks, Williams claims that the differences are not to be traced to a shift in these basic conceptions of ethical life. We are more like the ancients (...) than we are prepared to acknowledge, and only when this is understood can we properly grasp our most important differences from them, such as our rejection of slavery. The author is a philosopher, but much of his book is directed to writers such as Homer and the tragedians, whom he discusses as poets and not just as materials for philosophy. At the center of his study is the question of how we can understand Greek tragedy at all, when its world is so far from ours. Williams explains how it is that when the ancients speak, they do not merely tell us about themselves, but about ourselves. _Shame and Necessity_ gives a new account of our relations to the Greeks, and helps us to see what ethical ideas we need in order to live in the modern world. (shrink)

In verschiedenen philosophischen Traditionen findet sich die These, dass Haltungen der Anerkennung eine zentrale Rolle für die Existenz von sozialen Institutionen spielen. Der Artikel gibt einen kurzen Überblick über zentrale anerkennungstheoretische Modelle in der Sozialontologie.

In Morality and Socially Constructed Norms, Laura Valentini argues that moral obligations to respect social norms can be explained without invoking the concept of ‘joint commitment.’ Her resulting account is, in one important sense, individualistic, and therefore struggles to account for widely held intuitions about the normative significance of social norms. I argue that we can rescue the notion of joint commitment from Valentini’s objections, and incorporate it into a version of her account that preserves its insights.

Former Google advertising strategist, now Oxford-trained philosopher James Williams launches a plea to society and to the tech industry to help ensure that the technology we all carry with us every day does not distract us from pursuing our true goals in life. As information becomes ever more plentiful, the resource that is becoming more scarce is our attention. In this 'attention economy', we need to recognise the fundamental impacts of our new information environment on our lives in order to (...) take back control. Drawing on insights ranging from Diogenes to contemporary tech leaders, Williams's thoughtful and impassioned analysis is sure to provoke discussion and debate. Williams is the inaugural winner of the Nine Dots Prize, a new Prize for creative thinking that tackles contemporary social issues. This title is also available as Open Access. (shrink)

This paper discusses recent evidence that violations of core knowledge offer special learning opportunities for infants and young children. Children make predictions about the world from the youngest ages. When their fail to match observed data, they show an enhanced drive to seek and retain new information about entities that violated their expectations. Finally, the authors draw comparisons between children and adults, and with other species, to explore how surprise shapes thought more broadly.

An analysis of two heuristic strategies for the development of mechanistic models, illustrated with historical examples from the life sciences. In Discovering Complexity, William Bechtel and Robert Richardson examine two heuristics that guided the development of mechanistic models in the life sciences: decomposition and localization. Drawing on historical cases from disciplines including cell biology, cognitive neuroscience, and genetics, they identify a number of "choice points" that life scientists confront in developing mechanistic explanations and show how different choices result in (...) divergent explanatory models. Describing decomposition as the attempt to differentiate functional and structural components of a system and localization as the assignment of responsibility for specific functions to specific structures, Bechtel and Richardson examine the usefulness of these heuristics as well as their fallibility—the sometimes false assumption underlying them that nature is significantly decomposable and hierarchically organized. When Discovering Complexity was originally published in 1993, few philosophers of science perceived the centrality of seeking mechanisms to explain phenomena in biology, relying instead on the model of nomological explanation advanced by the logical positivists (a model Bechtel and Richardson found to be utterly inapplicable to the examples from the life sciences in their study). Since then, mechanism and mechanistic explanation have become widely discussed. In a substantive new introduction to this MIT Press edition of their book, Bechtel and Richardson examine both philosophical and scientific developments in research on mechanistic models since 1993. (shrink)

In the Critique of Judgment, Kant claims that genius is a talent for art, but not for science. Despite his restriction of genius to the domain of fine art, several recent interpreters have suggested that genius has a role to play in Kant’s account of cognition in general and scientific practice in particular. In this paper, I explore Kant’s reasons for excluding genius from science as well as the reasons that one might nevertheless be tempted to think that his account (...) allows room for the scientific genius. I then argue that Kant’s concerns are not only epistemic, but also moral, and together, they give us good reason for resisting the veneration of genius. (shrink)

Bernard Williams's remarkable essay on morality confronts the problems of writing moral philosophy, and offers a stimulating alternative to more systematic accounts which seem nevertheless to have left all the important issues somewhere off the page. Williams explains, analyses and distinguishes a number of key positions, from the purely amoral to notions of subjective or relative morality, testing their coherence before going on to explore the nature of 'goodness' in relation to responsibilities and choice, roles, standards, and human nature. The (...) final chapters make a fascinating enquiry into what morality is about, looking beyond happiness to other human aims and ideals. This re-issue of a classic in moral philosophy includes a new foreword by the author. (shrink)

Computer-based design environments for skilled domain workers have recently graduated from research prototypes to commercial products, supporting the learning of individual designers. Such systems do not, however, adequately support the collaborative nature of work or the evolution of knowledge within communities of practice. If innovation is to be supported within collaborative efforts, thesedomain-oriented design environments (DODEs) must be extended to becomecollaborative information environments (CIEs), capable of providing effective community memories for managing information and learning within constantly evolving collaborative contexts. In (...) particular, CIEs must provide functionality that facilitates the construction of new knowledge and the shared understanding necessary to use this knowledge effectively within communities of practice. (shrink)

One of the great American pragmatic philosophers alongside Peirce and Dewey, William James (1842–1910) delivered these eight lectures in Boston and New York in the winter of 1906–7. Though he credits Peirce with coining the term 'pragmatism', James highlights in his subtitle that this 'new name' describes a philosophical temperament as old as Socrates. The pragmatic approach, he says, takes a middle way between rationalism's airy principles and empiricism's hard facts. James' pragmatism is both a method of interpreting ideas (...) by their practical consequences and an epistemology which identifies truths according to their useful outcomes. Furnished with many examples, the lectures illustrate pragmatism's response to classic problems such as the question of free will versus determinism. Published in 1907, this work further develops James's approach to religion and morality, introduced in The Will to Believe (1897) and The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), both reissued in this series. (shrink)

A pioneer in early studies of the human mind and founder of that peculiarly American philosophy called Pragmatism, William James remains America's most widely read philosopher. Generations of students have been drawn to his lucid presentations of philosophical problems. His works, now being made available for the first time in a definitive edition, have a permanent place in American letters and a continuing influence in philosophy and psychology. The essays gathered in the posthumously published Essays in Radical Empiricism formulate (...) ideas that had brewed in James's mind for thirty years as he sought a way out of the philosophical dilemmas generated by the new psychology of the late nineteenth century. They constitute the explanatory core of his doctrine of radical empiricism, a doctrine that charts his course between the absolute idealism he could not accept and, at the other extreme, the law of associationism, which reduces knowledge to sheer contiguity of ideas. In his introduction John J. McDermott describes the historical background and the genesis of James's theory and considers the objections raised by its opponents. (shrink)

This is the first critical study of The Logic of Sense, Gilles Deleuze's most important work on language and ethics, as well as the main source of his vital philosophy of the event.James Williams explains the originality of Deleuze's work with careful definitions of all his innovative terms and a detailed description of the complex structure he constructs. This reading makes connections to his ground-breaking work on literature, to his critical but also progressive relation to the sciences, and to his (...) controversial denial of the priority of standard logics, human values and 'meaning' in thinking.This book will open new debates and develop current ones around Deleuze's work in philosophy, politics, literature, linguistics, cultural studies and sociology. (shrink)

Information can be public among a group. Whether or not information is public matters, for example, for accounts of interdependent rational choice, of communication, and of joint intention. A standard analysis of public information identifies it with (some variant of) common belief. The latter notion is stipulatively defined as an infinite conjunction: for p to be commonly believed is for it to believed by all members of a group, for all members to believe that all members believe it, and so (...) forth. This analysis is often presupposed without much argument in philosophy. Theoretical entrenchment or intuitions about cases might give some traction on the question, but give little insight about why the identification holds, if it does. The strategy of this paper is to characterize a practical-normative role for information being public, and show that the only things that play that role are (variants of) common belief as stipulatively characterized. In more detail: a functional role for “taking a proposition for granted” in non-isolated decision making is characterized. I then present some minimal conditions under which such an attitude is correctly held. The key assumption links this attitude to beliefs about what is public. From minimal a priori principles, we can argue that a proposition being public among a group entails common commitment to believe among that group. Later sections explore partial converses to this result, the factivity of publicity and publicity from the perspective of outsiders to the group, and objections to the aprioricity of the result deriving from a posteriori existential presuppositions. (shrink)

The debate over the existence of a “public sphere” in China’s Late Qing/Early Republican era began nearly three decades ago, but it has yet to generate a special socio-cultural review on the “Confucian social imaginary” of the Chinese people. The article builds on existing “economic-political approach” and “idea-communication approach” to argue decisive factors hindering the development of a Habermasian “public sphere.” These includes (1) people’s traditional-collectivist lifestyle, (2) lack of understanding of “universal equality,” (3) conservative self-positioning during social transition, (4) (...) regionalist attitude toward outsiders, (5) lack of access to Enlightenment ideas, (6) disregard for parliamentary systems, and (7) ignorance of the rule of law. (shrink)

This new volume of philosophical papers by Bernard Williams is divided into three sections: the first Action, Freedom, Responsibility, the second Philosophy, Evolution and the Human Sciences; in which appears the essay which gives the collection its title; and the third Ethics, which contains essays closely related to his 1983 book Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Like the two earlier volumes of Williams's papers published by Cambridge University Press, Problems of the Self and Moral Luck, this volume will be (...) welcomed by all readers with a serious interest in philosophy. It is published alongside a volume of essays on Williams's work, World, Mind, and Ethics: Essays on the Ethical Philosophy of Bernard Williams, edited by J. E. J. Altham and Ross Harrison, which provides a reappraisal of his work by other distinguished thinkers in the field. (shrink)

Introduction: the advance of governmentality -- Foucault, power, and governmentality: introduction; what is governmentality?; beyond the microphysics of power?; from theory of the state to genealogy of the state; history of the art of government; pastoral power; raison d'état; liberal governmentality; five propositions on foucault and governmentality -- Governmentality 3.4.7.: introduction; governmentality after Foucault; governmentality and the political sciences; some problems in governmentality -- Foucault effect redux? some notes on international governmentality studies: constellation; a few preliminary observations; problems and debates (...) in international governmentality studies -- Reconnecting governmentality and genealogy: introduction; genealogy and governmentality; pluralizing genealogy; practicing genealogy; lines of descent: the family tree of power?; counter-memory and re-serialization; the retrieval of forgotten struggles and subjugated knowledges -- Conclusion: encountering governmentality: governmentality as a new cartography of power; from mapping to encountering; governmentality and politics. (shrink)

As humans, we want to live meaningfully, yet we are often driven by impulse. In Religion and the Meaning of Life, Williams investigates this paradox – one with profound implications. Delving into felt realities pertinent to meaning, such as boredom, trauma, suicide, denial of death, and indifference, Williams describes ways to acquire meaning and potential obstacles to its acquisition. This book is unique in its willingness to transcend a more secular stance and explore how one's belief in God may be (...) relevant to life's meaning. Religion and the Meaning of Life's interdisciplinary approach makes it useful to philosophers, religious studies scholars, psychologists, students, and general readers alike. The insights from this book have profound real-world applications – they can transform how readers search for meaning and, consequently, how readers see and exist in the world. (shrink)

Exploring the construct of social-responsibility orientation across three Asian and two Western societies, we show evidence that top-level executives in these societies hold fundamentally different beliefs about their responsibilities toward different stakeholders, with concomitant implications for their understanding and enactment of responsible leadership. We further find that these variations are more closely aligned with institutional factors than with cultural variables, suggesting a need to clarify the connection between culture and institutions on the one hand and culture and social-responsibility orientations on (...) the other. (shrink)