Mass-marketing frauds are on the increase. Given the amount of monies lost and the psychological impact of MMFs there is an urgent need to develop new and effective methods to prevent more of these crimes. This paper reports the early planning of automated methods our interdisciplinary team are developing to prevent and detect MMF. Importantly, the paper presents the ethical and social constraints involved in such a model and suggests concerns others might also consider when developing automated systems.

In the face of mounting criticism against advance directives, we describe how a novel, computer-based decision aid addresses some of these important concerns. This decision aid, Making Your Wishes Known: Planning Your Medical Future , translates an individual's values and goals into a meaningful advance directive that explicitly reflects their healthcare wishes and outlines a plan for how they wish to be treated. It does this by (1) educating users about advance care planning; (2) helping individuals identify, clarify, and prioritize (...) factors that influence their decision-making about future medical conditions; (3) explaining common end-of-life medical conditions and life-sustaining treatment; (4) helping users articulate a coherent set of wishes with regard to advance care planning—in the form of an advance directive readily interpretable by physicians; and (5) helping individuals both choose a spokesperson, and prepare to engage family, friends, and health care providers in discussions about advance care planning. (shrink)

The ad baculum is not a fallacy in an argument, but is offered instead of an argument to put an end to further argument. This claim is the basis for criticizing Michael Wreen's "neo-traditionalism," which yields misreadings of supposed cases of the ad baculum because of its rejection of any consideration of what the person using the ad baculum, or someone who refers to that use as an "argument," is doing. The paper concludes with reflections on the values that (...) should inform talk of a fallacy in an argument such as the one that Wreen is giving. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn a recent paper, Michael Pardo argues that the epistemic property that is legally relevant is the one called Safety, rather than Sensitivity. In the process, he argues against our Sensitivity-related account of statistical evidence. Here we revisit these issues, partly in order to respond to Pardo, and partly in order to make general claims about legal epistemology. We clarify our account, we show how it adequately deals with counterexamples and other worries, we raise suspicions about Safety's value here, (...) and we revisit our general skepticism about the role that epistemological considerations should play in determining legal policy. (shrink)

Howard Robinson has argued that even if the major claims of Berkeleian idealism are mistaken, including its account of the “physical world,” “the overall endeavour of defending idealism is more plausible than it is generally believed to be”. He argues that aspects of Berkeley’s arguments for idealism, including a Berkeleian argument against naive realism, can be shown to refute the representative realist’s view of perception, and its concomitant ontology. This ontology is at least partially materialist. According to Robinson, once naive (...) realism is disposed of and the objections to RR are exposed, Berkeleian Idealism can raise its shadowy head with at least the respectability afforded the currently more fashionable Representationalism. We shall argue that Robinson’s claim cannot plausibly be sustained. His defense of Berkeleian idealism, based in part on his understanding of naive realism and his critique of Representationalism, falters. “The overall endeavour of defending idealism” is not as plausible as Robinson takes it to be. (shrink)

Shame is one of a family of self-conscious emotions that includes embarrassment, guilt, disgrace, and humiliation. _On Shame_ examines this emotion psychologically and philosophically, in order to show how it can be a galvanizing force for moral action against the violence and atrocity that characterize the world we live in. Michael L. Morgan argues that because shame is global in its sense of the self, the moral failures of all groups in which we are a member – including the (...) entire human race – reflect on each person individually. Drawing on historical and current affairs to explore the emotion of shame, as well as films such as _Night and Fog_, _Hotel Rwanda_ and _Life is Beautiful_ and the work of Primo Levi, Bernard Williams, and Stanley Cavell, Michael Morgan illustrates how moral responsibility can be facilitated by calling upon an emotional reaction that is familiar, complex, and central to our conception of ourselves as individuals and as members of society. (shrink)

Table of contents : 1. The beginnings of phenomenology: Husserl and his predecessors Richard Cobb-Stevens, Boston College 2. Philosophy of existence 1: Heidegger Jacques Taminiaux, University of Louvain, Belgium 3. Philosophy of existence 2: Sartre Thomas Flynn, Emory University 4. Philosophy of existence 3: Merleau-Ponty Bernard Cullen, Queen's University, Belfast 5. Philosophies of religion: Jaspers, Marcel, Levinas William Desmond, Loyola College 6. Philosophies of science: Mach, Duhem, Bachelard Babette Babich, Fordham University 7. Philosophies of Marxism: Gramsci, Lukacs, Benjamin, Althusser (...) class='Hi'>Michael Kelly, University of Southampton 8. Critical theory: from Adorno to Habermas David Rasmussen, Boston College 9. Hermeneutics: Gadamer, Ricoeur Gary Madison, McMaster University 10. Italian idealism and after: Croce, Gentile, Vattimo Giacomo Rinaldi, University of Urbino, Italy 11. French structuralism and after: Barthes, Lacan, Lévi-Strauss, Foucault Hugh Silverman, State University of New York at Stony Brook 12. French feminism and after: de Beauvoir, Kristeva, Irigaray, Cixious Alison Ainley, Oxford Brookes University 13. Deconstruction Simon Critchley, Essex University 14. Derrida Timothy Mooney, Essex University 15. Postmodernist theory: Lyotard, Baudrillard Thomas Docherty, Trinity College, Dublin. (shrink)

Catastrophe Theory was developed in an attempt to provide a form of Mathematics particularly apt for applications in the biological sciences. It was claimed that while it could be applied in the more conventional physical way, it could also be applied in a new metaphysical way, derived from the Structuralism of Saussure in Linguistics and Lévi-Strauss in Anthropology.Since those early beginnings there have been many attempts to apply Catastrophe Theory to Biology, but these hopes cannot be said to have been (...) fully realised. (shrink)

The post-Holocaust suicide of a concentration camp survivor is particularly unsettling. One thinks, for instance, of Cliff Stern's devastated response to Professor Louis Levy's death in Woody Allen's movie Crimes and Misdemeanors. Loosely based on Primo Levi, Allen's professor provides in short documentary clips an astute analysis of the contradictions of a loving God in the Old Testament and stoically counsels embracing life despite the indifference and occasional cruelty of the universe. Having experienced, understood, and accepted the absurdity and (...) injustice of life, Levy, one might think, would rage to the bitter end against the dying of the light. But for no apparent reason, he kills himself. Cliff's response... (shrink)

This essay returns to Of Grammatology, Derrida’s seminal work of 1967, in order to demonstrate the key role played by the category of interiority in that work and in deconstruction more generally. The essay show how Derrida traces the values associated with interiority in his readings of Plato, Rousseau, and Levi-Strauss in order to argue that the opposition between interiority and exteriority is not one philosophical opposition among others but the single most powerful and persistent opposition in Western philosophy, (...) organizing everything from the relationship between speech and writing to that between presence and absence, essence and accident, even life and death. We thus come to see through a reading of this early work of Derrida’s that deconstruction will have been from its very inception a deconstruction of any claims to an inside that would come before or exclude its outside, that is, a deconstruction of every phantasm of interiority. (shrink)

In 2010, American sociologist John Levi Martin asserted that in-depth interviews are inadequate for the study of culture. This sparked a debate in the discipline over the legitimacy of interview methods for researchers of culture and others. Here, we contextualize and contribute to this debate. We review the ideas of Martin and argue that in-depth interviews are in fact valid, well-supported in the field, and useful for investigating cultural phenomena. We build this counter-argument on three angles: epistemological, theoretical and (...) methodological. Given this defense, we also explore how social scientists are implementing innovative ways to complement in-depth interview approaches, such as through social network analysis. En el año 2010, John Levi Martin, un reconocido sociólogo estadounidense dedicó una de sus publicaciones para aseverar que las entrevistas en profundidad eran inadecuadas para estudiar fenómenos culturales. Esto desató un debate en la disciplina respecto a la legitimidad de los métodos basados en entrevistas para aquellos investigadores estudiosos de la sociología de la cultura u otras áreas similares. En este trabajo, contextualizamos y contribuimos a este debate. Revisamos las ideas de Martin y defendimos la idea de que las entrevistas en profundidad realmente son válidas y que existen favorables antecedentes en su aplicación. Por lo tanto sí son necesarias al investigar este tipo de fenómenos. Construimos esta contra-respuesta desde tres ángulos: epistemológico, teórico y metodológico. Haciendo nuestra defensa de este tipo de entrevistas, también damos cuenta de la manera en que científicos sociales implementan formas innovadoras para complementar su función, tal como sucede en el análisis de redes sociales. (shrink)

In ‘A Non-Pragmatic Vindication of Probabilism’, Jim Joyce attempts to ‘depragmatize’ de Finetti’s prevision argument for the claim that our partial beliefs ought to satisfy the axioms of probability calculus. In this paper, I adapt Joyce’s argument to give a non-pragmatic vindication of various versions of David Lewis’ Principal Principle, such as the version based on Isaac Levi's account of admissibility, Michael Thau and Ned Hall's New Principle, and Jenann Ismael's Generalized Principal Principle. Joyce enumerates properties that must (...) be had by any measure of the distance from a set of partial beliefs to the set of truth values; he shows that, on any such measure, and for any set of partial beliefs that violates the probability axioms, there is a set that satisfies those axioms that is closer to every possible set of truth values. I replace truth values by objective chances in his argument; I show that for any set of partial beliefs that violates the probability axioms or a version of the Principal Principle, there is a set that satisfies them that is closer to every possible set of objective chances. (shrink)

In the wake of much previous work on Gilles Deleuze's relations to other thinkers (including Bergson, Spinoza and Leibniz), his relation to Kant is now of great and active interest and a thriving area of research. In the context of the wider debate between 'naturalism' and 'transcendental philosophy', the implicit dispute between Deleuze's 'transcendental empiricism' and Kant's 'transcendental idealism' is of prime philosophical concern. -/- Bringing together the work of international experts from both Deleuze scholarship and Kant scholarship, Thinking Between (...) Deleuze and Kant addresses explicitly the varied and various connections between these two great European philosophers, providing key material for understanding the central philosophical problems in the wider 'naturalism/ transcendental philosophy' debate. The book reflects an area of great current interest in Deleuze Studies and initiates an ongoing interest in Deleuze within Kant scholarship. The contributors are Mick Bowles, Levi R. Bryant, Patricia Farrell, Christian Kerslake, Matt Lee, Michael J. Olson, Henry Somers-Hall and Edward Willatt. (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.

Isaac Levi's new book is concerned with how one can justify changing one's beliefs. The discussion is deeply informed by the belief-doubt model advocated by C. S. Peirce and John Dewey, of which the book provides a substantial analysis. Professor Levi then addresses the conceptual framework of potential changes available to an inquirer. A structural approach to propositional attitudes is proposed, which rejects the conventional view that a propositional attitude involves a relation between an agent and either a (...) linguistic entity or some other intentional object such as a proposition or set of possible worlds. The last two chapters offer an account of change in states of full belief understood as changes in commitments rather than changes in performance; one chapter deals with adding new information to a belief state, the other with giving up information. The book builds upon topics discussed in some of Levi's earlier work. It will be of particular interest to discussion theorists, epistemologists, philosophers of science, computer scientists, and cognitive psychologists. (shrink)

Giorgio Levi Della Vida (1886-1967) was not only an eminent Islamologist, he was also a man with solid roots in his own time. He taught in Naples and Rome, then for the ten years 1939-1948 at the University of Pennsylvania. He was one of the few university teachers who, when the oath of loyalty to the Italian fascist regime was introduced in October 1931, opted not to accept that act of submission. His memoirs, Fantasmi ritrovati, were published in 1966; (...) the book, now out of print, conjures up a tableau vivant of half a century of intellectual encounters in Italy and Europe between the wars. Among the portraits he paints there is the astounding story of those crucial days in June 1924 when the fascist government became a full-blown regime. This article presents extended extracts from that story. (shrink)

It is a commonplace that in making decisions agents often have to juggle competing values, and that no choice will maximise satisfaction of them all. However, the prevailing account of these cases assumes that there is always a single ranking of the agent's values, and therefore no unresolvable conflict between them. Isaac Levi denies this assumption, arguing that agents often must choose without having balanced their different values and that to be rational, an act does not have to be (...) optimal, only what Levi terms 'admissible'. This book explores the consequences of denying the assumption and develops a general approach to decision-making under unresolved conflict. Professor Levi discusses conflicts of value in several domains - those arising in moral dilemmas, the drawing of scientific inferences, decisions taken under uncertainty, and in social choice. In each of these he adapts his theoretical framework, showing how conflict may often be reduced though not always altogether eliminated. (shrink)

Isaac Levi is one of the preeminent philosophers in the areas of pragmatic rationality and epistemology. This collection of essays constitutes an important presentation of his original and influential ideas about rational choice and belief. A wide range of topics is covered, including consequentialism and sequential choice, consensus, voluntarism of belief, and the tolerance of the opinions of others. The essays elaborate on the idea that principles of rationality are norms that regulate the coherence of our beliefs and values (...) with our rational choices. The norms impose minimal constraints on deliberation and inquiry, but they also impose demands well beyond the capacities of deliberating agents. This major collection will be eagerly sought out by a wide range of philosophers in epistemology, logic, and philosophy of science, as well as economists, decision theorists, and statisticians. (shrink)

'At last one of the most famous generalizing works in anthropology by the field's most stimulating and controversial contemporary figure has been translated, beautifully, and with the enlightening preface of the second French edition.

From one end of his philosophical work to the other, Gilles Deleuze consistently described his position as a transcendental empiricism. But just what is transcendental about Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism? And how does his position fit with the traditional empiricism articulated by Hume? In Difference and Givenness , Levi Bryant addresses these long-neglected questions so critical to an understanding of Deleuze’s thinking. Through a close examination of Deleuze’s independent work--focusing especially on Difference and Repetition-- as well as his engagement with (...) thinkers such as Kant, Mai;mon, Bergson, and Simondon, Bryant sets out to unearth Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism and to show how it differs from transcendental idealism, absolute idealism, and traditional empiricism. What emerges from these efforts is a metaphysics that strives to articulate the conditions for real existence, capable of accounting for the individual itself without falling into conceptual or essentialist abstraction. In Bryant’s analysis, Deleuze’s metaphysics articulates an account of being as process or creative individuation based on difference, as well as a challenging critique--and explanation--of essentialist substance ontologies. A clear and powerful discussion of how Deleuze’s project relates to two of the most influential strains in the history of philosophy, this book will prove essential to anyone seeking to understand Deleuze’s thought and its specific contribution to metaphysics and epistemology. (shrink)

Isaac Levi's new book develops further his pioneering work in formal epistemology, focusing on the problem of belief contraction, or how rationally to relinquish old beliefs. Levi offers the most penetrating analysis to date of this key question in epistemology, offering a completely new solution and explaining its relation to his earlier proposals. He mounts an argument in favor of the thesis that contracting a state of belief by giving up specific beliefs is to be evaluated in terms (...) of the value of the information lost by doing so. The rationale aims to be thoroughly decision theoretic. Levi spells out his goals and shows that certain types of recommendations are obtained if one seeks to promote these goals. He compares his approach to his earlier account of inductive expansion. The recommendations are for "mild contractions." These are formally the same as the "severe withdrawals" considered by Pagnucco and Rott. The rationale, however, is different. A critical part of the book concerns the elaboration of these differences. The results are relevant to accounts of the conditions under which it is legitimate to cease believing and to accounts of conditionals. Mild Contraction will be of great interest to all specialists in belief revision theory and to many students of formal epistemology, philosophy of science, and pragmatism. (shrink)

Atlas, S. On the relation between subject and object.--Bamberger, B. Religion and the arts.--Bemporad, J. Man, God, and history.--Braude, W. C. The two lives of Hillel's sandwich.--Chapman, C. B. The health guilds, the public interest and the malpractice dilemma.--Feuer, L. Influence of Abba Hillel Silver on the evolution of Reform Judaism.--Hackerman, N. Ignorance, the motivation for understanding.--Hartshorne, C. Whitehead's metaphysical system.--Ogden, S. M. Prolegomena to a Christian theology of nature.--Sandmel, S. The rationalist denial of Jewish tradition in Philo.--Shakow, D. Educating (...) the mental health researcher for potential development in man.--Turner, D. An Ashendene dozen from the Levi A. Olan collection of fine books.--Olan, L. A. A preliminary summing up. (shrink)

This book by one of the world's foremost philosophers in the fields of epistemology and logic offers an account of suppositional reasoning relevant to practical deliberation, explanation, prediction and hypothesis testing. Suppositions made 'for the sake of argument' sometimes conflict with our beliefs, and when they do, some beliefs are rejected and others retained. Thanks to such belief contravention, adding content to a supposition can undermine conclusions reached without it. Subversion can also arise because suppositional reasoning is ampliative. These two (...) types of nonmonotonic logic are the focus of this book. A detailed comparison of nonmonotonicity appropriate to both belief contravening and ampliative suppositional reasoning reveals important differences that have been overlooked. (shrink)

Continental philosophy has entered a new period of ferment. The long deconstructionist era was followed with a period dominated by Deleuze, which has in turn evolved into a new situation still difficult to define. However, one common thread running through the new brand of continental positions is a renewed attention to materialist and realist options in philosophy. Among the leaders of the established generation, this new focus takes numerous forms. It might be hard to find many shared positions in the (...) writings of Badiou, DeLanda, Laruelle, Latour, Stengers, and Žižek, but what is missing from their positions is an obsession with the critique of written texts. All of them elaborate a positive ontology, despite the incompatibility of their results. Meanwhile, the new generation of continental thinkers is pushing these trends still further, as seen in currents ranging from transcendental materialism to the London-based speculative realism movement to new revivals of Derrida. As indicated by the title The Speculative Turn, the new currents of continental philosophy depart from the text-centered hermeneutic models of the past and engage in daring speculations about the nature of reality itself. This anthology assembles authors, of several generations and numerous nationalities, who will be at the centre of debate in continental philosophy for decades to come. (shrink)