Notions of human nature and what is natural are vague and contradictory within the field of bioethics, especially evident through individuals critical of bodily diversity through nanobiology and biotechnology in general. This paper discusses the paradoxical aspects of these notions of human nature, while showing that they rely on a notion of a standard body that all humans allegedly share. I examine several writings on biotechnology by bioethicists, specifically by people working in policy—it is here that the normativity of human (...) nature becomes a pressing concern. Once it has been shown that there is no standard body, and indeed typical bioethical notions of human nature are internally contradictory, a more productive conversation can be engaged in that allows for morphological diversity, be it through biotechnological change or via nature itself. (shrink)

This essay examines narratives about cadaver dissection through the lens of psychoanalytic theory in order to better understand the nature of medical students’ socialization into medicine and its implications for physician-patient communication. The theoretical framework provided by Julia Kristeva focuses attention on the nature of subject-formation in relation to abjection – that which reveals the contingent nature of the speaking self. Analysis of memoirs and other narratives by medical students demonstrates that students encounter the abject in the process of dissecting (...) a corpse, but are rigorously trained to map over this experience using the technical tools of biomedicine. Other students rely on dark and morbid forms of humor to develop a sense of emotional distance from their cadaver. This analysis reveals new insights about the nature of the gap between physicians and their patients. In particular, it indicates that this gap is not fixed or static but fluid and malleable. Physicians are always shifting between the symbolic realm of biomedicine and the affective, semiotic mode of encountering the abject. This malleability provides the key to training and educating medical students, socializing them in such a way that they are reflexive about this process of oscillation. How physicians handle the reality of their fluctuation between the semiotic and the symbolic is what will determine their ability to engage with patients. (shrink)

Moral agency is limited, imperfect, and structurally constrained. This is evident in the many ways we all unwittingly participate in widespread injustice through our everyday actions, which I call ‘structural wrongs’. To do justice to these facts, I argue that we should distinguish between summative and formative moral criticism. While summative criticism functions to conclusively assess an agent's performance relative to some benchmark, formative criticism aims only to improve performance in an ongoing way. I show that the negative sanctions associated (...) with summative responses are only justifiably imposed under certain conditions when persons exercise their agency wrongly — conditions that do not always hold for structural wrongs. Yet even in such cases we can still use formative responses, which are warranted whenever agents fall short of moral ideals. Expanding our repertoire of moral criticism to include both summative and formative responses enables us to better appreciate both the powers and limitations of our agency, and the complexity of moral life. (shrink)

I propose a new concept of solidarity, which I call “solidarity from below,” that highlights an aspect of solidarity widely recognized in popular uses of the term, but which has hitherto been neglected in the philosophical literature. Solidarity from below is the collective ability of otherwise powerless people to organize themselves for transformative social change. I situate this concept with respect to four distinct but intertwined questions that have motivated extant theorizing about solidarity. I explain what it means to conceptualize (...) solidarity from below as a form of power, rather than as a feeling, disposition, duty, or scheme of social arrangements. Finally, I suggest that the moral-relational aspects of solidarity emerge secondarily from the process of collective power, and not the other way around. (shrink)

"Nietzsche in Context presents a comprehensive reinterpretation of Nietzsche's thought, placing Nietzsche in the context of the philosophers of his own time. Offering a survey of important philosophical themes, Robin Small identifies the writer or writers with whom Nietzsche most felt himself to be engaging in dialogue. This historical dimension is complemented by original analysis and interpretation of the ideas under discussion. Nietzsche in Context takes Nietzsche scholarship into new and fruitful directions. By locating his ideas within a broader (...) context, this book provides a comprehensive reinterpretation of Nietzsche's thought adding to the continuing interest of his contributions to philosophy."--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

In 1928, Friedrich Solmsen argued that Aristotle'sPosterior Analyticswas largely composed before thePrior Analytics. Ross rejected Solmsen's position in 1939, and a rather lengthy series of rebuttals and counter-attacks between the two scholars followed. Quite recently, Jonathan Barnes has revived this issue with arguments in favour of something very close to Solmsen's thesis: that Aristotle first developed a theory of demonstration (‘apodeictic’) before he had worked out the syllogistic, and that thePosterior Analyticswas originally conceived against this background. Subsequently, when Aristotle formulated (...) a syllogistic, he is supposed by Barnes to have revised or added to the contents of thePosterior Analyticsso as to make syllogistic the logic of Aristotelian science. Thus, Barnes says: ‘the syllogism is in fact an incidental adjunct to the theory of demonstration: the theory can be formulated without reference, explicit or implicit, to Syllogistic, and itcould havebeen discovered by someone who knew nothing whatever about the Syllogism’ (pp. 33–4). (shrink)

In this paper, I offer some reasons for thinking that knowledge is a social phenomenon. My argument is based on Helen Longino’s work on scientific knowledge, in particular her 2002 book The Fate of Knowledge. Longino’s basic idea is that a scientific hypothesis or theory is justified when it emerges (relatively) unscathed from social interactions between scientists. If we accept – as Longino and many others do – that knowledge requires justification, it follows that scientific knowledge is a social phenomenon. (...) I argue that much the same goes for other forms of empirical knowledge, such as historical knowledge, various forms of collective knowledge and our knowledge of the ‘social world’. But does it go for empirical knowledge in general? I offer some – admittedly far from conclusive – reasons for thinking that it might. I also argue that, even if it doesn’t, we still need to distinguish between two kinds of knowledge, one of which is constitutively social and the other of which isn’t. Scientific knowledge is a paradigm example of the former and simple perceptual knowledge is a paradigm example of the latter. The end result is a form of pluralism about knowledge. (shrink)

To address longstanding workforce shortages, increase efficiency and control the costs associated with the modern health-care provision, there has been a worldwide policy to promote increased flexibility within the health-care workforce. This is being done primarily by extending the ‘scope of practice’ of existing occupational roles into what is referred to as ‘advanced’ practice. The development of the advanced practice nurse (APN) has occurred within the context of a shortage of medical staff, and the need to control cost. However, the (...) means by which substantially repurposed occupational groups such as these, are incorporated into complex, hierarchical organisations such as the UK national health service (NHS) remains poorly understood. Using modern sociological theory, the development of the APN role has been examined in terms of power, control, professional identity and gender relations. Each of the theoretical approaches used adds to the quality of the discussion, although none provide a comprehensive picture. However, when synthesised, they do provide an enhanced insight into the evolution of the role. It is argued here that by critically examining the development of the APN role, this will enable both a better understanding of, and the means to influence, its future direction of travel. (shrink)

D‐amino acids are being recognized as functionally important molecules in mammals. We recently identified endogenous D‐cysteine in mammalian brain. D‐cysteine is present in neonatal brain in substantial amounts (mM) and decreases with postnatal development. D‐cysteine binds to MARCKS and a host of proteins implicated in cell division and neurodevelopmental disorders. D‐cysteine decreases phosphorylation of MARCKS in neural progenitor cells (NPCs) affecting its translocation. D‐cysteine controls NPC proliferation by inhibiting AKT signaling. Exogenous D‐cysteine inhibits AKT phosphorylation at Thr 308 and Ser (...) 473 in NPCs. D‐cysteine treatment of NPCs led to 50% reduction in phosphorylation of Foxo1 at Ser 256 and Foxo3a at Ser 253. We hypothesize that in the developing brain endogenous D‐cysteine is as a physiologic regulator of NPC proliferation by inhibiting AKT signaling mediated by Foxo1 and Foxo3a. Endogenous D‐cysteine may regulate mammalian neurodevelopment with roles in schizophrenia and Alzheimer's disease (AD). (shrink)

It is generally thought that truthmaking has to be an internal relation because if it weren’t, then, as David Armstrong argues, “everything may be a truthmaker for any truth”. Depending on whether we take an internal relation to be one that is necessitated by the mere existence of its terms or one that supervenes on the intrinsic properties of its relata, the truthbearers involved in the truthmaking relation must either have their contents essentially or intrinsically. In this paper, I examine (...) Armstrong’s account, according to which what is made true at the fundamental level are mental state tokens. The conclusion is reached that such tokens have their contents neither essentially nor intrinsically, and so, are simply the wrong kind of entities to be made true internally. (shrink)

Primary works on Huang-Lao Taoism and Yin-yang philosophy, lost for more than two thousand years, are translated and prefaced with an informative introduction.

In this paper I argue against the traditional view that truth-making distributes over entailment and present a novel account that takes truth-making to distribute over grounding between the existence of facts, thereby avoiding the shortcomings of the traditional view.

This article proposes an analytical approach to algorithms that stresses operations of folding. The aim of this approach is to broaden the common analytical focus on algorithms as biased and opaque black boxes, and to instead highlight the many relations that algorithms are interwoven with. Our proposed approach thus highlights how algorithms fold heterogeneous things: data, methods and objects with multiple ethical and political effects. We exemplify the utility of our approach by proposing three specific operations of folding—proximation, universalisation and (...) normalisation. The article develops these three operations through four empirical vignettes, drawn from different settings that deal with algorithms in relation to AIDS, Zika and stock markets. In proposing this analytical approach, we wish to highlight the many different attachments and relations that algorithms enfold. The approach thus aims to produce accounts that highlight how algorithms dynamically combine and reconfigure different social and material heterogeneities as well as the ethical, normative and political consequences of these reconfigurations. (shrink)

This book is part of the Critical Practitioner-Scholar series edited by Barry Down and Rob Hattam for DOI Press. It is, as the title implies, an edited collection of essays which first appeared in...

This book is the second volume of an edited collection made up of essays initially published in the Critical Pedagogy Networker (CPN) between 1988 and 2002. It should be read in conjunction with Vo...

GS 341 is one of the most familiar of Nietzsche’s writings. This article proposes a new reading that stands in contrast with most English-language Nietzsche scholarship. The text presents a communication and its reception. A ‘demon’ makes an announcement, and a hearer responds in one way or another. But there is also another narrative altogether, whose conceptual vocabulary comes from a dynamic world-view. In this an interaction of forces leads to a new situation. If the hearer is not crushed by (...) the ‘greatest weight’, there must be an inner force that counteracts its impact. I argue that what Nietzsche calls amor fati is a state that allows our drives to achieve full expression, and so makes possible a collective strength able to withstand the greatest impact. The final sentence refers to a “confirmation and sealing”. What happens is that the demon’s message makes an impression on the receptive hearer. For Nietzsche this is a working metaphor, not a turn of phrase. In a draft from this period he writes: “Let us stamp the image of eternity on our life!” That sudden and forceful act, embodying an evaluative judgement, is the event that GS 341 is all about. (shrink)

In an assessment of the educational thought of Karl Marx and its later influence, this book provides a perspective in which many aspects of Marx's ideas are seen. It explores Marx's approach to each of these issues and in relating this approach to later developments.

This chapter contains sections titled: Time, Space, and Finitude From a Final State to Eternal Recurrence Possibility and Time A Dionysian World.

The Stanford University Press edition of Nietzsche’s works in English translation continues here with the Nachlass from what is described as “the period of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.” Based on the edition of Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, it corresponds to volume 10 of their Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe and to volume 7/1 of their Kritische Gesamtausgabe: Werke, which appeared in 1976. Colli and Montinari’s editorial apparatus has been included, and the translators, Paul S. Loeb and David F. Tinsley, have added (...) notes of their own, as well as a lengthy after-word. The result is a substantial volume of over eight hundred pages, with much of interest to Nietzsche scholars in various ways. The Nachlass... (shrink)

Employees with self-perceived misattributed culpability or incompetence are on the receiving end of complaints, reprimands, or accusations which, from their perspective, incorrectly assume that that they have fallen short of required standards or outcomes. We analyzed an archive of 23 personal stories featuring SMCI, which had been provided by 16 Hong Kong Chinese employees. The stories indicated that the most severe impacts on employee morale had arisen from punitive and targeted feedback based on misrepresentations by superiors, who had engaged in (...) blame deflection, politicking and manipulation, conflict and retaliation, and/or prejudice and stereotyping. We also identified organizational processes, such as soliciting and accepting voice and engaging in problem solving discussions that could attenuate any adverse emotional impact. (shrink)

In this paper, I will be arguing that the most recent incarnation of AI research -- that of embodied robotics and situated cognition -- demonstrates a strict and remarkable parallel with the work of mid-century French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and that through this parallel we see demonstration and confirmation of ideas about minds, bodies, and what Merleau-Ponty often called a 'dialogue with the world'. Seeing these theories confirmed in AI research will ultimately provide us with evidence that suggests our traditional (...) understanding of minds as these isolated entities shuffling symbolic representations around in the absence of interaction is simply absurd, and in fact dialogue itself comes first -- dialogue with others and dialogue with the world itself. (shrink)

This article reports some findings from a study of verbal interaction from sittings between members of the public and mediums: people who claim to be able to talk to the dead on behalf of the living. Instead of trying to debunk the ontological status of the mediums' claimed powers and the existence of the afterlife, the article examines mediums' discourse as a form of institutional interaction. It focuses on instances in which mediums report the words of their spirit contacts in (...) their sittings with clients. It is argued that this is a key practice by which mediums establish the basis of a favourable assessment of the authenticity of their powers. The analysis examines the recurrent organizational properties of utterances in which the spirits' words are introduced into the sitting, and describes some of the inferential or rhetorical tasks addressed by these reports. (shrink)

Should I break my promise? -- Should I tell people his secret? -- Can I cancel my plans with my friend? -- Why won't he trust me with his toy? -- Why didn't they believe me? -- Is it okay if I keep Maddie's shirt? -- Is it honest to stuff everything under Mary's bed? -- Should I tell my teacher the truth? -- Should I look at his paper and copy him? -- Activity.

Introduction: the languages ideology -- Ideology -- Entrenchment and the linguistic individual --Conventionalization and the illusion of shared grammar -- Conclusion.

Current methods of forensic DNA profiling, based on Polymerase Chain Reaction amplifications of a varying number of Short Tandem Repeat loci found at different locations on the human genome, are regularly described as constituting the “gold standard for identification” in contemporary society. At a time when criminal justice systems in Europe and North America increasingly seek to utilize the epistemic authority of a variety of sciences in support of the apprehension and prosecution of suspects and offenders, genetic science and recombinant (...) DNA technology are often singled out for particular approbation. Indeed, the development and application of DNA profiling has been widely described as the “greatest breakthrough in forensic science since fingerprinting.”. (shrink)

I raise two worries about the Debunker's and Defeater Dilemmas, respectively, and I argue that moral cognition is inextricable from social cognition, which tends to rationalize deep social inequality. I thus opine that our moral-social capacities fare badly in profoundly unjust social contexts such as our own.

This essay explores the epistemological implications of the Daoist concept of rou 柔 or “suppleness” and its related notion rouzhi 柔知 or the “supple way of knowing.” It is comprised of three interrelated parts. Part one starts with a brief introduction to rou and its usage in early Chinese texts, where it outlines three important ways to approach it. In part two, it moves to a careful reading of female Daoist Cao Wenyi’s 曹文逸 Lingyuan Dadaoge 《靈源大道歌》 (The Song of the (...) Ultimate Source of Great Dao or Dadaoge for short), where it explores her text as formulating a Daoist way of knowing based on an appreciation of rou. The third section discusses concrete connections between rou and specific epistemic virtues. (shrink)

This question might seem odd, but it is, nevertheless, directly relevant to our life today. My intention is to bring ancient Daoist philosophy into a conversation about the challenges that technology poses. Today, cutting-edge technologies do not exist just in research labs but have already easily penetrated all aspects of our lives. It is difficult to argue that we do not yet inhabit a world with Artificial Intelligence, for it has become a pervasive and effective technology woven into the fabric (...) of everyday living. (shrink)

In the seventy years since AI became a field of study, the theoretical work of philosophers has played increasingly important roles in understanding many aspects of the AI project, from the metaphysics of mind and what kinds of systems can or cannot implement them, the epistemology of objectivity and algorithmic bias, the ethics of automation, drones, and specific implementations of AI, as well as analyses of AI embedded in social contexts (for example). Serious scholarship in AI ethics sometimes quotes Asimov’s (...) speculative laws of robotics as if they were genuine proposals, and yet Lem remains historically undervalued as a theorist who uses fiction as his vehicle. Here, I argue that Lem’s fiction (in particular his fiction about robots) is overlooked but highly nuanced philosophy of AI, and that we should recognize the lessons he tried to offer us, which focused on the human and social failures rather than technological breakdowns. Stories like “How the World Was Saved” and “Upside Down Evolution” ask serious philosophical questions about AI metaphysics and ethics, and offer insightful answers that deserve more attention. Highlighting some of this work from The Cyberiad and the stories in Mortal Engines in particular, I argue that the time has never been more appropriate to attend to his philosophy in light of the widespread technological and social failures brought about by the quest for artificial intelligence. In service of this argument, I discuss some of the history and philosophical debates around AI in the last decades, as well as contemporary events that illustrate Lem’s strongest claims in critique of the human side of AI. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Framed by a critical assessment of R. M. Hare’s classic paper “What Is Wrong With Slavery?,” this article argues that traditional forms of philosophical analysis miss chattel slavery’s specifically racialized harm. A crucial reason is the failure to attend to how slavery was experienced by those who were enslaved. To remedy this neglect, and adapting Calvin Warren’s reading of the Dred Scott decision, I show that slave narratives are rich philosophical resources for thinking about the existential reality of enslavement (...) and that they anticipate later insights from the Afro-pessimist and Black nihilist traditions. I conclude by showing how these insights construe the harm of chattel slavery in ways that are inexpressible through the kinds of traditional philosophical sense-making that Hare pursues. (shrink)

This article reads Monique Wittig's Le Corps lesbien through Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of le corps sans organes and devenir-femme, devenir-animal in order to illuminate both Wittig's formal and figurative concerns and her larger literary objectives. The dismembered and dismember-ing lesbian lovers that Wittig describes in Le Corps lesbien illustrate a process of becoming-woman, becoming-animal and becoming-other that leads to a becoming-minoritarian and a renunciation of stratification and subjectification in the body without organs. This process is a celebration of dispersed, (...) multiplicitous identity that exists in haecceities. Wittig's lesbian lovers undergo various becomings in the text to illustrate the multiplicity of possibilities as they move towards the BwO, and the text as a whole uses this BwO to resist and dismantle the hetero-patriarchal order. (shrink)

In this paper I address two concerns with Kelly Trogdon’s grounding mechanism view, i.e. the idea that metaphysical explanation can be modeled on causal-mechanical explanation. The first concern threatens to undermine the unity that grounding-mechanical explanations imposes on metaphysical explanation; and the second concern requires the grounding mechanic to put forth a formal condition on grounding-mechanical models. After having discussed both of these, I provide a solution to the first and argue that the second concern is unwarranted.

This history of hypnosis dispels the myths about this long misunderstood topic--thought provoking and engagingly written.