From machine learning and computer vision to robotics and natural language processing, the application of data science and artificial intelligence is expected to transform health care (Ce...

To many contemporary scholars, Émile Meyerson is a footnote in an obscure history: early twentieth-century French philosophy of science. While the traditions of épistémologie are beginning to enjoy the scrutiny they deserve, Meyerson’s role remains overlooked. This article provides an overview of Meyerson’s philosophical project to help sow the seeds for a more systematic recuperation of its legacy. By orienting his work historically, I elucidate the nature of Meyerson’s critique of positivism, his distinctive method, and the implications these have for (...) the relation between science and philosophy. In particular, I show that for Meyerson positivisme refers not only to the doctrine of Auguste Comte but to a general philosophical tendency. Inseparable from Meyerson’s critique of this tendency is his implementation of a new methodology—épistémologie—according to which reason must be understood through the historical development of science. Épistémologie reveals that positivism not only is an incomplete account of science but is detrimental to its progress. Accordingly, Meyerson hopes to secure science’s right to function according to its own immanent principles, thereby providing prolegomena to all future metaphysics through a historical determination of the nature and limits of human reason. (shrink)

Despite the praise his writing garnered during his lifetime, e.g., from readers such as Einstein and de Broglie, Émile Meyerson has been largely forgotten. The rich tradition of French épistémologie has recently been taken up in some Anglo-American scholarship, but Meyerson—who popularized the term épistémologie through his historical method of analyzing science, and criticized positivism long before Quine and Kuhn—remains overlooked. If Meyerson is remembered at all, it is as a historian of classical science. This paper attempts to rectify both (...) states of affairs by explicating one of Meyerson׳s last and untranslated works, Réel et déterminisme dans la théorie quantique, an opuscule on quantum physics.I provide an overview of Meyerson׳s philosophy, his critique of Max Planck׳s interpretation of quantum physics, and then outline and evaluate Meyerson׳s neo-Kantian alternative. I then compare and contrast this interpretation with Cassirer׳s neo-Kantian program. Finally I show that, while Meyerson believes the revolutionary new physics requires "profoundly" modifying our conception of reality, ultimately, he thinks, it secures the legitimacy of his thesis: that science seeks explanations in the form of what he calls "identification." I hope my research will enable a more general and systematic engagement with Meyerson׳s work, especially with a view to assessing its viability as a philosophical method today. (shrink)

This volume features 16 essays on the philosophy of technology that discuss its identity, its position in philosophy in general, and the role of empirical studies in philosophical analyses of engineering ethics and engineering practices. This volume is published about fifteen years after Peter Kroes and Anthonie Meijers published a collection of papers under the title The empirical turn in the philosophy of technology, in which they called for a reorientation toward the practice of engineering, and sketched the likely benefits (...) for philosophy of technology of pursuing its major questions in an empirically informed way. The essays in this volume fall apart in two different kinds. One kind follows up on The empirical turn discussion about what the philosophy of technology is all about. It continues the search for the identity of the philosophy of technology by asking what comes after the empirical turn. The other kind of essays follows the call for an empirical turn in the philosophy of technology by showing how it may be realized with regard to particular topics. Together these essays offer the reader an overview of the state of the art of an empirically informed philosophy of technology and of various views on the empirical turn as a stepping stone into the future of the philosophy of technology. (shrink)

Shaftesbury's Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times was published in 1711. It ranges widely over ethics, aesthetics, religion, the arts (painting, literature, architecture, gardening), and ancient and modern history, and aims at nothing less than a new ideal of the gentleman. Together with Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Addison and Steele's Spectator, it is a text of fundamental importance for understanding the thought and culture of Enlightenment Europe. This volume presents a new edition of the text together with an (...) introduction, explanatory notes and a guide to further reading. (shrink)

To make behavioral choices that are in line with our goals and our moral beliefs, we need to gather and consider information about our current situation. Most information present in our environment is not relevant to the choices we need or would want to make and thus could interfere with our ability to behave in ways that reflect our underlying values. Certain sources of information could even lead us to make choices we later regret, and thus it would be beneficial (...) to be able to ignore that information. Our ability to exert successful self-governance depends on our ability to attend to sources of information that we deem important to our decision-making processes. We generally assume that, at any moment, we have the ability to choose what we pay attention to. However, recent research indicates that what we pay attention to is influenced by our prior experiences, including reward history and past successes and failures, even when we are not aware of this history. Even momentary distractions can cause us to miss or discount information that should have a greater influence on our decisions given our values. Such biases in attention thus raise questions about the degree to which the choices that we make may be poorly informed and not truly reflect our ability to otherwise exert self-governance. (shrink)

The proliferation of personal data collection practices fundamentally reshapes how society is ordered and commercialized, and demands reconsideration of the possibilities for a just and equitable s...

Unreal City: a zany cartoon megalopolis where towers are built of cotton candy, facts scatter like pixie dust, and the truth is whatever you feel it to be. And it's no fantasy. It's where we live. We dwell in Unreal City. We believe in un-being. With saber-like wit, poet and professor Anthony Esolen leads readers on a tour through the ruins of their own Western world--through king-size bookstores, manicured college campuses, strobe-lit choir lofts, mechanized farms, divorce courts, drag-queen libraries, (...) and beyond. This hilarious guide to a culture gone mad with sex and self-care minces no words and spares no egos. We the people of Unreal City are no better, and certainly no smarter, than our fathers. But fear not. Sex and the Unreal City insists there's no need to settle down in the ninth circle of unreality. Esolen lights a torch and heads up the well-trod path back to our cleaner, kinder, truer homeland: earth. Along the way, the author sings the songs of masters somehow long forgotten--Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, the evangelists--and asks us to chant along. Readers of essayists like George Weigel, George Rutler, Malcom Muggeridge, and Walker Percy will enjoy this rollicking, intelligent book."--Amazon. (shrink)

“Public health legal preparedness” is a term born in the ferment, beginning in the late 1990s, that has led to unprecedented recognition of the essential role law plays in public health and, even more recently, in protecting the public from terrorism and other potentially catastrophic health threats.The initial articulation of public health has not kept pace with rapid evolution in the concept and in practical development of public health preparedness itself. This poses the risk that legal preparedness may fall behind (...) construction of general readiness in the public health system—and may, in fact, undercut achievement of comprehensive public health preparedness for massive threats to health in both the United States and world-wide. Inadvertent results might include both negative health impacts and infringement on individual rights. (shrink)

In my article I evaluate Searle's account of mental causation, in particular his account of the causal efficacy of unconscious intentional states. I argue that top-down causation and overdetermination are unsolved problems in Searle's philosophy of mind, despite his assurances to the contrary. I also argue that there are conflicting claims involved in his account of mental causation and his account of the unconscious. As a result, it becomes impossible to understand how unconscious intentional states can be causally efficacious. My (...) conclusion will be that if Searle's conception of unconscious intentionality is to play a genuine role in the causal explanation of human action, it needs to be rethought. (shrink)

In my reply I focus on three topics: the usefulness of Searle's physical analogies for understanding the relationship between higher-level mental properties and lower-level physical properties, the question of overdetermination and the causal efficacy of unconscious intentional states. I argue that Searle's reply does not refute my arguments against his analogies, while concerns about overdetermination are only taken away because his reply shows that there is no genuine unconscious mental causation in his view. That makes it hard to understand how (...) he can maintain at the same time that we follow rules unconsciously. (shrink)

This work explores the underlying issues and problems surrounding reflection, describing a selection of initiatives and fulfilling a need for novice reflectors to increase their knowledge. The theoretical underpinnings are presented, along with the realities of using reflection in practice.

Critiquing any practice, theory, or law, requires understanding the characteristics of the environment which created a need for this law. There are hundreds of different cultures in the world, and each one has its own set of norms, characteristics, and values. What in one country is perceived normal, ethical or unethical, right or wrong, may not be the same somewhere else in the world. The first civilizations begun in Africa and Europe many thousands of years ago when people were hunters (...) and nomads, it is not unreasonable to suspect that many of those traits and characteristics have been socially transferred and/or inherited by future generations. (shrink)

Restless Ideas is a lively new textbook of contemporary social theory that speaks directly to the anxious age in which we live today. In addition to providing a highly readable guided tour of major social theories from the mid-20th to the early 21st century, this book is full of dynamic examples that show how these theories may be used to deepen our understanding of current events and of our own life experiences. The emergence of demagogic political leaders like Donald Trump (...) in the USA, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey; the rise of religious fundamentalism, terrorism, and political populism; the digital echo-chamber of social media; and the underlying causes of Brexit are only some of the many current social issues that can be framed through contemporary social theories. Similarly, the politics of sexual, racial and ethnic minorities can be analyzed through the prism of theoretical perspectives such as queer theory, standpoint and intersectional theory, postcolonial theory and critical race theory, while the ongoing struggles for gender equality and gender justice can usefully be examined through the generational perspectives of feminist theories. This book sets the stage with a critical discussion of the loaded history of the social theory canon and makes the argument that there has never been a better time than the present to broaden our understanding of our shared global heritage of social theory, to include some of the formerly excluded classics of past social thinkers, and to open the doors to current social thinkers theorizing from the margins. The book traces the modern roots of contemporary social theory back to the works of the early structural functionalists, systems theorists, conflict theorists, symbolic interactionists, ethnomethodologists and sociobiologists, building on and at times inverting the canon with the critical advancements to social theory. Later chapters focus on the current influence of structuration theory, third wave critical theory, postmodernism and poststructuralism, critical race theory, postcolonialism, liquid and late modernity theories, and globalization theories. These perspectives include the works of contemporary social theorists such as Anthony Giddens, Pierre Bourdieu, Juliet Mitchell, Dorothy Smith, Judith Butler, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Gayatri Spivak, Homi K. Bhabha, Zygmunt Bauman, Slavoj Zizek, Alain Badiou, Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, Nancy Fraser, Manuel Castells and Ulrich Beck. The underlying premise - and the promise - of this book is that social theory has the power to provide us with the skills for more informed observation, analysis, and empathic understanding of social behavior and social interaction. In a word: the value of social theory may be seen in how it can enhance social literacy - by deepening our understanding of the world around us, and by empowering us to become practical theorists in our own lives. (shrink)

The prevailing economic paradigm, in which a closed circular flow of production and consumption can be described in terms of 'natural laws ' of the equilibrium of market forces, is being challenged by our growing knowledge of complex systems, particularly ecosystems. It is increasingly apparent that neo-classical economics does not reflect social, economic and environmental realities in a world of limited resources. The best way to understand the problems implicit in the concept of 'sustainable development ' is provided by Ecological (...) Economics – a new synthesis in which the traditional virtue of thrift is justified using modern ideas from systems theory and thermodynamics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:GROUNDING THE HUMAN CONVERSATION Introduction ANTHONY M. MATTEO Elizabethtown Oollege Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania SINCE THE APPEARENCE of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions 1 the so called "rationality debate " has been conducted at a high pitch in Anglo-American philosophy. Concurrently, this debate has occupied some of the luminaries of Continental philosophy: Gadamer, Habermas, Feyerabend, and Derrida. Now that the Sturm und Drang associated with it has to (...) some extent subsided, we would like to offer a partial analysis and critique. of the insights that this controversy has proffered. In this essay our fundamental thesis is twofold: I) At the heart of the rationality debate is a longing to deconstruct narrow and restrictive methodologies.for acquiring knowledge, thereby creating the possibility for a free and open " human conversation," unfettered by the dogmatisms of the past; ~) The " deconstructive " phase of the deba.te now requires an essentially "constructive " complement: further conditions necessary to ground a free and open " human conversation " need to be specified. In this latter ta.sk we will suggest that the work of the contemporary analytic philosopher, A. C. Grayling, and that of the fa:ther of Transcendental Thomism, Joseph Marecha.I, can be particularly helpful. I ncommensurability The most radical claim to emerge from the recent rationality debate is that of" incommensura.bility ": namely, two or more awropriations of reality can be so utterly diverse that we can1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). 285 ANTHONY M. MATTEO not adjudicate between them as to their respective truth or falsity. Take at face value, for example, Paul Feyerabend's proclamation: that the views of scientists, and especially their views on basic matters, are often as different from each other as are the ideologies that underlie different cultures. Even worse: there exist scientific theories which are mutually incommensurable though they apparently deal " with the same subject matter." 2 Underlying :this claim is the belief that there is no a prori limit to the number of independent ways in which the stuff of reality can be conceived. Furthermore, since there is no atemporal or ahistorical standpoint beyond the fray of contending worldviews, no one view can legitimately demand absolute cognitive priority on the grounds that it more faithfully captures the " essence " of things than any other possible alternative. In effect, then, " reality is entirely reconceivable.... Our experience of the accidents of objects has no more direct claim to being veridical than our judgments about the nature of things." 3 Even a partial list of the factors contributing to the genesis of the notion of radical incommensurability would be impressive : the rise of historical consciousness and its assertion of the historically conditioned nature of all world views, the emphasis in the sociology of knowledge on the socially constructed nature of all visions of reality, the contention in the philosophy of science that.all scientific observation and appraisal is ineluctably theory-laden, a:s well as the Marxist critique of theoretical positions as intellectual supports for vested class interests. Without gainsaying the significance of these and other possible factors in the evolution of the notion of incommensurability, we would argue that a proper gra:sp of its apparent plausi2 Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge (London : NLB, 1975), p. 274. a Victor Preller, Di·vine Science And The Science Of God (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 69. GROUNDING THE HUMAN CONVERSATION ~87 bility and consequent appeal can best be attained if we unearth its foundation in ·a relativist reading of Kant's Copernican Revolution in philosophy. Kant's connection with this notion turns on a particular development of his basic distinction between " our " mode of conceiving reality and reality-initself (Ding-an-Sich). In Kant's view, we can only know the appearance of reality as filtered through our conceptual scheme; thus, the thing-in-itself-reality in its pure nature or aseity-is opaque and impenetrable. For Kant, however, there was only one conceptual scheme: namely, the scheme structured by the presuppositions of Euclidean geometry and Newtonian physics. Kant believed that one of his great contributions to our theoretical life was to demonstrate that this scheme was coterminous with the powers of human conceptualization as such... (shrink)

Although there are several provisions within the Nigerian legal framework that, however, address the issue of church attack, the state capacity to implement effective constitutional sanctioning on perpetrators of this heinous crime has always been found wanting or completely absent, leading to countless religious attacks on churches with seeming state consent. This study employs semi-structured interviews to draw data from affected families from Benue and Enugu States, Nigeria. The article explored their experiences. The study participants were recruited through snowball sampling (...) technique, and data were analysed thematically. The respondents stated that church killings or killing of Christians is rising because of the fact that perpetrators stand lower risk of detection and apprehension than other crimes. Also respondents interrogated that justification for the crime is land acquisition and religious intolerance. On the persistence of the challenge, all the 13 respondents stated that the crime seems to have state approval that has made it seemly impossible to tackle. The article calls for continuous inter-religious dialogue and intentional governmental responsibility in protecting lives of all persons living within the geographical enclave of Nigeria which is necessary for the common good. Closer understanding of other faiths and religions will help build bridges of peace and tolerance. The article also calls for the need to promote African traditional values, such as the value of sacredness of life, human respect and good neighbourliness.Contribution: This study initiated the discussions that will help the public understand the reason for continuous church attacks in Nigeria, what church crime connotes in the Nigerian context and its uniqueness from other crimes. These discussions sit quite well within the transdisciplinary religious perspective of this journal. (shrink)

The Politics of Well-Being argues that the relationship between well-being and ethical life has been overlooked. The more specific argument of the book is that ethical life requires political engagement, and the emergence of a society committed to critical thinking. It is argued that these conditions allow for our ordination and confirmation as ethical subjects. While well-being can be experienced in different ways, it is claimed that, after experience of ethical life, a more sustainable form of it is revealed to (...) us, a form which we would be drawn to preserve, a form which can be constituted as an object of hope. While the book draws on philosophical themes, its main focus is political. This is because its primary objective is to identify and to examine what needs to be done in order to realise ethical life. Its main focus in this respect is the identification and examination of the barriers which need to be overcome if ethical life is to be realised. It is acknowledged that this will not be an easy task. Indeed, it may be an impossible task. However, despite these barriers, and despite the dark days we are living through, the book is a call to hope rather than a surrender to despair. This book will be of interest to students of politics, psychology, cultural studies, philosophy and sociology, as well as anyone else interested in exploring new ideas about how the make the world a better place. (shrink)

The study of a middle school social studies and literacy project this paper addresses occurred in the national capital region of the United States, where perceptions of “patriotism” and immigration policies were the subjects of frequent media reports. With this examination the authors considered one overarching research question: how do middle school students describe and illustrate citizenship when given access to multimodal texts and media (e.g., digital photography and slam poetry)? The authors called on young adolescents to create slam poems (...) with incorporated images to address the question “What does it mean to be a ‘citizen’?”. The authors examined products of this project, which included surveys and slam poems, to address this research question, identifying findings that might inform social studies educators’ practices and curricula. Employing alternative and multimodal texts motivated students to engage with this project and to more candidly share expansive perspectives about what they believe makes a “citizen”. (shrink)