Artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics are digital technologies that will have significant impact on the development of humanity in the near future. They have raised fundamental questions about what we should do with these systems, what the systems themselves should do, what risks they involve, and how we can control these. - After the Introduction to the field (§1), the main themes (§2) of this article are: Ethical issues that arise with AI systems as objects, i.e., tools made and used (...) by humans. This includes issues of privacy (§2.1) and manipulation (§2.2), opacity (§2.3) and bias (§2.4), human-robot interaction (§2.5), employment (§2.6), and the effects of autonomy (§2.7). Then AI systems as subjects, i.e., ethics for the AI systems themselves in machine ethics (§2.8) and artificial moral agency (§2.9). Finally, the problem of a possible future AI superintelligence leading to a “singularity” (§2.10). We close with a remark on the vision of AI (§3). - For each section within these themes, we provide a general explanation of the ethical issues, outline existing positions and arguments, then analyse how these play out with current technologies and finally, what policy consequences may be drawn. (shrink)

This is a critical introduction to modern French philosophy, commissioned from one of the liveliest contemporary practitioners and intended for an English-speaking readership. The dominant 'Anglo-Saxon' reaction to philosophical development in France has for some decades been one of suspicion, occasionally tempered by curiosity but more often hardening into dismissive rejection. But there are signs now of a more sympathetic interest and an increasing readiness to admit and explore shared concerns, even if these are still expressed in a very different (...) idiom and intellectual context. Vincent Descombes offers here a personal guide to the main movements and figures of the last forty-five years. He traces over this period the evolution of thought from a generation preoccupied with the 'three H's' - Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger, to a generation influenced since about 1960 by the 'three masters of suspicion' - Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. In this framework he deals in turn with the thought of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, the early structuralists, Foucault, Althusser, Serres, Derrida, and finally Deleuze and Lyotard. The 'internal' intellectual history of the period is related to its institutional setting and the wider cultural and political context which has given French philosophy so much of its distinctive character. (shrink)

In this paper it is argued that existing ‘self-representational’ theories of phenomenal consciousness do not adequately address the problem of higher-order misrepresentation. Drawing a page from the phenomenal concepts literature, a novel self-representational account is introduced that does. This is the quotational theory of phenomenal consciousness, according to which the higher-order component of a conscious state is constituted by the quotational component of a quotational phenomenal concept. According to the quotational theory of consciousness, phenomenal concepts help to account for the (...) very nature of phenomenally conscious states. Thus, the paper integrates two largely distinct explanatory projects in the field of consciousness studies: (i) the project of explaining how we think about our phenomenally conscious states, and (ii) the project of explaining what phenomenally conscious states are in the first place. (shrink)

This paper investigates the prospects of Rodney Brooks’ proposal for AI without representation. It turns out that the supposedly characteristic features of “new AI” (embodiment, situatedness, absence of reasoning, and absence of representation) are all present in conventional systems: “New AI” is just like old AI. Brooks proposal boils down to the architectural rejection of central control in intelligent agents—Which, however, turns out to be crucial. Some of more recent cognitive science suggests that we might do well to dispose of (...) the image of intelligent agents as central representation processors. If this paradigm shift is achieved, Brooks’ proposal for cognition without representation appears promising for full-blown intelligent agents—Though not for conscious agents. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a digital technology that will be of major importance for the development of humanity in the near future. AI has raised fundamental questions about what we should do with such systems, what the systems themselves should do, what risks they involve and how we can control these. - After the background to the field (1), this article introduces the main debates (2), first on ethical issues that arise with AI systems as objects, i.e. tools made and (...) used by humans; here, the main sections are privacy (2.1), manipulation (2.2), opacity (2.3), bias (2.4), autonomy & responsibility (2.6) and the singularity (2.7). Then we look at AI systems as subjects, i.e. when ethics is for the AI systems themselves in machine ethics (2.8.) and artificial moral agency (2.9). Finally we look at future developments and the concept of AI (3). For each section within these themes, we provide a general explanation of the ethical issues, we outline existing positions and arguments, then we analyse how this plays out with current technologies and finally what policy conse-quences may be drawn. (shrink)

‘From now on, I'll describe the cities to you’, the Khan had said, ‘in your journeys you will see if they exist.’ But the cities visited by Marco Polo were always different from those thought of by...

Will future lethal autonomous weapon systems (LAWS), or ‘killer robots’, be a threat to humanity? The European Parliament has called for a moratorium or ban of LAWS; the ‘Contracting Parties to the Geneva Convention at the United Nations’ are presently discussing such a ban, which is supported by the great majority of writers and campaigners on the issue. However, the main arguments in favour of a ban are unsound. LAWS do not support extrajudicial killings, they do not take responsibility away (...) from humans; in fact they increase the abil-ity to hold humans accountable for war crimes. Using LAWS in war would probably reduce human suffering overall. Finally, the availability of LAWS would probably not increase the probability of war or other lethal conflict—especially as compared to extant remote-controlled weapons. The widespread fear of killer robots is unfounded: They are probably good news. (shrink)

This book closely examines our commonly held beliefs about human suffering, and offers unique insights into God's role in why we suffer. Dr. Perri critically examines what it means to be human from a Judeo-Christian perspective, and extrapolates from the work of Carl Gustav Jung showing a deeply complex development of human transcendence in human suffering. On an interpersonal level, Dr. Perri elaborates on the work of Martin Buber and Emanuel Levinas and shows how our suffering can be shared and (...) lessened by our unconditionality and presence for the other. Scriptural passages are quoted from both the Hebrew and New Testament texts, and are used to depict the suffering of humankind as seen in the face of Job. It was this face, according to Perri, that Jesus saw in the faces of those He came to redeem, and that ultimately brought Him to the crucifix of redemption. Dr. Perri challenges Sartre's position that our existence precedes our essence, and draws on the work of Abraham Joshua Heschel and Christian theology in this regard. He further elaborates a neurodevelopmental paradigm that creates essence as the basis of our freedom to choose. This book can be read and studied by both professionals in the helping and healing professions, and lay persons seeking to better understand our suffering, and how to better help those who suffer. Dr. Perri offers specific ways in how to be present for those who suffer, how to read and receive the hidden language of human suffering, and how to use silence as a communication skill. (shrink)

Traditionally, discussions of moral participation – and in particular moral agency – have focused on fully formed human actors. There has been some interest in the development of morality in humans, as well as interest in cultural differences when it comes to moral practices, commitments, and actions. However, until relatively recently, there has been little focus on the possibility that nonhuman animals have any role to play in morality, save being the objects of moral concern. Moreover, when nonhuman cases are (...) considered as evidence of moral agency or subjecthood, there has been an anthropocentric tendency to focus on those behaviors that inform our attributions of moral agency to humans. For example, some argue that the ability to evaluate the principles upon which a moral norm is grounded is required for full moral agency. Certainly, if a moral agent must understand what makes an action right or wrong, then most nonhuman animals would not qualify (and perhaps some humans too). However, if we are to understand the evolution of moral psychology and moral practice, we need to turn our attention to the foundations of full moral agency. We must first pay attention to the more broadly normative practices of other animals. Here, we begin that project by considering evidence that great apes and cetaceans participate in normative practices. (shrink)

In recent years, Charles Sanders Peirce has emerged, in the eyes of philosophers both in America and abroad, as one of America’s major philosophical thinkers. His work has forced us back to philosophical reflection about those basic issues that inevitably confront us as human beings, especially in an age of science. Peirce’s concern for experience, for what is actually encountered, means that his philosophy, even in its most technical aspects, forms a reflective commentary on actual life and on the world (...) in which it is lived. In Charles S. Peirce: On Norms and Ideals, Potter argues that Peirce’s doctrine of the normative sciences is essential to his pragmatism. No part of Peirce’s philosophy is bolder than his attempt to establish esthetics, ethics, and logic as the three normative sciences and to argue for the priority of esthetics among the trio. Logic, Potter cites, is normative because it governs thought and aims at truth; ethics is normative because it analyzes the ends to which thought should be directed; esthetics is normative and fundamental because it considers what it means to be an end of something good in itself. This study shows that pierce took seriously the trinity of normative sciences and demonstrates that these categories apply both to the conduct of man and to the workings of the cosmos. Professor Potter combines sympathetic and informed exposition with straightforward criticism and he deals in a sensible manner with the gaps and inconsistencies in Peirce’s thought. His study shows that Peirce was above all a cosmological and ontological thinker, one who combined science both as a method and as result with a conception of reasonable actions to form a comprehensive theory of reality. Peirce’s pragmatism, although it has to do with "action and the achievement of results, is not a glorification of action but rather a theory of the dynamic nature of things in which the "ideal" dimension of reality – laws, nature of things, tendencies, and ends – has genuine power for directing the cosmic order, including man, toward reasonable goals. (shrink)

The point of departure of this article is the trend towards hybridisation in new technology development, which makes classical dichotomies between machines, human life and the environment obsolete and leads to the post-human world we live in today. We critically reflect on the post-human concept of the hybrid world. Although we agree with post-humanists that human life can no longer be opposed to machines but appears as a decentralized human-technology relation, alliance or network that constitutes a hybrid world, we ask (...) for a limit to hybridisation. After rejecting the concept of metabolism as such a limit, we explore the concept of the responsive conativity of material entities. The principle of conativity of material entities provides a materialist perspective on metabolism, which enables us to conceive material entities as self-assertive material entities that are differentiated from the environment. The principle of responsivity of material entities provides a materialist perspective on the post-human world in which material entities are responsive to each other and form alliances and networks. We propose to differentiate between the conativity and responsivity of material entities and propose the conativity of matter as a limit to hybridisation in the post-human world. (shrink)

The rapidly increasing role of automation throughout the economy, culture and our personal lives has generated a large literature on the risks of algorithmic decision-making, particularly in high-stakes legal settings. Algorithmic tools are charged with bias, shrouded in secrecy, and frequently difficult to interpret. However, these criticisms have tended to focus on particular implementations, specific predictive techniques, and the idiosyncrasies of the American legal-regulatory regime. They do not address the more fundamental unease about the prospect that we might one day (...) replace judges with algorithms, no matter how fair, transparent, and intelligible they become. The aim of this paper is to propose an account of the source of that unease, and to evaluate its plausibility. I trace foundational unease with algorithmic decision-making in the law to the powerful intuition that there is a basic moral and legal difference between showing that something is true of many people just like you and showing that it is true of you. Human judgment attends to the exception; automation insists on blindly applying the rule. I show how this intuitive thought is connected to both epistemological arguments about the value of statistical evidence, as well as to court-centered conceptions of the rule of law. Unease with algorithmic decision-making in the law thus draws on an intuitive principle that underpins a disparate range of views in legal philosophy. This suggests the principle is deeply ingrained. Nonetheless, I argue that the powerful intuition is not as decisive as it may seem, and indeed runs into significant epistemological and normative challenges. At an epistemological level, I show how concerns about statistical evidence's ability to track the truth can be resolved by adopting a probabilistic, rather than modal, conception of truth-tracking. At a normative level, commitment to highly individualized decision-making co-exists with equally ingrained and competing principles, such as consistent application of law. This suggests that the “rule of law” may not identify a discrete set of institutional arrangements, as proponents of a court-centric conception would have it, but rather a more loosely defined set of values that could potentially be operationalized in multiple ways, including through some level of algorithmic adjudication. Although the prospect of replacing judges with algorithms is indeed unsettling, it does not necessarily entail unreasonable verdicts or an attack on the rule of law. (shrink)

This contribution aims at discussing the agonistic dimension of John Dewey’s pragmatism. The paper starts by reconstructing Dewey’s influence on Albert Meyer, a leading figure of 20th-century American psychiatry. This comparison will shed light on Dewey’s influence on Meyer, focusing on some core psychological notions such as mental health and growth. Moreover, it will show the key role played by the category of conflict in Dewey’s pragmatism, and how the latter can account for the darker and more problematic sides of (...) human life. The paper ends with a quick elaboration on the notion of survivance, which denotes the ability to “go on” – both as individuals and as societies – in the face of conflict and devastation. (shrink)

" La formule cartésienne causa sive ratio scande l'histoire de la causalité, entre le privilège suarézien de la cause efficiente et l'invention leibnizienne du principe de raison suffisante. Elle traverse un siècle exactement, des Disputationes metaphysicae de Suarez (1597) aux 24 thèses métaphysiques de Leibniz (1697). La métaphysique s'y constitue en époque de la causalité. Qu'ils la soutiennent ou qu'ils la récusent, les philosophes du XVIIe siècle ont en commun de discuter la thèse qui confère l'intelligibilité à la relation causale (...) ; elle prend la forme exemplaire de l'équivalence cartésienne de la cause et de la raison. Mais la façon dont la relation causale gagne l'intelligibilité demeure à son tour inintelligible, puisqu'elle renvoie à la toute-puissance incompréhensible de celui qui l'exerce, y compris peut-être envers lui-même : sui causa. C'est là précisément la thèse que les post-cartésiens ne cesseront de lire comme un problème et de récuser : Spinoza, en posant que l'ordre et la connexion des idées sont les mêmes que l'ordre et la connexion des choses ; Malebranche, en faisant de la cause occasionnelle une raison inefficace et en concentrant en Dieu toute l'efficace ; Leibniz, en employant le principe de raison suffisante, qui rationalise l'existence en la soustrayant à l'emprise de l'efficience. Loin de la produire, la causalité se voit alors soumise, sous diverses modalités, à l'intelligibilité. Aussi le principe de raison suffisante signe-t-il ce que nous appelons la fin de la cause - par excellence la fin de l'efficience -, qui n'est pas la fin de la question du fondement, mais le déplacement de sa réponse vers plus fondateur que la cause : la raison. Ainsi se trouve accomplie l'essence du fondement à l'époque moderne de l'histoire de la métaphysique. " V. C. (shrink)

The point of departure of this article is the trend towards hybridisation in new technology development, which makes classical dichotomies between machines, human life and the environment obsolete and leads to the post-human world we live in today. We critically reflect on the post-human concept of the hybrid world. Although we agree with post-humanists that human life can no longer be opposed to machines but appears as a decentralized human-technology relation, alliance or network that constitutes a hybrid world, we ask (...) for a limit to hybridisation. After rejecting the concept of metabolism as such a limit, we explore the concept of the responsive conativity of material entities. The principle of conativity of material entities provides a materialist perspective on metabolism, which enables us to conceive material entities as self-assertive material entities that are differentiated from the environment. The principle of responsivity of material entities provides a materialist perspective on the post-human world in which material entities are responsive to each other and form alliances and networks. We propose to differentiate between the conativity and responsivity of material entities and propose the conativity of matter as a limit to hybridisation in the post-human world. (shrink)

what is the ontology of planets?Our access point to this question is the ontology of planet Earth. Although the presence of life marks planet Earth as special among other planets, Earth shares a basic commonality with them – namely, its material existence. We take this commonality as a point of departure for our reflections on the ontology of both planet Earth and other planets. In this chapter, we ask for the ontology of this materiality of planets. We consult the ontology (...) of planet Earth as I developed it in an earlier contribution (Blok, 2019), explore the ontology of planets as absolute boundary of the natural habitats on Earth, and reflect on the opportunities and limitations such ontology provides for future human colonies on other planets. (shrink)

Sufficientarian theories of distributive justice are often considered to be vulnerable to the ‘blindness to inequality and other values objection’. This objection targets their commitment to holding the moral irrelevance of requirements of justice above absolute thresholds of advantage, making them insufficiently sensitive to egalitarian moral concerns that do have relevance for justice. This paper explores how sufficientarians could reply to this objection. Particularly, I claim that, if we accept that the force of the aforementioned objection comes from relational, and (...) not distributive, inequalities, different strategies are open for sufficientarians in order to be sensitive to these concerns. Drawing on recent literature about the relation between distributive and relational egalitarianism, and the possibility of reducing one to the other, strategies of ‘internalizing’ and ‘externalizing’ relational egalitarian concerns to a distributive sufficientarian framework are explored. In turn, I suggest that both strategies fail in their standard versions, but argue that a particular ‘hybrid view’ about justice is an attractive candidate for the sufficientarian theorist. (shrink)

part 1. An annotated translation of Pramāṇavārttikasvavṛtti 24,16-45,20 (Pramāṇavārttika 1.40-91.

No introductory textbook can do complete justice to the subject of ethics. The best it can do is to help students develop a basic competency in ethical analysis and acquire a measure of confidence in their judgment; it should also stimulate enough interest in the subject that they will want to continue learning about it, formally or informally, when the final chapter is completed and the course is over. Even that relatively modest aim is difficult to achieve. The author must (...) strike the right balance between the theoretical and the practical, between breadth and depth of treatment, and between rigor and relevance, so that students are challenged but not daunted. (shrink)

This article provides the first extensive study of Emanuel Swedenborg’s (1688–1772) views on Africans and slavery. Although significant scholarship has been devoted to Swedenborg’s influence on the British abolitionist movement in the 1780s-1790s, comparably little has been written on the ideas and context which inspired this influence in the first place. This article explores Swedenborg’s ties to networks and debates about African evangelization, colonization, and slavery during the neglected period of the Swedish Age of Liberty (1719–1772). It shows that Swedenborg (...) was the first Swede to condemn slavery, as early as 1741, explains why he regarded slavery as a divine punishment in the afterlife for European missionaries, and why he presented sub-Saharan Africans as superior, in contrast to the dominant dismissive views of Linnaeus, Bäck, Kant, or Buffon. Like most Lutherans of his time, Swedenborg did not advocate the abolition of slavery, yet within a generation his provocative views about African superiority and spiritual emancipation were used by his followers to articulate their abolitionist agenda. Swedenborg’s millenarian doctrines more broadly re-harnessed biblical traditions about Africa and tropes about the bon sauvage, in a counter-example to narratives about the trope’s decline in the second half of the eighteenth century. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage propose de retracer le parcours intellectuel et spirituel de l’écrivain roumain d’expression française Emil Cioran (1911-1995). Le texte s’appuie sur une approche biographique pour saisir les enjeux philosophiques et identitaires de la vie et de l’oeuvre de Cioran. Tout d’abord son enfance imprégnée de culture allemande où liberté et insouciance cèdent vite la place à l’ennui ; sa fascination pour les thèses ultra-nationalistes pendant sa jeunesse studieuse et angoissée ; la volonté d’aveuglement que lui inspire ensuite son mépris (...) des affaires humaines ; la fuite de la Roumanie pendant la Guerre et l’affirmation de son incertitude identitaire et intellectuelle ; l’abandon finalement de son pays et de sa langue comme refus de sa propre histoire. L’ouvrage tente d’apporter un regard nouveau sur l’homme et son oeuvre pour résoudre les contradictions inhérentes à son renversement identitaire: bien que la mémoire soit au centre de sa pensée, Cioran se dirigea toujours plus vers la nécessité de l’oubli. La démarche de Vincent Piednoir démontre que cette volonté d’oubli a inscrit le philosophe dans la mémoire collective. De nombreux livres ont commenté la pensée de Cioran. L’originalité de celui-ci est de s’étendre, sans esprit de polémique mais sans tabou, sur sa jeunesse roumaine et profasciste. (shrink)

The first installment of the planned How to Live trilogy describes how the power of habit and the lure of the ordinary conspire to make change and improvement difficult and offers routine-breaking challenges to inspire positive transformation.

Can we make machines that think and act like humans or other natural intelligent agents? The answer to this question depends on how we see ourselves and how we see the machines in question. Classical AI and cognitive science had claimed that cognition is computation, and can thus be reproduced on other computing machines, possibly surpassing the abilities of human intelligence. This consensus has now come under threat and the agenda for the philosophy and theory of AI must be set (...) anew, re-defining the relation between AI and Cognitive Science. We can re-claim the original vision of general AI from the technical AI disciplines; we can reject classical cognitive science and replace it with a new theory (e.g. embodied); or we can try to find new ways to approach AI, for example from neuroscience or from systems theory. To do this, we must go back to the basic questions on computing, cognition and ethics for AI. The 30 papers in this volume provide cutting-edge work from leading researchers that define where we stand and where we should go from here. (shrink)

A companion volume to On Understanding Understanding, this second edition incorporates corrections to the previous text and includes new readings. The works collected in this volume are mainly from the British Empiricists. The breadth of the selection is not so diverse that the pieces cannot be readily understood by a newcomer to Epistemology, they have a logical progression of development (from Locke to Berkeley to Hume), and all of the philosophers whose work is represented have had great influence on contemporary (...) Anglo-American philosophy. In the Introduction, Potter sets the selections in their historical context and urges the readers to form their own viewpoint in terms of the period's contribution to the advancement of culture, politics, and society. He gives a concise summary of the Enlightenment period, demonstrating how and why Rationalism and Empiricism came about, and challenges the reader not to simply note the points of disparity between the two schools, but to notice the similarities of their common assumptions - both substantive and methodological. Readings in Epistemology, Second Edition is an excellent classroom tool. A biographical note on the philosopher, and list of suggested books for further study, heads each of the readings. Study Questions which stimulate discussion, are at the end of each piece. (shrink)

Investigating Girard's new propositionnal calculus which aims at a large scale study of computation, we stumble quickly on that question: What is a multiplicative connective? We give here a detailed answer together with our motivations and expectations.

In this chapter, we will first argue that current practices in CBE are framed within the market or economic logic and miss the normative dimension of the call for circularity. The transition to the CBE requires a fundamental reflection on the role of economic actors in the social and ecological environment with significant consequences for their business practices. Second, we will argue that the transition to the CBE requires the acknowledgement of the normative and social dimensions of this transition at (...) the meso and macro levels, and the establishment of an environmental and social logic on the micro level of business practices. Third, we will argue that the concept of responsible innovation (RI) can help to articulate the normative and social dimensions of the transition to the CBE, and enables the operationalisation of the environmental and social logic at the micro level. In this respect, RI can be understood as a driver for the transition to the CBE. (shrink)

In this article, we investigate how to explain the difference between traditional design, engineering, and technology—which have exploited nature and put increasing pressure on Earth’s carrying capacity since the industrial revolution—and biomimetic design—which claims to explore nature’s sustainable solutions and promises to be regenerative by design. We reflect on the concept of mimesis. Mimesis assumes a continuity between the natural environment as a regenerative model and measure for sustainable design that is imitated and reproduced in biomimetic design, engineering, and technology. (...) We conceptualize mimesis in terms of two interdependent boundary conditions: differentiation and participation. We subsequently develop four characteristics of biomimicry as regenerative design, engineering, and technology: technological mimesis is 1) a participative differentiation of nature; 2) supplemental to natural mimesis in biomimetic design; 3) the participative differentiation of technological mimesis is constitutive of nature; 4) the participative differentiation of technological mimesis is always limited. (shrink)

This extended abstract summarises some of the basic points of AI ethics and policy as they present themselves now. We explain the notion of AI, the main ethical issues in AI and the main policy aims and means.

There is, in some quarters, concern about high–level machine intelligence and superintelligent AI coming up in a few decades, bringing with it significant risks for humanity. In other quarters, these issues are ignored or considered science fiction. We wanted to clarify what the distribution of opinions actually is, what probability the best experts currently assign to high–level machine intelligence coming up within a particular time–frame, which risks they see with that development, and how fast they see these developing. We thus (...) designed a brief questionnaire and distributed it to four groups of experts in 2012/2013. The median estimate of respondents was for a one in two chance that high-level machine intelligence will be developed around 2040-2050, rising to a nine in ten chance by 2075. Experts expect that systems will move on to superintelligence in less than 30 years thereafter. They estimate the chance is about one in three that this development turns out to be ‘bad’ or ‘extremely bad’ for humanity. (shrink)

Theories of quantum gravity generically presuppose or predict that the reality underlying relativistic spacetimes they are describing is significantly non-spatiotemporal. On pain of empirical incoherence, approaches to quantum gravity must establish how relativistic spacetime emerges from their non-spatiotemporal structures. We argue that in order to secure this emergence, it is sufficient to establish that only those features of relativistic spacetimes functionally relevant in producing empirical evidence must be recovered. In order to complete this task, an account must be given of (...) how the more fundamental structures instantiate these functional roles. We illustrate the general idea in the context of causal set theory and loop quantum gravity, two prominent approaches to quantum gravity. (shrink)

En se posant la question du " goût des belles choses " dans notre quotidien, les ethnologues rassemblés ici ont emprunté une autre voie que celles de la réflexion philosophique classique - centrée sur la définition d'une catégorie du ...

The starting point of this article is the observation that the emergence of the Anthropocene rehabilitates the need for philosophical reflections on the ontology of technology. In particular, if technological innovations on an ontic level of beings in the world are created, but these innovations at the same time _create_ the Anthropocene World at an ontological level, this raises the question how World creation has to be understood. We first identify four problems with the traditional concept of creation: the anthropocentric, (...) ontic and outcome orientation of traditional concepts of creation, as well as its orientation of material fabrication. We subsequently develop a progressive concept of World creation with four characteristics that move beyond the traditional conceptuality: (1) a materialistic concept of creation that accounts for (2) the ontogenetic process and (3) the ontic and ontological nature of creation, and (4) is conceptualized as semantic creation of the World in which we live and act. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

Dans cet article, j'introduis premièrement l'une des plus célèbres objections dirigées à l’encontre de la théorie du bloc en croissance (GBT), communément appelée « l’objection épistémique », selon laquelle GBT ne fournirait aucune raison de croire que nous sommes situés dans le présent objectif – bien au contraire. Deuxièmement, j'exprime mon insatisfaction à l’égard des tentatives traditionnelles de répondre à cette objection (Merricks 2006, Forrest 2004, Correia & Rosenkranz 2018). Enfin, troisièmement, je présente ma propre solution à l'objection épistémique, basée (...) sur l'existence continue des particuliers nus. (shrink)

Some authors have recently suggested that it is time to consider rights for robots. These suggestions are based on the claim that the question of robot rights should not depend on a standard set of conditions for ‘moral status’; but instead, the question is to be framed in a new way, by rejecting the is/ought distinction, making a relational turn, or assuming a methodological behaviourism. We try to clarify these suggestions and to show their highly problematic consequences. While we find (...) the suggestions ultimately unmotivated, the discussion shows that our epistemic condition with respect to the moral status of others does raise problems, and that the human tendency to empathise with things that do not have moral status should be taken seriously—we suggest that it produces a “derived moral status”. Finally, it turns out that there is typically no individual in real AI that could even be said to be the bearer of moral status. Overall, there is no reason to think that robot rights are an issue now. (shrink)