It is a cliché of self-help advice that there are no problems, only opportunities. The rationale and actions of the BSHS in creating its Global Digital History of Science Festival may be a rare genuine confirmation of this mantra. The global COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 meant that the society's usual annual conference – like everyone else's – had to be cancelled. Once the society decided to go digital, we had a hundred days to organize and deliver our first online festival. (...) In the hope that this will help, inspire and warn colleagues around the world who are also trying to move online, we here detail the considerations, conversations and thinking behind the organizing team's decisions. (shrink)

The final published book by Nobel Prize-winning author and philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941), La pensée et le mouvant (translated here as The Creative Mind), is a masterly autobiography of his philosophical method. Through essays and lectures written between 1903 and 1923, Bergson retraces how and why he became a philosopher, and crafts a fascinating critique of philosophy itself. Until it leaves its false paths, he demonstrates, philosophy will remain only a wordy dialectic that surmounts false problems. With masterful skill and (...) intensity, Bergson shows that metaphysics and science must be rooted in experience for philosophy to become a genuine search for truth. And in the quest for unanswered questions, the spiritual dimension of human life and the importance of intuition must be emphasized. A source of inspiration for physicists as well as philosophers, Bergson's introduction to metaphysics reveals a philosophy that is always on the move, blending man's spiritual drive with his mastery of the material world. (shrink)

I argue for a deflationary answer to the question, “What is it to be a woman?” Prior attempts by feminist theorists to provide a metaphysical account of what all and only women have in common have all failed for the same reason: there is nothing women have in common beyond being women. Although the social kinds man and woman are primitive, their existence can be explained. I say that human sex difference is the material ground of systems of gender; gender (...) systems serve to enable male control of female reproductive capacities. This explains the fact that most women are female, but it does not entail that all women are female or that all females are women. To clarify my position, I draw an analogy between the kind woman and the kind parent. While it is difficult to come up with necessary and sufficient conditions for being a parent, it is clear that the social institution or practice of parenting has its material ground in the biological facts about human reproduction together with facts about infantile dependency. Saying this does not entail that all and only biological progenitors are parents. (shrink)

In a quiet London office, a software designer muses on the algorithms that will make possible the risk flags to be visualized on the screens of border guards from Heathrow to St Pancras International. There is, he says, ‘real time decision making’ – to detain, to deport, to secondarily question or search – but there is also the ‘offline team who run the analytics and work out the best set of rules’. Writing the code that will decide the association rules (...) between items of data, prosaic and mundane – flight route, payment type, passport – the analysts derive a novel preemptive security measure. This paper proposes the analytic of the data derivative – a visualized risk flag or score drawn from an amalgam of disaggregated fragments of data, inferred from across the gaps between data and projected onto an array of uncertain futures. In contrast to disciplinary and enclosed techniques of collecting data to govern population, the data derivative functions via ‘differential curves of normality’, imagining a range of potential futures through the association rule, thus ‘opening up to let things happen’. In some senses akin to the risk orientation of the financial derivative, itself indifferent to actual underlying people, places or events by virtue of modulated norms, the contemporary security derivative is not centred on who we are, nor even on what our data say about us, but on what can be imagined and inferred about who we might be – on our very proclivities and potentialities. (shrink)

In a 1955 lecture the physicist Richard Feynman reflected on the place of doubt within scientific practice. ‘Permit us to question, to doubt, to not be sure’, proposed Feynman, ‘it is possible to live and not to know’. In our contemporary world, the science of machine learning algorithms appears to transform the relations between science, knowledge and doubt, to make even the most doubtful event amenable to action. What might it mean to ‘leave room for doubt’ or ‘to live and (...) not to know’ in our contemporary culture, where the algorithm plays a major role in the calculability of doubts? I propose a posthuman mode of doubt that decentres the liberal humanist subject. In the science of machine learning algorithms the doubts of human and technological beings nonetheless dwell together, opening onto a future that is never fully reduced to the single output signal, to the optimised target. (shrink)

Atheists are frequently demonized as arrogant intellectuals, antagonistic to religion, devoid of moral sentiments, advocates of an "anything goes" lifestyle. Now, in this revealing volume, nineteen leading philosophers open a window on the inner life of atheism, shattering these common stereotypes as they reveal how they came to turn away from religious belief. These highly engaging personal essays capture the marvelous diversity to be found among atheists, providing a portrait that will surprise most readers. Many of the authors, for example, (...) express great affection for particular religious traditions, even as they explain why they cannot, in good conscience, embrace them. None of the contributors dismiss religious belief as stupid or primitive, and several even express regret that they cannot, or can no longer, believe. Perhaps more important, in these reflective pieces, they offer fresh insight into some of the oldest and most difficult problems facing the human mind and spirit. For instance, if God is dead, is everything permitted? Philosophers without Gods demonstrates convincingly, with arguments that date back to Plato, that morality is independent of the existence of God. Indeed, every writer in this volume adamantly affirms the objectivity of right and wrong. Moreover, they contend that secular life can provide rewards as great and as rich as religious life. A naturalistic understanding of the human condition presents a set of challenges--to pursue our goals without illusions, to act morally without hope of reward--challenges that can impart a lasting value to finite and fragile human lives. Collectively, these essays highlight the richness of atheistic belief--not only as a valid alternative to religion, but as a profoundly fulfilling and moral way of life. "This Atheists R Us compilation differs markedly in tone from Hitchens and Dawkins. Excellent fare for Christian small groups whose members are genuinely interested in the arguments raised by atheists." --Christianity Today "Readable, personal, and provocative.... Contrary to the popular image, atheism isn't all rebellious trumpets and defiant drums.... Here we have all the varieties of unreligious experience, a full symphony of unbelief." --Free Inquiry "Compelling and sophisticated arguments that religious people ought to confront." --Tikkun. (shrink)

Shaun Gallagher applies enactivist thinking to a staggeringly wide range of topics in philosophy of mind and cognitive science, even venturing into the realms of biological anthropology. One prominent point Gallagher makes that the holistic approach of enactivism makes it less amenable to scientific investigation than the cognitivist framework it seeks to replace, and should be seen as a “philosophy of nature” rather than a scientific research program. Gallagher also gives truth to the saying that “if you want new ideas, (...) read old books”, showing how the insights of the American pragmatists, particularly Dewey and Mead, offer a variety of resources and tools that can be brought to bear on modern day enactivism. Here, I suggest that the adoption of enactivist thinking would undermine the assumptions of certain scientific positions, requiring their abandonment, rather than simply making it more difficult to conduct research within an enactivist framework. I then discuss how Mead’s work has been used previously as a “pragmatist intervention” to help resolve problems in a related 4E endeavour, Gibson’s ecological psychology, and make a case for the inclusion of radical behaviorism as another pragmatist resource for 4E cognition. I conclude with a plea for further enactivist intervention in studies of comparative cognition. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:JOSEPH MARGOLIS THE LOGIC AND STRUCTURES OF FICTIONAL NARRATIVE The fascination of fiction and narrative is plainly immense, sind current analyses are notably fresh and ingenious. But ifone were to venture a compendious account of die most strategic conceptual claims bearing on those notions, they might well be captured by the following three theses: (i) that fiction and narrative are logically quite distinct, without necessarily excluding one anodier; (ii) (...) that fictional worlds are no worlds at all; they are merely imagined to exist; and (iii) that events, whether actual or imagined, cannot be specified independently of the categories by which we identify them as the events they are, categories subject to change over time. What is intriguing about mese three claims is that they strike the ear as utterly commonplace and obvious. But that is dieir strength. For it would be a great convenience if the relevant puzzles generated by analytic philosophy, hermeneutics, the new narratology, semiotics and the like could be resolved, convincingly, by appeal to die implications of these diree homely trudis. In addition, diey affect one another in a rather complicated way, and, taken joindy, easily expose certain influential false starts. The import of (iii), for example, is notably ignored in die otherwise powerful analysis of narrative afforded by Gérard Genette. Its bearing on (i) utterly undermines the explicit dualism favored by Seymour Chatman, who is clearly influenced by Genette himself. The failure to mark die force of (i) and its analogue regarding poetry is most obvious in I. A. Richards's contrast between poetry and science, the work of the Prague circle, Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism, and such recent speech-act theories of poetry and fiction as those proposed by Richard Ohmann, Monroe Beardsley, and Mary Louise Pratt. The corresponding failure widi respect to (ii) is clear in John Searle's theory of reference and in die ontological claims made by Nicholas Wolterstorff. The connection between (i) and (ii) is muddled most famously by G. E. Moore. These charges suggest die quarrelsome promise of the intended economy. But, as we shall see, they also lead in the direction of a more constructive theory of texts and their interpretation and of die constraints of narrative and style diat affect fiction. 162 Joseph Margolis163 Fiction, we say, differs from reality as well as from legend. But in speaking thus, we betray an understandable confidence that these three kinds of"world"— or, these three worlds — are conceptually well-behaved and open to straightforward demarcation. Once more, we slip altogether too easily between talking about certain worlds and about the narrative accounts by which we do so. What distinguishes fictional reference? we ask, and what is a fictional world? The best way to proceed here is to begin with strong intuitions and to trace dieir systematic consequences in order to test how far they are unassailable — or whether and where they must yield to others that are more accommodating. One particularly promising equivocation is the following. We speak of fictional worlds as possible (but not actual) worlds; but even if what is possible in a fictional world corresponds (in some sense) to what is possible in the actual world, it is not, as such, a possibility of or at the actual world. The "possible worlds" idiom is fundamentally and doubly equivocal. For, a "possible world" signifies either what is merely logically or conceptually compossible, or what (under suitably referential, predicative, causal, and similar constraints) is compossible specifically with respect to the actual world (or some part of it). Certainly, Balzac's La Cousine Bette "presents" an imaginary world that is internally coherent and compossible. One might even say, ignoring its fictive nature, diat such a world — or events very much like those of the story — is compossible with a certain portion of the actual world of nineteenth-century France. But Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderfond, though it scrupulously presents a coherent world of compossible events, does not present a world compossible with the actual world. And, on certain views at least, Thomas Mann's The Transposed Heads presents a possible world that is a conceptual impossibility. There is, however, no need to quarrel about particular cases... (shrink)

Human interactions are often improvised rather than scripted, which suggests that efficient coordination can emerge even when collective plans are largely underspecified. One possibility is that such forms of coordination primarily rely on mutual influences between interactive partners, and on perception–action couplings such as entrainment or mimicry. Yet some forms of improvised joint actions appear difficult to explain solely by appealing to these emergent mechanisms. Here, we focus on collective free improvisation, a form of highly unplanned creative practice where both (...) agents' subjective reports and the complexity of their interactions suggest that shared intentions may sometimes emerge to support coordination during the course of the improvisation, even in the absence of verbal communication. In four experiments, we show that shared intentions spontaneously emerge during collective musical improvisations, and that they foster coordination on multiple levels, over and beyond the mere influence of shared information. We also show that musicians deploy communicative strategies to manifest and propagate their intentions within the group, and that this predicts better coordination. Overall, our results suggest that improvised and scripted joint actions are more continuous with one another than it first seems, and that they differ merely in the extent to which they rely on emergent or planned coordination mechanisms. (shrink)

The Social Intelligence or Social Brain Hypothesis is an influential theory that aims to explain the evolution of brain size and cognitive complexity among the primates. This has shaped work in both primate behavioural ecology and comparative psychology in deep and far-reaching ways. Yet, it not only perpetuates many of the conceptual confusions that have plagued psychology since its inception, but amplifies them, generating an overly intellectual view of what it means to be a competent and successful social primate. Here, (...) I present an analysis of the Social Intelligence/Brain hypothesis highlighting how its anthropocentric origins have led us to be held captive by a picture of what social life involves and the kind of mind needed to navigate the social landscape. I go on to consider how experimental work in this vein either does not test what it claims to be testing, or introduces impossible problems regarding animal minds that cannot be solved, but only dissolved. What we need, in other words, is the application of “Wittgenstein's razor” and the reinvention of primatology along his enactivist lines. (shrink)

"Ethics for Modern Life," an anthology of classic and contemporary readings, offers students a well-balanced and cohesive introduction to ethics.

The concept of dual-use encapsulates the potential for well-intentioned, beneficial scientific research to also be misused by a third party for malicious ends. The concept of dual-use challenges scientists to look beyond the immediate outcomes of their research and to develop an awareness of possible future (mis)uses of scientific research. Since 2001 much attention has been paid to the possible need to regulate the dual-use potential of the life sciences. Regulation initiatives fall under two broad categories—those that develop the ethical (...) education of scientists and foster an awareness and responsibility of dual-use issues, and those which assess the regulation of information being generated by current research. Both types of initiatives are premised on a cautious, risk-adverse philosophy which advocates careful examination of all future endpoints of research endeavors. This caution advocated within initiatives such as pre-publication review of journal articles contrasts to the obligation to share underpinning data sharing discussions. As the dual-use debate has yet to make a significant impact on data sharing discussions (and vice versa) it is possible that these two areas of knowledge control may present areas of ethical conflict for scientists, and thus need to be more closely examined. This paper examines the tension between the obligation to share exemplified by data sharing principles and the concerns raised by the risk-cautious culture of the dual-use debates. The paper concludes by reflecting on the issues of responsibility as raised by dual-use as relating to data sharing, such as the chain of custody for shared data. (shrink)

In common with much of the Western world, agrarianism—valuing farmers and agricultural activity as intrinsically worthwhile, noble, and contributing to the strength of the national character—runs through Australian culture and politics. Agrarian sentiments and attitudes have been identified through empirical research and by inference from analysis of political debate, policy content, and studies of media and popular culture. Empirical studies have, however, been largely confined to the US, with little in the way of recent re-evaluations of, or developments from, early (...) work. This paper reports on research that seeks quantitative empirical evidence for the existence of agrarianism in the Australian community and seeks to identify its core characteristics. Using a purpose-designed sub-set of items within a large, omnibus-style survey of regional and rural Australia, we demonstrate that agrarianism exists as a scientifically quantifiable concept identifiable through responses to four key propositions: that Australians should support policies aimed at improving the position of the agricultural industries; that working in agriculture and associated industries brings out the best in people; that agricultural producers make a major contribution to environmental protection and biodiversity conservation; and that the development of agriculture in Australia contributed to the development of the national character. We found very little variation in the degree to which different demographic groupings agree with agrarianism. Older people, farmers, and non-Indigenous Australian-born respondents were among those who were statistically significantly more likely to agree with the defining propositions of agrarianism, but their scores were only very slightly higher than those of other sub-populations in the sample. (shrink)

Discussions of what minds are and what they do is a contentious issue. This is particularly so when considering non‐human animals, for here the questions become: do they have minds at all? And if so, what kinds of minds are they? Alternatives to Cartesian or computational models of mind open up a whole new space of possibility for how we should conceive of animal minds, while also highlighting how Skinner's pragmatist‐inspired radical behaviourism has much more to offer than most researchers (...) in animal cognition would like to admit. Pragmatism, or ‘American Naturalism' is also highlighted by Chemero as the alternative for human cognition. The challenge, then, is to build an understanding of mind along pragmatist lines in a way that does justice to both human and non‐human animals. A clear understanding of embodiment, and commitment to a radical form of enactivism, can, perhaps, begin to generate a better kind of continuity. (shrink)

Background Ethical challenges constitute an inseparable part of daily decision-making processes in all areas of healthcare. Ethical challenges are associated with moral distress that can lead to burnout. Clinical ethics support has proven useful to address and manage such challenges. This paper explores how prehospital emergency personnel manage ethical challenges. The study is part of a larger action research project to develop and test an approach to clinical ethics support that is sensitive to the context of emergency medicine. Methods We (...) explored ethical challenges and management strategies in three focus groups, with 15 participants in total, each attended by emergency medical technicians, paramedics, and prehospital anaesthesiologists. Focus groups were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. The approach to data analysis was systematic text condensation approach. Results We stratified the management of ethical challenges into actions before, during, and after incidents. Before incidents, participants stressed the importance of mutual understandings, shared worldviews, and a supportive approach to managing emotions. During an incident, the participants employed moral perception, moral judgments, and moral actions. After an incident, the participants described sharing ethical challenges only to a limited extent as sharing was emotionally challenging, and not actively supported by workplace culture, or organisational procedures. The participants primarily managed ethical challenges informally, often using humour to cope. Conclusion Our analysis supports and clarifies that confidence, trust, and safety in relation to colleagues, management, and the wider organisation are essential for prehospital emergency personnel to share ethical challenges and preventing moral distress turning into burnout. (shrink)

(2008). Meta-Linguistics: Methodology and Ontology in Devitt's Ignorance of Language. Australasian Journal of Philosophy: Vol. 86, No. 4, pp. 643-656.

Increasing globalisation and advances in artificial reproductive techniques have opened up a whole new range of possibilities for infertile couples across the globe. Inter-country gestational surrogacy with monetary remuneration is one of the products of medical tourism meeting in vitro fertilisation embryo transfer. Filled with potential, it has also been a hot topic of discussion in legal and bioethics spheres. Fears of exploitation and breach of autonomy have sprung from the current situation, where there is no international regulation of surrogacy (...) agreements—only a web of conflicting national laws that generates loopholes and removes safeguards for both the surrogate and commissioning couple. This article argues the need for evidence-based international laws and regulations as the only way to resolve both the ethical and legal issues around commercial surrogacy. In addition, a Hague Convention on inter-country surrogacy agreements is proposed to resolve the muddled state of affairs and enable commercial surrogacy to demonstrate its full potential. (shrink)

This paper takes off from a growing preoccupation in Western political-social philosophy on the thinkability of the materiality of change, that became most pronounced in Alain Badiou's philosophy of the event. It traces the development of the discourse of radical change tied to a materialist theory of subjectivity beginning from Badiou, down to the strong criticism posed against it by Slavoj Žižek. This is then followed by the discussion of Bruno Bosteels' potent defense of Badiou's philosophy. Finally, the last part (...) takes off from this debate and highlights how this tension in Badiou's philosophy was possible in the first place. Using Adrian Johnston's key insight on pre-evental and post-evental time, this paper argues that Žižek and Bosteels respectively employ pre-evental and post-evental lenses in reading the relation of event to being. Furthermore, these two lenses are themselves the effect of the split readability of the event at the moment of its rupture: the parallax-effect that divides the event into two. This paper asserts that neither of the two is sufficient. Both are fundamental in outlining what sort of sustained disciplines are necessary before and after events take place. (shrink)

Recently, several philosophers have argued that there is a political necessity to alter certain important concepts, such as WOMAN, in order to give us better tools to understand and change oppressive conditions. I argue that conceptual change of this sort is impossible. But I also argue that it is politically unnecessary – we can effect progressive change using the same old concepts we've always had.

“Our impartiality is kept for abstract merit and demerit, which none of us ever saw.” -George Eliot, Middlemarch,book 4, chap. 40, 1871.Naturalized epistemology, as I understand it, is the practice of treating knowledge – human or otherwise – as a natural phenomenon, susceptible of investigation by the methods of empirical science. A naturalized approach to the study of knowledge differs saliently from more traditional forms of epistemology in taking the existence of knowledge for granted. Naturalized epistemologists do not concern themselves (...) with skeptical challenges. Nor are naturalized epistemologists much concerned with questions about what counts as “knowledge,” properly speaking. They do not worry if a bird’s natively specified program for star-based navigation is “justified” for the bird, nor if the sub-personal data structures and algorithms posited by cognitive psychologists can be properly counted as “beliefs.” The naturalized epistemologist is interested in the explanation of anything that even appears to be a cognitive achievement, whether or not it passes muster as “knowledge” in some preferred sense. (shrink)

Few, if any, scientific inquiries are conducted against a background of complete knowledge, a background in which inquirers are in possession of the ‘full facts’ that relate to a particular question or issue. More often than not, scientists are compelled to conduct their deliberations in contexts of epistemic uncertainty, in which partial knowledge or even a total absence of knowledge characterise inquiry. Nowhere is this epistemic uncertainty more evident, or indeed more successfully controlled, than in the branch of scientific inquiry (...) called epidemiology. In this paper, I examine how epidemiologists overcome the unique challenges to inquiry that are posed by epistemic uncertainty. In specific terms, I contend that epidemiologists employ analogical reasoning strategies in an attempt to advance their inquiries in situations that are epistemically uncertain. The context for my claims will be the early inquiries that were conducted into the emergence of HIV/AIDS in the United States. I argue that early scientific work in relation to HIV/AIDS was directly premised upon epidemiological investigations in which analogical reasoning with hepatitis B had featured significantly. I conclude that epidemiological investigations of AIDS exemplify the capacity of analogical reasoning to advance inquiry under conditions of epistemic uncertainty. To this extent, analogical reasoning should be a concern both to those who address practical problems of uncertainty management and to those who pursue theoretical debates within argumenta-tion studies and epistemology. (shrink)

In our contemporary moment, when machine learning algorithms are reshaping many aspects of society, the work of N. Katherine Hayles stands as a powerful corpus for understanding what is at stake in a new regime of computation. A renowned literary theorist whose work bridges the humanities and sciences among her many works, Hayles has detailed ways to think about embodiment in an age of virtuality, how code as performative practice is located, and the reciprocal relations among human bodies and technics. (...) This special issue follows the 2017 publication of her book Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious, in which Hayles traces the nonconscious cognition of biological life-forms and computational media. The articles in the special issue respond in different ways to Hayles’ oeuvre, mapping the specific contours of computational regimes and developing some of the ‘inflection points’ she advocates in the deep engagement with technical systems. (shrink)

As Quilty-Dunn et al. observe, the language-of-thought hypothesis (LoTH) has fallen out of favor in philosophy. I will support the arguments made for its rehabilitation by Quilty-Dunn et al. by reviewing old, but still potent arguments for LoTH, and briefly criticizing recent proposed alternatives to LoT, such as Frances Egan's deflationism and Eric Schwitzgebel's dispositionalism, revealing inadequacies in such antirepresentational, antisyntactic theories.

"Annual General Meeting Members Lunch." Ethos: Official Publication of the Law Society of the Australian Capital Territory, (202), pp. 17.

Wright, Claire Louise If the sacraments are, as Louis-Marie Chauvet argues, the major symbolic expressions of 'the body as the point where God writes God's self in us', few concepts could be more central to sacramental theology than time, the medium in which human, ecclesial, cultural and cosmic 'bodies' have their being and expression. Christian narratives, traditions and rituals are founded in history and the shared memory of culture. As Miroslav Volf notes, the 'sacred memory' of the death and (...) resurrection of Christ defines the identity of Christians as 'the pulsating heart that energizes and directs their actions and forms their hopes '. Indeed, all human experience, identity and meaning-making are mediated by an awareness of time, the flow and relativity of chronos and the moment of kairos. As Chauvet puts it, the 'sensible mediation' of history comprises 'the very milieu within which human beings attain their truth and thus correspond to the Truth which calls them'. (shrink)

Policy discussions and corporate strategies on machine learning are increasingly championing data reuse as a key element in digital transformations. These aspirations are often coupled with a focus on responsibility, ethics and transparency, as well as emergent forms of regulation that seek to set demands for corporate conduct and the protection of civic rights. And the Protective measures include methods of traceability and assessments of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ datasets and algorithms that are considered to be traceable, stable and contained. However, (...) these ways of thinking about both technology and ethics obscure a fundamental issue, namely that machine learning systems entangle data, algorithms and more-than-human environments in ways that challenge a well-defined separation. This article investigates the fundamental fallacy of most data reuse strategies as well as their regulation and mitigation strategies that data can somehow be followed, contained and controlled in machine learning processes. Instead, the article argues that we need to understand the reuse of data as an inherently entangled phenomenon. To examine this tension between the discursive regimes and the realities of data reuse, we advance the notion of reuse entanglements as an analytical lens. The main contribution of the article is the conceptualization of reuse that places entanglements at its core and the articulation of its relevance using empirical illustrations. This is important, we argue, for our understanding of the nature of data and algorithms, for the practical uses of data and algorithms and our attitudes regarding ethics, responsibility and regulation. (shrink)

Fodor and LePore's reconstruction of the semantic holism debate in terms of "atomism" and "anatomism" is inadequate: it fails to highlight the important issue of how intentional contents are individuated, and excludes or obscures several possible positions on the metaphysics of content. One such position, "weak sociabilism" is important because it addresses concerns of Fodor and LePore's molecularist critics about conditions for possession of concepts, without abandoning atomism about content individuation. Properties like DEMOCRACY may be "theoretical" in the following sense: (...) only devices capable of inference can come to be selectively sensitive to such properties. Thus, such concepts cannot be punctate, although their contents are individuated, as atomism requires, independently of their conceptual connections. (shrink)