In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Wilfrid Sellars and Phenomenology: Intersections, Encounters, Oppositions ed. by Daniele De Santis and Danilo MancaHeath WilliamsDE SANTIS, Daniele and Danilo Manca, editors. Wilfrid Sellars and Phenomenology: Intersections, Encounters, Oppositions. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2023. xiv + 272 pp. Cloth, $95.00This is an eminently readable and engaging collection of essays. There is much more here than merely comparing and contrasting two disparate thinkers. There are important contributions (...) to metaphysics, epistemology, thought about the relation between science and culture, and the future of phenomenology and pragmatism. It has what one wants from a collection of edited papers: very few contributions that are obscure or tangential, with nearly every one addressing a broadly relevant philosophical topic.The two major motifs running through the various works in this edited book are epistemologically orientated questions on the myth of the given, and metaphysically orientated questions arising from the contrasting scientific and manifest images. As Landfredi states, these "are two main theoretical dimensions in which phenomenology and Sellars's approach critically confront each other."To the metaphysical motifs firstly. Husserl's thoughts on the relation between the scientific and manifest image is outlined in his Crisis of the European Sciences and Sellars's in Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man. In contemporary metaphysics, the competition between the manifest and scientific image has been heightened thanks to the aggressive scientific realism of works like Ladyman and Ross's Everything Must Go, coupled as it is with a dismissal of our commonsense perceptual and cognitive capacities.Both Lanfredi and Manca take a conciliatory approach, aiming to minimize incompatibility between Husserl's manifest and Sellars's scientific images. Manca's attentive and judicious reading makes apparent the origins of the metaphysical commitments of both thinkers. The former accepts the power of the scientific method of mathematization but warns that its ontology remains forever incomplete until the lifeworld is considered. The latter's scientific realism ultimately affords science the final say on what exists. The difference between them comes down to whether the emergent properties of a system are ultimately reducible to parts and the arrangement between them. Sellars thinks they are, while for Husserl "the parts are not juxtaposed from without but integrated with each other in such a way that they become able to generate new [End Page 546] properties." A thematically related analysis is found in the contribution of De Santis, who argues that Simons's adaptation of Husserlian mereology fails to provide a solution on how to build complex particulars out of basic ones.Hopp's article connects our two domains of critical encounter as he suggests that you can get from a phenomenological epistemology to a metaphysical reification of items in manifest image, because fulfilled perceptual knowledge claims presuppose the existence of that which is perceived. He thinks there are resources within Husserl not only to defend this position but to use it to critique many of the claims that undergird Sellars's prosecution of the myth. Hopp ends by asking what current experimental evidence the scientific realist has to rule out the existence of macrosized phenomenologically given objects. One might refer to the above-mentioned work by Ladyman and Ross by way of reply.Epistemological themes include the claim that aspects of phenomenology can be imported or modified to forge a coherent account of perceptual knowledge that (a) affords perception a role in epistemology and (b) explains the concomitant, vexing relation between the space of reasons of causes while (c) avoiding the myth of the given.Two authors who demonstrate close parallel between Husserl and Sellars are Nunziante and Rump. Nunziante shows that one of Sellars's attempts at (a) comes via his account of "perceptual takings," which is influenced by, and homologous to, Husserl's account of the passive synthesis of prepredicative perception in Experience and Judgement, as handed to Sellars by Farber. These prove to be essential stepping stones in Sellars's thinking about how the perceptual realm marries to the intellectual one.Rump shows that Sellars's attempt to solve the regress problem for coherentism in order to solve (a) stumbles on the problem of how causal, nonconceptual, noncategorial, and nonpropositionally structured protoperceptual experiences furnish... (shrink)

: A comparison of casuistry with the strain of particularism developed by John McDowell and David Wiggins suggests that casuistry is susceptible to two very different mistakes. First, as sometimes developed, casuistry tends toward an implausible rigidity and systematization of moral knowledge. Particularism offers a corrective to this error. Second, however, casuistry tends sometimes to present moral knowledge as insufficiently systematized: It often appears to hold that moral deliberation is merely a kind of perception. Such a perceptual model of deliberation (...) cannot offer a convincing account of the possibility of moral progress. This second problem is one to which particularism is itself prone. To redress it, other aspects of casuistry must be exploited: Casuistry contains an account of presumptive generalizations that explains how moral deliberation might be structured by rules while also depending at critical junctures on perception. (shrink)

This article examines how claimants alleging multiple discrimination, i.e. discrimination on the basis of two or more grounds, fare under existing antidiscrimination law. It argues that the current statutory regime, both conceptually and practically, hinders multiple discrimination claims. Specifically, the grounds of anti‐discrimination legislation may not adequately address an individual's experience of discrimination, leaving a claimant, or class of claimants, with no effective remedy. Further, in cases of both direct and indirect discrimination, claimants alleging multiple discrimination find it difficult or (...) impossible to identify an appropriate comparator. In sum, despite previous legislative and judicial failures to address issues of multiple discrimination, the forthcoming reforms to anti‐discrimination law promise merely an exacerbation, not an amelioration, of these problems. (shrink)

The conserved quantity theory of causation aims to analyze causal processes and interactions in terms of conserved quantities. In order to be successful, the theory must correctly distinguish between causal processes and interactions, on the one hand, and pseudoprocesses and mere intersections on the other.Moreover, it must do this while satisfying two further criteria: it must avoid circularity; and the appeal to conserved quantities must not be redundant. I argue that the theory is not successful in meeting these (...) criteria. (shrink)

In this book, Ramsey addresses the moral problems of medicine, life and death and not merely to those who share his faith.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy of Music Education Review 12.1 (2004) 67-70 [Access article in PDF] Response to Mary J. Reichling, "Intersections: Form, Feeling, and Isomorphism" David Stevenson Vassalboro, Maine Mary J. Reichling's essay regarding the three concepts, form, feeling, and isomorphism, is lucid, well structured, and aptly supported by research of other music education philosophers. She states her purpose in the opening paragraph: "to examine and to elucidate various aspects of (...) these three concepts in her [Susanne Langer's] writing, as they are fundamental to an understanding of her aesthetic theory and to the construction of a philosophy of music and music education."A philosophy of music education must be the focus in all ensuing debate, and must remain of paramount importance. Arguments, especially dialectic arguments, are not won or lost; they merely strip away the outer garments until more and more of the truth is exposed. My thoughts regarding Reichling's essay are offered in this vein.Reichling amply makes the point that music is a dynamic moving form. She asserts that "Langer argues that form is not separable from content," clarifying further by saying that "By content Langer is designating the form's import or meaning." And she offers other examples of dynamic, moving forms, among them, "forms created by movements of clouds or fog through the mist and early light." [End Page 67]At this point, perhaps interjecting the notion of perception is in order. I would suggest that the cloud formations offer no content or meaning outside of the viewer's perceptions or imagination. Music (art), being the nebulous subject that it is, ensconced in subjectivity and steeped in perception, both interpersonal and intrapersonal at the same time, exists to be taken by individuals, each at his or her own level of accomplishment, understanding, and interest. Therefore, does the meaning inhere in the form, as Langer and Reichling assert, or is it assigned by the listener (in the case of music) or by the viewer (in the case of the cloud formation)? "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: infinite."1 William Blake's observation notwithstanding, the truth is that perception is the only thing that we have with which to view our existence. I believe that there is such a thing as absolute truth, and that reality does exist. However, we mere mortals lack the ability to view the world through anything other than our own perceptions. The knowledge or meaning gained through contemplation of the form is, in all likelihood, quite different for each observer.Likewise, imagination and conceptual ability play a role in interpreting what the senses have perceived. Langer, and by quotation, Reichling, offers the notion of a red dot placed on the rim of a spinning wheel that appears to the viewer as a red circle. "When the spinning stops, the form, the red circle, evaporates. Did it really exist? Does it have ontological status? Is it merely an illusion?" I asked my students to close their eyes and imagine a spinning wheel with a red dot placed on the rim. I asked them, "As the wheel spins, do you see the dot?" The answer was that they saw a red circle. Did they really see a red circle, or even a spinning wheel? Of course not, we were in a music classroom. Yet they were able to conceptualize or imagine the image, and I would suggest that that carries more weight in the realm of art than does actual ontological status.The problem with the experiment of the preceding paragraph is that "Langer argues that form is not separable from content, writing that it is not possible 'to divorce the logical form from its one embodiment or expression.'" In the subsequent paragraph Reichling states, When the music stops, when the ballet is concluded, when the play ends, when the wheel stops spinning, memory may remain but the content (content as meaning-my parenthetical interjection), the feeling, the red circle, the image the dancer created is gone. Is this illogical or has knowledge... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy of Music Education Review 12.1 (2004) 67-70 [Access article in PDF] Response to Mary J. Reichling, "Intersections: Form, Feeling, and Isomorphism" David Stevenson Vassalboro, Maine Mary J. Reichling's essay regarding the three concepts, form, feeling, and isomorphism, is lucid, well structured, and aptly supported by research of other music education philosophers. She states her purpose in the opening paragraph: "to examine and to elucidate various aspects of (...) these three concepts in her [Susanne Langer's] writing, as they are fundamental to an understanding of her aesthetic theory and to the construction of a philosophy of music and music education."A philosophy of music education must be the focus in all ensuing debate, and must remain of paramount importance. Arguments, especially dialectic arguments, are not won or lost; they merely strip away the outer garments until more and more of the truth is exposed. My thoughts regarding Reichling's essay are offered in this vein.Reichling amply makes the point that music is a dynamic moving form. She asserts that "Langer argues that form is not separable from content," clarifying further by saying that "By content Langer is designating the form's import or meaning." And she offers other examples of dynamic, moving forms, among them, "forms created by movements of clouds or fog through the mist and early light." [End Page 67]At this point, perhaps interjecting the notion of perception is in order. I would suggest that the cloud formations offer no content or meaning outside of the viewer's perceptions or imagination. Music (art), being the nebulous subject that it is, ensconced in subjectivity and steeped in perception, both interpersonal and intrapersonal at the same time, exists to be taken by individuals, each at his or her own level of accomplishment, understanding, and interest. Therefore, does the meaning inhere in the form, as Langer and Reichling assert, or is it assigned by the listener (in the case of music) or by the viewer (in the case of the cloud formation)? "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: infinite."1 William Blake's observation notwithstanding, the truth is that perception is the only thing that we have with which to view our existence. I believe that there is such a thing as absolute truth, and that reality does exist. However, we mere mortals lack the ability to view the world through anything other than our own perceptions. The knowledge or meaning gained through contemplation of the form is, in all likelihood, quite different for each observer.Likewise, imagination and conceptual ability play a role in interpreting what the senses have perceived. Langer, and by quotation, Reichling, offers the notion of a red dot placed on the rim of a spinning wheel that appears to the viewer as a red circle. "When the spinning stops, the form, the red circle, evaporates. Did it really exist? Does it have ontological status? Is it merely an illusion?" I asked my students to close their eyes and imagine a spinning wheel with a red dot placed on the rim. I asked them, "As the wheel spins, do you see the dot?" The answer was that they saw a red circle. Did they really see a red circle, or even a spinning wheel? Of course not, we were in a music classroom. Yet they were able to conceptualize or imagine the image, and I would suggest that that carries more weight in the realm of art than does actual ontological status.The problem with the experiment of the preceding paragraph is that "Langer argues that form is not separable from content, writing that it is not possible 'to divorce the logical form from its one embodiment or expression.'" In the subsequent paragraph Reichling states, When the music stops, when the ballet is concluded, when the play ends, when the wheel stops spinning, memory may remain but the content (content as meaning-my parenthetical interjection), the feeling, the red circle, the image the dancer created is gone. Is this illogical or has knowledge... (shrink)

Women's equality claims have occupied the forefront of the European debate on face-veil bans; most claims have been denounced as mere manipulation for anti-Islamic and/or anti-immigrant political agendas, and the dilemma between anti-sexist and anti-racist struggles has been argued to be false. This article examines how opportunistic manipulation of gender equality claims and the ‘ethnicisation’ of sexism have been assessed and confronted in the scholarly debate opposing the bans, as well as the impact that this debate has had on (...) women's equality claims and the intersectionality issue. I argue that the women's oppression argument has not been fully considered, because it would have disrupted the anti-racist struggle due to unresolved problems with understanding intersectionality. (shrink)

The paper aims to develop a resemblance theory of properties that technically improves on past versions. The theory is based on a comparative resemblance predicate. In combination with other resources, it solves the various technical problems besetting resemblance nominalism. The paper’s second main aim is to indicate that previously proposed resemblance theories that solve the technical problems, including the comparative theory, are nominalistically unacceptable and have controversial philosophical commitments.

The question of liability in the case of using intelligent agents is far from simple, and cannot sufficiently be answered by deeming the human user as being automatically responsible for all actions and mistakes of his agent. Therefore, this paper is specifically concerned with the significant difficulties which might arise in this regard especially if the technology behind software agents evolves, or is commonly used on a larger scale. Furthermore, this paper contemplates whether or not it is possible to share (...) the responsibility with these agents and what are the main objections surrounding the assumption of considering such agents as responsible entities. This paper, however, is not intended to provide the final answer to all questions and challenges in this regard, but to identify the main components, and provide some perspectives on how to deal with such issue. (shrink)

We study the intersection type assignment system as defined by Barendregt, Coppo and Dezani. For the four essential variants of the system (with and without a universal type and with and without subtyping) we show that the emptiness (inhabitation) problem is recursively unsolvable. That is, there is no effective algorithm to decide if there is a closed term of a given type. It follows that provability in the logic of "strong conjunction" of Mints and Lopez-Escobar is also undecidable.

This paper argues that the Repugnant Conclusion which the Mere Addition Paradox generates is not the same as the one which a sum-aggregative view like impersonal total utilitarianism leads to, but a slightly more moderate version of it. Given a spectrum of outcomes {A, B, C, …, X, Y, Z} such that in each of them there is a population that is twice as large as the previous one and has a level of wellbeing that is just barely lower (...) than the previous one, the Mere Addition Paradox implies that while almost all the outcomes of the spectrum are better than A, the last ones, such as Y and Z, will not, lest we accept that adding lives at a negative level is positive or neutral. This affects the way the Mere Addition Paradox should be presented. (shrink)

De-extinction technology aims to bring extinct species back into existence, often with the goal of releasing created organisms into natural environments. In this paper, I argue that there are aesthetic reasons to avoid engaging in de-extinction and release projects, even if they pass moral permissibility criteria. The strength of these reasons depends on conclusions regarding species authenticity - a problem that arises at the intersection of de-extinction technology and the 'species problem' in the philosophy of biology. Since species (...) authenticity affects the perceived naturalness of 'natural' environments, and thus the aesthetic judgments thereof, I contend that there will be negative aesthetic consequences of de-extinction efforts that ought to be further explored before such projects move forward. (shrink)

This groundbreaking volume of original essays presents fresh avenues of inquiry at the intersection of philosophy and psychiatry. Contributors draw from a variety of fields, including evolutionary psychiatry, phenomenology, biopsychosocial models, psychoanalysis, neuroscience, neuroethics, behavioral economics, and virtue theory. Philosophy and Psychiatry’s unique structure consists of two parts: in the first, philosophers write five lead essays with replies from psychiatrists. In the second part, this arrangement is reversed. The result is an interdisciplinary exchange that allows for direct discourse, and a (...) volume at the forefront of defining an emerging discipline. Philosophy and Psychiatry will be of interest to professionals in philosophy and psychiatry, as well as mental health researchers and clinicians. (shrink)

Mass incarceration is an ethical crisis. Yet it is not only the magnitude of the system that is troubling. Mass incarceration has been created and sustained by racism, classism, and ableism, and the problems of the criminal legal system will not be solved without meaningfully intervening upon these forms of oppression. Beyond that, incarceration itself—whether of one person or 2 million—represents a moral failing. To punish and control, rather than invest in community and healing, is antithetical to the values of (...) the field of bioethics. This commentary, which responds to the article “Fifty Years of U.S. Mass Incarceration and What It Means for Bioethics,” by Sean Valles, considers abolition as a crucial form of justice that must be centered in the work of bioethics. Abolition is both an antiracist intervention and a means of considering the ways health care broadly and bioethics specifically have allowed for the perpetuation of carcerality in the United States. (shrink)

In many assessment problems—aptitude testing, hiring decisions, appraisals of the risk of recidivism, evaluation of the credibility of testimonial sources, and so on—the fair treatment of different groups of individuals is an important goal. But individuals can be legitimately grouped in many different ways. Using a framework and fairness constraints explored in research on algorithmic fairness, I show that eliminating certain forms of bias across groups for one way of classifying individuals can make it impossible to eliminate such bias across (...) groups for another way of dividing people up. And this point generalizes if we require merely that assessments be approximately bias-free. Moreover, even if the fairness constraints are satisfied for some given partitions of the population, the constraints can fail for the coarsest common refinement, that is, the partition generated by taking intersections of the elements of these coarser partitions. This shows that these prominent fairness constraints admit the possibility of forms of intersectional bias. (shrink)

In formulating procreative principles, it makes sense to begin by thinking about whose interests ought to matter to us. Obviously, we care about those who exist. Less obviously, but still uncontroversially, we care about those who will exist. Ought we to care about those who might possibly, but will not actually, exist? Recently, unusual positions have been taken regarding merely possible people and the non-identity problem. David Velleman argues that what might have happened to you – an existent person (...) – often doesn't merit moral consideration since the alternative person one would have been had what might have happened actually happened is a merely possible person about whom one has no reason to care. He argues that his way of thinking can eliminate the non-identity problem. Caspar Hare argues that merely possible people have interests and are morally relevant. He argues that we can solve the non-identity problem by rejecting the view that merely possible people are morally irrelevant. Both Hare and Velleman argue that focusing on one's de dicto rather than on one's de re children can help us avoid the non-identity problem. I analyze the role that merely possible, nonexistent hypothetical entities ought to play in our moral reasoning, especially with regard to procreation. I refute both Velleman's and Hare's views and demonstrate the difficulties we encounter when we try to apply their views to common non-identity cases. I conclude with the common-sense view regarding who matters, morally: only those who do, did, or will exist. (shrink)

In the first ever commentary on the Groundwork, one of Kant’s earliest critics, Gottlob August Tittel, argues that the categorical imperative is not a new principle of morality, but merely a new formula. This objection has been unjustly neglected in the secondary literature, despite the fact that Kant explicitly responds to it in a footnote in the second Critique. In this paper I seek to offer a thorough explanation of both Tittel’s ‘new formula’ objection and Kant’s response to it, as (...) well as illustrate its significance. I argue that the objection is in fact the third step in a line of argument that Tittel presents in his commentary, and that the objection is best understood within this context. I analyze Kant’s response in the second Critique footnote line-by-line so as to show that Kant both clarifies that it was never his aim to offer a new principle, but only ‘establish’ the principle that common human reason already implicitly employs. Furthermore, I show that Kant uses the opportunity to clarify the sense in which the categorical imperative is a ‘formula [Formel]’, namely as a representation of a complicated and abstract principle, like the moral law, in a way that is easier to understand and apply. I conclude by illustrating the fourth step in Tittel’s line of argument, which makes the overall significance of the ‘new formula’ objection clear: for Tittel, the problem is not that Kant seems to be offering merely a new formula, but that the categorical imperative lacks a foundation. (shrink)

The article discusses the certain features of the constitutional doctrine of human rights developed by the Constitutional Court of Lithuania which were influenced by the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights, the role of the European Convention on Human Rights as a legal source in the system of sources of constitutional law. The intersection of the jurisprudences, which came into being due to different assessments of the legal regulation in cases where the same legal act was recognized by (...) the Constitutional Court being in compliance with the Constitution and the European Court of Human Rights recognized that the application of the said act was a cause of the violation of a certain person’s rights protected by the Convention (or vice versa) is one of the most important questions and raises many theoretical and practical problems. Different assessment of the legal acts made by the European Court of Human Rights with regard to their compliance with the Conventionshould not be regarded as such an essential circumstance which could lead to possible repeated review of such legal act at the Constitutional Court, such intersection of the jurisprudences, should be solved by ordinary courts while following the doctrine that in cases where legal acts contain the legal regulation which competes with that established in the international treaty, the international treaty should be applied. (shrink)

Philosophers readily talk about merely verbal disputes, usually without much or any explicit reflection on what these are, and a good deal of methodological significance is attached to discovering whether a dispute is merely verbal or not. Currently, metaphilosophical advances are being made towards a clearer understanding of what exactly it takes for something to be a merely verbal dispute. This paper engages with this growing literature, pointing out some problems with existing approaches, and develops a new proposal which builds (...) on their strengths. (shrink)

Standard epistemology takes it for granted that there is a special kind of value: epistemic value. This claim does not seem to sit well with act utilitarianism, however, since it holds that only welfare is of real value. I first develop a particularly utilitarian sense of “epistemic value”, according to which it is closely analogous to the nature of financial value. I then demonstrate the promise this approach has for two current puzzles in the intersection of epistemology and value theory: (...) first, the problem of why knowledge is better than mere true belief, and second, the relation between epistemic justification and responsibility. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Intersection of Heidegger's Philosophy and His Politics as Reflected in the Views of His Contemporaries at the University of FreiburgRichard DetschThere has been so much speculation in the last ten years or more about the reasons for and the extent of Heidegger's involvement in the Nazi movement that another attempt to come to grips with this important problem might seem superfluous. Amidst the weighty arguments advanced in (...) what has become a multitude of treatises and tomes, however, there has thus far been little interest in dealing with Heidegger's simple statement in his Spiegel interview that he was moved by the "confusion of opinions... from 22 parties... to adopt a political stance that was national and above all social."1 If we suspend our suspicion for the moment that Heidegger is here again manipulating the facts to fit his postwar predicament, as has been amply demonstrated [End Page 407] regarding other details, and examine the evidence we will find that there are indeed indications of the predominance of Heidegger's social concerns with respect to the political situation of the early '30s as well as of his leaning toward an authoritarian form of government an inclination shared, to be sure, by a significantly large number of his compatriots, academic and otherwise. There is one approach in particular toward answering the question of why Heidegger became a Nazi which the present attempt hopes to put in question: the emphasis on his abandonment of his Christian religious origins. The following statement by Theodore Kisiel expresses this line of reasoning most succinctly: "It will take a decade, but it will be not just an anti-Catholic, nor an anti-Christian, but the full-blown anti-religious attitude of the German Geist ripened from German Idealism that sweeps Heidegger into National Socialism, with all the romantic fervor of another religious conversion."2 John Caputo argues, based on the work of Kisiel and van Buren, that the Heidegger of the early twenties was drawing from two "equiprimordial" sources, "the Aristotelian and the Christian." "It was only in the 1930's, in the period of Heidegger's active political engagement with National Socialism, that the twofold root of the tradition was pruned to a single root... a Great Greek beginning from which everything Jewish and Christian, everything Roman, Latin, and Romance, was to be excluded as fallen, derivative, distortive, and inauthentic."3 This shift in perspective, this rejection by Heidegger of earlier Christian impulses in his work led to "fatal" lapses in the ethical realm: "... by leaving behind Kierkegaard and Luther... and by treating Aristotle as a fading echo of the primordially early Greek, Heidegger left the question of Being in a state of utter mystification about ethico-political matters, about the matter of our concrete responsibilities to one another."4 David Farrell Krell makes this lack of respect for and attention to the "other" the centerpiece of an entire study attempting to show Heidegger's propensity for the inhuman ideology of Nazism.5 These arguments derive perhaps from the rhetorical question posed by the Freiburg historian Hugo Ott in 1988: "Didn't this pseudo-religious expectation of salvation [through the mission of the Führer] conceal a monstrous hubris, wasn't the thinking of Heidegger in its radically contained, i.e., in its elementary [End Page 408] simplicity really a surrogate for the Christian view of life thrown overboard?"6 The problem with all such arguments is that "the Christian view of life" did not prevent others of a background similar to Heidegger's from an enthusiastic acceptance of Nazism without an abandonment of their religious faith. In this regard, let the case of Engelbert Krebs, Heidegger's one-time friend and mentor, the Jesuit priest who officiated at his marriage ceremony, serve as an example. Ott deals with Krebs fairly extensively in his Heidegger biography, stressing Krebs's chagrin when Heidegger turned his back on the Catholic Church, but fails to mention at all the enthusiasm for the Nazi movement that Krebs shared with his former friend.During his tenure as dean of the Theological Faculty at the University of Freiburg, Krebs delivered an address in a university lecture... (shrink)

A growing number of studies on fairness in artificial intelligence (AI) use the notion of intersectionality to measure AI fairness. Most of these studies take intersectional fairness to be a matter of statistical parity among intersectional subgroups: an AI algorithm is “intersectionally fair” if the probability of the outcome is roughly the same across all subgroups defined by different combinations of the protected attributes. This paper identifies and examines three fundamental problems with this dominant interpretation of intersectional fairness in AI. (...) First, the dominant approach is so preoccupied with the intersection of attributes/categories (e.g., race, gender) that it fails to address the intersection of oppression (e.g., racism, sexism), which is more central to intersectionality as a critical framework. Second, the dominant approach faces a dilemma between infinite regress and fairness gerrymandering: it either keeps splitting groups into smaller subgroups or arbitrarily selects protected groups. Lastly, the dominant view fails to capture what it really means for AI algorithms to be fair, in terms of both distributive and non-distributive fairness. I distinguish a strong sense of AI fairness from a weak sense that is prevalent in the literature, and conclude by envisioning paths towards strong intersectional fairness in AI. (shrink)

The Problems of Philosophy is a 1912 book by Bertrand Russell, in which Russell attempts to create a brief and accessible guide to the problems of philosophy. Focusing on problems he believes will provoke positive and constructive discussion, Russell concentrates on knowledge rather than metaphysics: If it is uncertain that external objects exist, how can we then have knowledge of them but by probability. There is no reason to doubt the existence of external objects simply because of sense data. Russell (...) guides the reader through his famous 1910 distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description and introduces important theories of Plato, Aristotle, René Descartes, David Hume, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and others to lay the foundation for philosophical inquiry by general readers and scholars alike. "In the following pages I have confined myself in the main to those problems of philosophy in regard to which I thought it possible to say something positive and constructive, since merely negative criticism seemed out of place. For this reason, theory of knowledge occupies a larger space than metaphysics in the present volume, and some topics much discussed by philosophers are treated very briefly, if at all. (shrink)

Intersectionality has utilized various feminist theories that continue subculture of violence thinking about Black men and boys. While intersectional feminists often claim that intersectionality leads to a clearer social analysis of power and hierarchies throughout society and within groups, the categories and claims of intersectionality fail to distinguish themselves from previously racist theories that sought to explain race, class, and gender, based on subcultural values. This article is the first to interrogate the theories used to construct the gendered categories and (...) the assumptions behind Black male positionality under intersectional analyses. Contrary to its promises for more liberated Black identities, intersectionality merely replicates the pseudo-science of racist criminology and presents decades old theories as cutting-edge gender analyses. In short, while intersectionality has allowed Black women to create nuanced experiences and epistemological accounts of Black womanhood, the very same theory has confined Black male experience to the perpetration of violence and defined Black manhood as lesser—merely the exemplification of white masculinity’s pathological excess. (shrink)

This book is an invitation to read poetry. Simon Critchley argues that poetry enlarges life with a range of observation, power of expression and attention to language that eclipses any other medium. In a rich engagement with the poetry of Wallace Stevens, Critchley reveals that poetry also contains deep and important philosophical insight. Above all, he argues for a "poetic epistemology" that enables us to think afresh the philosophical problem of the relation between mind and world, and ultimately to (...) cast the problem away. Drawing astutely on Kant, the German and English Romantics and Heidegger, Critchley argues that through its descriptions of particular things and their stubborn plainness - whether water, guitars, trees, or cats - poetry evokes the "mereness" of things. It is this experience that provokes the mood of calm and releases the imaginative insight we need to press back against the pressure of reality. Critchley also argues that this calm defines the cinematic eye of Terrence Malick, whose work is discussed at the end of the book. (shrink)

Robert E. Myers has assembled a collection of essays which explore aspects of the relationship between science fiction and philosophy. Contributing authors focus on significant issues, questions, and ideas that penetrate to the center of our individual and social conceptions of human existence, and affect the ways in which we attempt to comprehend our world, ourselves, and others. The authors bring to this study the insights of diverse disciplines: philosophy, social science, poetry, linguistics, future studies, medical humanities, and literature. Dealing (...) exclusively with topics relating to science fiction and philosophy they offer an initial exploration of the philosophical problems within science fiction and their implications. (shrink)

This study examines the problem of moral considerability and the Other and from two basic standpoints, namely, a phenomenological analysis of alterity and a hermeneutical-comparative encounter between the continental tradition and its "Other." This hermeneutical-comparative engagement places the phenomenological tradition in dialogue with the East Asian tradition concerning the intersection of knowledge and "moral disclosure." ;I argue that we confront the moral considerability of the Other horizontally, which is to say that the presence of knowing shades into the irreducible (...) difference of the situation occupied by the Other . Sincere attempts to identify with the Other realize a morally transformative confrontation with absolute alterity , namely, the direct phenomenological experience of the Other's autonomy, which constitutes the concrete sense of the Other as morally considerable. Moral relationships with the Other, therefore, are defined as those modes of comportment that allow the Other to be disclosed qua absolute alterity and not merely in terms of relative alterity. For example, relationships of intimacy, solidarity, and compassion, optimally disclose and shelter the absolute alterity of the Other. Hence, "intimation," rather than intentionality, defines the proper mode of directedness by which the Other qua Other is disclosed. ;The fundamental ethical question thus becomes the question of moral disclosure, i.e., the clarification of the domain of moral considerables, and, only secondarily, the question of "correct" moral action, i.e., the regulation of the domain of moral considerables. The project of ethics is thereby reconceived as an "inconceivable devotion" towards the Other, namely, a cultivated attention to alterity that situates us within a field of excessive moral obligation. In the end, an ethics of alterity requires an understanding of moral obligation as a commitment to a process of continually enacting new possibilities of intimacy, solidarity, and moral relation, which are rooted in the maturation of moral skill rather than in the refinement of moral theory. (shrink)

Intersectionality theory explores the special sorts of disadvantage that arise as the result of occupying multiple disadvantaged demographic categories. One significant methodological problem for the quantitative study of intersectionality is the difficulty of acquiring data sets large enough to produce significant results when one is looking for intersectional effects. For this reason, we argue, simulation methods may be particularly useful to this branch of theorizing because they can generate precise predictions and causal dependencies in a relatively cheap way, and (...) can thus guide future empirical work. We illustrate this point through models which show that intersectional oppression can arise under conditions where social groups are disadvantaged in the emergence of bargaining norms. As we show, intersectional disadvantage can arise even when actors from all social categories are completely identical in terms of preferences and abilities. The conditions necessary to derive such disadvantage are relatively minimal. And when actors behave in ways that reflect stronger intersectional identities, the potential for disadvantage increases. (shrink)

At the intersection of aesthetics and the philosophy of perception lies a problem about representational images. When you look at Vermeer's View of Delft, do you in fact get to see Delft? It would be nice if we could answer in the affirmative, as it would so neatly explain many of our practices in engaging with images. Be it in churches, advertising, or psychology labs, we typically use images as substitutes for the immediate perception of things. Here is what (...) I claim: Images make it possible to see the objects they represent, and they do so because they can function in vision as perceptual mediators. A perceptual mediator is an object of perception by means of which we can perceive something wholly distinct from it. I show that, while such perceptual mediators may be exceptional in vision, in other sensory modalities they occur universally. Our sensory lives would be impoverished without the possibility of perceiving things mediately. In Chapter 1 I identify a fundamental dispute about images. The dispute is about whether images represent by making absent scenes appear to a viewer, or by merely copying the way an object or event looks. Many philosophers favour the idea that images merely copy how things look. In Chapter 2 I explain my dissatisfaction with the copy view. I lay out my main positive proposal in Chapter 3. How does the idea that images make absent objects visible fit with our current concept of perception? I formulate my answer through a study of the other sensory modalities. In audition, it is no mystery that sounds can make other things heard. My arguments forge a connection between images and sounds that has not been explored in recent work on representation or perception. I show how it offers an attractive solution to our problem. In Chapter 4, I argue that moreover, we may regard mediate perception as a purely sensory mode of perception. There is no need to rely on non-sensory or quasi-sensory effects of thought or cognition. Instead, coming to see a painted surface as an image consists in no more than discovering a previously unseen aspect of our visible surroundings. In Chapter 5 I consider at a more general level how visual images contribute to visual perception. Overall, I establish how visual representation has a structural place in our visual world. (shrink)

The intersection approach is a common method of overcoming a conflict among multiple values. Under this approach, a state is more desirable than another if it is so for all criteria in question. A fundamental difficulty is that judgment under the intersection approach lacks completeness in too many cases. We propose alternative methods that extend the intersection approach: the union and union-intersection approaches. Our methods generate a (quasi-)coherence judgment which is more completed and can be applied to most problems of (...) ethical indices. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Intersection of Medicine and ReligionJohn C. DormoisThe practice of medicine offers a host of rewards to the practitioner. Besides the obvious intellectual satisfaction of solving a difficult diagnostic problem or the ability to make a comfortable living, I have found the greatest personal sense of moral gratification when helping [End Page 196] families negotiate the most challenging event in life: making decisions at end of life. Whether (...) the condition was a ruptured intracranial aneurysm with brain death or a patient with far advanced cancer struggling with the choice between experimental chemotherapy or choosing comfort therapy at home surrounded by family for the remaining days of life, the moral courage required to provide the best guidance was considerable. In my early years of practice I didn’t call my actions in these situations “courageous” nor were there moral “guidelines” providing a blueprint. I knew I responded with empathy and compassion and that this ability had a lot to do with being raised in a religious or spiritual home. At the same time, I suspected that some of the lack of empathy and compassion I witnessed in some of my colleagues was related to the very training programs of physicians. This essay traces the origin of my moral and ethical concerns about medical education and my intention to reinvigorate the spiritual or existential voice in medicine.An early life experience had a great deal to do with shaping my moral development. At age seven my family traveled through the West Indies. My father’s amateur radio hobby meant that at every stop we would be greeted by one of his radio contacts. One stop in particular was life changing.Port au Prince, Haiti was an unknown place to this seven year–old, but to say it was a culture shock to a boy from Kansas would be an understatement of epic proportions. It was during this visit that I experienced true poverty in its most blatant form. In downtown Port au Prince I saw limbless beggars and the deformed from polio and malnutrition. But it was the sight of the garbage dump near the center of town that changed my world forever. There, among piles of detritus, I saw children and families making their home in the dump. They had hollowed out a sort of cavern in the piles of trash that served as a place of refuge from both the rain and the sun.This experience in many ways has served as a framework and background for my life. Although seen through the eyes of a seven year–old, the picture can only be adequately understood within the context of being raised by religiously faithful parents, parents free of hypocrisy whose lives personified the best in Christian virtues and practices. These early experiences planted the seeds that would only fully blossom some 60 years later.Medical school was a demanding but exhilarating experience. Each day was a day of discovery … anatomy, physiology, pathology … all subjects opening up a whole new world to explore. Internal medicine suited me best since it was the specialty that most closely integrated all the basic sciences necessary to arrive at a diagnosis. I loved the elegance of endocrinology in particular where a given hormone mediator could cause widely different effects if present in excess or completely absent. But I was in the end drawn to cardiology since it combined complex physiology with my avocation, the love of running.There was, however, a disturbing aspect of medicine education that I observed affecting many of my classmates. Although I can vividly recall the enthusiasm that all of us shared as we donned our white coats for the first time and envisioned a future of caring for our patients, things gradually and insidiously changed over the next four years. The altruism and empathy that was so evident in the early years gradually lessened as graduation approached. I could not help being struck by this change and wondered at the time why that should happen. I had no insight then that what I had observed was a well recognized consequence of the medical school experience. I’m sure that the passage from professional training to practice in... (shrink)

This book reports on cutting-edge concepts related to Bourbaki’s notion of structures mères. It merges perspectives from logic, philosophy, linguistics and cognitive science, suggesting how they can be combined with Bourbaki’s mathematical structuralism in order to solve foundational, ontological and epistemological problems using a novel category-theoretic approach. By offering a comprehensive account of Bourbaki’s structuralism and answers to several important questions that have arisen in connection with it, the book provides readers with a unique source of information and inspiration for (...) future research on this topic. (shrink)

This paper concerns the relations between the relative Manin–Mumford conjecture and Pink’s conjecture on unlikely intersections in mixed Shimura varieties. The variety under study is the 4-dimensional Poincaré biextension attached to a universal elliptic curve. A detailed list of its special subvarieties is drawn up, providing partial verifications of Pink’s conjecture in this case, and two open problems are stated in order to complete its proof.

Merely a threat? Worldwide transformation as a chance of development - psychological reflection The author considers the psychological aspects of globalisation, drawing attention to the possible effects of worldwide transformations. She presents definition problems and characterises the main currents and mechanisms of globalisation at the turn of the 20th and 21st century. Several standpoints of contemporaneity researchers concerning the evaluation of the effects of undergoing transformations have also been recalled. Noticing the diverse effects for development and the functioning of individuals (...) and groups, she concentrates on a selected aspect of the living environment, namely, on diversity. She formulates the thesis that the heterogeneity of the environment, which constitutes a characteristic of globalisation, stimulates development in its various phases and fields, optimising particularly the functioning of reflective persons who enter into dialogue with contemporaneity. (shrink)

In "Futurc Generations: Further Problems,"‘ and Part Four of Reasons and Persons} Derek Pariit raises many perplexing questions. Although some think his ingenious arguments little more than delightful puzzles, I believe they challenge some of our deepest beliefs. In this article, I examine some of Pariit’s arguments, focusing mainly on "The Mere Addition Paradox." If my analysis is correct, Parfit’s arguments have extremely interesting and important implications that not even Pariit rcalized. In Part I, I present ParHt’s argument for (...) the Merc Addition Paradox, and show that given Pa.rHt’s assumptions, a radical conclusion seems t0 follow; the notion of "bctter th2m"—indced, even the notion of "aH things.. (shrink)

The majority of translation theories remerging from the works of contemporary philosophers suffer from a lack of well-organized textual/semiotic analysis tools. Although such theories are specifically important because of their postulates, their incoherent methods normally make them difficult to be used or even sufficiently understood. Hermeneutic theories, however, have been re-visiting and re-constructing their principles, showing a remarkable tendency toward methodological and empirical investigation guided by their philosophy. Translational hermeneutics, as a major movement, has suggested six fundamental principles. Although this (...) contribution systemizes and simplifies hermeneutic conceptions, it still needs to construct a lingual analytic system for practical translation. Seeking to address this problem, this study views the six principles in the light of narratology and suggests a unified organization based on Ricoeur’s narrative theory by breaking the principles into a cognitive-existential dimension and a lingual/semiotic dimension. This framework processes both minimal and maximal language variables and addresses practical and pedagogical considerations. (shrink)

Servant leadership offers a compelling ideal of self-sacrificing individuals who put the needs of others before their own and cultivate a culture of growth in their organisations. Although the theory’s attempts to emphasise the moral, emotional and relational dimensions of leadership are laudable, it has primarily assumed a decontextualised view of leadership untouched by power. This article aims to problematise servant leadership by undertaking an intersectional analysis of an Asian cis-male heterosexual senior manager in Australia. Through in-depth interviews with the (...) manager and his staff, the article shows how his attempts to practice servant leadership were informed by intersecting power dynamics of race, gender, sexuality, age and class that subordinated him to white power. The findings demonstrate the ways servant leadership is necessarily embedded in wider power structures that shape who gets to be a “servant leader” and who remains merely a “servant”. (shrink)

The first system of intersection types, Coppo and Dezani [3], extended simple types to include intersections and added intersection introduction and elimination rules (( $\wedge$ I) and ( $\wedge$ E)) to the type assignment system. The major advantage of these new types was that they were invariant under β-equality, later work by Barendregt, Coppo and Dezani [1], extended this to include an (η) rule which gave types invariant under βη-reduction. Urzyczyn proved in [6] that for both these systems it (...) is undecidable whether a given intersection type is empty. Kurata and Takahashi however have shown in [5] that this emptiness problem is decidable for the sytem including (η), but without ( $\wedge$ I). The aim of this paper is to classify intersection type systems lacking some of ( $\wedge$ I), ( $\wedge$ E) and (η), into equivalence classes according to their strength in typing λ-terms and also according to their strength in possessing inhabitants. This classification is used in a later paper to extend the above (un)decidability results to two of the five inhabitation-equivalence classes. This later paper also shows that the systems in two more of these classes have decidable inhabitation problems and develops algorithms to find such inhabitants. (shrink)

Kenneth Goodpaster has criticized ethicists like Feinberg and Frankena for too narrowly circumscribing the range of moral considerability, urging instead that “nothing short of the condition of being alive” is a satisfactory criterion. Goodpaster overlooks at least one crucial objection: that his own “condition of being alive” may aIso be too narrow a criterion of moral considerability, since “being in existence” is at least as plausible and nonarbitrary a criterion as is Goodpaster’s. I show that each of the arguments that (...) Goodpaster musters in support of his criterion can be used equally weIl to bolster “being in existence” as a test of moral considerability. Moreover, I argue that “being in existence” appears to be a stronger criterion overall, since it is broader. Until or unless a fuller justification is forthcoming of “being alive” as a satisfactory criterion of moral considerability-a justification which must demonstrate that “mere things,” included under the condition of “being in existence,” do not deserve moral consideration--Goodpaster’sthesis is confronted with a serious problem. (shrink)

The scandal to philosophy and human reason, wrote Kant, is that we must take the existence of material objects on mere faith . In contrast, the skeptical paradox that has scandalized recent philosophy is not formulated in terms of faith, but rather in terms of justification, warrant, and entitlement. I argue that most contemporary approaches to the paradox (both dogmatist/liberal and default/conservative) do not address the traditional problem that scandalized Kant, and that the status of having a warrant (...) (or justification) that is derived from entitlement is irrelevant to whether we take our beliefs on mere faith. For, one can have the sort of warrant that most contemporary anti-skeptics posit while still taking one’s belief on mere faith. An alternative approach to the traditional problem is sketched, one that still makes use of contemporary insights about “entitlement.”. (shrink)

This paper calls fresh attention to ethical problems surrounding prenatal testing by focusing on genetic knowledge gained through evolving testing procedures. Advances in reproductive and prenatal genetic testing include non-invasive tests, such as Verifi and Materniti21, designed to gather detailed information regarding fetal DNA as early as 10 weeks. Meanwhile, a new method of chromosomal microarray has proved more reliable than karyotyping in detecting fetal abnormality. This method detects abnormalities in 1 out of every 60 pregnancies in which karyotyping identified (...) the fetus as “normal.” Chromosomal microarray directly compares fetal DNA to DNA from a presumptively “healthy person” to identify genetic deviations. The chromosomal microarray method thus assumes a human genetic blueprint—that is, a normal genotype, deviance from which is risky and open to medical diagnosis. But, according to philosopher and geneticist Jackie Leach Scully, there is no genetic blueprint for human beings. Rather, genetic variation is constant. Thus, notes Scully, genetic discourse could free medical discourse from the dictates of the binary between normal and abnormal, although mistaken belief in a genetic blueprint can foil this alternative way of speaking and thinking. Prenatal testing has received critical philosophical attention from both disability theorists and feminists. Adrienne Asch suggests that prenatal testing and diagnosis stigmatizes already-existing persons with disabilities by suggesting that bodily deviance is intolerable. Licia Carlson coined the phrase “prenatal prototypes” to describe the obfuscating results of genetic profiling carried out on the fetus. The philosophical conversation Asch and Carlson stimulate involves higher stakes now that testing uncovers fetal genotype and reveals mere genetic deviation in order to aid reproductive decision-making. I argue that prenatal testing, and especially the most recently developed testing procedures described above, forecloses Scully’s alternative discourse of genetic variation by supporting an ideal of a singular “healthy genotype,” deviance from which is to be uncovered and avoided. Mobilizing this insight by drawing on the work of feminist disability scholars like Asch and Carlson, I seek to foreground the play between norm and deviance. I expose the normalizing field of statistical risk, operating in excess of medical diagnosis, which requires potential parents to manage and avoid deviance itself. (shrink)