This paper discusses the logical space of alternative conceptual engineering projects, with a specific focus on (1) the processes, (2) the targets and goals, and (3) the methods of such projects. We present an overview of how these three aspects interact in the contemporary literature and discuss those alternative projects that have yet to be explored based on our suggested typology. We show how choices about each element in a conceptual engineering project constrain the possibilities for the others, thereby giving (...) rise to distinct groupings of possible projects under the banner of conceptual engineering. We conclude with a critical reflection on the potential ethical issues that arise as a result of effectively putting conceptual engineering into practice. (shrink)

Spiritual practices awaken and attune us to the beauty both of the created order and of human relationships. Farley helps readers discover being made for both kinds of beauty, with contemplative disciplines immersing us in it. Tying these disciplines with contemplation allows us to engage with the struggle for justice in an unjust society.

This title explores how human commitments, rooted in the story of God's love, are acts of free choice and love. Farley reflects on the concrete experiences of people who strive to be faithful to what they have claimed to love: 'My concern is to name something that I think is, after all, common to all of our lives - an experience, a reality, perhaps a problem, a challenge, something that is sometimes a source of joy, sometimes a cause of (...) tragedy'. Farley explores the nature nad meaning of commitment as it is played out in our lives, addressing love, fidelity, a sense of obligation, and covenant. (shrink)

Granted that God may exist, how may God be defined in our time? Addressing this issue Benjamin Farley explores a variety of belief systems, Western and Eastern, religious and skeptical. Taking an approach that is both critical of religion as well as sympathetic, Farley refuses to shy away from hard questions or to dismiss constructive answers that speak to the human condition. He distinguishes human "intellectual ascent" towards God from humankind's "innate and inner sense" to know and relate (...) to the living God, demonstrating the efforts and rewards of both approaches in Christianity, as well as in Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Zen. Alongside these more obviously "religious" approaches, Farley reviews the methodologies and findings of today's greatest scientific minds, including skeptics such as Hawking, Dawkins, and Wilson, as well as their skeptical forerunners of the past. He argues that belief in God can no more ignore the scientific truth about the universe than science can dismiss the spiritual yearnings and hunger of humanity for purpose, meaning, and its inescapable sense of the presence of God. (shrink)

We present a computational model of dialectical argumentation that could serve as a basis for legal reasoning. The legal domain is an instance of a domain in which knowledge is incomplete, uncertain, and inconsistent. Argumentation is well suited for reasoning in such weak theory domains. We model argument both as information structure, i.e., argument units connecting claims with supporting data, and as dialectical process, i.e., an alternating series of moves by opposing sides. Our model includes burden of proof as a (...) key element, indicating what level of support must be achieved by one side to win the argument. Burden of proof acts as move filter, turntaking mechanism, and termination criterion, eventually determining the winner of an argument. Our model has been implemented in a computer program. We demonstrate the model by considering program output for two examples previously discussed in the artificial intelligence and legal reasoning literature. (shrink)

Putting God First: Jewish Humanism after Heidegger tackles the challenge of maintaining Jewish identity in a world dominated by Western humanism. It argues that the Holocaust reflects more broadly on contemporary humanism than the Jewish world has ever dared to acknowledge. It advances the view that the establishment of the State of Israel presents a profound historical opportunity to disentangle Jewish thought from elements of the Western humanist tradition that threaten Jewish survival and conceal from view the plausibility of core (...) Jewish ideas and values. The work proposes that a healthy and peaceful relationship between Westernism and a robust Jewish identity can be achieved only by unraveling the two, and it presents a philosophical path for achieving this. Following a precise analysis of modern and postmodern thought that includes discussions of Immanuel Kant, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Ludwig Wittgenstein, George Steiner, Bruno Latour, Hannah Arendt, Jonathan Haidt, Daniel Kahneman, and others, the centerpiece of the book offers a close reading of the masterwork Being and Time, which Martin Heidegger composed in the period when his thought was gravitating toward his endorsement of Hitler and Nazism. This deep dive into Heidegger's ontological understanding of how the individual (Dasein) interacts with others in space and time yields a method for articulating the onto-theological meanings of key Jewish concepts such as the Nefesh (psyche), the Neshamah (soul), Tzelem Elohim (human being in God's image), Am Segulah, (Jewish chosenness), Shabbat, the Land of Israel, and more in texts such as the Tanya, the Sefat Emet, the Nefesh HaChayim, the Kedushat Levi, and in the writings of Rav Kook and the Maharal of Prague. Ultimately the book proposes a disentangled spiritual/political vision for a Jewish state that is characterized by the politics of Tikun Olam" -- From the publisher. (shrink)

The works of Hannah Arendt and Albert Camus--two of the most compelling political thinkers of the "resistance generation" that lived through World War II--can still provide penetrating insights for contemporary political reflection. Jeffrey C. Isaac offers new interpretations of these writers, viewing both as engaged intellectuals who grappled with the possibilities of political radicalism in a world in which liberalism and Marxism had revealed their inadequacy by being complicit in the rise of totalitarianism. According to Isaac, self-styled postmodern (...) writers who proclaim the death of grandiose ideologies often fail to recognize that such thinkers as Camus and Arendt had already noted this. But unlike many postmodernists, these two sought to preserve what was worthy in modern humanism--the idea of a common human condition and a commitment to human rights and the dignity of individuals. Isaac shows that both writers advanced the idea of a democratic civil society made up of self-limiting groups. Although they criticized the typical institutions of mass democratic politics, they endorsed alternative forms of local and international organization that defy the principle of state sovereignty. Isaac also shows how Arendt's writings on the Middle East, and Camus's on Algeria, urged the creation of such institutions. The vision of a "rebellious politics" that Arendt and Camus shared is of great relevance to current debates in democratic theory and to the transformations taking place in Europe and the states of the former Soviet Union. (shrink)

This article advances sustainability towards a new logic that favors the flourishing of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and well-being from North to South. It presents a Global Dual-Perspective (GDP) and a Dynamic Equilibrium Framework (DEF) that inform sustainability, management, and international business with a paradoxical view of the SDGs and a strengthened analysis that outlines the role of multinational enterprises (MNEs) in addressing the SDGs within and across the North–South. This article reveals that organizations will effectively unleash virtuous cycles of (...) SDGs and well-being when confronting and juxtaposing environmental, health, social, economic, and law-oriented goals. Furthermore, virtuous cycles will be more successful when splitting and integrating short- and long-term conflicting goals within and across the North–South to fuel systemic resilience and sustainable development. (shrink)

In the last book of The Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius develops his solution to the problem of divine foreknowledge and free choice. Interpreters standardly hold that this problem and his solution to it presuppose causal indeterminism. In this paper, I argue that Boethius, following a Neoplatonist view found in Proclus, is a causal determinist and compatibilist and maintains that God’s providential knowledge ensures the occurrence of all the events he knows. This alternative interpretation offers a better fit with Boethius’s text (...) and its historical antecedents and provides resources to address the main criticisms of his solution. (shrink)

Recently, researchers on organization theory and behavior were challenged by the introduction of cognitive machines in the list of the organization’s participants. Researchers in this field advocated that cognitive machines contribute to improve cognitive abilities in the organization by extending people’s rationality and decision-making capacity and by reducing intra-individual and group dysfunctional conflicts. This paper supports these findings and extends their results to upper layers at managerial and organizational levels of application by proposing the concept of new industrial organizations with (...) structure and processes of Computational Organization Management Networks. In such a new organization type, cognitive machines and cognitive information systems are prominent actors of governance, automation, and control of the whole enterprise. (shrink)

Humans and organizations have limitations of computational capacity and information management. Such constraints are synonymous with bounded rationality. Therefore, in order to extend the human and organizational boundaries to more advanced models of cognition, this research proposes concepts of cognitive machines in organizations. From a micro point of view, what makes this research distinct is that, beyond people, it includes in the list of participants of the organization the cognitive machines. From a macro point of view, this paper relies on (...) the premise that cognitive machines can improve the cognitive abilities of the organization. From such perspectives, it presents rationale and principles of a class of cognitive machines with capabilities to carry out complex cognitive tasks in organizations. It also introduces analyses of the cognitive machines in organizations through theories of bounded rationality, economic decision-making, and conflict resolution. The analyses indicate that these machines can solve or reduce intra-individual and group dysfunctional conflicts which arise from decision-making processes in the organization, and thus they can improve the degree of organizational cognition. From all these backgrounds, this research outlines implications of cognitive machines for organizations. (shrink)

En el siglo XX y en especial en este momento de transición, algunos artistas han retomado los hechos históricos y en varios casos los horrores de la humanidad para plantearse preguntas sobre el hombre del hoy y del mañana. En el artículo se planteará una reflexión particular, exponiendo la relación entre las artes escénicas y los conflictos humanos, políticos y sociales. Adicionalmente se expondrá la recreación de hechos históricos, temas y personajes, como base para la reflexión y la renovación de (...) la esperanza y de la memoria. (shrink)

We present a novel model of individual people, online posts, and media platforms to explain the online spread of epistemically toxic content such as fake news and suggest possible responses. We argue that a combination of technical features, such as the algorithmically curated feed structure, and social features, such as the absence of stable social-epistemic norms of posting and sharing in social media, is largely responsible for the unchecked spread of epistemically toxic content online. Sharing constitutes a distinctive communicative act, (...) governed by a dedicated norm and motivated to a large extent by social identity maintenance. But confusion about this norm and its lack of inherent epistemic checks lead readers to misunderstand posts, attribute excess or insufficient credibility to posts, and allow posters to evade epistemic accountability—all contributing to the spread of epistemically toxic content online. This spread can be effectively addressed if people and platforms add significantly more context to shared posts and platforms nudge people to develop and follow recognized epistemic norms of posting and sharing. (shrink)

For the past fifty years anxiety over naturalism has driven debates in social theory. One side sees social science as another kind of natural science, while the other rejects the possibility of objective and explanatory knowledge. _Interpretation and Social Knowledge_ suggests a different route, offering a way forward for an antinaturalist sociology that overcomes the opposition between interpretation and explanation and uses theory to build concrete, historically specific causal explanations of social phenomena.

I present and explain the Bohmian account of collapse in quantum mechanics.

Presents Newton's unifying idea of gravitation and explains how he converted physics from a science of explanation into a general mathematical system.

This first critical edition of Isaac Abravanel’s correspondence opens a window into the cultural, political and commercial world of one of the first Jewish humanists of the quattrocento. Jewish leader of the expelled Sephardim after 1492, commentator of the Bible, Abravanel is a legendary figure of the Sephardic history. The edition of the letters along with the introductive essay that reconstructs their cultural background intends to connect the legendary figure of Abravanel to the major reason of his remarkable career: (...) his successful assimilation of Renaissance humanism. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to give a philosophical analysis of the relationship between contingently available technology and the knowledge that it makes possible. My concern is with what specific subjects can know in practice, given their particular conditions, especially available technology, rather than what can be known “in principle” by a hypothetical entity like Laplace’s Demon. The argument has two parts. In the first, I’ll construct a novel account of epistemic possibility that incorporates two pragmatic conditions: responsibility and (...) practicability. For example, whether subjects can gain knowledge depends in some circumstances on whether they have the capability of gathering relevant evidence. In turn, the possibility of undertaking such investigative activities depends in part on factors like ethical constraints, economical realities, and available technology. In the second part of the paper, I’ll introduce “technological possibility” to analyze the set of actions made possible by available technology. To help motivate the problem and later test my proposal, I’ll focus on a specific historical case, one of the earliest uses of digital electronic computers in a scientific investigation. I conclude that the epistemic possibility of gaining access to scientific knowledge about certain subjects depends (in some cases) on the technological possibility for making responsible investigations. (shrink)

This major work challenges some widely held positions in epistemology - those of Peirce and Popper on the one hand and those of Quine and Kuhn on the other.

The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy.

Reproduces the text of Newton's dissertation on the nature and properties of light.

I propose an account of possible worlds. According to the account, possible worlds are pluralities of sentences in an extremely large language. This account avoids a problem, relating to the total number of possible worlds, that other accounts face. And it has several additional benefits.

This book draws on fields as diverse as biochemistry, physiology, pharmacology, psychology, psychiatry, and ethology, to form a fascinating synthesis of information on the nature of fear and of panic and anxiety disorders. Dr. Marks offers both a detailed discussion of the clinical aspects of fear-related syndromes and a broad exploration of the sources and mechanisms of fear and defensive behavior. Dealing first with normal fear, he establishes a firm, scientific basis for understanding it. He then presents a thorough analysis (...) of the development, symptoms and treatment of fear-related syndromes. Phobic and obsessive-compulsive disorders are examined in detail. The book is illustrated with examples of fear and defensive behavior in other living organisms. By drawing provocative analogies between animal and human behavior, it sheds new light on the origins of fears, phobias, and obsessive-compulsive problems, as well as on their treatment by drugs and psychological means. Clinical psychologists, ethologists, and anyone interested in the mechanisms of behavior will be fascinated by this authoritative study. The text is intriguing and informative, and the bibliography of over 2,100 entries makes it an invaluable reference. (shrink)

Although typically invisible, neoliberal policies and ideologies are often at the root of why farmers markets struggle to offer affordable prices for consumers, sufficient income for farmers, and expand socially and environmentally sustainable food systems. Argentinian ferias francas, a variation on farmers markets, offer a unique case to examine how they may be designed to alleviate these issues by challenging neoliberalism through legislative mechanisms. Ferias francas emerged as an explicitly anti-neoliberal, grassroots response to Argentina’s expansion of neoliberal agricultural policies that (...) stimulated global agribusiness and displaced small-scale farmers. Organizers partnered with municipal, provincial, and national governments to develop legislation to support small-scale farmers and to make the network of ferias competitive with global agribusiness. I ask, how can organizers expand farmers markets’ potential to fulfill the social and environmental goals of agri-food movements, given neoliberal capitalism’s constraints and contradictions? I analyze feria legislation by situating it in its social and historical context, and comparing legislative mechanisms to core elements of neoliberalism in the economy and in the everyday mentalities of agri-food activists. I find that mechanisms such as setting prices lower than neighboring supermarkets and establishing uniform prices for feria goods contest some aspects of neoliberalism. However, the ferias also reproduce neoliberalism, and are still subject to the price standards set under the global neoliberal agroeconomy, raising questions about their prospects for sustainability under neoliberal capitalism. This analysis of feria legislation makes neoliberalism’s influence on farmers markets visible and highlights legislative mechanisms that address some of its harmful effects. (shrink)

There has recently been increasing interest in the possibility and ethics of lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS), which would combine sophisticated AI with machinery capable of deadly force. One objection to LAWS is that their use will create a troubling responsibility gap, where no human agent can properly be held accountable for the outcomes that they create. While some authors have attempted to show that individual agents can, in fact, be responsible for the behaviour of LAWS in various circumstances, this (...) will not be possible in all cases. This article argues, however, that by assigning responsibilities to group agents operating within the military‐industrial complex, as well as the military‐industrial complex as a whole, we may be able to close the responsibility gap, or at least reduce its costs. Insofar as the potential for responsibility gaps poses an ethical barrier to the development and deployment of LAWS, this argument, if sound, may show their use to be morally permissible in a greater range of cases. (shrink)