When Herbert Marcuse's essay entitled “Repressive tolerance” was published in the mid-1960s it was trenchantly criticised because it was anti-democratic and defied the academic canon of value neutrality. Yet his argument is attracting renewed interest in the 21st century, particularly when, post 9/11, the thresholds or limits of tolerance are being contested. This article argues that Marcuse's original essay was concerned to problematise the dominant social understandings of tolerance at the time, which were more about insisting that individual citizens tolerate (...) government policy than governments encourage debate and dissent. The article shows how Marcuse attempted to demonstrate the social production of knowledge about tolerance, and how he diagnosed the social function performed by “impartiality” and “relativism”, and by “neutrality” and “objectivity”, which contributed to tolerance being repressive. In the sense that he was concerned about what counted socially as tolerance, and how it was socially defended and justified, his article can helpfully be conceived as an exercise in social epistemology. (shrink)

"Written in a racy, persuasive style, the book impresses the reader as a work of significant scholarship...I encourage students of comparative religions- and especially those of Islamic economics- to read it with great care."&$151; Islamic Studies The worlds of economics and theology rarely intersect. The former appears occupied exclusively with the concrete equations of supply and demand, while the latter revolves largely around the less tangible concerns of the soul and spirit. Intended as an interfaith clarification of the relationship between (...) the material and the spiritual worlds, this volume first inspects secular beliefs about the relationship between economics and ethics. Exploring the differences and similarities between the treatment of economic issues in each of the great monotheistic religions, Rodney Wilson reveals how each tradition considers such subjects as individual wealth, lending, economic regulation, usury, insurance capitalism, socialism, and banking. He concludes with an intriguing epilogue on the rapidly expanding field of business ethics. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence research has foundered on the issue of representation. When intelligence is approached in an incremental manner, with strict reliance on interfacing to the real world through perception and action, reliance on representation disappears. In this paper we outline our approach to incrementally building complete intelligent Creatures. The fundamental decomposition of the intelligent system is not into independent information processing units which must interface with each other via representations. Instead, the intelligent system is decomposed into independent and parallel activity (...) producers which all interface directly to the world through perception and action, rather than interface to each other particularly much. The notions of central and peripheral systems evaporateeverything is both central and peripheral. Based on these principles we have built a very successful series of mobile robots which operate without supervision as Creatures in standard office environments. (shrink)

This is an exciting time for brain science. Recent progress has been such that it now seems realistic to look toward an explanation of mind in terms of the brain's anatomy and physiology. Models based on artificially symmetrical arrays of idealized neurons are now being superseded by ones which properly take into account the brain's actual circuitry. This book presents a comprehensive overview of the current state of brain modeling, containing contributions from many leading researchers in this field. It will (...) be of interest not only to researchers in the fields of brain science and neurobiology, but also to psychologists and those involved in the study of artificial intelligence. (shrink)

The emergence of private authority has become a feature of the post-Cold War world. The contributors to this volume examine the implications of this erosion of the power of the state for global governance. They analyse actors as diverse as financial institutions, multinational corporations, religious terrorists and organised criminals. The themes of the book relate directly to debates concerning globalization and the role of international law, and will be of interest to scholars and students of international relations, politics, sociology and (...) law. (shrink)

In order to build autonomous robots that can carry out useful work in unstructured environments new approaches have been developed to building intelligent systems. The relationship to traditional academic robotics and traditional artificial intelligence is examined. In the new approaches a tight coupling of sensing to action produces architectures for intelligence that are networks of simple computational elements which are quite broad, but not very deep. Recent work within this approach has demonstrated the use of representations, expectations, plans, goals, and (...) learning, but without resorting to the traditional uses, of central, abstractly manipulable or symbolic representations. Perception within these systems is often an active process, and the dynamics of the interactions with the world are extremely important. The question of how to evaluate and compare the new to traditional work still provokes vigorous discussion. (shrink)

We evaluate the effectiveness of impact investing from the perspective of the market failures approach (MFA) to business ethics. Under the MFA, businesses are ethically obligated to contribute to market efficiency by mitigating market failures. The MFA ethics literature emphasizes a negative externality interpretation of market failures, with ethical practice as self-regulation. We argue that the MFA also obligates businesses, and investors, to produce positive externalities, a form of private provision of public goods. We develop a graphical MFA ethical framework (...) addressed to impact investing. The framework is based on impact projects’ dual financial and social returns. Dual returns trade-offs originate in market failures and increase with positive externalities. In practice, a key determinant of market failure and the size of returns trade-offs is the availability of intermediate public goods. This varies systematically across sectors and country-markets. We identify the market circumstances under which impact investing is feasible. We show how provision of positive externalities mitigates market failures. We show that the effectiveness of impact investing depends on the interaction of the determinants of feasibility and of the size of project trade-offs. We show how government supporting intervention, through blended finance vehicles, can improve impact investing effectiveness. Finally, we show that evidence of actual patterns of impact investing across sectors and countries supports our analysis. (shrink)

Improving the Odds: Raising the Class is a book aimed at legislators, school administrators, home school advocates, and college and university professors which examines the education system and provides a paradigm for improvement. The aim of this book is to find simple ways to approach improving the school system in America based on a belief that we need to build a system that has improvement built into the process of training and educating both teacher and students.

Most animals have significant behavioral expertise built in without having to explicitly learn it all from scratch. This expertise is a product of evolution of the organism; it can be viewed as a very long term form of learning which provides a structured system within which individuals might learn more specialized skills or abilities. This paper suggests one possible mechanism for analagous robot evolution by describing a carefully designed series of networks, each one being a strict augmentation of the previous (...) one, which control a six legged walking machine capable of walking over rough terrain and following a person passively sensed in the infrared spectrum. As the completely decentralized networks are augmented. the robot’s performance and behavior repetoire demonstrably improve. The rationale for such demonstrations is that they may provide a hint as to the requirements for automatically building massive networks to carry out complex sensory-motor tasks. The experiments with an actual robot ensure that an essence of reality is maintained and that no critical disabling problems have been ignored. (shrink)

Hume's argument concerning miracles is interpreted by making approximations to terms in Bayes's theorem. This formulation is then used to analyse the impact of multiple testimony. Individual testimonies which are ‘non-miraculous’ in Hume's sense can in principle be accumulated to yield a high probability both for the occurrence of a single miracle and for the occurrence of at least one of a set of miracles. Conditions are given under which testimony for miracles may provide support for the existence of God.

Whom a prime minister or president will not shake hands with is still more noticed than with whom they will. Public identity can afford to be ambiguous about friends, but not about enemies. Rodney Barker examines the available accounts of how enmity functions in the cultivation of identity, how essential or avoidable it is, and what the consequences are for the contemporary world.

This papers explores the diversity of pilgrim expressions in the Celtic Christian sources, focusing largely upon scriptural and theological images-namely, the image of Jerusalem, the example of Abraham, and journey as a metaphor for the earthly life. Discussion on Celtic interest in Jerusalem will focus on the text, De locis sanctis, by Adomnán of Iona. Central to Abrahamic pilgrimage is the ideal of being a stranger, foreigner, exile and alien in the world. Columbanus and Columba are both described as pilgrims (...) in the tradition of Abraham. The life of Patrick raises the question of the relationship between Abrahamic pilgrimage and the missionary life. The phenomenon of the seafaring monks, most famously St Brendan, will also be discussed through the lens of Abraham, while the corresponding text, The Voyage of St Brendan, will lead to a short discussion of liturgy as a form of pilgrimage. Finally, the lifelong journey of the Christian life-expressed through the metaphors of road and journey in the writings of Columbanus-will be discussed. (shrink)

Both direct, and evolved, behavior-based approaches to mobile robots have yielded a number of interesting demonstrations of robots that navigate, map, plan and operate in the real world. The work can best be described as attempts to emulate insect level locomotion and navigation, with very little work on behavior-based non-trivial manipulation of the world. There have been some behavior-based attempts at exploring social interactions, but these too have been modeled after the sorts of social interactions we see in insects. But (...) thinking how to scale from all this insect level work to full human level intelligence and social interactions leads to a synthesis that is very di erent from that imagined in traditional Arti cial Intelligence and Cognitive Science. We report on work towards that goal. (shrink)

It is suggested that consciousness is primarily associated not with stimuli and perception, as commonly supposed, but with movement and responses. Consciousness of stimuli arises in situations in which possible movements are planned, or in which information must be actively acquired rather than passively registered, and may or may not require overt movements to be performed. By emphasizing response, this formulation provides a simple explanation for the perceived unity of consciousness: though stimuli can be diverse, with independent components, movements must (...) necessarily be coordinated. Therefore, if we are to look for a `site' for consciousness, it is likely to be in a region such as the anterior cingulate that is neurally close to the higher motor hierarchical levels, and also accessible both to real sensory feedback and also to virtual feedback derived through mechanisms of efference copy from actual or proposed motor commands. It is suggested that synchrony of arrival of such information may be an important prerequisite of this unity, and that on this basis such a `master node' might be expected to be temporally `equidistant' from each of these sources; this may well be true of the anterior cingulate, but no doubt also of other structures. (shrink)

We give a systematic technical exposition of the foundations of the theory of computably compact metric spaces. We discover several new characterizations of computable compactness and apply these characterizations to prove new results in computable analysis and effective topology. We also apply the technique of computable compactness to give new and less combinatorially involved proofs of known results from the literature. Some of these results do not have computable compactness or compact spaces in their statements, and thus these applications are (...) not necessarily direct or expected. (shrink)

In this book R. G. Peffer tackles the challenges of finding in Marx's work an implicit moral theory, of answering claims that Marxism is incompatible with morality, and of developing the outlines of an adequate Marxist moral and social ...

It is claimed that the universe appears to be fine-tuned so as to admit the development of life. In this article Rodney Holder examines the evidence for fine-tuning and the chief rival explanation to design, namely the existence of a.

Rupturing along part the Hope Fault during a large earthquake in 1888, North Canterbury region, South Island of New Zealand, caused fence lines that crossed the fault to be laterally displaced by 1.5–2.6 m. The offset fence lines were documented (photographed, mapped, and published on) by the Government geologist, Alexander McKay, and forgotten. In the same year, observations of another fault line, the Awatere Fault, in the Marlborough area, South Island, led McKay to propose large-scale lateral displacement of ∼ 29–33 (...) km of geological formations along the fault, the result of cumulative movement of many earthquakes over millions of years (ca. 7 Ma). This ‘revolutionary’ idea was never published. The significance of McKay’s observations/deductions of small- and large-scale lateral displacement on faults was not fully appreciated in New Zealand until 1955 when aerial photography revealed that displacement of geomorphic features intersecting fault lines is dominantly horizontal rather than vertical. The idea of large-scale horizontal movement of the Earth’s crust, for example 483 km of lateral displacement of geological formations along the Alpine Fault in New Zealand first proposed in 1949, is now an integral part of the reigning paradigm of plate tectonics theory that explains the dynamics of movement of the Earth’s crust. (shrink)

This paper provides a philosophical analysis of some of the things faculty do to maximize their Student Evaluation of Teachers scores. It examines 28 practices that are claimed to be unethical methods for maximizing SET scores. The paper offers an argument concerning the morality of each behavior and concludes that 13 of the 28 practices suggest unethical behavior. The remaining 15 behaviors are morally permissible.

The challenge that confronts corporate decision-makers in connection with global labor conditions is often in identifying the standardsby which they should govern themselves. In an effort to provide greater direction in the face of possible global cultural conflicts, ethicistsThomas Donaldson and Thomas Dunfee draw on social contract theory to develop a method for identifying basic human rights: Integrated Social Contract Theory (ISCT). In this paper, we apply ISCT to the challenge of global labor standards, attempting to identify labor rights that (...) could serve as guides for corporations producing or outsourcing outside of their home country. In addition to identifying areas of universal agreement, we also examine whether ISCT is, in fact, a sufficient basis for determining worker rights; we seek to define the parameters of the “sweatshop” problem; we include the application and results of our ISCT analysis as applied to labor standards: the global labor rights hypernorms; and conclude that ISCT is sufficient only for rights that are universal. We also discuss whether market-driven decisions can identify the boundaries of labor rights, or at least assure that market outcomes are compatible with maintaining labor rights, in order to respond to the shortcomings of ISCT. We conclude with some comments on directions of analysis for labor rights determination. (shrink)

The article analyses Dante’s explanatory paraphrase and exegesis of the Lord’s Prayer, which opens the eleventh canto of Purgatory. The author reminds us that the prayer is the only one fully recited in the entire Comedy and this devotional practice is in line with the Franciscan prescription to recite it in the sixth hour of the Divine Office when Christ died on the cross. The prayer is reported by the poet on the first terrace of Purgatory, where the proud and (...) vainglorious must learn the virtue of humility, and therefore it symbolizes the perfect reciprocity between man and Godhead. Dante collates and amplifies the two complementary Latin versions of the Lord’s Prayer from Matthew 6: 9–13 and Luke 11: 2–4. The two synoptic texts are supplemented by the Gospel of John, from which Dante takes the concept of celestial bread – the flesh and the blood of Christ – which nourishes, liberates and sanctifies Christians. Apart from the Bible, Dante also draws upon the Augustinian and Tomistic traditions. However, the main hypotext behind the prayer, which is neither cited nor acknowledged in any explicit form in the Comedy, is the Franciscan Laudes creaturarum, also known as the Canticle of the Brother Sun. Written in vernacular by St. Francis himself, who is also the author of the Expositio in Pater noster, the Canticle was still recited and sung together with the Lord’s Prayer in the Franciscan communities in Dante’s time. Moreover, following the parallel readings popular nowadays in Dante studies, the author argues that Purgatorio 11 may be elucidated in the context of Paradiso 11, which is the Franciscan canto par excellence, and taken together they both offset cantos 10, 11, 12 of Inferno, which are based on the sin of pride. The denunciation of pride in and around canto 11 of Inferno alludes to humility – the remedy of such pride in Purgatory 11, which in turn prepares the reader for the encounter with St. Francis – the paragon of humility – in Paradiso 11. The author concludes that the Dantean paraphrase of the Lord’s Prayer is no less than an elaborate exegesis and homage to Christ and His teachings, something which is encompassed in a nutshell in the Sermon on the Mount. (shrink)

The first brief description is given of a project aimed at searching for the neural correlates of consciousness through computer simulation. The underlying model is based on the known circuitry of the mammalian nervous system, the neuronal groups of which are approximated as binary composite units. The simulated nervous system includes just two senses - hearing and touch - and it drives a set of muscles that serve vocalisation, feeding and bladder control. These functions were chosen because of their relevance (...) to the earliest stages of human life, and the simulation has been given the name CyberChild. The system's pain receptors respond to a sufficiently low milk level in the stomach, if there is simultaneously a low level of blood sugar, and also to a full bladder and an unchanged diaper. It is believed that it may be possible to infer the presence of consciousness in the simulation through observations of CyberChild's behaviour, and from the monitoring of its ability to ontogenetically acquire novel reflexes. The author has suggested that this ability is the crucial evolutionary advantage of possessing consciousness. The project is still in its very early stages, and although no suggestion of consciousness has yet emerged, there appears to be no fundamental reason why consciousness could not ultimately develop and be observed. (shrink)

"If we are to understand not only the direct impact of Marx on the development of German thought but also his sometimes extremely indirect influence, an exact knowledge of Hegel, of both his greatness and his limitation, is absolutely indispensable."- from the preface. It is well known that Hegel exerted a major influence on the development of Marx's thought. This circumstance led Lukács, one of the chief Marxist theoreticians of this century, to embark on his exploration of Hegelian antecedents in (...) the German intellectual tradition, their concrete expression in the work of Hegel himself, and later syntheses of seemingly contradictory modes of though. Four phases of Hegel's intellectual development are examined: "Hegel's early republican phase," "the crisis in Hegel's views on society and the earliest beginnings of his dialectical method," "rationale and defense of objective idealism," and "the breach with Schelling and _ The Phenomenology of Mind_." Lukács completed this study in 1938, but because of the imminent outbreak of war, it was not published until the late 1940s. A revised German edition appeared in 1954, and it is this text that is the basis of this first English translation of the work. (shrink)

The title of this book was inspired by a passage in Charles Sherrington's Man on his Nature.

Artificial Intelligence as a discipline has gotten bogged down in subproblems of intelligence. These subproblems are the result of applying reductionist methods to the goal of creating a complete artificial thinking mind. In Brooks (1987) 1 have argued that these methods will lead us to solving irrelevant problems; interesting as intellectual puzzles, but useless in the long run for creating an artificial being.

The first part of this paper explores the general issues in using Artificial Life techniques to program actual mobile robots. In particular it explores the difficulties inherent in transferring programs evolved in a simulated environment to run on an actual robot. It examines the dual evolution of organism morphology and nervous systems in biology. It proposes techniques to capture some of the search space pruning that dual evolution offers in the domain of robot programming. It explores the relationship between robot (...) morphology and program structure, and techniques for capturing regularities across this mapping. (shrink)