У статті йдеться про особливості живого, життя щодо неживого і про роль ентропії в саморегулюванні життям взагалі і людською життєдіяльністю зокрема. Живе протидіє ентропії своїми сутнісними ознаками, зокрема самоактивністю, відкритістю системи, здатністю реагування на зовнішні впливи, розмноженням, саморегуляцією, регенерацією пошкоджень, енергією, інформацією, автономністю, цілісністю. А живе розумне (людина) – ще й правилами моралі, релігійними заповідями, правом, цілераціональністю, ціннісними орієнтирами. Як всезагальний фізичний закон, ентропія призводить неживий і живий світ до хаосу, безпорядку, а все живе – до смерті. Але на певний (...) час і найпростіший організм, і людина протидіють цьому. Автор продовжує тему «ентропія і життя», з’ясовуючи особливості цієї протидії. (shrink)

This book is an excellent collection of papers which partly spring from, and partly bear on the Study Group on the Unity of Knowledge held in various universities, October, 1967-March, 1970. The papers all bear on the problem of reduction. In "Unity of Physical Law and Levels of Description," Ilya Prigogine argues that organized structures need physical laws of organization, not of entropy only, to explain their genesis and operation." The editor’s paper, "Reducibility: Another Side Issue," argues, following Polanyi, that (...) living things as machines already transcend physics, since they demand both chemical and engineering principles for their explanation." "How is Mechanism Conceivable?" points out that ordinary ways of talking about and explaining behavior, i.e., as involving intention and purpose, differs in logic from mechanistic explanation. But this difference in logic of the two languages is "never an obstacle to the reduction of one theory to another, indeed, there is always such a noncongruence of the conceptual mesh." Anthony J. P. Kenny’s "The Homunculus Fallacy" argues against "the reckless application of human-being predicates to insufficiently human-like objects." In "Behavior, Belief, and Emotion," A. C. MacIntyre argues for the thesis that "there is no necessary connection between at least some emotions and particular forms of behavior." In "The Critique of Artificial Reason," H. Dreyfus criticizes both the empirical and a priori arguments for optimism underlying the work in artificial intelligence. It displays the underlying philosophical assumption inherent in Western philosophical tradition since Plato. The last two papers concern Polanyi’s theory of knowledge. In "Tacit Knowledge and the Concept of Mind," W. T. Scott shows how Ryle’s "Concept of Mind can be significantly extended by considering certain features of the philosophical position that Michael Polanyi has developed around the concept of tacit knowing." R. S. Cohen’s "Tacit, Social and Hopeful" discusses the difficulties in Polanyi’s epistemology and the merits of the logical reconstruction work in science. Only the papers by Dreyfus and Scott have been previously published. Throughout the collection, the editor has provided useful introductory remarks focusing upon the unifying themes in the collection.—A. S. C. (shrink)

This book is an excellent collection of papers which partly spring from, and partly bear on the Study Group on the Unity of Knowledge held in various universities, October, 1967-March, 1970. The papers all bear on the problem of reduction. In "Unity of Physical Law and Levels of Description," Ilya Prigogine argues that organized structures need physical laws of organization, not of entropy only, to explain their genesis and operation." The editor’s paper, "Reducibility: Another Side Issue," argues, following Polanyi, that (...) living things as machines already transcend physics, since they demand both chemical and engineering principles for their explanation." "How is Mechanism Conceivable?" points out that ordinary ways of talking about and explaining behavior, i.e., as involving intention and purpose, differs in logic from mechanistic explanation. But this difference in logic of the two languages is "never an obstacle to the reduction of one theory to another, indeed, there is always such a noncongruence of the conceptual mesh." Anthony J. P. Kenny’s "The Homunculus Fallacy" argues against "the reckless application of human-being predicates to insufficiently human-like objects." In "Behavior, Belief, and Emotion," A. C. MacIntyre argues for the thesis that "there is no necessary connection between at least some emotions and particular forms of behavior." In "The Critique of Artificial Reason," H. Dreyfus criticizes both the empirical and a priori arguments for optimism underlying the work in artificial intelligence. It displays the underlying philosophical assumption inherent in Western philosophical tradition since Plato. The last two papers concern Polanyi’s theory of knowledge. In "Tacit Knowledge and the Concept of Mind," W. T. Scott shows how Ryle’s "Concept of Mind can be significantly extended by considering certain features of the philosophical position that Michael Polanyi has developed around the concept of tacit knowing." R. S. Cohen’s "Tacit, Social and Hopeful" discusses the difficulties in Polanyi’s epistemology and the merits of the logical reconstruction work in science. Only the papers by Dreyfus and Scott have been previously published. Throughout the collection, the editor has provided useful introductory remarks focusing upon the unifying themes in the collection.—A. S. C. (shrink)

Technology is no longer confined to the laboratory but has become an established part of our daily lives. Its sophistication offers us power beyond our human capacity which can either dazzle or threaten; it depends who is in control. _Living in a Technological Culture_ challenges traditionally held assumptions about the relationship between `man-and-machine'. It argues that contemporary science does not shape technology but is shaped by it. Neither discipline exists in a moral vacuum, both are determined by politics rather (...) than scientific inquiry. By questioning our existing uses of technology, this book opens up wider debate on the shape of things to come and whether we should be trying to change them now. As an introduction to the philosophy of technology this will be valuable to students, but will be equally engaging for the general reader. (shrink)

"Permanent Things reminds us that some of the century's most imaginative minds - G. K. Chesterton, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, Dorothy Sayers, and Evelyn Waugh - were profoundly at odds with the secularist spirit of the age, seeing progressive enlightenment as ushering in, not a millennium of perfect freedom, but a Waste Land whose inhabitants - Waugh's "vile bodies," Eliot's "hollow men," Lewis's "men without chests" - can find refuge from their boredom and anomie only in the ceaseless (...) acquisition of things or in the consoling illusions of pseudo religions - "distracted from distraction by distraction," as Eliot memorably put it." "How does one explain the desolation of a world which, though richly endowed with material comforts, is mentally and spiritually impoverished? The essayists here are united, as were their subjects, by a need to try to answer this question. Modern man's poverty of spirit, visible alike in so much of his art and architecture, his literature and philosophy and political science, reflects his loss of any good reasons for living - his loss of the Permanent Things." "The Christian writers whose work is eloquently interpreted in this book repay our attention for at least two reasons. First is their ability to sharpen our awareness of what, by any previous civilized standards, must be called the abnormal condition of modern man. For all the writers treated in this book, it was never enough to simply capture the spiritual aridity of modern life. It was also necessary to speak of a moral order that may yet be restored by the expressive power and beauty of the written word."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved. (shrink)

Although Seibutsu no Sekai (The World of Living Things) , the seminal 1941 work of Kinji Imanishi, had an enormous impact in Japan, both on scholars and on the general public, very little is known about it in the English-speaking world. This book makes the complete text available in English for the first time and provides an extensive introduction and notes to set the work in context. Imanishi's work, based on a very wide knowledge of science and the natural (...) world, puts forward a distinctive view of nature and how it should be studied. Imanishi's work is particularly important as a background to ecology, primatology and human social evolution theory in Japan. (shrink)

The Oldest Living Things in the World is an epic journey through time and space. Over the past decade, artist Rachel Sussman has researched, worked with biologists, and traveled the world to photograph continuously living organisms that are 2,000 years old and older. Spanning from Antarctica to Greenland, the Mojave Desert to the Australian Outback, the result is a stunning and unique visual collection of ancient organisms unlike anything that has been created in the arts or sciences before, (...) insightfully and accessibly narrated by Sussman along the way. Her work is both timeless and timely, and spans disciplines, continents, and millennia. It is underscored by an innate environmentalism and driven by Sussman’s relentless curiosity. She begins at “year zero,” and looks back from there, photographing the past in the present. These ancient individuals live on every continent and range from Greenlandic lichens that grow only one centimeter a century, to unique desert shrubs in Africa and South America, a predatory fungus in Oregon, Caribbean brain coral, to an 80,000-year-old colony of aspen in Utah. Sussman journeyed to Antarctica to photograph 5,500-year-old moss; Australia for stromatolites, primeval organisms tied to the oxygenation of the planet and the beginnings of life on Earth; and to Tasmania to capture a 43,600-year-old self-propagating shrub that’s the last individual of its kind. Her portraits reveal the living history of our planet—and what we stand to lose in the future. These ancient survivors have weathered millennia in some of the world’s most extreme environments, yet climate change and human encroachment have put many of them in danger. Two of her subjects have already met with untimely deaths by human hands. Alongside the photographs, Sussman relays fascinating – and sometimes harrowing – tales of her global adventures tracking down her subjects and shares insights from the scientists who research them. The oldest living things in the world are a record and celebration of the past, a call to action in the present, and a barometer of our future. (shrink)

This paper interprets Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time-era account of us as ‘Dasein’ as an appropriation of Aristotle’s definition of us as the living thing that has logos. As Heidegger understands it, to have logos is not to be rational but to be synthesising or gathering, where this means that we (i) gather entities into practical contexts and so into their being that, what, and how they are, (ii) gather ourselves into social contexts and so into being who we (...) are, and (iii) gather the three dimensions of our temporality together into our being as Dasein. This gathering can occur authentically or inauthentically, which is to say that we can gather well or poorly. Gathering excellently is the ethico-ontological challenge of being Dasein that we are called to take up. (shrink)

Introduction. The universality of modern technol- ogy testifies to a certain mode of its existence. It manifests itself in the fact that there is practically not a single segment of the modern world, not a single sphere of culture where technology has not spread its influence - direct or indirect / anony- mous. On the basis of the study, the authors come to the conclusion that technology is both a tradition and a logic built into the tradition, and the realiza- (...) tion of a special existential orientation, an embodi- ment of a special kind. The purpose of the study is to reveal whether its essence is connected only with the pragmatic func- tion of technology, or whether there is a special symbolic beginning in technology, which takes technology beyond the scope of rational use. Methods. The authors apply the structuralist method that makes it possible to reveal structures behind the everyday understanding of technology that can generate semantic layers. The structuralist method is complemented by the phenomenological method, since the identified structures constitute the symbolic foundations of technical reality. The phenomenological method makes it possible to reveal the “hidden care” of a person, the target reason for the existence of technology. Scientific novelty of the research. The article reveals the deep meaning of the target cause of the technique. The technical is aimed at overcom- ing natural barriers, creating artificial natures, with its own special logic of existence. The material properties of things allow the permeability and conditionality of all qualitative obstacles. Quantita- tive homogeneity, the permeability of all qualities makes the boundaries between the types of living things conditional. There is no line of demarca- tion not only within life (the theory of evolution is based on this), but also between the living and the non-living. It is possible that there is no boundary between the temporal and the immortal. Results. The desire of mankind to overcome time is embodied in the being of technology. Mankind strives to conquer nature, to overcome all the bar- riers that the natural world continues to put up, in order to bypass natural laws to enter the realm of absolute freedom, which connects with immortal- ity. The created technical things themselves have certain laws for implementing a technical idea and limit technical creativity, but the meaning of technical creation is to overcome any restrictions. Man is a technician, because he is the self-willed transformer of the world. There is a revolutionary charge in technology that changes the world to hu- man request. The technique embodies the struggle of a desperate being with the rejection of his fate, his mortal fate. Conclusions. Despite the fact that science positions itself as rational, sober knowledge, nevertheless, the old dream of overcoming the barrier of death has not gone away. At the present stage, technol- ogy is trying to realize this dream through imple- menting safety, comfort, quality medical care, and an increase in life expectancy. Everything technical is centered on the problem of “life and death”. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to contribute to the substantial body of feminist scholarship on the place of women in Aristotle’s psychic and political hierarchy. Whereas the traditional point of departure for such analyses is more typically Aristotle’s Politics, mine is his hylomorphic or organizational/ecological account of what defines a living thing and its powers in de Anima. My primary claim is that although his de Anima account does offer a more promising view of what defines particular kinds (...) of living things, including human beings qua the power of intellection, it does not ultimately save him from the ambiguity endemic to his account of women’s capacity to deliberate in his Politics. Such a result is significant for feminists who, in seeking nondualistic accounts of embodied human existence, have sometimes turned to Aristotle’s hylomorphism for support, but, I suggest, might be better off to seek such support elsewhere. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 33.2 (2005) 42-70 [Access article in PDF] "O Happy Living Things" Frankenfoods and the Bounds of Wordsworthian Natural Piety Anne-Lise François With all the flowers Fancy e'er could feignWho breeding flowers will never breed the same. —John Keats, "Ode to Psyche" And I could wish my days to beBound each to each in natural piety. —William Wordsworth, "My heart leaps up" O happy living things! no (...) tongue Their beauty might declare:A spring of love gusht from my heart, And I bless'd them unaware!Sure my kind saint took pity on me, And I bless'd them unaware. —Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" "O happy living things!"—vitamin-enriched grains; potatoes equipped to kill their predators; silk-producing goats; fast-growing salmon that hardly require feeding. Is it possible to predicate the breathless exclamation that escapes Coleridge's mariner, unaware not of water snakes but of the fantastic array of genetically modified creatures—animals and plants—currently under design or production by biotech industries? Already in May 2000 a New York Times article was announcing the imminent arrival of "fast-growing trout and catfish, oysters that can withstand viruses, and an 'Enviropig,' whose feces are less harmful to the environment because they contain less phosphorus." An article inset describes the emergent production of "pharm-animals":These domesticated beasts—cows, pigs, goats, sheep, and chickens—have been given the ability to produce pharmaceuticals and other valuable substances in their milk, eggs or semen. Endowed by scientists with foreign genes, often taken from humans, these animals, or bioreactors, as they are also known, earn their keep as living chemical factories. Two companies, the Genzyme Corporation of Cambridge, Mass., and PPL Therapeutics, a Scottish company, already have products from pharm animals being tested in clinical trials supervised by the Food and Drug Administration. Many other animals are [End Page 42] still in the development stage. For example, Nexia Biotechnologies in Canada is working on a goat that carries a gene from spiders allowing it to produce spider silk in its milk. When the spider silk, which consists of extremely strong, light proteins, is extracted from the goat's milk, the substance, potentially, can be used in applications like bulletproof vests. [Yoon] This last sentence is intriguing. The genetic revolution often bills itself as a second green revolution that will prevent starvation and alleviate disease, promising to feed the world's growing population in terms that tend to essentialize poverty and hunger as inevitable symptoms of a human condition, rather than understand them through the lens of specific colonial and postcolonial histories. But bulletproof vests? The indignant leftist response here would be to deride the collusion between biotechnology and the military-industrial complex—bulletproof vests leaving little doubt as to whose desires count as universal, timeless needs. Yet such a response is perhaps too quick to attribute reason to these genetic experiments in cross-species breeding, and too quick to accept the terms in which biotechnicians present themselves—as the instruments of reason, whether of global capitalism or universal human progress. Part of what this essay wishes to suggest is that to dream up such things and to think of wanting to do them—make a goat produce spider silk in its milk—involve particular fantasies, fantasies not simply about recreating the world in one's image, but about learning to desire the world again, to be excited by it or "surprised" by its existence, to borrow a phrase from Stanley Cavell. The journalist's parenthetical "potentially" indicates that no use has yet been determined, no burning need fuels such experiments, and hints at the boredom behind them—what William Wordsworth might have called the "state of almost savage torpor" in which desire itself has to be invented.As the New York Times writer's double metaphor of animal as laborer- and factory-in-one suggests—"these animals, or bioreactors, as they are also known, earn their keep as living chemical factories"—the binaries animal-human, machine-animal... (shrink)

Although _Seibutsu no Sekai _, the seminal 1941 work of Kinji Imanishi, had an enormous impact in Japan, both on scholars and on the general public, very little is known about it in the English-speaking world. This book makes the complete text available in English for the first time and provides an extensive introduction and notes to set the work in context. Imanishi's work, based on a very wide knowledge of science and the natural world, puts forward a distinctive view (...) of nature and how it should be studied. Imanishi's work is particularly important as a background to ecology, primatology and human social evolution theory in Japan. Imanishi's views on these subjects are extremely interesting because he formulated an approach to viewing nature which challenged the usual international ideas of the time, and which foreshadow approaches that have currency today. (shrink)

Suppose, as biocentrists do, that even microorganisms have a good of their own - that is, some objective form of welfare. Still, human welfare is vastly greater and more valuable. If it were infinitely greater, individualistic biocentrism would be pointless. But consideration of the facts of evolutionary history and of the conceptual relations between infinity and incommensurability reveals that there are no infinite welfare differences among living things. It follows, in particular, that there is some very large number (...) of bacteria whose aggregate overall welfare is not less than the welfare of a human being. (shrink)

It is necessary to take into account the data of science in the theoretical debates conducted by scientists contributing ontological theories in order to develop new approaches to theological issues in Islamic thought. Even, Kalam scholars with the duty of defending and basing the principles of Islam in the classical sense have established a theological understanding intertwined with science in understanding both existence philosophically and the Script theologically. With its discoveries and theories in the last century, it can be argued (...) that modern science has made a serious progress compared to the past. Maintaining its own methodology and paradigm, every scientific discipline has the opportunity to benefit from the methods and data of other disciplines. Consequently, it is possible to assert that Kalam can enjoy the same opportunity too, as long as staying in its own problem area. According to modern science, the motion system is the unity of structures that enable living things to move. Moreover, Bones and joints, which are the structures of the skeletal system, are passive elements of the movement system. Muscles, on the other hand, are the active elements of the movement system and provide the movement of the body by affecting the bones and joints. Muscle tissue shapes the body by adhering to the bones, besides enabling movement activity to occur. One of the most important systems that provide movement is the nervous system. Because for a person to have movement, the muscles must contract, and the muscles must be stimulated for the contraction of the muscles. The system that enables this contraction to occur is the nervous system. Energy is also required for contraction to occur in the human body. Muscles create energy for movement by first providing their energy from the ATP molecule present in the muscle cells. Considering the movement theories of classical theology scholars, it is seen that they shaped the occurrence of human actions through the concept of potency. While the scholars classify power as spiritual/mental and physical strength in terms of its structure, they have characterized it as accident in terms of its nature. In this context, we can say that the equivalent of the power, which is regarded as necessary for the formation of human acts by the theologians, is the movement system in today's science. The spirit/mental that scholars regard as a structure of power for the occurrence of human action can be regarded as the electrical activity that activates muscles when considered within the framework of the movement system of today's science. It is seen that Kalam scholars emphasize physical competence in their definitions of power as well. At this point, Ash'arians defined the power as the soundness of organs, Mu’tazila expressed it as the presence of organs and their being away from disasters, and the Mâturîdîs stated it as the organs being healthy. With these definitions, Kalam scholars mean that a person should also be physically competent to make a movement. The structures scientifically accepted as biological and physical competence in the movement system are the skeletal system, muscles and nervous system. Therefore, we can say that the strength of the physical fitness/well-being emphasized in the definition of power by theologians corresponds scientifically to the skeletal system, muscles and nervous system. One of the issues that Kalam scholars discuss about power is the issue of the accident of power. The reason why they describe power as an accident is to emphasize its impermanence and to show that it was created by Allah. So, in modern science, electrical activity must occur in the brain in order for human organs to move. The occurrence of this electrical activity is independent of the human being. The fact that electrical activity occurs independently from human beings shows that it conforms to Kalam scholars’ definition of the accident. As a result, we can say that the theory of power created by scholars for human movement has a counterpart in the movement system put forward by today's science. (shrink)

The most important question we can ask ourselves is: what kind of life is the best? This is the same as asking: How does one give meaning to one's life? How can one justify one's existence and make it worthwhile? How does one make experience valuable, and keep growing and learning in the process - and through this learning acquire a degree of understanding of oneself and the world? A civilised society is one which never ceases debating with itself aboutwhat (...) human life should best be. Some would, with justice, say that if wewant ours to be such a society we must all contribute to that discussion. This book is, with appropriate diffidence, such a contribution. It consists of a collection of Grayling's regular 'Last Word' columns in the Guardian.This time topics include Suicide, Deceit, Luxury, Profit, Marriage, Meat-eating, Liberty, Slavery, Protest, Guns and War. (shrink)

In this essay, I attempt to provide answers to the following four queries concerning the metaphysics of early human embryogenesis. (1) Following its first cellular fission, is it coherent to claim that one and only one of two “blastomeric” twins of a human zygote is identical with that zygote? (2) Following the fusion of two human pre-embryos, is it coherent to claim that one and only one pre-fusion pre-embryo is identical with that postfusion pre-embryo? (3) Does a (...) live human being come into existence only when its brain comes into existence? (4) At implantation, does a pre-embryo become a mere part of its mother? I argue that either if things have quidditative properties or if criterialism is false, then queries (1) and (2) can be answered in the affirmative; that in light of recent developments in theories of human death and in light of a more “functional” theory of brains, query (3) can be answered in the negative; and that plausible mereological principles require a negative answer to query (4). (shrink)

Ennead I.1 is a succinct and concentrated analysis of key themes in Plotinus' psychology and ethics. It focuses on the soul-body relation, discussing various Platonic, Aristotelian, and Stoic views before arguing that there is only a soul-trace in the body (forming with the body a "compound"), while the reasoning soul itself is impassive and flawless. The soul-trace hypothesis is used to account for human emotions, beliefs, and perceptions, and human fallibility in general. Its problematic relation to our rational (...) powers, as well as the question of moral responsibility, are explored. Plotinus develops his original and characteristic concept of the self or "we," which is so called because it is investigated as something common to all humans (rather than a private individual self), and because it is multiple, referring to the reasoning soul or to the "living thing" composed of soul-trace and body. Plotinus explores the relation between the "we" and consciousness, and also its relation to the higher metaphysical entities, the Good, and Intellect. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Wandering the Magnetosphere*Ingrid Koenig (bio)Navigation notes: These emergent drawings–excerpts from a visual essay–take up the complex network of impacts across physical forces entangled with bio-geo-political time. A key element for this work is a living cosmography to depict movement across time, and to visualize wandering on a planet, in the magnetosphere, and between the internal energy of Earth and the solar energy of the cosmos. Physicists say there (...) are no things, there are only relations between things.Q: Hello ancient stone - may I unfold you like a book? Do you carry a message from deep time? A: Yes, what you’re holding is not a thing, but a process. Click for larger view View full resolutionDrawing from Svalbard, Day 17 expedition, 2019[End Page 97]Drifting on a rocky planet, between the internal energy of Earth and the solar energy of the cosmos–we live within a “cosmo-tectonic circulation” —Jerome Gaillardet, geo-chemist. Click for larger view View full resolutionGeocosmic Logic[End Page 98] Click for larger view View full resolutionHow Entropy is Time (detail) Click for larger view View full resolutionMagnetic Story[End Page 99] Click for larger view View full resolutionMessage From Deep Time 3 Click for larger view View full resolutionMessage From Deep Time 1[End Page 100] Click for larger view View full resolutionLooping Matters 1 (Litli-Hrutur, Iceland) Click for larger view View full resolutionLooping Matters 2[End Page 101] Click for larger view View full resolutionMother Rock Waves (Miradalir Valley, Iceland) Click for larger view View full resolutionMother Rock in Time[End Page 102] Click for larger view View full resolutionVolcanic Logic (Miradalir Valley, Iceland) Click for larger view View full resolutionSonic Lava (Miradalir Valley, Iceland)[End Page 103] Click for larger view View full resolutionWaves Across Time (Miradalir Valley, Iceland) Click for larger view View full resolutionDisorientations[End Page 104] Click for larger view View full resolutionMessage From Deep Time 2 Click for larger view View full resolutionGravitational Thought[End Page 105] Click for larger view View full resolutionMagnetic Thought (Miradalir Valley, Iceland) Click for larger view View full resolutionDistance Ladder Collapse[End Page 106] Click for larger view View full resolutionMattering Logic 3 Click for larger view View full resolutionMattering Logic 4[End Page 107] Click for larger view View full resolutionHow We Make Time into Space Click for larger view View full resolutionHow Entropy is Time (detail 2–Svalbard)[End Page 108]Ingrid Koenig Ingrid Koenig is Associate Professor at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, Vancouver, Canada. She was the inaugural Artist in Residence (2011 to 2021) at TRIUMF, Canada’s particle accelerator center, and co-organizes processes of collaboration between artists and physicists in a project called Leaning Out of Windows. Her studio and research practices traverse the fields of physics, social history, feminist theory, and narratives of science. Her drawings explore the complex phenomena of physics and involve intuitive responses to specific sites through fieldwork in Canada’s Rocky Mountains, Germany, Iceland, Arctic Circle art + science expeditions, and through collaborations with physicists. She has received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Goethe Institute, and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council. She co-edited the recently published book, Leaning Out of Windows: An Art and Physics Collaboration (Figure 1 Publishing, 2023).Footnotes* Excerpts from Wandering the Magnetosphere–drawings by Ingrid Koenig, 2019 to 2023, and ongoingCopyright © 2023 Johns Hopkins University Press and SubStance, Inc... (shrink)

Humans naturally and effortlessly use a set of cognitive tools to reason about biological entities and phenomena. Two such tools, essentialist thinking and teleological thinking, appear to be early developmental cognitive defaults, used extensively in childhood and under limited circumstances in adulthood, but prone to reemerge under time pressure or cognitive load. We examine the nature of another such tool: anthropocentric thinking. In four experiments, we examined patterns of property attribution to a wide range of living and non-living (...) objects, manipulating time pressure, response type, and property in a total of 471 participants. Results showed no tendency toward increased similarity-based attribution patterns indicative of anthropocentric thinking under time pressure. However, anthropocentric thinking was consistently observed for unfamiliar properties. These findings suggest that anthropocentric thinking is not a developmentally persistent cognitive default, but rather a cognitive strategy deliberately employed in situations of uncertainty. (shrink)

Mary Anne Warren investigates a theoretical question that is at the centre of practical and professional ethics: what are the criteria for having moral status? That is: what does it take to be an entity towards which people have moral considerations? Warren argues that no single property will do as a sole criterion, and puts forward seven basic principles which establish moral status. She then applies these principles to three controversial moral issues: voluntary euthanasia, abortion, and the status of non- (...) class='Hi'>human animals. (shrink)

Elegant, suggestive, and clarifying, Lewis Thomas's profoundly humane vision explores the world around us and examines the complex interdependence of all things. Extending beyond the usual limitations of biological science and into a vast and wondrous world of hidden relationships, this provocative book explores in personal, poetic essays to topics such as computers, germs, language, music, death, insects, and medicine. Lewis Thomas writes, "Once you have become permanently startled, as I am, by the realization that we are a social species, (...) you tend to keep an eye out for the pieces of evidence that this is, by and large, good for us.". (shrink)

continent. 2.2 (2012): 155–158 Michel Serres. Biogea . Trans. Randolph Burks. Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing. 2012. 200 pp. | ISBN 9781937561086 | $22.95 Conveying to potential readers the significance of a book puts me at risk of glad handing. It’s not in my interest to laud the undeserving, especially on the pages of this journal. This is not a sales pitch, but rather an affirmation of a necessary work on very troubled terms: human, earth, nature, and the problematic world we (...) made. It is this world that aspirates the silence (so to speak), and therefore the subject which, along with the development of the “made world” exports the excess augmentation of the cosmically missing, this silence of the natural, et cetera. Had we learned from Locke that lesson of “labor,” to consume what we need… but perhaps we need more than what matters? Serres’ Biogea has several functions on this manner, if it is indeed a book to be consumed. First, readers searching for novelistic entertainment have a place to dwell. Biogea deserves a place in your back pocket; biographical generosity and poetic fluidity should satisfy most textual fetishes. For lay philosophers who want to refresh their acumen, Biogea deserves a place on the book shelf, one already reads a sorely needed postmodern tune-up here. Serres’ style is clearly French; he leaves few cheese crumbs on his words, rather preciseness and breathing in the work give way to a sweeping manner that breaks the narrative line of sight. A circular narrative and anachronistic fragmentation of terms allows an abyssal atmosphere to swell, if only to pump into the book the externality of its broader text. Biogea aspires to a higher standard and the book, at times, is thinking this negentropic problem too. Univocal, the publisher, has crafted a book appropriate for the hands to hold and the translations are an achievement of an otherwise difficult writer to translate. Terms are the conditions of a broader text. It is important to note that Serres’ content is as much a thinking of terminal ports. There is a regard for the transportation technology of the written word. For me, this is the mark of genius, a craftiness that tells of a book device that I may trust. Serres is an accomplished thinker and a necessary voice to check the putative trendiness of anti-postmodernist and market-driven theory of endless cultural liquidation. Offering interventions on subjectivity as an open system we are given a chance to affirm the human, not merely to discard it, but to engage its poetic image emotion, the calibratory silent sense of the analogic world; the terms on which we base our efforts. 1 The human is the center of its own negation, constantly mediating it. Something deeper at stake appears in the work then, and it is quite obvious from the onset. Certainly, a book is an intensification of possible text and those who brought this actual book into existence have captured a rarity in regards to the subject matter and artistic accomplishment. I mentioned terms as conditions, so let us understand Biogea as bio-yea, a yes to bios . An affirmation of living and accepting presence for all of its defiance of images, words, and things temporal. Therefore Serres’ existence and its existants plays parts; out of linearity and still like a porous bone pumping blood it manufactures into the fleshy life it becomes. Starting from a man named silence chaos emerges, or the man “Old Taciturn” takes up a journey anticipating a great flood. In other words, a development akin to the one in Genesis. In dealing with this ancestral occupation, fusing Genesis with contemporary philosophical terms, Serres initiates this anachronistic fragmentation under the forming subjectivity of his own autobiography. This mutation in the open system is precisely one of Serres’ terms. There an abyss is at work, stated, but also measured by heels on the ground—the abyss dispatching earthen tensions, that which plays our tunes, that which we abide by and recognize in volcanoes, rivers, oceans, earthquakes and weaponry in the battles of the world. Set in later stages of the book, such tensions are harnessed through scientific principles in an attempt to unify the terms of natural force if only to terminate the world. Thus the elevation of the earth into the world is clearly set forth. Here already, and few pages in, a resonance is set forth under appellations such as the river Garonne, a subjectivity as much as it is inhuman, the river is the inhuman that makes us human. I get the sense that Serres is taking up a challenge issued by Wallace Stevens; namely, that the great poems of heaven and hell have been written, but that only the poem of the earth has resisted composition. 2 On this level we cannot avoid the killing factor of silence, given that our cognition blocks its pure, radical obliteration. Thus a silence of attunement to the earth is in a novel dialectic of the rithmic and rhythm. A technological world, a triumph of termination is set forth. If a text imposes its will given the reader who authorizes it, it is made to convey or convect a presupposition to a reader or its inhabitant(s). Text is therefore both, in-content, contenting, contentedness, and in reading it, a way to navigate self-destruction (dis-content). Here then would one note that the “inhuman” reveals itself, “an aperiodic rhythm of lovers and beloved…the sea as our friend…but as our enemy…maternal vivifying sea.” The sea is an open book, or vaginal birth canal, where the engagement of text comes forth: “…woman sea, open vulva.” One sees like the sea, but only after it, when the uninhabitable truth of inhabiting it switches the polarity of the sailors soul: “I was seeing like the sea” (9-11). In other words, we are invited to embrace the nonsense of the visible. At this point I am taken to Jean-François Lyotard’s work The Inhuman , specifically the first entry on negentropy that would be congruent with Serres’ thematic. 3 The human being exports, deports, or transplants its relation through text, through the system— and this is its sense or relation to silence, to music. Unaware of Serres’ proximity to this work, the concept of gender interrelation as regards a solar catastrophe runs clear. It would be, on this basis, that Serres references his peers, the other texts that, as mentioned above, are discarded in philosophy today. For students of philosophy what we have here is perhaps a gift, a needed project. If silence and death are at work, there is a political valence to deal with, and here, much like the domain of the text and the dominion of the reader, we confront the world of natural, fluid violence. The anti-postmodernist critique is in part based on a weak idea that the loss of ideology, of a world vision, motivates the “correlationist” project. 4 Serres seems to offer another way to view this when he notes that whereas persons “sometimes kill,” it is clearly “the collective” that “always kills” (17). What is the collective today, if not an organizing function we never see yet acts in its favor in the name of truth? One feels a sense of enigma here, if only to link to what Stevens remarked of communism as a “grubby faith,” providing this applies for capitalism as well, namely any ideology of progress overly interested in absolutes. Here we get the sense that the inhuman, silence, this type of killing, always killing, could not be matched by human-made, political dynamos. Or that if it comes to an equilibrium, a catastrophe is never too far from us to read with our heels. We are left to note that the forces of nature presuppose and permeate political systems, the more these systems obtain force, the more the system takes upon itself the proper name of nature that motivates its dissemination, albeit falsely. This note, that in an age of ecocide and technological captivity (sustainability and transparency) political regimes won’t grow our soul-learning ears any larger than our tongues, stands clear to us. The promise of technological desubjectification is here pushed aside. Regarding politics, Serres illustrates this fact: Where did this corpse come from? Who was it? Who killed it? I don’t know. I won’t try to find out. I refuse to get vengeance for it. And I only see Garonne. For our victims, today, are the rivers, too. Their waters have irrigated my life, enchanted my thought, invigorated my body; I’ve known them to be threatening, untamable, as dangerous as the sea when it rages. Yes, murderous. They decided to control their courses; dams, sometimes senseless, destroying sites and valleys, reduced entire populations to servile displacements; programs for the irrigation of thirsty farmland, often beneficial of course, completed their drying up.(22) Serres enters into his idea concerning the captivity of language from the natural into a world system: For thousands of years, we have been licking things with our tongues, covering and daubing them so as to appropriate things for ourselves. If language boils down to a convention, this convention took place between the speakers without consulting the thing named, become as a result the property of those who covered it in this way with their drawn or voiced productions. Malfeasance analyzes these acts of appropriation. Thus every inert object, every living thing as well, sleeps under the covers of signs, a little in the way that, today, a thousand posters shouting messages and ugly riots of color drown, with their filthy flood, the landscapes, or better, exclude them from perception because the meaning, almost nil, of this false language and these base images forms an irresistible source of attraction to our neurons and eyes. This appropriation covers the world’s beauty with ugliness. (38-39) Technological concealment coming to bear, we begin to get a sense of another commentary on the condition of sensing, driving home the necessity of a text dealing with such subject matter to be what its terms insist. Thus toward new openings: The new opening. As low beneath our feet as you like, the Biogea opens us to another space, high enough for us to be able to acquire a wisdom there, that of redeveloping this same place differently from our fathers, this place that’s still politically cut up by old hatreds, beneath the flood of tears and blood that we call history. Without this soft place, spiritually very old, but newly conceived in this way, without the juridical construction of a common good, opposed to our filthy ownership, I don’t see how our planet, hard, will survive. Hardness that depends on a softness, material belonging that depends on this temporary rented location (51). Serres enters into a summit on the content and the structure of his work. Archimedes is brought in with the concept of three volcanoes. Meaning fire, but as well earth, water, air. For it was Archimedes’ war machines that sought to lift the earth, thus bringing in the question of principles of science: “can a principle be invented while controlling its consequences?” (66-7). May the earth be put in a sentence, terminated by terminology, appellations, gone wild? By means of these element-dominating laws, this old physicist began to tear nature away from the ancient myths; by a strange return, today we’re plunging our successes back into the anxieties and terrors from which that ancient physics was born. Yes, our new history of science and technology is plunging, today, as though in a loop, into the fundamental human myths from which Empedocles’ first laws came. A major progression and a regression on the nether side of the origins. Consequently, the contemporary time requires that we try to return to that unity in which the principles of hate and love are at the same time human, living, inert and global. We will never attain a deontology of our knowledge and actions without thinking the subjective, the objective, the collective, and the cognitive all together simultaneously. Here, hate and love are the result of these four components.(71) Working then on the concept of fire-starting mirrors to the atomic annihilation of the Second War, Serres works into the subjectivity in question on the matter of rhythm—say rithmic— precisely at that point: Knowledge is changing today. The all-political is dying; the monarchy of the sciences said to be hard is coming to a close. The science of the things of the world will have to communicate just as much as the things of the world do, which do it much better than humans do, who don’t always want to do it. Let’s celebrate two changes this morning. The first one strikes a new blow to our narcissism. No, knowledge and the world don’t resemble our analytical enjoyments of refined cutting up, of endless debates and of exclusions full of hate. They, on the contrary, form a bloc and a sum, alliance and alloys. Uniting the fields of knowledge among themselves the way the things are connected among themselves, the second newness puts into place sets united by interlacing, webs and simplexes that combine with the things of the world, themselves combined, the combined knowledge that understands them.(130-1) Biogea closes on its opening flood thematic, approaching the initial telos of Genesis. Here the trees are brought into a position with atmosphere, the opaque abyssal reservoir, the tomb of the sun, sea in the polarity of the earthen heaven and hell. The poem of the earth then is silent but deadly, indeed, as funny as that phrase is, mainly a tomb gas. The meaning of the living and the non-meaning of things converge in the muteness of the world; this meaning and non-meaning plunge there and come out, the ultimate eddy. Mundus patet: through a fissure, through an opening, a fault, a cleft come noises, calls as small as these apertures. I’m listening, attentive, I’m translating, I’m advancing in the scaled-down meaning and science. Mundus patet: should the world open greatly, it will launch me into its silence. The totality remains silent. Knowledge expanded in elation. White origin of meaning, fountain of joy. (198) Final Remarks One test of a review is the long term trajectory the referee thinks the book will have. I see Serres’ text lending greatly into the vision of Biogea . In fact, in the vision of the novel inquiries of Stephen Jay Gould’s work there is something to be thought on the level of the individual and the species; namely, that humanity and its uniqueness is in its deferral, its thinking and naming, a thinking surrounded by silence that filters into everything, that pulls us through the world, the kinetic pulse we recognize, and all of that we cleave away in the base philosophical maxim of difference itself. Unique individuals are spatial creatures: we dwell, and we ought to get good at it. Yet this is an imaginative space that, if you are crazy enough to believe it, de-term-ine the conditions of its own terms. That is why we are not merely creating spaces on the acceleration of time, or so this ignoramus thinks, to accidentally transcend. Imagination already has this insatiable silence that we drink up and fail to manifest. Space is timeless. The imagination itself, shared by humans for themselves, their objects, and the species as a whole, is a non-defined space of relation; a whole human trajectory as part of nature, and part of worlds that are the other side of thinking nature, the consequence of it, at least our attempt to do so. Our survival is based on our deliberation, our caution, our natural deconstructive sense toward this silence that is already part of the song, sung, singing of this century without end. Good books will let us inhabit this space and recognize a form of life. Serres’ text moves toward dwelling, as noted, in masterful and accessible ways. The pitched battles are the falling replays of anemic and dead politics. As soon as we realize there is humanity, we may be able to enjoy the end of it, our inhuman capability of listening to silence. NOTES 1. See Michel Serres. The Parasite . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2007. 2. Wallace Stevens, “Imagination as Value” [ca. 1945], in Collected Poetry and Prose . New York: The Library of America. 1997. 724-39. 3. Jean-François Lyotard. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time . Trans. Geoffrey Bennington & Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 1992. 4. See the introduction: Quentin Melliassoux. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency . Trans. Ray Brassier. New York: Continuum. 2008. EDITOR'S NOTE: This review was updated on August 8, 2012. Substantial edits include block quotes from the book under review as well as the inclusion of comments from the author. (shrink)

This paper seeks to propose a direction of research based upon the transformation of Merleau-Ponty's thinking with respect to animal life over the course of his writings. In his earlier works, Merleau-Ponty takes up the position that “life” does not mean the same thing when applied to an animal and a human being because of the manner in which the “human dialectic” alters the human being's relation to life. In his later works, particularly in his lectures on (...) nature, this position softens so that the relationship between animals and humans becomes non-hierarchical, but remains essentially the same: there may be no “rupture” between humans and animals, but they are still essentially distinct insofar as all non-humans can be grouped into a single class of “animality.” I attempt to show that Merleau-Ponty fails to follow through with his most radical insights with respect to the relationships between living beings by preserving this distinction and suggest some ways in which we might today confront this problem through the works of Merleau-Ponty in a way that he did not. The proposal, then, is to take seriously “dialectical” biology and develop a Merleau-Pontian conception of species based upon the interrelations of living beings and their environments rather than focusing solely on organisms as discrete units. The conclusion then considers what the consequences of this understanding might be for our understanding of Merleau-Ponty's ontology in general. (shrink)

Intelligence augmentation was one of the original goals of computing. Artificial Intelligence (AI) inherits this project and is at the leading edge of computing today. Computing can be considered an extension of brain and body, with mathematical prowess and logic fundamental to the infrastructure of computing. Multimedia computing—sensing, analyzing, and translating data to and from visual images, animation, sound and music, touch and haptics, as well as smell—is based on our human senses and is now commonplace. We use data (...) visualization and sonification, as well as data mining and analysis, to sort through the complexity and vast volume of data coming from the world inside and around us. It helps us ‘see’ in new ways. We can think of this capacity as a new kind of “digital glasses”. The Internet of Living Things (IOLT) is potentially an even more profound extension of ourselves to the world: a network of electronic devices embedded into objects, but now with subcutaneous, ingestible devices, and embedded sensors that include people and other living things. Like the Internet of Things (IOT), living things are connected; we call those connections “ecology”. As the IOT becomes increasingly synonymous with the IOLT, the question of ethics that is at the centre of aesthetics and the arts will move to the forefront of our experience of and regard for the world in and around us. (shrink)

As a young man Bill Adams travelled the world teaching US citizens abroad on behalf of a large state university on the East Coast. Back home he reflected that if there were answers to the great questions of life, then he’d not found them — not in India, in Europe, in China, or Japan. In time he came to see that his lifelong interest in how the mind works could be the clue to the meaning of life. Socrates had been (...) right all along: Know thyself. Adams now sets out a new reasoned argument, based on his experience as a cognitive psychologist and as a human being, to show why Socrates was right: the purpose of life is to recognize ourselves — in each other and in all things. The mind is looking for itself: that is how it works, that is what it does for a living. (shrink)

The concept of person is integral to bioethical discourse because persons are the proper subject of the moral domain. Nevertheless, the concept of person has played no role in the prevailing formulation of human death because of a purported lack of consensus concerning the essential attributes of a person. Beginning with John Locke's fundamental proposition that person is a ‘forensic term’, I argue that in Western society we do have a consensus on at least one necessary condition for personhood, (...) and that is the capacity for conscious experience. When we consider the whole brain formulation of death, and the most prominent defense of it by the President's Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research, we can readily identify the flaws that grow out of the failure to define human death as the permanent loss of the capacity for conscious experience. Most fundamental among these flaws is a definition of human death that reduces persons to the capacity of the brain to regulate purely physiological functioning. Such a formulation would, in theory, apply to any member of the animal kingdom. I suggest that an appropriate concept of death should capture what it is about a particular living being that is so essential to it that the permanent loss of that thing constitutes death. What is essential to being a human being is living the life of a person, which derives from the capacity for conscious experience. (shrink)

The developers of ecological ethics claim that the rationale of anthropocentrism is false. Its main message is that natural complexes and resources exist to be useful to the human being who sees them only from the perspective of using them and does not take into account their intrinsic value. Kant’s anthropocentric teaching argues that the instrumental attitude to nature has its limits. These limits are hard to determine because the anthropocentrists claim that the human being is above nature. (...) Indeed, the “human exclusiveness thesis” (J.- M. Schaeffer) assumes that its advocates underestimate nature’s impact on humans and their connection to other living beings. Constructing a dialogue between Kant and Schaeffer helps to solve two problems. First, to determine whether Kant’s ethical and teleological concept is immune to Schaeffer’s critique. Second, to clarify the German philosopher’s contribution to environmental ethics. I come to the conclusion that it is premature to claim that consciousness and free will exist only in the framework of their being conditioned by nature. I also demonstrate that in his teleological teaching Kant sees the mechanism of nature as the dependence of living things on forces that act in an unpremeditated manner. Recognition of these forces sets limits to humans’ instrumental attitude to nature and paves the way for them to become moral subjects. Thus, Kant’s teaching combines “the human exclusiveness thesis” and the intuitions of the representatives of deep ecology and the opponents of anthropocentrism as such. (shrink)

The painter "takes his body with him."Nevertheless, Renoir was looking at the sea.Close! stand close to me, Starbuck; let me look into a human eye.The painter takes his body with him—he looks at what he sees and what he sees looks back at him. Perception takes place in the exchange, in time and in the world, not only between people or between living things but also between "subject" and "object," between perceiver and perceived. In this exchange that Maurice (...) Merleau-Ponty calls "the chiasm"—"this mediation through reversal"—something direct and active takes place. Before we can know or say what we're seeing, before we divide what we see into things or kinds of things, before naming and measurement, assertion and... (shrink)

This essay describes a new ethical theory that has begun to coalesce from the works of several scholars in the international computer ethics community. I call the new theory ‚Flourishing Ethics’ because of its Aristotelian roots, though it also includes ideas suggestive of Taoism and Buddhism. In spite of its roots in ancient ethical theories, Flourishing Ethics is informed and grounded by recent scientific insights into the nature of living things, human nature and the fundamental nature of the (...) universe – ideas from today’s information theory, astrophysics and genetics. Flourishing Ethics can be divided conveniently into two parts. The first part, which I call ‚Human-Centered FE,’ is focused exclusively upon human beings – their actions, values and characters. The second part, which I call ‚General FE,’ applies to every physical entity in the universe, including humans. Rather than replacing traditional ‚great ethical theories,’ Flourishing Ethics is likely to deepen and broaden our understanding of them. (shrink)

In this new collection A.C. Grayling adds to the variety of discussion and insight in his previous three essay collections. He returns to questions of personal ethics and the problems of the contemporary world, but also looks at the lives and ideas of great thinkers, the role of the arts in civilisation, and the need for reason everywhere Anthony Grayling illustrates in his celebrated accessible prose what each area offers to thought. In a wide-ranging array of illuminating topics, THE HEART (...) OF THINGS shows how far-reaching Grayling's masterly, and timely, commentary on the humanities is to general readers. (shrink)

We live in an era where our health is linked to that of others across the globe, and nothing brings this home better than the specter of a pandemic. This paper explores the findings of town hall meetings associated with the Canadian Program of Research on Ethics in a Pandemic , in which focus groups met to discuss issues related to the global governance of an influenza pandemic. Two competing discourses were found to be at work: the first was based (...) upon an economic rationality and the second upon a humanitarian rationality. The implications for public support and the long-term sustainability of new global norms, networks, and regulations in global public health are discussed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A FAOT ABOUT THE VIRTUES A. CHADWICK RAY Oentrai OoUege Peila, Iowa PHILIPPA FOOT remarks in Virtues and Vices that "with the nota;ble exception of Peter Gea;ch hardly 100.yone sees ·any difficulty in the thought that virtues may sometimes be di·splayed in bald ructions." 1 That a man may use his courage to deplorable ends; that 'a tea.ah.er ma.y show charity in igiving a miudent undeserved credit-these seem to (...) ibe hardly problema.tic possibilities. Yet Aquinas upholds •a definition of morrul virtue as " a good quality o[ the mind, by which we live rightly, of whioh no one cain make bad use,..."2 And Aristotle's conception of the man Ol:f p:riactica:l reason as the standard of moral virtue likewise seems to p!'lec1ude a virtue 's being misused.3 Times change, and rupparently eV'en virtue is not what it used to be. Nevertheless I mean here to survey the resour.ces of moral psyichology in the tradition of.Airistotle to see what sort of grounding can be found for the no-bad-use thesis. Presumably Geach stamds wlmost 1 afone today on this question, because the more traditional view would seem defensible only if it is taken as analytic. We could stipulate that an action wilil be called virtuous only if on balance it is the wisest alternative aivaifaible to the agent, but the utility of such a l Philippa Foot, Virtues and Vices (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 15. In After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 216, Macintyre finds Hume, Kant, Mill, and Rawls taking virtues as dispositions to conform to certain rules. To the extent that rules are unreliable, the virtues will be too. 2 Aquinas, Summa theoiogiae, I-II, q.55, a.4. a Aristotle, Nioomaohean Flthios 1106b36-7a2, 1113a30-31. 430 A. CHADWICK RAY concept would be doubtfrnl, and 'virtue' would seem to name no real thing. The'1'e are, after aH, appwrently anomalous cases, as wihen a teacher is moved to indulgence by an undeserving student's plea and seems to show kindness to a fault. The deifense oif the no-bad-use thesis requires us to deny that real kindness is shown here. But if no better justification for the denia~ can be offered than that the action is wrong and so cannot be virtuous, the thesis wil:l express only an a11bitrary decision about how to use 'virtue ' and related terms. But if such deni1als can he justified by appeal to facts about human nature, then the no.:brud-use thesis itself may perhaps be taken a;s descriptive of certain realities constitutive of human life. After considel'ing some of the conditions of vir:tuous action and the possibility of degrees of virtue (section III), I shaill argue (IV and V) that the opening sentence of Aristotle 's Nicomachean Ethics affords a bctua:l ba;sis for sustaining the no-had-use thesis as descriptive of virtues as we find them; that if "every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good " is perhaps an overstatement, still the humanness and intelligibility of an action would seem to depend on its aiming at some good; and that it is largely by trying to consider actions independently of the goods they aim a;t that we imagine virtues able to se1we unworthy ends. Payffig fuH rega11d to the purposiveness of human action and the desires expressed in it will also make it possible (VI) to avnid oonoluding with Aristotle that the virtues are inseparable from eaich other. I conclude (VII) with some brief refteetion on the meaning of my departures from Aristotle. Before offering my own interpretation of the Aristotelian resources, though, I briefly contend for the reality of moral virtues (as tiraditiona1ly understood ) against conventioIJJa1ist interpretations ('section I) and then (H) consider an ailtemative account (roughly Geach's) of the nature of the virtues that would sa¥e the no-bad-use thesis. A FACT ABOUT THE VIRTUES 431 I. Virtues as Teleological Di8}Jositions Why indeed speak of vi1rtues at a1l? Behavior would seem to be describahle and e:x:p1a... (shrink)

Conventional ethics of how humans should eat often ignore that human life is itself a form of organic activity. Using Henri Bergson’s notions of intellect and intuition, this chapter brings a wider perspective of the human organism to the ethical question of how humans appropriate life for nutriment. The intellect’s tendency to instrumentalize living things as though they were inert seems to subtend the moral failures evident in practices such as industrial animal agriculture. Using the case study (...) of Temple Grandin’s sympathetic cattle technologies, this chapter moves beyond animal welfare concerns to ground food ethics on the phenomenal character of food that is obscured by human activities of fabrication. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A FAOT ABOUT THE VIRTUES A. CHADWICK RAY Oentrai OoUege Peila, Iowa PHILIPPA FOOT remarks in Virtues and Vices that "with the nota;ble exception of Peter Gea;ch hardly 100.yone sees ·any difficulty in the thought that virtues may sometimes be di·splayed in bald ructions." 1 That a man may use his courage to deplorable ends; that 'a tea.ah.er ma.y show charity in igiving a miudent undeserved credit-these seem to (...) ibe hardly problema.tic possibilities. Yet Aquinas upholds •a definition of morrul virtue as " a good quality o[ the mind, by which we live rightly, of whioh no one cain make bad use,..."2 And Aristotle's conception of the man Ol:f p:riactica:l reason as the standard of moral virtue likewise seems to p!'lec1ude a virtue 's being misused.3 Times change, and rupparently eV'en virtue is not what it used to be. Nevertheless I mean here to survey the resour.ces of moral psyichology in the tradition of.Airistotle to see what sort of grounding can be found for the no-bad-use thesis. Presumably Geach stamds wlmost 1 afone today on this question, because the more traditional view would seem defensible only if it is taken as analytic. We could stipulate that an action wilil be called virtuous only if on balance it is the wisest alternative aivaifaible to the agent, but the utility of such a l Philippa Foot, Virtues and Vices (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 15. In After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 216, Macintyre finds Hume, Kant, Mill, and Rawls taking virtues as dispositions to conform to certain rules. To the extent that rules are unreliable, the virtues will be too. 2 Aquinas, Summa theoiogiae, I-II, q.55, a.4. a Aristotle, Nioomaohean Flthios 1106b36-7a2, 1113a30-31. 430 A. CHADWICK RAY concept would be doubtfrnl, and 'virtue' would seem to name no real thing. The'1'e are, after aH, appwrently anomalous cases, as wihen a teacher is moved to indulgence by an undeserving student's plea and seems to show kindness to a fault. The deifense oif the no-bad-use thesis requires us to deny that real kindness is shown here. But if no better justification for the denia~ can be offered than that the action is wrong and so cannot be virtuous, the thesis wil:l express only an a11bitrary decision about how to use 'virtue ' and related terms. But if such deni1als can he justified by appeal to facts about human nature, then the no.:brud-use thesis itself may perhaps be taken a;s descriptive of certain realities constitutive of human life. After considel'ing some of the conditions of vir:tuous action and the possibility of degrees of virtue (section III), I shaill argue (IV and V) that the opening sentence of Aristotle 's Nicomachean Ethics affords a bctua:l ba;sis for sustaining the no-had-use thesis as descriptive of virtues as we find them; that if "every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good " is perhaps an overstatement, still the humanness and intelligibility of an action would seem to depend on its aiming at some good; and that it is largely by trying to consider actions independently of the goods they aim a;t that we imagine virtues able to se1we unworthy ends. Payffig fuH rega11d to the purposiveness of human action and the desires expressed in it will also make it possible (VI) to avnid oonoluding with Aristotle that the virtues are inseparable from eaich other. I conclude (VII) with some brief refteetion on the meaning of my departures from Aristotle. Before offering my own interpretation of the Aristotelian resources, though, I briefly contend for the reality of moral virtues (as tiraditiona1ly understood ) against conventioIJJa1ist interpretations ('section I) and then (H) consider an ailtemative account (roughly Geach's) of the nature of the virtues that would sa¥e the no-bad-use thesis. A FACT ABOUT THE VIRTUES 431 I. Virtues as Teleological Di8}Jositions Why indeed speak of vi1rtues at a1l? Behavior would seem to be describahle and e:x:p1a... (shrink)

In this paper I argue that the contemporary pathologizing of old age is directly tied to the notion of uselessness, understood entropically as that which cannot contribute energy for useful work. The elderly are configured as socially useless and thus threaten the health of the body politic. As a result, they are marginalized, ignored, and treated as waste to be jettisoned from the system. Because understanding bodies as machines able or unable to perform work accords with the second law of (...) thermodynamics, the first half of this paper discusses entropy as both scientific law and philosophical concept. The second section explores the lived experience of aging and the pathologized position of social uselessness through Simone Beauvoir’s analysis of old age. As she herself ages, the place of senescence comes to play a more pronounced role in her philosophical inquiry. Writing about the lived experience of aging adds a vital dimension to the scientific and philosophical perspectives, insofar as it foregrounds the various ways that entropy is felt: slowing, dissipating, and ultimately dying. While these should be viewed as part of the normal life cycle, they become markers of abjection which are judged harshly against the standard of social utility. (shrink)

In worlds that lack life, there is no value. For all that, there is no mystery about 'the existence of values in a world of facts'. The world does not consist of facts, rather true descriptions of the world consist of statements of fact. It is as much a fact concerning the world that there are things that are of value to living things, that human beings value things and possess valuable characteristics, perform valuable deeds, stand in valuable (...) relationships to others, as it is a fact that there is life on earth. (shrink)

The bestseller from our pre-eminent philosopher, A.C. Grayling 'Grief and loneliness, depression, despair and failure - those things are the common human lot at least at times in all our lives'. Yet it is philosophy which, while not providing an answer to these problems, can enable us to prepare for them, and create strategies with which to deal with them. It is only through reflecting upon the world around us, reading, thinking, questioning, enjoying, that we can inculcate understanding, tolerance (...) and importantly the courage to live our lives. It is our responsibility to live such 'considered lives' and to realise that we are authors of a narrative that can be shaped and controlled. This is the fifth in a series of essay miscellanies from our foremost philosopher A.C. Grayling, reflecting upon the form of our world and its multiplicity. The essays are grouped by theme into reflections upon life and the standards we live by, including vivid polemics and perceptive pieces on significant thinkers, contemporary rights and liberties issues. This book brilliantly articulates the philosophical debate and reflection that is needed to prepare us for life in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

The phenomenology of home requires a differing notion of embodiment, perception, space/time, imagination, and animality. Home is in lived space, a deep psychic structure, and a dialogue with built structures and the natural world. Home requires cultivation that can increase our sense of belonging, shelter, direction and purpose. Home shows us trajectories of the back and forth dialogue with the inanimate world, deep past, ancestors, qualities of the things, animals and the natural world. Home is key to dwelling in space (...) in a centered way and appropriating the deep past. The meaning of home can lead to social efforts at providing homes and deepening ecological and historical awareness. (shrink)

Floods are one of the most common natural disasters in the world that affect all aspects of life, including human beings, agriculture, industry, and education. Research for developing models of flood predictions has been ongoing for the past few years. These models are proposed and built-in proportion for risk reduction, policy proposition, loss of human lives, and property damages associated with floods. However, flood status prediction is a complex process and demands extensive analyses on the factors leading to (...) the occurrence of flooding. Consequently, this research proposes an Internet of Things-based flood status prediction (IoT-FSP) model that is used to facilitate the prediction of the rivers flood situation. The IoT-FSP model applies the Internet of Things architecture to facilitate the flood data acquisition process and three machine learning (ML) algorithms, which are Decision Tree (DT), Decision Jungle, and Random Forest, for the flood prediction process. The IoT-FSP model is implemented in MATLAB and Simulink as development platforms. The results show that the IoT-FSP model successfully performs the data acquisition and prediction tasks and achieves an average accuracy of 85.72% for the three-fold cross-validation results. The research finding shows that the DT scores the highest accuracy of 93.22%, precision of 92.85, and recall of 92.81 among the three ML algorithms. The ability of the ML algorithm to handle multivariate outputs of 13 different flood textual statuses provides the means of manifesting explainable artificial intelligence and enables the IoT-FSP model to act as an early warning and flood monitoring system. (shrink)

The article discusses the modern philosophical concepts of transhumanism and posthumanism. The central issue of these concepts is “What is the posthuman?” The 21st century is marked by a contradictory understanding of the role and status of the human. On the one hand, there comes the realization of human hegemony over the whole world around: in the 20th century mankind not only began to conquer outer space, invented nuclear weapons, made many amazing discoveries but also shifted its attention (...) to itself or rather to the modification of itself. Transhumanist projects aim to strengthen human influence by transforming human beings into other, more powerful and viable forms of being. Such projects continues the project of human “deification.” On the other hand, acknowledging the onset of the new geological epoch of the Anthropocene, there comes the rejection of classical interpretations of the human. The categories of historicity, sociality and subjectivity are no longer so anthropocentric. In the opinion of the posthumanists, the project of the Vitruvian man has proven to be untenable in the present-day environment and is increasingly criticized. The reflection on the phenomenon of the human and his future refers to the concepts that explore not only human but also non-human. Very often we can find a synonymous understanding of transhumanism and posthumanism. Although these movements work with the same modern constructs and concepts but interpret them in a fundamentally different way. The discourse of transhumanism refers to the Cartesian opposition of the body and the mind. Despite the sacralization of technology and the desire to purify the posthuman from such seemingly permanent attributes of the living as aging and death, transhumanism in many ways continues the ideas of the Enlightenment. For posthumanists, the subject is nomadic and a kind of assembly of human, animal, digital, chimerical. Thus, in posthumanism the main maxim of humanism about the human as the highest value is rejected – the human ceases to be “the measure of all things.”. (shrink)

'The unconsidered life is not worth living' - Socrates. Thinking about life, what it means and what it holds in store does not have to be a despondent experience, but rather can be enlightening and uplifting. A life truly worth living is one that is informed and considered so a degree of philosophical insight into the inevitabilities of the human condition is inherently important and such an approach will help us to deal with real personal dilemmas. This (...) book is an accessible, lively and thought-provoking series of linked commentaries, based on A. C. Grayling's 'The Last Word' column in the Guardian. Its aim is not to persuade readers to accept one particular philosophical point of view or theory, but to help us consider the wonderful range of insights which can be drawn from an immeasurably rich history of philosophical thought. Concepts covered include courage, love, betrayal, ambition, cruelty, wisdom, passion, beauty and death. This will be a wonderfully stimulating read and act as an invaluable guide as to what is truly important in living life, whether facing success, failure, justice, wrong, love, loss or any of the other profound experience life throws out. (shrink)

One of the major causes of juvenile delinquency almost anywhere in the world, including Nigeria, is abusive conditions in the homes. The abusive condition in the Nigerian situation is exacerbated by the authoritarian concept of the home. Children are usually seen as mere objects who are to obey their parents, especially the father who has an absolute power over his children. Christian parents too are guilty of being authoritarian and their favourite cliché is 'children, obey your parents'. This article aims (...) at developing a theological guideline that would assist fathers in rearing their children from the biblical perspective via a socio-rhetorical study of Ephesians 6:4. It examines the rearing of children in the 1st century among the Jews and the Graeco-Romans - the original recipients. Then, it compares the social condition of Nigeria with that of the 1st century Graeco-Roman. It concludes by stating that the key to understanding the verse is the phrase μὴπαροργίζετε, a combination of μὴ and a present active imperative, which is used to prohibit actions already in progress. Thus, the verse becomes an appeal to fathers to stop exasperating their children. To achieve this, fathers should see their children as full-fledged human beings with a right to their opinions and decisions about their lives. CONTRIBUTION: This article holds that rather than being treated as obedient objects to fathers in all things, children must be seen as human beings created with will, mind and intelligence and therefore be given a say in issues that concerns them and be disciplined in love and not harshly. (shrink)

In this paper I approach the hermeneutic of living nature as suggested by Martin Heidegger in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. On the basis of complex hermeneutic procedures, Heidegger held the well-known thesis about the animal’s poverty of world. My hypothesis is that the relevance of this thesis should be minimized for the sake of the acknowledgment of a poverty in the world proper to human beings. Poverty in the world refers to the main result of a comparison (...) between the structure of the intentionality of animals and the transcendental-formative structure of human existence. Such a comparison does not only point out the lack of the “something as something-structure” in the intentionality of animals, but also the necessary fragmentation in the human sharing of life’s intentionality. From here results a very important semantic limitation, for every meaningful speech about animal life should take into account the incompleteness in the sharing of the intentional spheres of living beings and humans. I conclude suggesting a set of questions that should be focused in a constructive hermeneutic of living nature. Key words: Heidegger, hermeneutic of nature, lfe, intentionality. (shrink)

The third of five books in one of the greatest works in modern philosophical naturalism. Santayana's Life of Reason, published in five books from 1905 to 1906, ranks as one of the greatest works in modern philosophical naturalism. Acknowledging the natural material bases of human life, Santayana traces the development of the human capacity for appreciating and cultivating the ideal. It is a capacity he exhibits as he articulates a continuity running through animal impulse, practical intelligence, and ideal (...) harmony in reason, society, art, religion, and science. The work is an exquisitely rendered vision of human life lived sanely. In this third book, Santayana offers a naturalistic interpretation of religion. He believes that religion is ignoble if regarded as a truthful depiction of real beings and events; but regarded as poetry, it might be the greatest source of wisdom. Santayana analyzes four characteristic religious concerns: piety, spirituality, charity, and immortality. He is at his most profound in his discussion of immortality, arguing for an ideal immortality that does not eradicate the fear of death but offers a way for mortal man to share in immortal things and live in a manner that will bestow on his successors the imprint of his soul. This critical edition, volume VII of The Works of George Santayana, includes notes, textual commentary, lists of variants and emendations, bibliography, and other tools useful to Santayana scholars. The other four books of the volume include Reason in Common Sense, Reason in Society, Reason in Art, and Reason in Science. (shrink)

. The human brain combines empathy and imagination via the old brain which sets our destiny in the evolutionary scheme of things. This new understanding of cognition is an emergent phenomenon—basically an expressive ordering of reality as part of “a single natural system.” The holographic and subsymbolic paradigms suggest that we live in a contextual universe, one which we create and yet one in which we are required to adapt. The inadequacy of the new brain—specially the left hemisphere's rational (...) view of destiny—is replaced by a view of a new relatedness in reality in which human destiny comes from and depends upon the mutual interchange between the new brain and the old brain for the survival of what is significant to the whole systemic context in which we live. (shrink)

ONE might characterize the late twentieth century as a period when men have become oblivious of nature. Not only- is the concept of human nature under attack, but the broader awareness of nature itself, of things that exist by nature as opposed to those that exist through other causes, is no longer part of our mental equipment. The ecological crisis and the near exhaustion of many natural resources bear eloquent witness to this state of affairs. The scientific and industrial (...) revolutions have made us proficient at converting the objects that surround us into artifacts, at "manipulating nature," if you will, but they have dulled our appreciation for the intelligibility of nature in its own right. As an example I would cite the latest theme to attract attention in the philosophy of science, that of scientific revolutions and theory change, which has sought to substitute the notion of progress for that of truth. According to Thomas Kuhn and Larry Laudan, among others, science can no longer be said to be concerned with investigating the truth about the universe in which we live-another way of speaking about the truth of nature. Instead, the goal of science is seen by them to be progress, progress defined in terms of problem-solving effectiveness rather than as an approach to truth. In their view rationality has ceased to have an extrinsic norm; men are rational to the extent that they can solve puzzles or problems, not to the extent that they can understand the world of nature that surrounds them. (shrink)

For Millikan, purpose pervades the biological order, including the genes and genetically encoded traits of every living thing, the unconditioned reflexes and conditioned behavior of every animal, artifacts produced by humans or non-humans. There are also the conscious, explicit purposes and intentions of human beings. These are purposes in “a quite univocal sense,” Millikan insists. “In all cases,” she says, “the thing’s purpose is … what it was selected for doing.” Moreover, “…the purposes we attribute to whole persons (...) … are composed of no more than the purposes of [their] parts and aspects, and of the ways these have been designed to work together.” (13) The chain of purposes forms a double helix with another great chain -- the great chain of signs. At the bottom of the great chain, sit locally recurrent natural signs. These are wholly natural occurrences or states of affairs that carry “local information.” Locally recurrent natural signs are not yet intentional signs but they are the ground on which intentionality ultimately rests. Local natural signs are “basic” representations in the following sense: … when the systems that produce and/or use intentional representations perform the tasks they were designed to perform and perform these tasks by means of their normal mechanism … then the intentional representations are basic representations. (69) When an intentional sign producing/consuming system is functioning “normally” its intentional signs will just be local natural signs. Systems don’t always function normally; So we can’t quite say that intentional signs are built out of locally recurrent natural signs. Still, without such signs subsisting at the ground level, there apparently could not be intentional signs. But it is far from clear whether locally recurrent natural sign can really carry the load Millikan needs them to carry. Locality seems designed to exorcise the ghost of disjunction that haunts many correlational theories of content.. (shrink)

How far apart are humans from animals—even the “vampire squid from hell”? Playing the scientist/philosopher/provocateur, Vilém Flusser uses this question as a springboard to dive into a literal and a philosophical ocean. “The abyss that separates us” from the vampire squid “is incomparably smaller than that which separates us from extraterrestrial life, as imagined in science fiction and sought by astrobiologists,” Flusser notes at the outset of the expedition. Part scientific treatise, part spoof, part philosophical discourse, part fable, _Vampyroteuthis Infernalis_ (...) gives its author ample room to ruminate on human—and nonhuman—life. Considering the human condition along with the vampire squid/octopus condition seems appropriate because “we are both products of an absurd coincidence... we are poorly programmed beings full of defects,” Flusser writes. Among other things, “we are both banished from much of life’s domain: it into the abyss, we onto the surfaces of the continents. We have both lost our original home, the beach, and we both live in constrained conditions.” Thinking afresh about the life of an “other”—as different from ourselves as the vampire squid/octopus—complicates the linkages between animality and embodiment. Odd, and strangely compelling, _Vampyroteuthis Infernalis_ offers up a unique posthumanist philosophical understanding of phenomenology and opens the way for a non-philosophy of life. (shrink)

Yang Guorong is one of the most prominent Chinese philosophers working today and is best known for using the full range of Chinese philosophical resources in connection with the thought of Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Heidegger. In The Mutual Cultivation of Self and Things, Yang grapples with the philosophical problem of how the complexly interwoven nature of things and being relates to human nature, values, affairs, and facts, and ultimately creates a world of meaning. Yang outlines how humans might (...) live more fully integrated lives on philosophical, religious, cultural, aesthetic, and material planes. This first English translation introduces current, influential work from China to readers worldwide. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:March 13, 2008 (7:35 pm) G:\WPData\TYPE2702\russell 27,2 054.wpd 272 Reviews 1 See Brian J.yL. Berry and Donald C. Dahmen, “Paul Wheatley, 1921–1999”, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 91 (2001): 734–47. THE LIVES OF THOSE WHO WOULD BE IMMORTAL Richard Henry Schmitt U. of Chicago Chicago, il 60637, usa [email protected] David Leavitt. The Indian Clerk: a Novel. London: Bloomsbury, 2008; New York: Bloomsbury, 2007. Pp. 485. isbn 1-59691-040-2. (...) £16.99; us$24.95 (hb). From the start, this novel interested me for two reasons. First, it attempts to tell us the personal stories of two individuals who were working at the highest level in a very abstract Weld, namely G.yH. Hardy (1877–1947) and Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887–1920) during their collaboration on pure mathematics between spring 1914 and spring 1919. Obviously the same problems would arise in trying to tell the personal story of Bertrand Russell’s supervision of Ludwig Wittgenstein in mathematical logic, which occurred at Cambridge University in the years just before the start of the Great War. It is a great challenge to try to tie personal dynamics and abstract thought into a single coherent narrative. There are implications for the philosophy of mathematics and the history and sociology of science. So, of course, we have to ask: how does author David Leavitt rise to this challenge? Second, a more personal reason: Paul Wheatley1 told me shortly before his death that he thought this period at Cambridge represented the highest accom- March 13, 2008 (7:35 pm) G:\WPData\TYPE2702\russell 27,2 054.wpd Reviews 273 2 G.yH. Hardy, Ramanujan: Twelve Lectures on Subjects Suggested by His Life and Work (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1940). Two lectures were presented at Harvard in 1936; the Wrst, a more personal recollection, was printed unchanged. The quote is from p. 2. The second lecture was expanded into the remaining published lectures, all considering speciWc mathematical topics. plishment possible for an academic institution: its fellows and masters had managed to attract and then recognize the genius of Ramanujan and Wittgenstein and to admit them to advanced studies without any real academic credentials. Wheatley had been the chair of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago; so, he knew something about such matters, as he did about many things involving humans, human settlements, and their arrangement in the world. Incidentally, Wheatley himself appeared as a character, Battle, in Ravenstein, Saul Bellow’s roman à clef about Allan Bloom. So, to the extent that Cambridge University just before and during the Great War plays a role here, we want to learn as much as we can about the atmosphere of the place. The Indian Clerk is a historical novelz—zin this case naming actual names, elaborating what we know about real people and occasionally adding Wctional charactersz—zall centered on the extraordinary mathematical genius Ramanujan and his equally extraordinary importation from India to Cambridge. The story is told largely in the third person, by an omniscient narrator, but repeatedly we also have the inner voice of G.yH. Hardy: there are a number of chapters with the indication “New Lecture Hall, Harvard University”, dated 1936, in which Hardy speaks in the Wrst person. In these passages David Leavitt uses parts of the published lectures, along with G.yH. Hardy’s private thoughtsz—zas imagined by Leavittz—zabout this “one romantic incident in my life” and about other matters that still haunt him.2 The novel is thus in some sense more about G.yH. Hardy and his inner life than it is about Srinivasa Ramanujan. The triumph of the novel is its ability to reconstruct and convey in a lively manner the circumstances of the time, the look and smell of the place, the crosscurrents, dynamics, and dislocations of people during these years. Leavitt has woven together a great deal, from many diTerent realms: pre-war meetings of the Apostles, the high table, the pre-war mathematics tripos, the method of collaboration between Hardy and J.yE. Littlewood, Cambridge as military training grounds and as hospital for the wounded, vegetarian cookery, feminism, Hindu... (shrink)