In this article, I argue that Adorno’s conception of a possible reconciliation with nature is neither one of complete synthesis, nor absolute alienation. The most elaborated formulations regarding the possibility of such a reconciliation, which would be tantamount to a liberated nature, are to be found in Adorno’s aesthetics, and particularly in his discussion of the art–nature relation. The article engages Simon Hailwood’s recent criticism of the concept of the Anthropocene and his discussion of Adorno’s conception of the domination of (...) nature. While I concur with Hailwood’s insistence on the idea of “alienation from nature” in order to reach a more appropriate understanding of our current predicament, his analysis of Adorno’s take on this idea is problematic. I conclude by discussing another recent work on our troubled relationship with nature. While more attentive to artistic expressions than Hailwood’s work, Andreas Malm’s The Progress of This Stormconstitutes an inverted parallel to the former through its negligence of Adorno’s contribution to the discussion of the human–nature dialectic. (shrink)

Ruben Östlund’s film Force Majeure was mostly received as a depiction of the crisis of masculinity. And it is, but that particular theme is also placed within a larger context concerning questions of value, understanding, order, and control, questions asked not only on a thematic level but also through cutting, framing, and the use of camera views. Not accepting any simple dichotomy between form and meaning, Force Majeure places itself firmly in an avant- garde and modernist tradition. Thereby the film (...) is also related to this tradition’s ambition of investigating Western thought, knowledge and art anew, problematising given forms of rational thinking in order for something new to emerge. In the wake of World War II it was, for thinkers like Adorno, Foucault, Stockhausen, and Boulez, seen as unavoidable and urgent to deconstruct the conventions and norms that had made Auschwitz possible. It is still urgent. This article takes its starting point in the connections between avant-garde serialism in music, Foucault’s serialist methods of research and Deleuze’s theories of modernist film, in order to grasp how the aesthetics of Force Majeure continues to deconstruct. (shrink)

The article analyses the constitution of subjectivity in Ruben Östlund’s film Force Majeure. At the centre of attention stands the male protagonist who is uncapable of reconciling his inner nature with the external expectations. If the film may be un- derstood as a critique of existing middle-class conventions, it also reproduces a highly conventional ideal of the self-identical subject. The article argues that this confusion or irony is an expression of a Cartesian subject – still prevalent in the film – (...) in crisis. A neglected aspect of Descartes’ theory is that the autonomy of the subjects presupposes the existence of God. The problem for Östlund’s char- acters is that there is no God. Still, they act as if he, or as if any au- thority might, legitimize their subjectivity. Thus, the whole existence becomes a series of performances. The idea of an inner nature cor- responds with the notion of an outer nature. The latter is certainly very present in Force Majeure, but at the same time this nature is constantly problematized. On an allegorical level, the film may thus be read as a comment on the Anthropocene, a state where we no longer know neither what “nature”, nor “culture” is. (shrink)

This article is a discussion of Theodor W. Adorno’s comment, in the beginning of ‘The Essay as Form’, that interpretations of essays are over-interpretations. I argue that this statement is programmatic, and should be understood in the light of Adorno’s essayistic ideal of configuration, his notion of truth, and his idea of the enigmatic character of art. In order to reveal how this over-interpreting appears in practice, I turn to Adorno’s essay on Kafka. According to Adorno, the reader of Kafka (...) is caught in an aporia: Kafka’s work cannot be interpreted, yet every single sentence calls for interpretation. This paradox is related to the gestures and images in Kafka’s work: like Walter Benjamin, Adorno means that they contain sedimented, forgotten experiences. Instead of interpreting these images, Adorno visualizes the experiences indirectly by presenting images of his own. His own essay becomes gestural. (shrink)

This study examines the role of executive compensation in public governance. We collect data on corruption cases that involve top-level executives in Chinese listed state-controlled firms. We find a significant positive relationship between underpayment of executives and the likelihood of an investigation into corrupt behavior. We also show that corruption is positively associated with firm performance and that the relationship between underpayment of executives and corruption is influenced by firm performance, suggesting that top managers are more likely to engage in (...) illicit behavior if they are compensated poorly while the firms under their control perform well. Finally, we find that pay-performance sensitivity decreases when top executives are involved in corruption investigations, indicating a lack of pecuniary incentives. Our empirical findings point toward an important relationship between executive compensation and corrupt behavior, thus providing valuable input to the understanding of executive pay and its effects in China’s state sector. (shrink)

The article analyses the constitution of subjectivity in Ruben Östlund’s film Force Majeure. At the centre of attention stands the male protagonist who is uncapable of reconciling his inner nature with the external expectations. If the film may be un- derstood as a critique of existing middle-class conventions, it also reproduces a highly conventional ideal of the self-identical subject. The article argues that this confusion or irony is an expression of a Cartesian subject – still prevalent in the film – (...) in crisis. A neglected aspect of Descartes’ theory is that the autonomy of the subjects presupposes the existence of God. The problem for Östlund’s char- acters is that there is no God. Still, they act as if he, or as if any au- thority might, legitimize their subjectivity. Thus, the whole existence becomes a series of performances. The idea of an inner nature cor- responds with the notion of an outer nature. The latter is certainly very present in Force Majeure, but at the same time this nature is constantly problematized. On an allegorical level, the film may thus be read as a comment on the Anthropocene, a state where we no longer know neither what “nature”, nor “culture” is. (shrink)

This guide accompanies the following article: ‘Logic and Divine Simplicity’. Philosophy Compass 6/4 : pp. 282–294, doi: Author’s IntroductionFirst‐order formalizations of classical theistic doctrines are increasingly used in contemporary work in philosophy of religion and philosophical theology, as a means for clarifying the conceptual structure of the doctrines and their role in inferential procedures. But there are a variety of different ways in which such doctrines have been formalized, each representing the doctrines as having different conceptual structures. Moreover, the adequacy (...) of such formalizations as such has, at least with respect to some classes of doctrines, been disputed. One reason for disputing their adequacy derives from the conceptual impact of classical theism’s doctrine of divine simplicity.Author RecommendsFrege, Gottlob ‘Begriffsschrift: a formula language of pure thought,’ trans. Michael Beany, in The Frege Reader, ed. Beany. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 47–78. The preface contains interesting remarks about the purpose of formalization as understood by the chief pioneer of modern formal logic. These remarks are also connected by Frege to his views on the relation between thought and language more generally.Russell, Bertrand, and Whitehead, A.N. Principia Mathematica, Vol. I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.The preface and first section of the long introduction contain remarks on the purpose and advantages of formalization. Chapter 1 of the introduction contains what is probably one of the first formalizations ever of a theistic doctrine, and is given in terms of a definite description analysis.Suppes, Patrick ‘The Desirability of Formalization in Science,’The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 65, No. 20, pp. 651–64.Clear and concise discussion of some of the advantages of formalization in philosophical inquiry, written by a prominent contemporary American philosopher‐logician.Nieznański, Edward ‘The Beginnings of Formalization in Theology,’ in Advances in Scientific Philosophy: Essays in Honour of Paul Weingartner, eds. Gerhard Schurz and Gregory J.W. Dorn. Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Ropodi, pp. 551–9.A valuable paper that narrates, among other things, the programme of formalizing theistic doctrines that emerged in Poland in the 1920s under the influence of the Lvov‐Warsaw School. Various examples of formalizations are also given.Quine, W.V.O. Mathematical Logic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.In Section 27 of this classic study, Quine offers a formalization of theistic doctrines which seeks to avoid the difficulties of earlier formalizations by means of a subtle extensional singleton set analysis. The proposal has not won many adherents, but is worthy of careful study nonetheless.Woleński, Jan ‘Theism, Fideism, Atheism, Agnosticism,’ in Logic, Ethics and All That Jazz: Essays in Honour of Jordan Howard Sobel, eds. Lars‐Göran Johansson, Jan Österberg, and Rysiek Sliwinski. Uppsala: Uppsala Philosophical Studies, pp. 387–400.A concise but lucid survey of some attempts to formalize theistic doctrines and some problems besetting these attempts. Woleński also proposes his own method of formalization, which could be described as a simplified version of Quine’s method in Mathematical Logic.Bocheński, Joseph The Logic of Religion. New York: New York University Press.The first book‐length treatment of the relation between modern logic and theism. It covers much ground, and remains very readable.Alston, William P. ‘Religious Language and Verificationism,’ in The Rationality of Theism, eds. Paul Moser and Paul Copan. London: Routledge, pp. 17–34.Identifies some problems with attempts at articulating theistic doctrines by means of subject‐predicate language. Highly relevant to formalizations of theistic doctrines, even though this topic is not dealt with explicitly.Kraal, Anders ‘Logic and Divine Simplicity,’Philosophy Compass.Offers a survey of three main methods of formalizing theistic doctrines, and of some variants of these methods. Argues that certain formalizations of theistic doctrines are bound to be rejected as conceptually inadequate by all who understand the doctrines at hand within the framework provided by the traditional doctrine of divine simplicity.Sample Syllabus Week I: The Idea of Formalization and the Project of Formalizing Theistic Doctrines Reading:Frege, Gottlob ‘Begriffsschrift: a formula language of pure thought,’ trans. Michael Beany, in The Frege Reader, ed. Beany. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 47–78. Russell, Bertrand, and Whitehead, A.N. Principia Mathematica, Vol. I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Suppes, Patrick ‘The Desirability of Formalization in Science,’The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 65, No. 20, pp. 651–64.Nieznański, Edward ‘The Beginnings of Formalization in Theology,’ in Advances in Scientific Philosophy: Essays in Honour of Paul Weingartner, eds. Gerhard Schurz and Gregory J.W. Dorn. Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Ropodi, pp. 551–9. Week II: Formalizing Theistic Doctrines: Three Alternative Methods Reading:Woleński, Jan ‘Theism, Fideism, Atheism, Agnosticism,’ in Logic, Ethics and All That Jazz: Essays in Honour of Jordan Howard Sobel, eds. Lars‐Göran Johansson, Jan Österberg, and Rysiek Sliwinski. Uppsala: Uppsala Philosophical Studies, pp. 387–400.Russell, Bertrand, and Whitehead, A.N. Principia Mathematica, Vol. I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Quine, W.V.O. Mathematical Logic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Week III: Arguments for and Against Some Formalizations of Theistic Doctrines Reading:Bocheński, Joseph The Logic of Religion. New York: New York University Press. Kraal, Anders ‘Logic and Divine Simplicity,’Philosophy Compass, Vol. 6, No. 4, pp. 282–94.Focus Questions1 What do Frege, Russell and Whitehead, and Suppes understand the purpose or purposes of logical formalization to be, and why do they think formalization can achieve these purposes?2 Woleński sketches some simple ways of formalizing theistic doctrines such as ‘God exists’ or ‘God is almighty’ in terms of 1‐place predicates which he subsequently abandons in favour of other methods. What reasons lead him to abandon these more simple methods of formalization?3 What are the advantages of the definite description formalization of theistic doctrines offered by Russell and Whitehead?4 Quine offers a subtle formalization of the theistic doctrine ‘God exists’ in terms of singleton sets. What problems are Quine’s formalization intended to accommodate, and how does it seek to accommodate them?5 Which relative merits or demerits are there in Bocheński’s and Kraal’s respective arguments for and against the adequacy of certain formalizations of theistic doctrines? (shrink)

The article takes the first steps towards a general theory of civil society elites, a concept not fully developed in either elite or civil society research. This conceptual gap hampers academic and public understanding of the dynamics at the top of civil society. To address this, the authors rely on the theoretical framework of Pierre Bourdieu to build a theory of civil society elites as managers of civic capital. This role is illustrated through examples from the differently institutionalised UK and (...) Nordic civil societies. The first part of the article introduces the notion of civic capital and its emergence during the 19th century. The second part focuses on elite positions in civil society fields, demonstrating how civil society elites, as managers of civic capital, navigate between their constituents and other elite groups. These elites wield the power to consecrate social relations while misrecognising their own symbolic and economic gains. Recent scandals in the climate movement and UK and Nordic civil societies shed light on the symbolic aspects of the positions of civil society elites. This comprehensive analysis contributes to elite and civil society research and enriches public discussions about the role of civil society leaders in society. (shrink)

The introduction of new medical treatments based on invasive technologies has often been surrounded by both hopes and fears. Hope, since a new intervention can create new opportunities either in terms of providing a cure for the disease or impairment at hand; or as alleviation of symptoms. Fear, since an invasive treatment involving implanting a medical device can result in unknown complications such as hardware failure and undesirable medical consequences. However, hopes and fears may also arise due to the cultural (...) embeddedness of technology, where a therapy due to ethical, social, political and religious concerns could be perceived as either a blessing or a threat. While Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) for treatment resistant depression (TRD) is still in its cradle, it is important to be proactive and try to scrutinize both surfacing hopes and fears. Patients will not benefit if a promising treatment is banned or avoided due to unfounded fears, nor will they benefit if DBS is used without scrutinizing the arguments which call for caution. Hence blind optimism is equally troublesome. We suggest that specificity, both in terms of a detailed account of relevant scientific concerns as well as ethical considerations, could be a way to analyse expressed concerns regarding DBS for TRD. This approach is particularly fruitful when applied to hopes and fears evoked by DBS for TRD, since it can reveal if our comprehension of DBS for TRD suffer from various biases which may remain unnoticed at first glance. We suggest that such biases exist, albeit a further analysis is needed to explore this issue in full. (shrink)

The article discusses the relation between political office and the rule of law in Plato’s dialogue Statesman. Taking its starting-point from an observation about the Statesman’s peculiar approach to constitutional analysis, the article argues that what Plato is concerned to show is how the reconceptualisation of the role of law in government proposed in that dialogue has important implications for what we take the role of the institution of office-holding to be. While Greek political tradition held the main aim of (...) archē to be the formal circumscription and control of official power within a constitutional order, Plato insists that it should primarily be understood as ensuring that the exercise of political power approximates, by means of law, the ideal rule by a political expert. The article ends by pointing out how this reading complements another recent discussion of office-holding in the Statesman. (shrink)

Taking up the controversial issue of the value of the laws of non-ideal cities in Plato’s Statesman, the paper argues for a modified version of the traditional interpretation, as defended against Christopher Rowe’s influential criticism. The paper agrees with the traditional view that the established laws of non-ideal cities are assumed to be good laws and that the Eleatic Stranger’s justification for this assumption can be found in 300b. But it also argues that this defence of the traditional interpretation must (...) be based on a revised understanding of the role of legislation in the Stranger’s conception of ideal rule. The unique contribution of the expert to good government consists in his distinctive ability to judge what is appropriate in each case, not in his work as legislator, which, on closer inspection, turns out to be based on the very same ancestral traditions that the second best city must resort to. (shrink)

Exploring Textual Action questions how we analyse works of art after the performative turn and shows how the interplay of performativity (textual action), space and topography, and the converging of genres and art forms is essential in modern drama, theatre, prose fiction, poetry and film. The volume also fosters a keen concern for the development of congenial theory. Its 14 detailed essays analyse works of art ranging from Balzac, Melville and George Eliot, to Breton, Kafka, Benjamin, Blixen and Woolf; and (...) from W.C. Williams, Bresson and Scorsese, to Sarraute, Duras, Reygadas, Dumont and Waltz. The approach of these studies discloses the art works as creative and dynamic utterances with active and shaping forces so powerful, and consequential, that they have the potential to transform human perception and blur clear distinctions between art and real life. Using an alternative and dynamic method and suggesting a direction towards the detailed analysis of literature, art, media and culture, Exploring Textual Action addresses current debates within the humanities. (shrink)

1. Fairness is about the just distribution of society's resources, and in ML, the main resource being distributed is model performance, e.g. the translation quality produced by machine translation...

This study is part of a comprehensive investigation of ethical thinking among male and female physicians and nurses. Nine women physicians with different levels of expertise, working in various wards in paediatric clinics at two of the university hospitals in Norway, narrated 37 stories about their experience of being in ethically difficult care situations. All of the interviewees’ narrations were concerned with problems relating to both action ethics and relation ethics. The main focus was on problems in a relation ethics (...) perspective. The most common themes in an action ethics perspective were overtreatment and withholding treatment. The more experienced physicians reasoned differently from the group of less experienced physicians and they coped with pressure in different ways. The less experienced physicians disclosed their professional experience yet seemed uncertain, while putting on an air of certainty, but the more experienced physicians disclosed both their professional and personal experience of caregiving and they seemed to allow themselves to feel uncertain in their certainty. Both groups emphasized a need for deep discussion between colleagues about their being in ethically difficult care situations. (shrink)

Indledning til “Om spørgsmålet: Hvad er oplysning?” af Moses Mendelssohn.

The prospect of using memory modifying technologies raises interesting and important normative concerns. We first point out that those developing desirable memory modifying technologies should keep in mind certain technical and user-limitation issues. We next discuss certain normative issues that the use of these technologies can raise such as truthfulness, appropriate moral reaction, self-knowledge, agency, and moral obligations. Finally, we propose that as long as individuals using these technologies do not harm others and themselves in certain ways, and as long (...) as there is no prima facie duty to retain particular memories, it is up to individuals to determine the permissibility of particular uses of these technologies. (shrink)

Head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG) is one of the most prominent theories employed in deep parsing of natural language. Many linguistic theories are arguably best formalized in extensions of modal or dynamic logic (Keller, Feature logics, infinitary descriptions and grammar, 1993; Kracht, Linguistics Philos 18:401–458, 1995; Moss and Tiede, In: Blackburn, van Benthem, and Wolther (eds.) Handbook of modal logic, 2006), and HPSG seems to be no exception. Adequate extensions of dynamic logic have not been studied in detail, however; the (...) most important aspect is the reference to sets of substructures. In this paper, an adequate extension is identified, and some important results are established: Satisfiability is highly undecidable, and model checking is shown to be in EXPTIME and PSPACE-hard. A fragment with polynomial time model checking procedures is identified; it is shown to cover considerable fragments of HPSG. (shrink)

The political outlook of the so-called ‘Anonymus Iamblichi’ has been a subject of controversy in the scholarly literature, with some commentators judging him to be a committed democrat, while others see in him a partisan of aristocracy or even oligarchy. This disagreement is not surprising, for the text contains passages that seem to pull in opposite directions. The article suggests that we move beyond the one-dimensional oligarch-or-democrat model traditionally employed and instead approach the issue from a fresh angle, applying the (...) more nuanced typology for understanding ancient social criticism developed by Josiah Ober.The article begins by situating the author within the social landscape of classical Athens. The resulting characterization presents the author as a representative of a distinctive social type: the Athenian ‘rich quietist’, who prefers private economic endeavours to engagement in public affairs, and who is ideologically committed to democratic government but also highly critical of how democratic society treats its wealthy citizens. This characterization helps make better sense of the seemingly contradictory political indications in the text. In particular, fragments 6 and 7 should be read as a single line of argument, which takes the form of an ‘immanent critique’ of contemporary Athenian democracy. According to ‘Anonymus Iamblichi’, democratic society rightly praises the rule of law as a distinctive democratic value, but it falls disappointingly short of that ideal in its treatment of its own wealthy elite citizens. (shrink)

Anthropogenic climate change is arguably one of the biggest problems that confront us today. There is ample evidence that climate change is likely to affect adversely many aspects of life for all people around the world, and that existing solutions such as geoengineering might be too risky and ordinary behavioural and market solutions might not be sufficient to mitigate climate change. In this paper, we consider a new kind of solution to climate change, what we call human engineering, which involves (...) biomedical modifications of humans so that they can mitigate and/or adapt to climate change. We argue that human engineering is potentially less risky than geoengineering and that it could help behavioural and market solutions succeed in mitigating climate change. We also consider some possible ethical concerns regarding human engineering such as its safety, the implications of human engineering for our children and society, and we argue that these concerns can be addressed. Our upshot is that human engineering deserves further consideration in the debate about climate change. (shrink)

Deep neural networks are said to be opaque, impeding the development of safe and trustworthy artificial intelligence, but where this opacity stems from is less clear. What are the sufficient properties for neural network opacity? Here, I discuss five common properties of deep neural networks and two different kinds of opacity. Which of these properties are sufficient for what type of opacity? I show how each kind of opacity stems from only one of these five properties, and then discuss to (...) what extent the two kinds of opacity can be mitigated by explainability methods. (shrink)

What does it mean that the author increasingly turns into a commodity? The article contains a discussion of some academic responses – taken from celebrity studies and autofiction studies – to this tendency. The texts discussed share an effort to rethink authorship, but nonetheless the implicit result is a reinforcement of a traditional, romantic notion of the author. Above all there is a lack of reflection on subjectivity in the authorship discourse, where concepts like “author”, “subject”, “self” often are treated (...) as synonymous. In that sense the academic responses are part of the commodification they ought to be studying. On another level this commodification could be understood as an expression of a more general crisis of subjectivity: there is a need of stories about autonomous subjects just because of a more extensive desubjectivation. Finally the article turns to Theodor W. Adorno and Jacques Rancière in order to find a more dynamic and apt understanding of subjectivity. (shrink)

Most, if not all, philosophers agree that computers cannot learn what words refers to from raw text alone. While many attacked Searle’s Chinese Room thought experiment, no one seemed to question this most basic assumption. For how can computers learn something that is not in the data? Emily Bender and Alexander Koller ( 2020 ) recently presented a related thought experiment—the so-called Octopus thought experiment, which replaces the rule-based interlocutor of Searle’s thought experiment with a neural language model. The Octopus (...) thought experiment was awarded a best paper prize and was widely debated in the AI community. Again, however, even its fiercest opponents accepted the premise that what a word refers to cannot be induced in the absence of direct supervision. I will argue that what a word refers to _is_ probably learnable from raw text alone. Here’s why: higher-order concept co-occurrence statistics are stable across languages and across modalities, because language use (universally) reflects the world we live in (which is relatively stable). Such statistics are sufficient to establish what words refer to. My conjecture is supported by a literature survey, a thought experiment, and an actual experiment. (shrink)

Landgrebe and Smith :2061–2081, 2021) present an unflattering diagnosis of recent advances in what they call language-centric artificial intelligence—perhaps more widely known as natural language processing: The models that are currently employed do not have sufficient expressivity, will not generalize, and are fundamentally unable to induce linguistic semantics, they say. The diagnosis is mainly derived from an analysis of the widely used Transformer architecture. Here I address a number of misunderstandings in their analysis, and present what I take to be (...) a more adequate analysis of the ability of Transformer models to learn natural language semantics. To avoid confusion, I distinguish between inferential and referential semantics. Landgrebe and Smith ’s analysis of the Transformer architecture’s expressivity and generalization concerns inferential semantics. This part of their diagnosis is shown to rely on misunderstandings of technical properties of Transformers. Landgrebe and Smith also claim that referential semantics is unobtainable for Transformer models. In response, I present a non-technical discussion of techniques for grounding Transformer models, giving them referential semantics, even in the absence of supervision. I also present a simple thought experiment to highlight the mechanisms that would lead to referential semantics, and discuss in what sense models that are grounded in this way, can be said to understand language. Finally, I discuss the approach Landgrebe and Smith advocate for, namely manual specification of formal grammars that associate linguistic expressions with logical form. (shrink)