COVID-19 vaccine refusal seems like a paradigm case of irrationality. Vaccines are supposed to be the best way to get us out of the COVID-19 pandemic. And yet many people believe that they should not be vaccinated even though they are dissatisfied with the current situation. In this paper, we analyze COVID-19 vaccine refusal with the tools of contemporary philosophical theories of responsibility and rationality. The main outcome of this analysis is that many vaccine-refusers are responsible for the belief that (...) they should not be vaccinated and epistemically rational in holding it. This is an important result because it provides insights into the legitimacy of certain public health policies. In particular, this result shows that a public health policy that would abandon the project of convincing certain vaccine-refusers with reasons – e.g., by simply making vaccination compulsory – is prima facie illegitimate. (shrink)

Theodor W. Adornos posthum veröffentlichte Ästhetische Theorie exponiert die Krise der Kunst im Zeitalter ihrer gesellschaftlichen Integration. Gesättigt mit der Erfahrung konkreter Kunstwerke, hinterfragt sie das tradierte Kategoriensystem philosophischer Ästhetik. Der vorliegende Band unternimmt erstmals eine kommentierende Auslegung, um den dichten Text aufzuschließen und ein Weiterdenken von Adornos kritischer Ästhetik anzuregen.

Psychologists and moral philosophers have much to say about self-awareness and so it is no surprise that in leadership research self-awareness also has come to play an important role. For some time now, leadership research has been dominated by psychologists and we argue that their version of the self-awareness is very thin. It is empty of morality and therefore offers only a partial understanding of humanity. That make its conclusions for leadership ineffective and unethical. Psychology-driven approaches to leadership stress effectiveness: (...) leaders make followers work towards a given goal in an effective manner. Self-awareness, to them, is a thorough understanding of one’s strengths, weaknesses, values, how others see one, all with the goal of turning people into followers. Since ethics is excluded, this view of self-awareness lacks a foundational moral concept: respect/dignity and is closer to self-assessment. Building on Immanuel Kant and other German Idealists, Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel proposed a theory of the development of self-awareness that is more holistic as it situates the individual in a social and moral context and thus transcends the purely functional view of the self-other relationship propagated in psychological approaches. We concretely argue that psychological approaches to leadership systematically drive managers into a catastrophic situation that Hegel describes in the Master-Slave Dialectic. Understanding Hegelian self-awareness prevents leaders becoming self-less masters. Truly self-aware leaders heed the warning of the Humanity Formulation of Kant’s Categorial Imperative, namely that they must always treat humanity, whether in their own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end. They understand their self, they understand its social and moral dimension, and they see their self-reflected in the other. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungSystemmedizinische Ansätze zeichnen sich durch die Integration großer Datenmengen aus vielfältigen Datenquellen aus und führen systembiologische und medizinische Forschungsansätze mit informationswissenschaftlichen Methoden und prädiktiven Verfahren mathematischer Modellierung zusammen. Hieraus resultiert eine enge Kooperation von Ärzten und Naturwissenschaftlern, wobei insbesondere die Expertise nicht-ärztlicher Forscher zunehmend an Bedeutung für die Datenaufbereitung und -interpretation gewinnt. Aus ethischer Perspektive wirft diese Entwicklung Fragen nach der konkreten Gestaltung einer systemmedizinischen Zusammenarbeit sowie möglichen Rollenveränderungen und neuen Verantwortungszuschreibungen an Ärzte und nicht-ärztliche Forscher auf. Um diese Fragen (...) mit Blick auf die Erfahrungen und Perspektiven der beteiligten Akteursgruppen zu beleuchten, führten wir eine qualitative Interviewstudie mit Ärzten und nicht-ärztlichen Forschern aus unterschiedlichen systemmedizinischen Kontexten durch. Aus dem Interviewmaterial ließen sich zwei Konzeptionen von Systemmedizin rekonstruieren. Die erste ist durch eine eindeutige arbeitsteilige Rollentrennung zwischen Ärzten und Forschern charakterisiert: Der Forscher fungiert als Dienstleister, der Arzt als translationaler, interdisziplinär ausgerichteter Mediziner. Die zweite zeichnet sich durch eine weitreichende Aufhebung der Rollentrennung von Ärzten und Forschern aus: Die Berufsgruppen agieren als interdisziplinäres Team mit einer engen wechselseitigen inhaltlichen und methodischen Zusammenarbeit der Akteure. In beiden Konzeptionen werden Rollenkonflikte von Ärzten und Forschern deutlich, die insbesondere auf die Diskrepanz zwischen dem Arzt- und Forscherethos und die mit ihnen je verknüpften spezifischen Handlungsnormen und Ziele zurückzuführen sind. Ferner besteht mit Blick auf die dem Arzt und Forscher jeweils zukommende Verantwortung gegenüber Patienten vielfältiger normativer Klärungsbedarf, insbesondere hinsichtlich der Frage, welche Verantwortung den Akteursgruppen gerechtfertigter Weise zugeschrieben werden kann. Diesbezüglich erscheint eine Differenzierung von versorgungsnäheren und grundlagenforschungsorientierten Arbeitsfeldern angeraten. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Das Mittelalter Jahrgang: 22 Heft: 2 Seiten: 456-461.

This white paper outlines the plans of the History Philosophy Culture Working Group of the Next Generation Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration.

The Aristotelian account of change—according to which no individual can survive a change of species because an individual's essence is, at least in part, determined by its species membership—remains popular in the seventeenth century. One important, but often overlooked dissenting voice comes from Anne Conway. Unlike many of her contemporaries, Conway firmly rejects the Aristotelian account of change. She instead endorses the doctrine of Radical Mutability, the view that a creature can belong to different species at different times. A (...) horse, for example, can gradually become a human being and yet remain the same individual. Why, though, is Conway so opposed to the prima facie appealing Aristotelian account of change? This paper claims that she levels two arguments against this account which have been largely neglected so far. First, she argues that there could be no causal interaction between creatures belonging to different species with distinct essences, because cause and effect would be too dissimilar in that case. Second, Conway argues that the Aristotelian model is inconsistent with divine goodness because it allows for the annihilation of creatures and because it imposes arbitrary restrictions on the capacity of creatures to improve. (shrink)

To successfully learn using open Internet resources, students must be able to critically search, evaluate and select online information, and verify sources. Defined as critical online reasoning, this construct is operationalized on two levels in our study: the student level using the newly developed Critical Online Reasoning Assessment, and the online information processing level using event log data, including gaze durations and fixations. The written responses of 32 students for one CORA task were scored by three independent raters. The resulting (...) score was operationalized as “task performance,” whereas the gaze fixations and durations were defined as indicators of “process performance.” Following a person-oriented approach, we conducted a process mining analysis, as well as a latent class analysis to test whether—following the dual-process theory—the undergraduates could be distinguished into two groups based on both their process and task performance. Using PM, the process performance of all 32 students was visualized and compared, indicating two distinct response process patterns. One group of students, defined as “strategic information processers,” processed online information more comprehensively, as well as more efficiently, which was also reflected in their higher task scores. In contrast, the distributions of the process performance variables for the other group, defined as “avoidance information processers,” indicated a poorer process performance, which was also reflected in their lower task scores. In the LCA, where two student groups were empirically distinguished by combining the process performance indicators and the task score as a joint discriminant criterion, we confirmed these two COR profiles, which were reflected in high vs. low process and task performances. The estimated parameters indicated that high-performing students were significantly more efficient at conducting strategic information processing, as reflected in their higher process performance. These findings are so far based on quantitative analyses using event log data. To enable a more differentiated analysis of students’ visual attention dynamics, more in-depth qualitative research of the identified student profiles in terms of COR will be required. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Kant-Studien Jahrgang: 109 Heft: 3 Seiten: 492-498.

'Everyone knows what attention is’ according to William James. Much work on attention in psychology and neuroscience cites this famous phrase only to quickly dismiss it. But James is right about this: ‘attention’ was not introduced into psychology and neuroscience as a theoretical concept. I argue that we should therefore study attention with broadly the same methodology that David Marr has applied to the study of perception. By focusing more on Marr's Computational Level of analysis, we arrive at a unified (...) answer to the question of what attention is, what role it plays in the mind, and why organisms like us have that capacity. I propose a methodology for studying attention at Marr's Computational Level that optimizes in a three-dimensional space: it should capture core aspects of our first-person experience of attention, be explanatorily powerful in psychology and neuroscience, and fertile in an interdisciplinary context. I show how this methodology leads to what I call the priority structure account of attention. Attention is what organizes current information to make it more useful for the organism. We can identify it by four features. Attention, in this way, helps a cognitive system to integrate its informational state with its current motivational state. I describe how this account improves on alternatives and shows why attention is a useful concept in many disciplines and for connecting them. -/- This article is categorized under: Philosophy > Psychological Capacities Psychology > Attention Philosophy > Foundations of Cognitive Science. (shrink)

It has been argued that the explanation of self-control requires positing special motivational powers. Some think that we need will-power as an irreducible mental faculty; others that we need to think of the active self as a dedicated and depletable pool of psychic energy or – in today more respectable terminology – mental resources; finally, there is the idea that self-control requires postulating a deep division between reason and passion – a deliberative and an emotional motivational system. This essay argues (...) that no such special motivational powers are necessary. Yet, at the same time, self-control does powerfully illustrate the importance of a feature of the mind. What it illustrates, I argue, is the importance of the mental activity of attention in the control of all action. It is by appeal to this mental activity that we can dispense with special motivational powers. If we think of Humeanism as the view that there is fundamentally only one kind of motivational system and that all action is based in that system, then this essay contributes to a defense of Humeanism. On the other hand, the essay also shows that any model of agency in terms of only beliefs and desires, motivational and representational states, or preferences and credences is incomplete. A different conception of Humeanism as the view that every mental state is either motivational, representational, or a combination of them, is false. (shrink)

What is attention? How does attention shape consciousness? In an approach that engages with foundational topics in the philosophy of mind, the theory of action, psychology, and the neurosciences this book provides a unified and comprehensive answer to both questions. Sebastian Watzl shows that attention is a central structural feature of the mind. The first half of the book provides an account of the nature of attention. Attention is prioritizing, it consists in regulating priority structures. Attention is not another (...) element of the mind, but constituted by structures that organize, integrate, and coordinate the parts of our mind. Attention thus integrates the perceptual and intellectual, the cognitive and motivational, and the epistemic and practical. The second half of the book concerns the relationship between attention and consciousness. Watzl argues that attentional structure shapes consciousness into what is central and what is peripheral. The center-periphery structure of consciousness cannot be reduced to the structure of how the world appears to the subject. What it is like for us thus goes beyond the way the world appears to us. On this basis, a new view of consciousness is offered. In each conscious experience we actively take a stance on the world we appear to encounter. It is in this sense that our conscious experience is our subjective perspective. (shrink)

Many of our attitudes are non-culpable: there was nothing that we should have done to avoid holding them. I argue that we can still be blameworthy for non-culpable attitudes: they can impair our relationships in ways that make our full practice of apology and forgiveness intelligible. My argument poses a new challenge to indirect voluntarists, who attempt to reduce all responsibility for attitudes to responsibility for prior actions and omissions. Rationalists, who instead explain attitudinal responsibility by appeal to reasons-responsiveness, can (...) make sense of blameworthiness for non-culpable attitudes. In response, voluntarists could propose a revision of our actual practices. This would lead us into a quite different debate. (shrink)

Quasi-realists argue that meta-ethical expressivism is fully compatible with the central assumptions underlying ordinary moral practice. In a recent paper, Andy Egan has developed a vexing challenge for this project, arguing that expressivism is incompatible with central assumptions about error in moral judgments. In response, Simon Blackburn has argued that Egan's challenge fails, because Egan reads the expressivist as giving an account of moral error, rather than an account of judgments about moral error. In this paper I argue that the (...) challenge can be reinstated, even if we focus only on the expressivist's account of judgments about moral error. (shrink)

Für Aristoteles ist das Kontinuum ein potentiell Unendliches. Dieser Unendlichkeitsbegriff, den er neben dem prozessualen und aktualen einführte, wurde im Laufe der Philosophiegeschichte nicht mehr berücksichtigt. So verwenden ihn u.a. weder Kant noch Weyl in ihren Kontinuumsbetrachtungen, obwohl ihr Kontinuumsverständnis ihn geradezu nahelegt. - In dieser Arbeit werden zum einen die ontologischen Kontinuumslehren des Aristoteles und späterer Philosophen und Mathematiker behandelt, zum anderen erfährt die von Aristoteles im 6. Buch der «Physik» vorgelegte strukturelle Kontinuumsuntersuchung eine eingehende Würdigung.

ABSTRACT The difference between perception and cognition seems introspectively obvious in many cases. Perceiving and thinking have also been assigned quite different roles, in epistemology, in theories of reference and of mental content, in philosophy of psychology, and elsewhere. Yet what is the nature of the distinction? In what way, or ways, do perception and cognition differ? The paper reviews recent work on these questions. Four main respects in which perception and cognition have been held to differ are discussed. First, (...) their phenomenal character, such as the often-remarked vivacity or immediacy of perception. Second, the way in which they represent the world, e.g. the non-propositional nature of the contents, or non-discursive character of the vehicles, that have been held to characterise perceptual representation. Third, their place in cognitive architecture, i.e., roughly, in the information-flow of the mind, such as their alleged (non-)modularity. Fourth, their mind-world relations, e.g. the way in which perceptions seem to be tightly causally linked with distal or proximal stimuli. Against this background, we distinguish some main options for an account of the perception/cognition distinction, in particular concerning whether there is one, several, or no interesting and principled distinction(s) to be drawn here. (shrink)

This paper argues for the normative significance of attention. Attention plays an important role when describing an individual’s mind and agency, and in explaining many central facts about that individual. In addition, many in the public want answers and guidance with regard to normative questions about attention. Given that attention is both descriptively central and the public cares about normative guidance with regard to it, attention should be central also in normative philosophy. We need an ethics of attention: a field (...) of study of which normative pressures, if any, govern attention. Like the ethics of belief, the ethics of attention will connect those normative questions to issues regarding the nature of attention, i.e. to what is subject to such normative pressures. Philosophers should develop an ethics of attention that helps to provide normative guidance and that is commensurate in its richness to the descriptive significance of attention. The second half of the paper sketches a framework that may help us to get started at developing the ethics of attention. (shrink)

This paper defends and develops the structuring account of conscious attention: attention is the conscious mental process of structuring one’s stream of consciousness so that some parts of it are more central than others. In the first part of the paper, I motivate the structuring account. Drawing on a variety of resources I argue that the phenomenology of attention cannot be fully captured in terms of how the world appears to the subject, as well as against an atomistic conception of (...) attention. In the second part of the paper, I show how the structuring account can be made precise: attention causes and causally sustains phenomenal relations to hold between the parts of the stream of consciousness; most importantly the relation of one part being peripheral to another. I end by pointing out consequences for both the scientific study of attention as well as for several areas of central philosophical interest. (shrink)

Dans la genese de sa constitution, la philosophie n'a pu faire l'economie d'une confrontation avec la musique qui fournissait aux anciens Grecs les schemes fondamentaux de la culture. De cette confrontation Platon est le temoin. Scindant la musique, il privilegie l'Harmonique, qui en est la partie theorique, sans toutefois lui reconnaitre la titre de science supreme. Correlativement, il condamne comme dysharmonie, tumulte fracassant et perturbateur de l'ordre cosmique, l'harmonie chromaticiste dont il s'emploie, non sans paradoxe, a decrire le detail. Par (...) cette lecture en filigrane des Dialogues de Platon, l'auteur se propose de reconstruire la pensee qui procede de l'harmonie chromaticiste et de montrer son importance dans l'elaboration de la philosophie fondatrice. Au carrefour des disciplines du savoir antique, ce livre s'adresse non seulement aux philosophes, mais aussi a tous ceux qui, musiciens ou stylisticiens, s'interessent a la forme musicale. (shrink)

What is attention? Attention is often seen as a subject matter for the hard sciences of cognitive and brain processes, and is understood in terms of sub-personal mechanisms and processes. Correspondingly, there still is a stark contrast between the central role attention plays for the empirical investigation of the mind in psychology and the neurosciences, and its relative neglect in philosophy. Yet, over the past years, several philosophers have challenged the standard conception. A number of interesting philosophical questions concerning the (...) nature of attention arise. This article provides an introduction to contemporary debates concerning these questions. In particular, it discusses the question of how the pre-theoretic conception of attention might be reconciled with a scientific conception, arguments that provide support for an anti-reductivist theory of attention, and sketches several recent anti-reductivist theories and their inter-relations. (shrink)

What is the philosophical significance of attention? The present article provides an overview of recent debates surrounding the connections between attention and other topics of philosophical interest. In particular, it discusses the interplay between attention and consciousness, attention and agency, and attention and reference. The article outlines the questions and contemporary positions concerning how attention shapes the phenomenal character of experience, whether it is necessary or sufficient for consciousness, and whether it plays a special role in the best philosophical theories (...) of action or conceptual reference. Various interdependencies between the answers to these questions are indicated, as well as how these answers might depend on the metaphysics of attention. Together with its companion piece this article serves as an introduction to the philosophy of attention. (shrink)

This dissertation investigates the nature, the phenomenal character and the philosophical significance of attention. According to its central thesis, attention is the ongoing mental activity of structuring the stream of consciousness or phenomenal field. The dissertation connects the scientific study of attention in psychology and the neurosciences with central discussions in the philosophy of mind. Once we get clear on the nature and the phenomenal character of attention, we can make progress toward understanding foundational issues concerning the nature and the (...) structure of conscious mentality itself. We understand better how consciousness is connected to self-awareness and to agency, and we get a better grip on the nature of perceptual experience, the unity of consciousness, and its subjective character. The dissertation also aims at showing that the current empirical investigation of attention should be complemented with work at the level of generality that a philosophical analysis can provide; it shows how such an analysis is relevant for the scientific study of attention by providing a new conceptual framework and suggesting several new areas of research. (shrink)

Perceptual illusions have often served as an important tool in the study of perceptual experience. In this paper I argue that a recently discovered set of visual illusions sheds new light on the nature of time consciousness. I suggest the study of these silencing illusions as a tool kit for any philosopher interested in the experience of time and show how to better understand time consciousness by combining detailed empirical investigations with a detailed philosophical analysis. In addition, and more specifically, (...) I argue against an initially plausible range of views that assume a close match between the temporal content of visual experience and the temporal layout of experience itself. Against such a widely held structural matching thesis I argue that which temporal changes we are experiencing bears no close relation to how our experience itself is changing over time. Explanations of the silencing illusions that are compatible with the structural matching thesis fail. (shrink)

In “Risk Based Passenger Screening in Aviation Security: Implications and Variants of a New Paradigm”, Sebastian Weydner-Volkmann describes the current paradigm shift from ‘traditional’ forms of screening to ‘risk based passenger screening’ (RBS) in aviation security. This paradigm shift is put in the context of the wider historical development of risk management approaches. Through a discussion of Michel Foucault, Herfried Münkler and Ulrich Beck, Weydner-Volkmann analyses the shortcomings of such approaches in public security policies, which become especially evident in (...) the aviation security context. As he shows, the turn towards methods of RBS can be seen as an attempt to address a trade-off ‘trilemma’ between the effective provision of security, the implied costs for industry and passengers, and the ethical, legal and societal implications of the screening procedures. In order to analyse foreseeable outcomes of embracing RBS, he differentiates three prototypical variants of the new paradigm on the basis of their main referent and rationale. For each variant, he then subsequently assesses the implications for the ‘trilemma’, after having unveiled the criteria of analysis that will necessarily have to be followed within a serious appraisal of RBS methods. (shrink)

What should we believe when epistemic and practical reasons pull in opposite directions? The traditional view states that there is something that we ought epistemically to believe and something that we ought practically to (cause ourselves to) believe, period. More recent accounts challenge this view, either by arguing that there is something that we ought simpliciter to believe, all epistemic and practical reasons considered (the weighing view), or by denying the normativity of epistemic reasons altogether (epistemic anti-normativism). I argue against (...) both accounts and defend the traditional view. An agent can be blameworthy in doxastic dilemmas for complying with their practical but not their epistemic reasons. This reveals how epistemic reasons are normative: the concept of epistemic blame helps us track epistemic normativity. (shrink)

Could the organization of consciousness be the key to understanding its unity? This paper considers how the attentional organization of consciousness into centre and periphery bears on the phenomenal unity of consciousness. Two ideas are discussed: according to the first, the attentional organization of consciousness shows that phenomenal holism is true. I argue that the argument from attentional organization to phenomenal holism remains inconclusive. According to the second idea, attentional organization provides a principle of unity for conscious experience, i.e. it (...) is a relationship between the phenomenal parts that occurs in the real definition or essence of consciousness. Conscious experience provides subjects with a subjective perspective, or point of view, because its various parts are structured by attention into what is more central and what is more peripheral. (shrink)

I argue first that attention is a (maybe the) paradigmatic case of an object-directed, non-propositional intentional mental episode. In addition attention cannot be reduced to any other (propositional or non-propositional) mental episodes. Yet, second, attention is not a non-propositional mental attitude. It might appear puzzling how one could hold both of these claims. I show how to combine them, and how that combination shows how propositionality and non-propositionality can co-exist in a mental life. The crucial move is one away from (...) an atomistic, building block picture to a more holistic, structural picture. (shrink)

We argue that Wittgenstein’s philosophical perspective on Gödel’s most famous theorem is even more radical than has commonly been assumed. Wittgenstein shows in detail that there is no way that the Gödelian construct of a string of signs could be assigned a useful function within (ordinary) mathematics. — The focus is on Appendix III to Part I of Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics. The present reading highlights the exceptional importance of this particular set of remarks and, more specifically, emphasises (...) its refined composition and rigorous internal structure. (shrink)

The development of artificial intelligence (AI) in medicine raises fundamental ethical issues. As one example, AI systems in the field of mental health successfully detect signs of mental disorders, such as depression, by using data from social media. These AI depression detectors (AIDDs) identify users who are at risk of depression prior to any contact with the healthcare system. The article focuses on the ethical implications of AIDDs regarding affected users’ health-related autonomy. Firstly, it presents the (ethical) discussion of AI (...) in medicine and, specifically, in mental health. Secondly, two models of AIDDs using social media data and different usage scenarios are introduced. Thirdly, the concept of patient autonomy, according to Beauchamp and Childress, is critically discussed. Since this concept does not encompass the specific challenges linked with the digital context of AIDDs in social media sufficiently, the current analysis suggests, finally, an extended concept of health-related digital autonomy. (shrink)

Recent psychological research shows that attention affects appearances. An “attended item looks bigger, faster, earlier, more saturated, stripier.” (Block 2010, p. 41). What is the significance of these findings? Ned Block has argued that they undermine representationism, roughly the view that the phenomenal character of perception is determined by its representational content. My first goal in this paper is to show that Block’s argument has the structure of a Problem of Arbitrary Phenomenal Variation and that it improves on other instances (...) of arguments of the same form along several dimensions (most prominently, these are arguments based on the possibility of spectral inversion). My second goal is to consider responses to Block’s version of the arbitrariness problem. I will show that most of them have serious drawbacks. Overall, the best view is to accept that attention may distort perception, sacrificing veridicality for usability. I end my discussion by showing how to develop that view. (shrink)

Discussions regarding which norms, if any, govern our practices of forming, maintaining and relinquishing beliefs have come to be collected under the label “The ethics of belief”. Included in the ethics of belief are debates about how those normative issues relate to the nature of belief, whether belief formation is, for example, ever voluntary. The present talk concerns an analogous set of questions regarding our practices of attention. “The ethics of attention” thus concerns the discussion of which norms, if any, (...) govern our practices of attention: what norms govern what we should attend to, how we should engage our capacity for attention, when we should begin and when we should stop to pay attention to something? Like the ethics of belief, the ethics of attention will connect those normative questions to issues regarding the nature of attention, what may or may not be subject to such normative pressures. Compared with rich, complex, and systematic investigation of the ethics of belief, the study of the ethics of attention is more or less undeveloped. This paper aims to begin to change that. Specifically, it shows that attention is an appropriate target for serious normative investigation and then classifies potential norms of attention along three dimensions: whether they are manner or object based, instrumental or non-instrumental, and whether its source is moral, prudential or epistemic. -/- [EDIT. 10. November 2021: this paper has been superseded by a new version. Please cite that in turn]. (shrink)

Observations of ultrafast cognition in human performance challenge intuitive information processing and computation metaphors of cognitive processing. Instances of ultrafast cognition are marked by ultrafast response times of reliable, accurate responses to a relatively complex stimulus. Ultrafast means response times that are as fast as a single feedforward burst of activity across the nervous system connecting eye to hand. Thus the information processing and computation metaphors in question are those in which some amount of time is required to decide and (...) initiate a response, over and above the minimum time required, physiologically, for the eye-hand chain of action potentials—these are metaphors in which the brain does work that has a measurable duration in time. Ultrafast cognition can be explained by synergies spanning the mind and body. Synergies are temporary dynamical structures that anticipate context-appropriate behaviour. An anticipatory state poises the mind and body in symmetry among equivalent options for behaviour, and only a minimal change in context, favouring one option over any other, is sufficient to break symmetry and enact an ultrafast cognitive response. (shrink)

The online version of the original article can be found under doi:10.1007/s11948-007-9045-2.

In this paper, I take a critical look at Sartorio’s book Causation and Free Will (2016). Sartorio offers a rich defence of an actual-sequence view of freedom, which pays close attention to issues in the philosophy of causation and how they relate to freedom. I argue that although this focus on causation is illuminating, Sartorio’s project nevertheless runs into some serious difficulties. Perhaps most worrying amongst them is whether the agent-based reason-sensitivity account, offered by Sartorio, is consistent with Frankfurt-style cases (...) – the very cases which are provided as the sole reason to endorse an actual-sequence view of freedom. I suggest that given that powers and causation are so intimately bound together, the debate is skewed somewhat by thinking of these as rivals. (shrink)

Sicherheitsfragen spielen für die Gestaltung technischer Innovation und Entwicklung sowie für deren gesellschaftliche Implementierung eine zentrale Rolle. Wonach hierbei im Einzelfall konkret gefragt wird, ist aber keinesfalls eindeutig. Vielmehr verweist der Sicherheitsbegriff immer auf ein komplexes Gefüge von Urteils- und Wertungszusammenhängen, die es im situativen Kontext von Mensch-Maschine-Interaktionen zu explizieren gilt.

_A portion of the revenue from this book’s sales will be donated to Doctors Without Borders to assist the humanitarian work of nurses, doctors, and other health care providers in the fight against COVID-19 and beyond._ _Concepts and Cases in Nursing Ethics_ is an introduction to contemporary ethical issues in health care, designed especially for Canadian audiences. The book is organized around six key concepts: beneficence, autonomy, truth-telling, confidentiality, justice, and integrity. Each of these concepts is explained and discussed with (...) reference to professional and legal norms. The discussion is then supplemented by case studies that exemplify the relevant concepts and show how each applies in health care and nursing practice. This new fourth edition includes an added chapter on end-of-life issues, and it is revised throughout to reflect the latest developments on topics such as global health ethics, cultural competence, social media, and palliative sedation, as well as ethical issues relating to COVID-19. (shrink)

This paper proposes the use of an argumentation framework with recursive attacks to address a trust model in a collaborative open multi-agent system. Our approach is focused on scenarios where agents share information about the credibility (informational trust) they have assigned to their peers. We will represent informants’ credibility through credibility objects which will include not only trust information but also the informant source. This leads to a recursive setting where the reliability of certain credibility information depends on the credibility (...) of other pieces of information that should be subject to the same analysis. Credibility objects are maintained in a credibility base which can have information in conflict. In this scenario, we will formally show that our proposal will produce a partially ordered credibility relation; such relation contains the information that can be justified by an argumentation process. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.