Human-centered explainable AI (HCXAI) advocates for the integration of social aspects into AI explanations. Central to the HCXAI discourse is the Social Transparency (ST) framework, which aims to make the socio-organizational context of AI systems accessible to their users. In this work, we suggest extending the ST framework to address the risks of social misattributions in Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly in sensitive areas like mental health. In fact LLMs, which are remarkably capable of simulating roles and personas, may lead (...) to mismatches between designers' intentions and users' perceptions of social attributes, risking to promote emotional manipulation and dangerous behaviors, cases of epistemic injustice, and unwarranted trust. To address these issues, we propose enhancing the ST framework with a fifth 'W-question' to clarify the specific social attributions assigned to LLMs by its designers and users. This addition aims to bridge the gap between LLM capabilities and user perceptions, promoting the ethically responsible development and use of LLM-based technology. (shrink)

PurposeThe COVID-19 lockdown interrupted normal daily activities, which may have led to an increase in sedentary behavior. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the level of physical activity among Swiss office workers.MethodsOffice workers from two Swiss organizations, aged 18–65 years, were included. Baseline data from January 2020 before the COVID-19 pandemic became effective in Switzerland were compared with follow-up data during the lockdown phase in April 2020. Levels of physical activity were (...) assessed using the International Physical Activity Questionnaire. Paired sample t-tests or Wilcoxon signed-rank test were performed for statistical analysis.ResultsData from 76 participants were analyzed. Fifty-four participants were female. The mean age was 42.7 years at baseline. About 75% of the participants met the recommendations on minimal physical activity, both before the COVID-19 pandemic and during the lockdown. Weak statistical evidence for a decline in total physical activity in metabolic equivalent of task minutes per week was found, with no evidence for a decrease in the three types of activity: walking, moderate-intensity activity and vigorous-intensity activity. Across the three categories “high,” “moderate,” and “low” physical activity, 17% of the participants became less active during the lockdown while 29% became more active.ConclusionThe COVID-19 pandemic did not result in a reduction in total physical activity levels among a sample of Swiss office workers during the first weeks of lockdown. Improved work-life balance and working times may have contributed to this finding.Clinical Trial Registrationwww.ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT04169646. Registered 15 November 2019 – Retrospectively registered, https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04169646. (shrink)

AimThe functional prognosis of patients after coma following either cardiac arrest or acute structural brain injury is often uncertain. These patients are associated with high mortality and disability. N20 and N70 somatosensory evoked potentials are used to predict prognosis. We evaluated the utility of SSEP as an early indicator of long-term prognosis in these patients.MethodsThis was a retrospective cohort study of patients admitted to the intensive care unit with a diagnosis of coma after CA or ABI. An SSEP study was (...) performed, including N20 and N70 at 24–72 h, after coma onset. Functional recovery was assessed 6–12 months later using the modified Glasgow scale. The study was approved by our local research ethics committee.ResultsIn the CA and ABI groups, the absence of N20 or N70 was a strong indicator of poor outcome. Conversely, the presence of N70 was an indicator of a good outcome.ConclusionSomatosensory evoked potentials are useful early prognostic markers with high specificity and sensitivity. Moreover, N70 has additional potential value for improving the prediction of good long-term functional outcomes.Clinical Trial Registration:[https://clinicaltrials.gov/], identifier [2018/01/001]. (shrink)

Evaluating the Knowledge and Practice of Limitation of Therapeutic Effort in Health Workers at a Health Care Institution for Cancer Patients in Medellín, 2018Avaliação do conhecimento e da prática da limitação de esforço terapêutico em equipe de atendimento de uma instituição prestadora de serviços de saúde para pacientes oncológicos de Medellín, 2018Limitation of therapeutic effort is any action that involves suspending or not initiating medical treatment or therapeutic measures in patients who will not receive any clinical benefit. In Latin America, (...) some research has proven a lack of familiarization and disagreement with the subject and its practices. The present study tried to objectify the knowledge of LTE of healthcare personnel at an institute in Medellín using a self-administered survey that allowed conducting a cross-sectional descriptive study with non-probabilistic sampling. Within the results, 56.5 % of respondents understood the concept of LTE, and 90 % applied it actively. However, there were discrepancies regarding the core concepts of the definition and practice.Para citar este artículo / To reference this article / Para citar este artigoVallejo LI, Palacio AM, Marulanda V, Restrepo A, Yepes LA, Valencia NL, Cruz MA. Evaluación del conocimiento y práctica de la limitación del esfuerzo terapéutico en personal asistencial de una institución prestadora de servicios de salud para pacientes oncológicos de Medellín, 2018. 2020;24:177-87. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5294/pebi.2020.24.2.5Recibido: 19/07/2019Aceptado: 08/08/2020Publicado: 27/11/2020. (shrink)

BackgroundEverybody has the right to decide whether to receive specific medical treatment or not and to provide their free, prior and informed consent to do so. As dementia progresses, people with Alzheimer’s dementia (PwAD) can lose their capacity to provide informed consent to complex medical treatment. When the capacity to consent is lost, the autonomy of the affected person can only be guaranteed when an interpretable and valid advance directive exists. Advance directives are not yet common in Germany, and their (...) validity is often questionable. Once the dementia diagnosis has been made, it is assumed to be too late to write an advance directive. One approach used to support the completion of advance directives is ‘Respecting Choices’®—an internationally recognised, evidence-based model of Advance Care Planning (ACP), which, until now, has not been evaluated for the target group of PwAD. This study’s aims include (a) to investigate the proportion of valid advance directives in a memory clinic population of persons with suspected AD, (b) to determine the predictors of valid advance directives, and (c) to examine whether the offer of ACP can increase the proportion of valid advance directives in PwAD.MethodWe intend to recruit at leastN = 250 participants from two memory clinics in 50 consecutive weeks. Of these, the first 25 weeks constitute the baseline phase (no offer of ACP), the following 25 weeks constitute the intervention phase (offer of ACP). The existence and validity of an advance directive will be assessed twice (before and after the memory clinic appointment). Moreover, potential predictors of valid advance directives are assessed.DiscussionThe results of this study will enhance the development of consent procedures for advance directives of PwAD based on the ACP/Respecting Choices (R) approach. Therefore, this project contributes towards increasing the autonomy and inclusion of PwAD and the widespread acceptance of valid advance directives in PwAD.Trial RegistrationDRKS, DRKS00026691, registered 15th of October 2021,https://www.drks.de/drks_web/navigate.do?navigationId=trial.HTML&TRIAL_ID=DRKS00026691. (shrink)

A student's future as a knowledge worker (one who "thinks for a living" with the task of problem solving) is the starting point of this book. With this in mind, the book combines a review of philosophical positions and problems with practical examples and perspectives gained from everyday challenges faced by knowledge workers in their businesses and organizations. Through the use of summative chapters, highlighted key concepts, questions for reflection, and illustrative examples on how to work with the theories presented, (...) the book provides a clear and accessible introduction to this challenging subject. Philosophy of Science primarily addresses students studying language, communication, marketing, economics, and management. However, the survey of the theoretical schools of thought - as well as the discussions on research ethics and the role of research in society - will be equally relevant for other students in the humanities and the natural and social sciences. (shrink)

In their paper, Romanis and Adkins delve into the potential impact of artificial amnion and placenta technology (AAPT) on cases of pregnancy loss1 that do not involve procreative loss. First, they call for more recognition of the negative feelings a person might have due to the premature end of their pregnant state. They claim that, should AAPT minimise concerns about prematurity as anticipated, individuals might feel pressured to opt for partial ectogestation to preserve their or their fetus’ well-being; moreover, they (...) point out that the feelings of loss in the context of AAPT are likely to be worse than the ones reported in neonatal intensive care units cases. Finally, they advocate for care pathways focusing on how the transfer of a fetus to the AAPT could affect the pregnant person, with particular attention to managing the grief potentially caused by the pregnancy loss. I praise the authors for such a call to action—especially since partial ectogestation is expected to become a reality in the short-term future—and I share their demands for additional and more attentive care of (formerly) pregnant patients. However, I am concerned that their approach is so focused on negative feelings towards pregnancy loss that it risks becoming …. (shrink)

Traditionally, the manufacturer/operator of a machine is held (morally and legally) responsible for the consequences of its operation. Autonomous, learning machines, based on neural networks, genetic algorithms and agent architectures, create a new situation, where the manufacturer/operator of the machine is in principle not capable of predicting the future machine behaviour any more, and thus cannot be held morally responsible or liable for it. The society must decide between not using this kind of machine any more (which is not a (...) realistic option), or facing a responsibility gap, which cannot be bridged by traditional concepts of responsibility ascription. (shrink)

Neural devices have the capacity to enable users to regain abilities lost due to disease or injury – for instance, a deep brain stimulator (DBS) that allows a person with Parkinson’s disease to regain the ability to fluently perform movements or a Brain Computer Interface (BCI) that enables a person with spinal cord injury to control a robotic arm. While users recognize and appreciate the technologies’ capacity to maintain or restore their capabilities, the neuroethics literature is replete with examples of (...) concerns expressed about agentive capacities: A perceived lack of control over the movement of a robotic arm might result in an altered sense of feeling responsible for that movement. Clinicians or researchers being able to record and access detailed information of a person’s brain might raise privacy concerns. A disconnect between previous, current, and future understandings of the self might result in a sense of alienation. The ability to receive and interpret sensory feedback might change whether someone trusts the implanted device or themselves. Inquiries into the nature of these concerns and how to mitigate them has produced scholarship that often emphasizes one issue – responsibility, privacy, authenticity, or trust – selectively. However, we believe that examining these ethical dimensions separately fails to capture a key aspect of the experience of living with a neural device. In exploring their interrelations, we argue that their mutual significance for neuroethical research can be adequately captured if they are described under a unified heading of agency. On these grounds, we propose an “Agency Map” which brings together the diverse neuroethical dimensions and their interrelations into a comprehensive framework. With this, we offer a theoretically-grounded approach to understanding how these various dimensions are interwoven in an individual’s experience of agency. (shrink)

Wittgenstein’s and Heidegger’s objections against the possibility of a science of aesthetics were influential on different sides of the analytic/continental divide. Heidegger’s anti-scientism leads him to an alētheic view of artworks which precedes and exceeds any possible aesthetic reduction. Wittgenstein also rejects the relevance of causal explanations, psychological or physiological, to aesthetic questions. The main aim of this paper is to compare Heidegger with Wittgenstein, showing that: there are significant parallels to be drawn between Wittgenstein’s and Heidegger’s anti-scientism about aesthetics, (...) and that their anti-scientism leads both towards partly divergent criticisms of what I will call ‘aestheticism’. The divergence is mainly due to a broader metaphilosophical disagreement concerning appeals to ordinary language. Thus situating the two philosophers’ positions facilitates a possible critical dialogue between analytic and continental approaches in aesthetics. (shrink)

Anche se siamo comunemente abituati a pensare alla scienza come a un qualcosa di assolutamente atemporale e indipendente da tutto, in realtà essa è profondamente influenzata dalla cultura e dalla società del tempo in cui vive. Infatti né la scienza è isolabile dalla società, né la società è isolabile dalla scienza, tanto meno come si sta configurando oggi. Per approfondire questi aspetti, esistono però due visioni antagoniste che bisogna superare: secondo la visione scolastica, retaggio del positivismo ottocentesco ancora molto diffuso (...) fra scienziati e pubblico di non esperti, la scienza è conoscenza senza soggetto conoscente. All'opposto, la visione cinica della scienza, sull'onda di talune elaborazioni della sociologia della scienza, la riduce a nient'altro che a una costruzione di soggetti che partecipano al gioco scientifico, una cultura come altre e da "mediare", e comunque una conoscenza relativa, se non frutto di una costruzione puramente soggettiva, arbitraria, ideologica. Un'analisi della costituzione sociale della scienza può, invece, mirare a un'indagine scientifica sulla scienza proprio configurando una relatività della conoscenza che supera sia l'assolutismo idealistico sia il relativismo soggettivistico. (shrink)

The problem of intentional inexistence arises because the following (alleged) intuitions are mutually conflicting: it seems that sometimes we think about things that do not exist; it seems that intentionality is a relation between a thinker and what such a thinker thinks about; it seems that relations entail the existence of what they relate. In this paper, I argue for what I call a radical relationist solution. First, I contend that the extant arguments for the view that relations entail the (...) existence of their relata are wanting. In this regard, I defend a kind of pluralism about relations according to which more than one kind of relation involves non-existents. Second, I contend that there are reasons to maintain that all thoughts are relations between thinkers and the things they are about. More accurately, I contend that the radical relationist solution is to be preferred to both the intentional content solution (as developed by Crane) and the adverbial property solution (as developed by Kriegel). Finally, I argue that once the distinction between thinking “X” and thinking about X has been drawn, the radical relationist solution can handle issues like ontological commitment, substitutivity failure, scrutability, and non-specificity. (shrink)

In recent years, Brentano’s theory of consciousness has been systematically reassessed. The reconstruction that has received the most attention is the so-called identity reconstruction. It says that secondary consciousness and the mental phenomenon it is about are one and the same. Crucially, it has been claimed that this thesis is the only one which can make Brentano’s theory immune to what he considers the main threat to it, namely, the duplication of the primary object. In this paper, I argue that (...) the identity reconstruction is untenable, and I defend an alternative, which I name the unity reconstruction. According to the unity reconstruction, secondary consciousness is a real part of the mental phenomenon it is about, and hence is distinct from it. I contend that this thesis does not in itself lead to the duplication of the primary object, and that what should be blamed is rather a controversial thesis about the intentional structure of secondary consciousness—a thesis which Brentano ultimately abandoned. (shrink)

In A Matter of Principle, Ronald Dworkin discusses the role a political morality should play in decisions about when the law should be obeyed and enforced, and even what law is. Noticing that liberalism was once a quasi-consensus theory in Great Britain and the United States – and, therefore, a natural candidate to that role in those countries – Dworkin argues that the loss of that status is due to an alleged failure of liberal political theorists to identify a kind (...) of egalitarianism as the constitutive principle on which liberalism is based. My aim in this paper is to advance arguments against such an influential claim that a certain egalitarianism would be the constitutive principle of political liberalism. (shrink)

As a positive thesis, philosophical anarchism claims that political authority is always at odds with practical rationality insomuch as authoritative directives are best analysed as content-independent reasons. The aim of this paper is to clarify the metaethical assumptions behind such a claim. Since philosophical anarchists reject as irrational the possibility that an agent can follow content-independent reasons issued by another agent, emphasising agents’ responsibility to assess the content of every directive before acting in conformity with it, it is safe to (...) say that philosophical anarchists must be cognitivist in metaethics. At the very least, were there no right or wrong answers to questions such as “what does one have reason to do in these circumstances?”, answers such as “one should follow authoritative directives” would be as good as any other. However, philosophical anarchism requires much more than metaethical cognitivism; indeed, it requires a very specific (and ambitious) type of cognitivism. I intend to show which one. (shrink)

It is safe to say that the main line of criticism against the reading of Critical Philosophy as Transcendental Semantics is that Kant would be concerned about semantic problems only on Critique of Pure Reason so that such reading would not make sense beyond that work. In this paper, I describe Transcendental Semantics in short words and analyze at length Kant’s theory of concepts on Transcendental Analytic of Critique of Pure Reason in order to make a suggestion: every concept has (...) to attend the demands of Transcendental Semantics to be called a concept in critical sense.A principal linha da crítica contra a leitura da filosofia crítica como semântica transcendental afirma que Kant teria trabalhado sobre problemas semânticos apenas na Crítica da razão pura, assim sendo, não faria sentido ultrapassar esse limite com aquela intepretação. Neste artigo, descrevo a semântica transcendental em poucas palavras e analiso a teoria dos conceitos de Kant na Analítica transcendental da Crítica da razão pura para oferecer a seguinte observação: para atender as demandas da semântica transcendental todo conceito tem de ser chamado de conceito em sentido crítico. (shrink)

This paper develops the idea that valid arguments are equivalent to true conditionals by combining Kripke’s theory of truth with the evidential account of conditionals offered by Crupi and Iacona. As will be shown, in a first-order language that contains a naïve truth predicate and a suitable conditional, one can define a validity predicate in accordance with the thesis that the inference from a conjunction of premises to a conclusion is valid when the corresponding conditional is true. The validity predicate (...) so defined significantly increases our expressive resources and provides a coherent formal treatment of paradoxical arguments. (shrink)

How ought you to evaluate your options if you’re uncertain about which axiology is true? One prominent response is Expected Moral Value Maximisation, the view that under axiological uncertainty, an option is better than another if and only if it has the greater expected moral value across axiologies. EMVM raises two fundamental questions. First, there’s a question about what it should even mean. In particular, it presupposes that we can compare moral value across axiologies. So to even understand EMVM, we (...) need to explain what it is for such comparisons to hold. Second, assuming that we understand it, there’s a question about whether EMVM is true. Since there are many plausible rivals, we need an argument to defend it. In this paper, I’ll introduce a representation theorem for axiological uncertainty to answer these two questions. Roughly, the theorem shows that if all our axiologies satisfy the von Neumann–Morgenstern axioms, and if the facts about which options are better than which in light of your uncertainty also satisfy these axioms as well as a Pareto condition, then these facts have a relevantly unique expected utility representation. If I’m right, this theorem at once affords us a compelling way to understand EMVM—and specifically intertheoretic comparisons—and a systematic argument for its truth. (shrink)

The identity of indiscernibles states that indiscernible objects must be identical. Many philosophers have held that the PII turns out to be either true but trivial, or non-trivial but false, depending on how the notion of discernibility is spelled out. In this paper, I propose and defend an account of this notion which aims to yield a minimally non-trivial and yet plausible version of the PII. I argue moreover that this version of the principle is immune to a number of (...) well-known and recent objections to the PII. (shrink)

The standard view of ignorance is that it consists in the mere lack of knowledge or true belief. Duncan Pritchard has recently argued, against the standard view, that ignorance is the lack of knowledge/true belief that is due to an improper inquiry. I shall call, Pritchard’s alternative account the Normative Account. The purpose of this article is to strengthen the Normative Account by providing an independent vargument supporting it.

In this paper we re-assess the philosophical foundation of Exactly True Logic ($$\mathcal {ET\!L}$$ ET L ), a competing variant of First Degree Entailment ($$\mathcal {FDE}$$ FDE ). In order to do this, we first rebut an argument against it. As the argument appears in an interview with Nuel Belnap himself, one of the fathers of $$\mathcal {FDE}$$ FDE, we believe its provenance to be such that it needs to be taken seriously. We submit, however, that the argument ultimately fails, (...) and that $$\mathcal {ET\!L}$$ ET L cannot easily be dismissed. We then proceed to give an overview of the research that was inspired by this logic over the last decade, thus providing further motivation for the study of $$\mathcal {ET\!L}$$ ET L and, more generally, of $$\mathcal {FDE}$$ FDE -related logics that result from semantical analyses alternative to Belnap’s canonical one. We focus, in particular, on philosophical questions that these developments raise. (shrink)

Friedrich Nietzsche was among the figures from the history of nineteenth century philosophy that, perhaps surprisingly, some of the Vienna Circle’s members had presented as one of their predecessors. While, primarily for political reasons, most Anglophone figures in the history of analytic philosophy had taken a dim view of Nietzsche, the Vienna Circle’s leader Moritz Schlick admired and praised Nietzsche, rejecting what he saw as a misinterpretation of Nietzsche as a militarist or proto-fascist. Schlick, Frank, Neurath, and Carnap were in (...) different ways committed to the view that Nietzsche made a significant contribution to the overcoming of metaphysics. Some of these philosophers praised the intimate connection Nietzsche drew between his philosophical outlook and empirical studies in psychology and physiology. In his 1912 lectures on Nietzsche, Schlick maintained that Nietzsche overcame an initial Schopenhauerian metaphysical-artistic phase in his thinking, and subsequently remained a positivist until his last writings. Frank and Neurath made the weaker claim that Nietzsche contributed to the development of a positivistic or scientific conception of the world. Schlick and Frank took a further step in seeing the mature Nietzsche as an Enlightenment thinker. (shrink)

In metasemantics, semantic dispositionalism is the view that what makes it the case that, given the value of the relevant parameters, a certain linguistic expression refers to what it does are the speakers’ dispositions. In the literature, there is something like a consensus that the fate of dispositionalism hinges on the status of three arguments, first put forward by Saul Kripke ‒ or at least usually ascribed to him. This paper discusses a different, and strangely neglected, anti-dispositionalist argument, which develops (...) some remarks first put forward by Paul Boghossian and Anandi Hattiangadi and revolves around the idea that semantic dispositionalists have no way to justify their privileging certain dispositions, the ones they take to be reference-determining, over all the others. After some background (Section 1) and a first presentation of the argument (Section 2), I discuss three ways a dispositionalist might try to answer it and find them all wanting (Section 3). (shrink)

According to the relational egalitarian theory of justice, justice requires that people relate as equals. To relate as equals, many relational egalitarians argue, people must (i) regard each other as equals, and (ii) treat each other as equals. In this paper, we argue that, under conditions of background injustice, such relational egalitarians should endorse affirmative action in the ways in which (dis)esteem is attributed to people as part of the regard-requirement for relating as equals.

Abstract:We discuss the role that transnational corporations (TNCs) should play in developing global governance, creating a framework of rules and regulations for the global economy. The central issue is whether TNCs should provide global rules and guarantee individual citizenship rights, or instead focus on maximizing profits. First, we describe the problems arising from the globalization process that affect the relationship between public rules and private firms. Next we consider the position of economic and management theories in relation to the social (...) responsibility of the firm. We argue that instrumental stakeholder theory and business and society research can only partially solve the global governance issue, and that more recent concepts of corporate citizenship and republican business ethics deliver theoretically and practically helpful, fresh insights. However, even these need further development, especially with regard to the legitimacy of corporate political activity. (shrink)

According to relational egalitarianism, justice requires equal relations. In this paper, I ask the question: can equal relations be unjust according to relational egalitarianism? I argue that while on some conceptions of relational egalitarianism, equal relations cannot be unjust, there are conceptions in which equal relations can be unjust. Surprisingly, whether equal relations can be unjust cuts across the distinction between responsibility-sensitive and non-responsibility-sensitive conceptions of relational egalitarianism. I then show what follows if one accepts a conception in which equal (...) relations can be unjust, including why it provides a reason to grant some people less political power than others. (shrink)

This article investigates the hitherto under-examined relations between affirmative action, paternalism and respect. We provide three main arguments. First, we argue that affirmative action initiatives are typically paternalistic and thus disrespectful towards those intended beneficiaries who oppose the initiatives in question. Second, we argue that not introducing affirmative action can also be disrespectful towards these potential beneficiaries because such inaction involves a failure to adequately recognize their moral worth. Third, we argue that the paternalistic disrespect involved in affirmative action is (...) alleviated when the potential beneficiaries’ preferences against such initiatives are adaptive. We conclude that although there is a relevant sense in which paternalistic affirmative action is disrespectful, it may well be more disrespectful not to pursue such policies. (shrink)

This paper discusses the volenti non fit injuria maxim. The volenti maxim states that a person is not wronged by that to which she consents, provided her consent is valid. I will argue, however, that the volenti maxim does not apply to all instances of valid consent. In some cases the consenter is wronged even if his consent is valid. Valid consent can only release others from consent-sensitive duties, not from consent-insensitive duties. If the consentee flouts a consent-insensitive duty the (...) consentee wrongs the consenter and thereby commits a wrong. (shrink)

There is little question as to whether there is good boring art, though its existence raises a number of questions for both the philosophy of art and the philosophy of emotions. How can boredom ever be a desideratum of art? How can our standing commitments concerning the nature of aesthetic experience and artistic value accommodate the existence of boring art? How can being bored constitute an appropriate mode of engagement with a work of art as a work of art? More (...) broadly, how can there be works of art whose very success requires the experience of boredom? Our goal in this paper is threefold. After offering a brief survey of kinds of boring art, we: i) derive a set of questions that we argue constitutes the philosophical problem of boring art; ii) elaborate an empirically informed theory of boredom that furnishes the philosophical problem with a deeper sense of the affect at the heart of the phenomenon; and iii) conclude by offering and defending a solution to the problem that explains why and how artworks might wish to make the experience of boredom key to their aesthetic and artistic success. (shrink)

Simondon adopts some concepts of social psychology as ‘in group’ and ‘out group’, namely from Kurt Lewin and Gordon Allport, that allow him to describe the fundamental processes shaping the domain of collective individuation, and to challenge Bergson’s distinction between a ‘closed’ community and an ‘open’ society. Reconstructing Simondon’s sources is necessary to understand how he tries to provide an analysis of the social system without presupposing a given anthropology, but rather exploring different perspectives on the human/nature threshold through the (...) concept of transindividual. In his study of the social system Simondon progressively gives conceptual shape to the processes he calls transindividual thanks to the ontogenetic analysis of the phenomena of belief, work and language. In all these domains, a ‘basic community’ emerges just over the threshold of the biological group, where the structural ambivalence of all collective processes as simultaneously closed and open becomes clear. That is why Simondon does not present the concept of the transindividual as a solution to the epistemological problem of psychic and collective individuation, but rather as the ‘field’ in which a whole series of social, biological and technical dimensions can be made converge towards a science of anthropogenic processes. (shrink)

This paper discusses some key connexive principles construed as principles about reasons, that is, as principles that express logical properties of sentences of the form ‘_p_ is a reason for _q_’. Its main goal is to show how the theory of reasons outlined by Crupi and Iacona, which is based on their evidential account of conditionals, yields a formal treatment of such sentences that validates a restricted version of the principles discussed, overcoming some limitations that affect most extant accounts of (...) conditionals. (shrink)

Ce livre propose une interprétation inédite de la biologie d'Aristote. Il montre que, dans la démarche aristotélicienne, à côté de la pensée discursive, oeuvre une pensée visuelle qui élabore une représentation de l'organisation spatiale du corps vivant, apportant ainsi une contribution décisive à la définition des deux tâches majeures de l'enquête scientifique aristotélicienne: l'explication causale et la détermination des genres.

Many people are worried about the harmful effects of climate change but nevertheless enjoy some activities that contribute to the emission of greenhouse gas (driving, flying, eating meat, etc.), the main cause of climate change. How should such people make choices between engaging in and refraining from enjoyable greenhouse-gas-emitting activities? In this chapter, we look at the answer provided by decision theory. Some scholars think that the right answer is given by interactive decision theory, or game theory; and moreover think (...) that since private climate decisions are instances of the prisoner’s dilemma, one rationally should engage in these activities provided that one enjoys them. Others think that the right answer is given by expected utility theory, the best-known version of individual decision theory under risk and uncertainty. In this chapter, we review these different answers, with a special focus on the latter answer and the debate it has generated. (shrink)

Memory of historical trauma has a unique power to generate works of art. This book analyzes the relation of public memory to history, forgetting, and selective memory in Berlin, Buenos Aires, and New York—three late-twentieth-century cities that have confronted major social or political traumas. Berlin experienced the fall of the Berlin Wall and the city’s reemergence as the German capital; Buenos Aires lived through the dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s and their legacy of state terror and disappearances; and New (...) York City faces a set of public memory issues concerning the symbolic value of Times Square as threatened public space and the daunting task of commemorating and rebuilding after the attack on the World Trade Center. Focusing on the issue of monumentalization in divergent artistic and media practices, the book demonstrates that the transformation of spatial and temporal experience by memory politics is a major cultural effect of globalization. (shrink)