Based on a series of lectures delivered in 1840, Thomas Carlyle’s_ On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History_ considers the creation of heroes and the ways they exert heroic leadership. From the divine and prophetic to the poetic to the religious to the political, Carlyle investigates the mysterious qualities that elevate humans to cultural significance. By situating the text in the context of six essays by distinguished scholars that reevaluate both Carlyle’s work and his ideas, David Sorensen (...) and Brent Kinser argue that Carlyle's concept of heroism stresses the hero’s spiritual dimension. In Carlyle’s engagement with various heroic personalities, he dislodges religiosity from religion, myth from history, and truth from “quackery” as he describes the wondrous ways in which these “flowing light-fountains” unlock the heroic potential of ordinary human beings. (shrink)

Dear Jacques Derrider,Today is my birthday. I received a considerable number of messages, almost all written and sent by computer programs. Because most of my contacts have died, or else they are too busy to write me.I'm not bothered by the fact that these letters were written by programs. I am troubled, however, when they remind me of all of those who have died. And especially when I am no longer able to distinguish between the programs that speak for the (...) living and those that speak for the dead.These digital mummies are called necrobots. The archive of conversations of the deceased person serves as a training database for a neural network. Once it is deployed in the email and social network accounts of the... (shrink)

The Bodymind Experience in Japanese Buddhism: A Phenomenological Study of Kukai and Dogen. David Edward Shaner. State University of New York Press, New York 1985. 250 pp. Cloth $ 34.50, paper $ 10.95.

Charitable interpreters of David Hume set aside his sprinkles of piety. Better to read him as lying than as clumsily inconsistent. We argue that the attribution of lies can pay dividends in historical scholarship no matter how strongly the theorist condemns lying. Accordingly, we show that our approach works even with one of the strongest condemners of lying: Immanuel Kant. We argue that Kant lied in his scholarly work and even in the first Critique. And we defend the claim (...) that this lie attribution, strange as it may sound, amounts to a kind of scholarly charity. (shrink)

What do you get when you cross a fallacy with a good argument? A fugu, that is, a valid argument that tempts you to reach its conclusion invalidly. You have yielded to the temptation more than you realize. If you are a teacher, you may have served many fugus. They arise systematically through several mechanisms. Fugus are interesting intermediate cases that shed light on the following issues: bare evidentialism, false pleasure, philosophy of education, and the ethics of argument. Normally, a (...) fugu will not yield knowledge from known premises. But if the reasoning is only slightly fallacious, they do yield knowledge. These mild fugus show that we can gain knowledge by invalid reasoning. This is a conservative resource for historians. They want to credit discoveries to Euclid rather than those who made minor corrections to his proofs, such as David Hilbert. We also benefit from this practice of grandfathering in old standards of knowledge attribution. For we can compete spiritedly for priority. We do not need to worry that credit will instead go to future scholars who will make the minor amendments needed to raise present proofs to a future standard of demonstration. (shrink)

But a winner must supply a nonevasive picture with no limit on potential detail--a purely imagistic depiction that does not rely on a mere description of an impossibility. There are logical minded philosophers from David Hume to Saul Kripke who think the prize cannot be won: What is conceivable is possible and whatever is depicted is thereby conceived, therefore, impossibilities cannot be depicted. Yet there is a rich aesthetics of inconsistency, best known through M. C. Escher. So I proceed (...) with the fine print for the competition. (shrink)

Ockham's razor is popularly phrased as a prohibition against multiplying entities beyond necessity. This prohibition should extend to the receptacle for these entities. To state my thesis more positively and precisely, both qualitative and quantitative parsimony apply to space, time, and possibility. All other things equal, we ought to prefer a hypothesis that postulates less space. Smaller is better. Admittedly, scientists are ambivalent about economizing on the void. They praise simplicity. Yet astronomers have a history of helping themselves to as (...) much empty space as they wish—staggering common sense with the vastness of the universe. This largesse is abetted by an aesthetic bias for sublime hypotheses. Whereas abductions based on beauty converge with parsimony, abductions based on the sublime diverge from parsimony. Awe stifles our inner accountant. Both types of abduction are popular. Both are dubious because we lack independent assurance that the universe is beautiful or sublime. The analogy between space and time supports an extension of parsimony to time. Uniformitarian geologists regarded time as a free resource. However, geologists and cosmologists must justify their postulation of an immense past. Possibility follows suit. Contrary to David Lewis, possible worlds should be minimized. Parsimony about possibilities provides a rationale for parsimony about absences. Absences are possibilities that are not actual. So proliferation of absences entails proliferation of possibilities. We should admit only those absences which do explanatory work. (shrink)

When the United States Supreme Court used the expression “with all deliberate speed” in the case Brown v. Board of Education, it did so presumably because of its vagueness. Many jurists, economists, linguists, and philosophers accordingly assume that vagueness can be strategically used to one’s advantage. Roy Sorensen has cast doubt on this assumption by strictly differentiating between vagueness and generality. Indeed, most arguments for the value of vagueness go through only when vagueness is confused with generality. Sorensen (...) claims that vagueness – correctly understood – has no function in law inter alia because judges lie systematically when confronted with borderline cases. I argue that both claims are wrong. First, judges do not need to resort to lying when adjudicating borderline cases, and even if they had to, this would not render vagueness useless. Secondly, vagueness has several important functions in law such as the reduction of decision costs and the delegation of power. Although many functions commonly attributed to the vagueness of legal expressions are in fact due to their generality or other semantic properties, vagueness has at least these two functions in law. (shrink)

Explores how Deleuze's philosophy can help us to understand our digital and biotechnological futuresIn a world where our lives are increasingly mediated by technologies, we need to pay more attention to Deleuze's often explicit focus onour reliance on the machine and the technological. These essays are a collective and determined effort to explore the usefulness Deleuze in thinking about our present and future relianceon technology. At the same time, they take seriously a style of thinking that negotiates between philosophy, science (...) and art.ContributorsWilliam Bogard, Abigail Bray, Ian Buchanan, Verena Conley, Ian Cook, Tauel Harper, Timothy Murray, Saul Newman, Luciana Parisi, Patricia Pisters, Mark Poster, Horst Ruthrof, David Savat, Bent Meier Sorensen and Eugene Thacker.". (shrink)

Artificial intelligence is rapidly entering our daily lives in the form of driverless cars, automated online assistants and virtual reality experiences. In so doing, AI has already substituted human employment in areas that were previously thought to be uncomputerizable. Based on current trends, the technological displacement of labor is predicted to be significant in the future – if left unchecked this will lead to catastrophic societal unemployment levels. This paper presents a means to mitigate future technological unemployment through the introduction (...) of a Basic Income scheme, accompanied by reforms in school curricula and retraining programs. Our proposal argues that such a scheme can be funded by a special tax on those industries that make use of robotic labour; it includes a practical roadmap that would see a government take this proposal from the conceptual phase and implement it nationwide in the span of one decade. (shrink)

In this book, which thoroughly revises and greatly expands his classic work Sameness and Substance, David Wiggins retrieves and refurbishes in the light of twentieth-century logic and logical theory certain conceptions of identity, of substance and of persistence through change that philosophy inherits from its past. In this new version, he vindicates the absoluteness, necessity, determinateness and all or nothing character of identity against rival conceptions. He defends a form of essentialism that he calls individuative essentialism, and then a (...) form of realism that he calls conceptualist realism. In a final chapter he advocates a human being-based conception of the identity and individuation of persons, arguing that any satisfactory account of personal memory must make reference to the life of the rememberer himself. This important book will appeal to a wide range of readers in metaphysics, philosophical logic, and analytic philosophy. (shrink)

Lipsey and Lancaster's "general theory of second best" is widely thought to have significant implications for applied theorizing about the institutions and policies that most effectively implement abstract normative principles. It is also widely thought to have little significance for theorizing about which abstract normative principles we ought to implement. Contrary to this conventional wisdom, I show how the second-best theorem can be extended to myriad domains beyond applied normative theorizing, and in particular to more abstract theorizing about the normative (...) principles we should aim to implement. I start by separating the mathematical model used to prove the second-best theorem from its familiar economic interpretation. I then develop an alternative normative-theoretic interpretation of the model, which yields a novel second best theorem for idealistic normative theory. My method for developing this interpretation provides a template for developing additional interpretations that can extend the reach of the second-best theorem beyond normative theoretical domains. I also show how, within any domain, the implications of the second-best theorem are more specific than is typically thought. I conclude with some brief remarks on the value of mathematical models for conceptual exploration. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence has historically been conceptualized in anthropomorphic terms. Some algorithms deploy biomimetic designs in a deliberate attempt to effect a sort of digital isomorphism of the human brain. Others leverage more general learning strategies that happen to coincide with popular theories of cognitive science and social epistemology. In this paper, I challenge the anthropomorphic credentials of the neural network algorithm, whose similarities to human cognition I argue are vastly overstated and narrowly construed. I submit that three alternative supervised learning (...) methods—namely lasso penalties, bagging, and boosting—offer subtler, more interesting analogies to human reasoning as both an individual and a social phenomenon. Despite the temptation to fall back on anthropomorphic tropes when discussing AI, however, I conclude that such rhetoric is at best misleading and at worst downright dangerous. The impulse to humanize algorithms is an obstacle to properly conceptualizing the ethical challenges posed by emerging technologies. (shrink)

Short-circuit evaluation denotes the semantics of propositional connectives in which the second argument is evaluated only if the first argument does not suffice to determine the value of the expression. Free short-circuit logic is the equational logic in which compound statements are evaluated from left to right, while atomic evaluations are not memorised throughout the evaluation, i.e. evaluations of distinct occurrences of an atom in a compound statement may yield different truth values. We provide a simple semantics for free short-circuit (...) logic and an independent axiomatisation. Finally, we discuss evaluation strategies, some other SCLs, and side effects. (shrink)

The issue of knowing what it means for a group to have collective beliefs is being discussed more and more in contemporary philosophy of the social sciences and philosophy of mind. Margaret Gilbert’s reconsideration of Durkheim’s viewpoint in the framework of the plural subject’s account is one of the most famous. This has implications in the history and the sociology of science—as well asin the history and sociology of philosophy—although Gilbert only outlined them in the former fields and said nothing (...) about the latter. Symmetrically but independently, a historian of science, Mara Beller, has recently challenged Kuhn’s conception of the role of consensus in sciences in a brilliant analysis by carefully studying the history of Copenhagen School of Quantum Mechanics. Not only does she show the role of disagreement and controversies (doubting whether there was any collective belief characteristic in this group of physicists), but she even shakes up the very idea of individual beliefs. Each scientist (Heisenberg, Bohr, etc.) could be seen as divided into several selves. This paper contends that these two conceptions open important new horizons in several domains, especially if they are linked together. The paper assesses this claim in the light of empirical examples like the Vienna Circle, Copenhagen School, and, eventually, Cartesian philosophy. (shrink)

A collection of 14 essays honoring the life and work of Oxford philosopher Wiggins touching on topics from ancient philosophy to ethics, metaphysics and the theory of meaning. The contributing scholars debate many of the seminal issues of Wiggins' work, including the determinancy of distinctness, relative identity, naturalism in ethics, logic and truth in moral judgments, and the practical wisdom of Aristotle. The collection uniquely features replies by Wiggins to each of the papers. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, (...) OR. (shrink)

Drawing on work of the past decade, this volume brings together articles from the philosophy, history, and sociology of science, and many other branches of the biological sciences. The volume delves into the latest theoretical controversies as well as burning questions of contemporary social importance. The issues considered include the nature of evolutionary theory, biology and ethics, the challenge from religion, and the social implications of biology today (in particular the Human Genome Project).

In this book, Sorensen presents the first general theory of the thought experiment. He analyses a wide variety of thought experiments, ranging from aesthetics to zoology, and explores what thought experiments are, how they work, and what their positive and negative aspects are. Sorensen also sets his theory within an evolutionary framework and integrates recent advances in experimental psychology and the history of science.

You face two buttons. Pushing one will destroy Greensboro. Pushing the other will save it. There is no way for you to know which button saves and which destroys. What ought you to do? Answer: You ought to make the correct guess and push the button that saves Greensboro. Second question: Do you have an obligation to push the correct button?

Gilbert (2000) examined the issue of collective intentionality in science. Her paper consisted of a conceptual analysis of the negative role of collective belief, consensus, and joint commitment in science, with a brief discussion of a case study investigated by Thagard (1998a, 1998b). I argue that Gilbert's concepts have to be refined to be empirically more relevant. Specifically, I distinguish between different kinds of joint commitments. I base my analysis on a close examination of Thagard's example, the discovery ofHelicobacter pylori, (...) and two other historical cases involving the Copenhagen school of quantum mechanics and the Austrian school of economics. I also argue that it is difficult to fulfill the condition of common knowledge, even in Gilbert's weak sense. I conclude by raising serious doubts about the very possibility of a certain type of joint commitment, which I refer to as an implicit joint commitment. (shrink)

L ’ histoire du droit de la guerre est marquée par trois temps principaux.Ainsi, de la période antique jusqu ’ au XIX e siècle se déploie la doctrine du justum bellum,visant à moraliser la guerre. Ensuite, au XIX e siècle, l ’ affirmation des souverainetésouvre la porte à la liberté d ’ user de la guerre comme instrument de politique internationale. Enfin, au terme de la Première Guerre mondiale, la volonté d ’ apporter une réponsenormative au recours à la force (...) s ’ est fait jour, donnant naissance au jus ad bellum. Cetteévolution juridique fut accompagnée d ’ une évolution sémantique qui, au XXI e siècle,conduira à une curieuse inversion conceptuelle. (shrink)