Achieving the global benefits of artificial intelligence (AI) will require international cooperation on many areas of governance and ethical standards, while allowing for diverse cultural perspectives and priorities. There are many barriers to achieving this at present, including mistrust between cultures, and more practical challenges of coordinating across different locations. This paper focuses particularly on barriers to cooperation between Europe and North America on the one hand and East Asia on the other, as regions which currently have an outsized impact (...) on the development of AI ethics and governance. We suggest that there is reason to be optimistic about achieving greater cross-cultural cooperation on AI ethics and governance. We argue that misunderstandings between cultures and regions play a more important role in undermining cross-cultural trust, relative to fundamental disagreements, than is often supposed. Even where fundamental differences exist, these may not necessarily prevent productive cross-cultural cooperation, for two reasons: (1) cooperation does not require achieving agreement on principles and standards for all areas of AI; and (2) it is sometimes possible to reach agreement on practical issues despite disagreement on more abstract values or principles. We believe that academia has a key role to play in promoting cross-cultural cooperation on AI ethics and governance, by building greater mutual understanding, and clarifying where different forms of agreement will be both necessary and possible. We make a number of recommendations for practical steps and initiatives, including translation and multilingual publication of key documents, researcher exchange programmes, and development of research agendas on cross-cultural topics. (shrink)

We study the question of how to decompose Hilbert space into a preferred tensor-product factorization without any pre-existing structure other than a Hamiltonian operator, in particular the case of a bipartite decomposition into "system" and "environment." Such a decomposition can be defined by looking for subsystems that exhibit quasi-classical behavior. The correct decomposition is one in which pointer states of the system are relatively robust against environmental monitoring (their entanglement with the environment does not continually and dramatically increase) and remain (...) localized around approximately-classical trajectories. We present an in-principle algorithm for finding such a decomposition by minimizing a combination of entanglement growth and internal spreading of the system. Both of these properties are related to locality in different ways. This formalism could be relevant to the emergence of spacetime from quantum entanglement. (shrink)

In her essay, “After de Brosses” (2017), Rosalind C. Morris briefly considers the historical importance of the concept of the fetish on the relatively recent movements of new materialism, but she does not engage with Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented Ontology. This essay addresses this gap and focuses on the influence of the fetish on Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented Ontology by focusing on Graham Harman’s conception of objects and Quentin Meillassoux’s theory of arche-fossils. In short, I am offering a posthumanist theorization (...) of the fetish in order to argue that Object-Oriented Ontology can be considered, at points, to be a fetish-oriented ontology and that this notion of the fetish allows us to think about philosophical considerations of objects in a new light. (shrink)

Scholars have cited the influence of Lucretius on Machiavelli as important to framing Machiavelli’s position on the freedom of political agents. Some scholars like Roecklin and Rahe argue that Machiavelli was a determinist based on Machiavelli’s rejection of the clinamen; others argue with Brown and Morfino that Machiavelli’s affirmation of Lucretian natural principles left room for the freedom of agents. However, this paper takes a different approach by arguing that Machiavelli successfully resists identification with either of these positions. I argue (...) here that Machiavelli affirms a notion of agency that reflects the influence of the Lucretian notion of mixed bodies where human actions emerge from an irreducible multiplicity of subjective and objective factors. I also argue that Machiavelli structures the narratives describing the actions of his agents in a way that supports interpreting their actions as both contingent and necessary. (shrink)

Immanuel Kant’s moral philosophy is organized around an exclusive disjunction of dignity or price, equality or equivalence. In his 1797 Doctrine of Right, however, Kant places enslaved black people on the wrong side of this disjunction when he speculates that their status as currency may offer insight into the origins of money. Recent work in black studies has begun to speculate on the link between blackness and money in modernity, and this paper draws attention to Kant’s role as an unlikely (...) and unwitting precursor for monetary theories of blackness. Precisely in his attempt to secure the priceless and unconditional character of freedom and dignity, it argues, Kant ends up demonstrating the positional value of both. (shrink)

Political scientists' failure to pay careful attention to the content (as opposed to the operationalization) of their chosen definition of 'democracy' can make them liable to draw invalid inferences from their empirical research. With this problem in mind, we argue for the following proposition: if one wishes to conduct empirical research that contributes to an existing conversation about democracy, then one must choose a definition of 'democracy' that picks out the topic of that conversation as opposed to some other (perhaps (...) nearby) topic of conversation. We show that, as a practical matter, one of the most effective methods for preserving "topic continuity" is to choose a definition of `democracy' that concurs with prevailing judgments about how to classify particular regimes, emphasizing the superiority (in this regard) of judgments about stylized hypothetical scenarios as opposed to judgments about the actual regimes we observe in our datasets. (shrink)

In his monograph *Happiness for Humans*, Daniel C. Russell argues that someone’s happiness is constituted by her virtuous engagement in a certain special sort of activity, which he calls *embodied activity*. An embodied activity is one which depends for its identity on things which lie outside of the agent’s control. What this means is that whether or not it is possible for the activity to continue is not completely up to the agent. A motivating example is my activity of living (...) alongside my spouse. Whether or not it is possible for this activity to continue is not entirely within my control, because my spouse might die, or otherwise become unavailable to me. To defend the view that it’s embodied activities which are constitutive of happiness, Russell defends what he calls the *embodied conception* of the self. This is the view that the boundaries of the self whose happiness is at stake include all the constitutive parts of our embodied activities. In response, I provide two arguments. Firstly, I show that while Russell makes a good case for the relevance of embodied *activities* to happiness, he doesn’t establish that we must adopt the embodied conception of the *self* in order to obtain those insights. Secondly, I argue that to draw the boundaries of the self in accordance with the embodied conception involves forming beliefs in a way that is not epistemically responsible. In making this argument I rely on the claim that there is a strong, particular sense in which other people are unknowable to us, a claim which is developed in the fiction of Haruki Murakami. (shrink)

The social model of disability claims that disadvantage from disability is primarily a result of the social response to bodily difference. Social modellers typically draw two normative conclusions: first, that society has a responsibility to address disability disadvantage as a matter of justice, not charity; second, that the appropriate way of addressing this disadvantage is to change social institutions themselves, to better fit for bodily difference, rather than to normalize bodies to fit existing institutions. This paper offers a qualified defense (...) of both inferences. Social institutions have reasons of justice to fix disability disadvantage, because the choice of institutions that contingently favor those whose bodies are statistically typical incurs responsibilities to compensate those who disfavored, in that choice. Among other things, this responsibility implies that societies should not simultaneously materially disadvantage disabled people, and also withhold symbolic resources, by demanding a presumption in favor of personal transformation – thereby, undermining the social conditions for disability pride. (shrink)

I propose a version of quantum mechanics featuring a discrete and finite number of states that is plausibly a model of the real world. The model is based on standard unitary quantum theory of a closed system with a finite-dimensional Hilbert space. Given certain simple conditions on the spectrum of the Hamiltonian, Schrödinger evolution is periodic, and it is straightforward to replace continuous time with a discrete version, with the result that the system only visits a discrete and finite set (...) of state vectors. The biggest challenges to the viability of such a model come from cosmological considerations. The theory may have implications for questions of mathematical realism and finitism. (shrink)

Emotional hardcore and other music genres featuring screamed vocals are puzzling for the appreciator. The typical fan attaches appreciative value to musical screams of emotional pain all the while acknowledging it would be inappropriate to hold similar attitudes towards their sonically similar everyday counterpart: actual human screaming. Call this the screamed vocals problem. To solve the problem, I argue we must attend to the anti-sublimating aims that get expressed in the emotional hardcore vocalist’s choice to scream the lyrics. Screamed vocals (...) help us see the value in rejecting (a) restrictive social norms of emotional expressiveness and (b) restrictive artistic norms about how one ought to express or represent pain in art, namely that if one is going to do so they must ensure the pain has been ‘beautified’. In developing this second point I argue that emotional hardcore is well-suited (though not individually so) for putting pressure on longstanding views in the history of aesthetics about the formal relationship between art and human pain. (shrink)

Both Derrida and Ricœur address philosophy’s relation to metaphor, and both take Aristotle as their starting points. However, though Ricœur’s The Rule of Metaphor is largely a response to Derrida’s “White Mythology,” Ricœur seems to pass right over Derrida’s critically important interpretation of Aristotle. In this essay, I dispel concerns that Ricœur may have been intellectually irresponsible in his engagement with Derrida on this point, and I demonstrate how Study 1 makes better sense as a detailed response to Derrida.

We explore how risk preferences affect pro-social behavior under uncertainty. We analyze a modified dictator game in which the dictator can, by reducing her own sure payoff, increase the odds that an unknown recipient wins a lottery. We first augment a standard social preferences model with reference-dependent risk attitudes and then test the model’s predictions for the dictator’s giving behavior using a laboratory experiment. Consistent with the predictions of the model, we find that the relationship between giving behavior and a (...) giver’s loss aversion is mediated by the strength of the giver’s pro-social preferences. Among more pro-social dictators, an increase in loss aversion increases the likelihood that a dictator contributes to a recipient. (shrink)

A companion paper provides a proposal for cosmic singularity resolution based upon general features of a bouncing unitary cosmological model in the mini-superspace approximation. This paper analyses novel phenomenology that can be identified within particular solutions of that model. First, we justify our choice of particular solutions based upon a clearly articulated and observationally-motivated principle. Second, we demonstrate that the chosen solutions follow a classical mini-superspace cosmology before smoothly bouncing off the classically singular region. Third, and most significantly, we identify (...) a 'Rayleigh-scattering' limit for physically reasonable choices of parameters within which the solutions display effective behaviour that is insensitive to the details of rapidly oscillating Planck-scale physics. This effective physics is found to be compatible with an effective period of cosmic inflation well below the Planck scale. The detailed effective physics of this Rayleigh-scattering limit is provided via: i) an exact analytical treatment of the model in the de Sitter limit; and ii) numerical solutions of the full model. (shrink)

Descartes conspicuous realisation in the 17 th century that reason alone could not validate itself led inexorably to the idea that God must be the form of metaphysical force that could supply the ultimate support that would allow us to know our own thoughts for certain. Similarly, Hume’s extraordinary insight in the 18 th century that our experiences are not intrinsically connected in terms of how we enjoy them led him to require that something natural must be posited to hold (...) them together and put us back into the world of common sense. This paper takes its departure from these self-supporting Cartesian and Humean claims and then tries to show how various other intellectual ideas and developments can be explained using a set of more general circular arguments that are framed in broadly Žizekian terms. (shrink)

Previous commentators on Plato’s Republic have relied on mistaken assumptions about the requirements for Plato’s theory of justice: that Plato establishes a bi-conditional between proper psychic rule and the performance of conventionally just acts. They believe that if Plato does not establish this bi-conditional, then his theory of justice as a virtue will succumb to the fallacy of irrelevance. I claim Plato need not meet that requirement. A novel interpretation of the arguments of Book IV concerning justice in the soul (...) suffices to dispense with one aspect of the bi-conditional – that conventional justice must imply justice as psychic harmony. Then, situating the theory of justice as psychic harmony in the context of the divided line, and in the dialectical ascent in the education of the philosopher-rulers, I show that the other conditional requirement – that justice in the soul must imply the performance of conventionally just actions – is also mistaken. (shrink)

Recent accounts of epistemic democracy aim to show that in some qualified sense, democratic institutions have a tendency to produce reasonable outcomes. Epistemic democrats aim to offer such accounts without presupposing any narrow, controversial view of what the outcomes of democratic procedures should be, much as a good justification of a particular scientific research design does not presuppose the hypothesis that the research aims to test. The article considers whether this aim is achievable. It asks, in particular, whether accounts of (...) epistemic democracy can be reconciled with the commonly held view that disagreement about which laws and policies should be enacted is a fundamental, permanent feature of democratic politics and imposes constraints on how we justify democratic procedures. (shrink)

It is now being recognized across the spectrum of bioethics, and particularly in genetics and population ethics, that to focus on the individual person, and thereby neglect communities and the goods which accrue to them, is to fail to see all the ethically significant features of a range of ethical issues. This article argues that more work needs to be done in order for bioethics to respect not only goods (such as rights and interests) of communities per se, but also (...) to recognize the difference between different types of communities and their goods. The diversity of communities and the types of communal goods which accrue to them is first outlined. Following this, a basic distinction between two such types: aggregative and corporate community goods, is explained and defended, and it is then argued argue that this distinction is necessary to understand and address what and whom is ethically at stake in any situation. This is illustrated with the example of UK Biobank, the conclusion being that if current and future individual are to be respected then communal goods of both types must be recognized and respected in an effective bioethics. (shrink)

This is the story of a seductive idea and its sobering consequences. The twentieth century brought a new cultural confidence in the social powers of invention – but also saw the advance of consumerism, world wars, globalisation and human-generated climate change. Techno-Fixers traces how passive optimism and active manipulations were linked to our growing trust in technological innovation. It pursues the evolving idea through engineering hubris, radical utopian movements, science fiction fanzines, policy-maker soundbites, corporate marketing, and consumer culture. It explores (...) how evangelists of technological fixes have proselytised their faith, and critically examines the examples and products of their followers. The new technological confidence mixed together beliefs that were simultaneously compelling and unsettling. As motor vehicles, electricity supplies and radio became part of modern life in the early decades of the century, it was hard to argue against the transformative effects and inevitability of such transitions. Like it or not, social consequences seemed to come inexorably with the Machine Age, the Space Age and the Information Age. This deterministic vision implied an ever more technological future with unavoidable social consequences. For many, innovative technologies promised appealing new lifestyles and powers. But for a narrower band of proponents – the first generation of technological fixers – wise engineering invention was touted as a guaranteed route to positive human benefits and societal progress. Socially-engaged engineers and designers argued that such improvements could be directed, hastened and amplified. These engineering adventurers argued that modern societies could be guided only by rational designers. They contended that adroit technological solutions could solve contemporary problems better than any traditional method, including economic initiatives, citizen education, political ideology, lifestyle changes, legal frameworks and moral guidance. Their seductive claims were tamed by more mainstream American enthusiasts, and eventually boiled down to the concept of the technological fix. Their shared confidence infused policy-makers, broadcasters and science popularisers. Trust in technological fixes shaped a new generation of managers and law-makers, engineers and educators, futurists and citizens – and continues to drive a new generation of techno-fixers today. This cultural wave, its promoters and detractors, have championed the promise and voiced concerns that we have inherited, still unresolved. This book tracks the hubristic influencers and weighs up the confidences and concerns associated with them: the dramatic potential for novel technologies to work alongside longer human traditions to meet our enduring ambitions – or to reshape society for the worse. (shrink)

Normative political theorists frequently compare hypothetical scenarios for the purpose of identifying reasons to prefer one kind of institution to alternatives. We examine three types of "unfair" comparisons and the reasoning errors associated with each. A theorist makes an _obscure comparison_ when one (or more) of the alternatives under consideration is underspecified; a theorist makes a _mismatched comparison_ when they fail to hold fixed the relevant contextual factors while comparing alternatives; and a theorist makes an _irrelevant comparison_ when they compare (...) alternatives assuming contextual factors that differ in important respects from those they "should" assume given their theoretical aims. We then introduce the notion of a modeling mindset and show how this mindset can help theorists detect and avoid the three types of error. We conclude with a reconstruction of Cohen's (2009) camping trip thought experiment to illustrate the approach. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

A growing body of literature has engaged with mass incarceration as a public health problem. This article reviews some of that literature, illustrating why and how bioethicists can and should engage with the problem of mass incarceration as a remediable cause of health inequities. “Mass incarceration” refers to a phenomenon that emerged in the United States fifty years ago: imprisoning a vastly larger proportion of the population than peer countries do, with a greatly disproportionate number of incarcerated people being members (...) of marginalized racial and ethnic groups. Bioethicists have long engaged with questions of health justice for incarcerated people, including consent issues for those participating in research and access to health care. This article provides an overview of the individual and public health impacts of mass incarceration. The article argues that mass incarceration is a bioethics issue that should be addressed in medical education, identifies opportunities for bioethicists to guide hospitals’ interactions with law enforcement officials, and calls on bioethicists to be in conversation with medical and nursing students and health care professionals about these groups’ advocacy efforts concerning structural racism, police violence, and mass incarceration. (shrink)

Zachary Schrag would like to put the burden of proof for continuation of research ethics review in the Social Sciences on those who advocate for research ethics committees (RECs), and asks that we take the concerns that he raises seriously. I separate his concerns into a principled issue and a number of pragmatic issues. The principled issue concerns the justification for having research ethics committees; the pragmatic issues concern questions such as the effectiveness of review and the expertise of the (...) committee members. I argue that RECs can be justified by their role in improving ethical practice and in reducing wrongs done to research participants. I propose a model of review for doing this, which I think would also address the pragmatic issues raised. I then offer an account of where the UK ethics review system is now and suggest three steps which could improve social science ethics review in the UK and move it in a perhaps more desirable direction. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore how our experience of pain and suffering structure our experience over time. I argue that pain and suffering are not as easily dissociable, in living and in conceptual analysis, as philosophers have tended to think. Specifically, I do not think that there is only a contingent connection between physical pain and psychological suffering. Rather, physical pain is partially constitutive of existential suffering. My analysis is informed by contemporary thinking about pain and suffering as well as (...) Indian Buddhist philosophy. (shrink)

Ray and Cooper (2024) make a very compelling argument for vastly increasing bioethicists’ engagement with environmental justice. I strongly support this proposal and agree with their arguments. Yet...

2003 Paul Bunge Prize of the Hans R. Jenemann Foundation for the History of Scientific Instruments Judging the brightness and color of light has long been contentious. Alternately described as impossible and routine, it was beset by problems both technical and social. How trustworthy could such measurements be? Was the best standard of intensity a gas lamp, an incandescent bulb, or a glowing pool of molten metal? And how much did the answers depend on the background of the specialist? A (...) History of Light and Colour Measurement: Science in the Shadows is a history of the hidden workings of physical science-a technical endeavor embedded in a social context. It argues that this "undisciplined" subject, straddling academia, commerce, and regulation, may be typical not only of 20th century science, but of its future. Attracting scientists, engineers, industrialists, and artists, the developing subject produced a new breed of practitioners having mixed provenance. The new measurers of light had to decide the shape not only of their specialism but of their careers: were they to be a part of physics, engineering, or psychology? The physical scientists who dominated the subject into the early 20th century made their central aim the replacement of the problematic human eye with physical detectors of light. For psychologists between the wars, though, describing the complexity of color was more important than quantifying a handful of its dimensions. And after WWII, military designers shaped the subject of radiometry and subsumed photometry and colorimetry within it. Never attaining a professional cachet, these various specialists moved fluidly between science and technology; through government, industry, and administration. (shrink)

Aristotle's thesis in Physics I 8 is that a certain old and familiar problem about coming to be can only be solved with the help of the new account of the "principles" he has developed in Physics I 7. This is a strong thesis and the literature on the chapter does not quite do it justice; specifically, as things now stand we are left wondering why Aristotle should have found this problem so compelling in the first place. In this paper (...) I develop an interpretation which will help to remedy this.I believe that Aristotle's problem about coming to be depends on a certain principle to the effect that "nothing can become what it already is" . The main innovation of the interpretation developed here is its suggestion that we understand this principle as a principle about kinds. So understood, the principle does not make the comparatively trivial point that nothing can become any individual it already is, but rather the more powerful and substantive point that nothing can become any kind of thing it already is. I argue that this is a point which Aristotle himself accepts and that this is why the problem about coming to be raises serious difficulties for him. I also discuss Aristotle's proposed solutions to this problem, explaining how each draws on his new account of the principles and why each is required for any full resolution of the difficulties the problem raises. In this way I hope to show how the interpretation developed here does justice to the very strong thesis with which Aristotle begins Physics I 8. I conclude brie fly and somewhat speculatively with a suggestion as to why Aristotle might accept the principle on which I have suggested the problem turns. (shrink)

The sports media landscape has shifted to favor outlets with inside access to sports organizations, teams, and athletes. This study interviews 21 NFL in-house reporters working at 19 official team websites to determine how they view their roles as sports journalists, including ethical standards and shifts in media boundaries. Qualitative interviews uncovered that cultivating a positive team image and protecting the interests of stakeholders supersede the production of objective news stories, even from those who started their careers as external sports (...) reporters. Internal reporters are often conflicted with their roles in the sports media ecosystem. Additionally, interviews reveal their efforts to maintain a balancing act between the established ideals of journalism with the positive spin that accompanies public relations. The present study illuminates how such positions both mirror and diverge from the expectations typically placed within sports journalism, while offering fruitful avenues for subsequent scholarly investigation. (shrink)

This article examines the temporal dimension of contemporary architecture, particularly in light of the climate crisis. Mikhail Bakhtin’s category of “adventure-time” is redeployed to describe the general chronotope of postmodernism, one in which contingency and spatiotemporal disjunctions are dominant. In contrast, this essay argues for a new emphasis on duration as a means of attending to temporal continuity. Potential paths for expanding architecture’s critical engagement with duration are explored.

The literature on the determination of death has often if not always assumed that the concept of human death should be defined in terms of the end of the human organism. I argue that this broadly biological conceptualization of human death cannot constitute a basis for agreement in a pluralistic society characterized by a variety of reasonable views on the nature of our existence as embodied beings. Rather, following Robert Veatch, I suggest that we must define death in moralized terms, (...) as the loss of an especially significant sort of moral standing. Departing from Veatch, however, I argue that we should not understand death in terms of the loss of all moral status whatsoever. Rather, I argue, what we should argue about, when we argue about death, is when and why people lose their rights-claims to the protection and promotion of their basic bodily functioning. (shrink)

This article asks what the emerging computational field of sentiment analysis can teach us about the sentimental novel, and vice versa. It argues that, despite humanistic skepticism about quantitative methods and sentiment analysis’s well-known limitations (in recognizing irony, for example), sentiment analysis can help us better to understand the novel form and the sentimental novel in particular. The literary approach to computational analysis taken in this article demonstrates the ability of sentiment analysis to link large-scale observations about text data to (...) small-scale features of individual texts and reveals that the sentimental novel itself already constitutes an analytical tradition. (shrink)

Larry May's and Kenneth Shockley's discussions of punishment for mob‐based harms fall back on the idea of individual mens rea. They recognise that the mens rea element is complicated by the fact that an individual's intentional actions in the context of mob activity have a collective dimension to them, either because they are ‘group‐based’, or because they are enabled or constrained by the collective's ‘normative authority’. However, their accounts of punishment fail to adequately reflect this complication. We claim that this (...) is because they primarily countenance ‘paradigmatic’ forms of punishment. Part 2 of the article argues that a non‐paradigmatic form of punishment – one that is ‘expressive’ insofar as it publicly communicates a denunciation – can better target the complex relations between the individual and collective dimensions of mob‐based harms. In order to better illuminate the target of such punishment, Part 1 of the article clarifies the relation between individual, shared and collective responsibility for mob‐based harms. Responding to several shortcomings in May's and Shockley's work, we examine the emergence of ‘mob mentality’ and argue that mob beliefs, intentions and norms are dynamically ‘expressed’ (i.e. publicly manifested, communicated and shaped) in and through the situated behaviour of individual mob members. (shrink)

The article reflects upon the observational practices and methods developed by the early exponents of ethology committed to naturalistic field study and explores how their approaches and techniques influenced a wider field of popular natural-history filmmaking and photography. In doing so, my focus is upon three aspects of ethological field studies: the socio-technical devices used by ethologists to bring birds closer to them, the distinctive observational and representational practices which they forged, and the analogies they used to codify behaviour. This (...) assemblage of elements included hides or screens from which to watch wild birds without disturbing them, optics to extend human vision, pens and paper to sketch and fix patterns of behaviour, watches to record timings, photography to capture action and freeze movement, and illustration and photographs to visualize behaviour. Carried through natural-history networks, the practices, methods and theories of ethologists like Huxley and Tinbergen influenced popular natural-history filmmaking and photography more broadly from the 1940s, driving a behavioural turn in these cultural practices. This popularization of the ‘ethological eye’ was further facilitated by the convergence of socio-technical devices, forms of observation and dramatization in the work of the early exponents of naturalistic field studies of birds and the popular filmmakers. (shrink)

Joshua Glasgow’s (2020) is a beautiful, philosophically rich book. Here I raise five main questions and criticisms. The first argues that holistic gratitude is too demanding: someone who can muster only fragmented gratitude is not failing to do and feel what is required; thus holistic gratitude is morally optional. The second suggests ways in which the metaphors Glasgow uses to express the idea of radiant value are problematic. The third notes that radiant value seems a sort of inverted cousin of (...) the doctrine of organic unities but points to an important analogy between them that problematizes the notion of radiant value. The fourth discusses Glasgow’s giving up on holistic gratitude in s penultimate chapter and briefly explores the strong affinities holistic gratitude to certain features of Roman Stoicism. The fifth draws on a passage from Henry James’ and the classical Chinese notion of harmony to gesture toward a conception of holistic gratitude that might, after all, provide solace for passing away. (shrink)

This essay offers an assessment of some of the fundamental features and contributions of John Russon’s scholarship on the dialogues of Plato. It focusses on the interpretive method he refers to as “reading as agents of nemesis” and on Russon’s unique emphasis on experience as the ground of philosophical activity in the Platonic corpus. I close by raising two issues that I see as fundamental questions that Russon’s work on Plato leaves unanswered—the difference in ontology, and thus method, between ancient (...) and modern philosophers and the frequently relied upon chronological ordering of Plato’s dialogues. (shrink)

A reassessment of Badiou's work which demonstrates its critical importance for contemporary philosophy. -/- This collection of thirteen essays engages directly with the work of Alain Badiou, focusing specifically on the philosophical content of his work and the various connections he established with both his contemporaries and his philosophical heritage. -/- You’ll find in-depth critical readings of his oeuvre through the lens of a number of important philosophical thinkers and themes, ranging from Cantor and category/topos theory, Lacan and Lautman, through (...) to Sartre and the subject. This is an important collection for anyone interested in the work of Badiou and contemporary Continental philosophy. (shrink)

The appendages of the adult fruit fly and other insects and Arthropods develop from secondary embryonic fields that form after the primary anterior/posterior and dorsal/ventral axes of the embryo have been determined. In Drosophila, the position and fate of the different fields formed within each segment are determined by genes acting along both embryonic axes, within individual segments, and within specific fields. Since the major architectural differences between most Arthropod classes and orders involve variations in the number, type and morphology (...) of body appendages, the elucidation of the embryology and molecular genetics of the origin and patterning of insect limb fields may help to facilitate an understanding of both the mechanism of appendage formation and some of the major steps in the morphological evolution of the Arthropods. In this review, we will discuss recent studies that have advanced our understanding of both the origin and patterning of Drosophila leg and wing secondary fields. These results provide fresh insights into potentially general mechanisms of how body parts develop and evolve. (shrink)

The idea that knowledge is a social phenomenon is no longer either novel or unfamiliar. With the growth of the social sciences, we are accustomed to seeing ideas and beliefs in social and historical terms, and trying to understand how they arise and why they take the forms that they do. Philosophers, however, are only gradually coming to terms with these views. For they call in question ideas about the nature of knowledge which have dominated epistemology since the seventeenth century.

Does the status of certain temporal experiences as illusory depend on one’s conception of time? Our concept of time in part determines our concept of what we hold to be real and unreal; what we hold to be real and unreal partially determines what we hold to be illusory; thus, our concept of time in part determines what we hold to be illusory. This paper argues that this dependency of illusions on the concept of time is applicable to illusions of (...) time. Two possible temporal illusions given the evidence are examined, simultaneity and the experience of the past; it is argued that the evidence points at temporal illusions depending on which conception of time is true. (shrink)