Text of and reflection on the 1981 encounter between Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jacques Derrida, which featured a dialogue between hermeneutics in Germany and post-structuralism in France. <br.

Building on the breakthrough text Philosophy and Engineering: An Emerging Agenda, this book offers 30 chapters covering conceptual and substantive developments in the philosophy of engineering, along with a series of critical reflections by engineering practitioners. The volume demonstrates how reflective engineering can contribute to a better understanding of engineering identity and explores how integrating engineering and philosophy could lead to innovation in engineering methods, design and education. The volume is divided into reflections on practice, principles and process, each of (...) which challenges prevalent assumptions and commitments within engineering and philosophy. The volume explores the ontological and epistemological dimensions of engineering and exposes the falsity of the commonly held belief that the field is simply the application of science knowledge to problem solving. Above all, the perspectives collected here demonstrate the value of a constructive dialogue between engineering and philosophy and show how collaboration between the disciplines casts light on longstanding problems from both sides. The chapters in this volume are from a diverse and international body of authors, including philosophers and engineers, and represent a highly select group of papers originally presented in three different conferences. These are the 2008 Workshop on Philosophy and Engineering held at the Royal Academy of Engineering; the 2009 meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Technology at the University of Twente in the Netherlands; and the Forum on Philosophy, Engineering, and Technology, held in Golden, Colorado at the Colorado School of Mines. (shrink)

How much responsibility ought a professional engineer to have with regard to supporting basic principles of sustainable development? While within the United States, professional engineering societies, as reflected in their codes of ethics, differ in their responses to this question, none of these professional societies has yet to put the engineer’s responsibility toward sustainability on a par with commitments to public safety, health, and welfare. In this paper, we aim to suggest that sustainability should be included in the paramountcy clause (...) because it is a necessary condition to ensure the safety, health, and welfare of the public. Part of our justification rests on the fact that to engineer sustainably means among many things to consider social justice, understood as the fair and equitable distribution of social goods, as a design constraint similar to technical, economic, and environmental constraints. This element of social justice is not explicit in the current paramountcy clause. Our argument rests on demonstrating that social justice in terms of both inter- and intra-generational equity is an important dimension of sustainability (and engineering). We also propose that embracing sustainability in the codes while recognizing the role that social justice plays may elevate the status of the engineer as public intellectual and agent of social good. This shift will then need to be incorporated in how we teach undergraduate engineering students about engineering ethics. (shrink)

Solutions to the problem ofprotecting informational privacy in cyberspacetend to fall into one of three categories:technological solutions, self-regulatorysolutions, and legislative solutions. In thispaper, I suggest that the legal protection ofthe right to online privacy within the USshould be strengthened. Traditionally, inidentifying where support can be found in theUS Constitution for a right to informationalprivacy, the point of focus has been on theFourth Amendment; protection in this contextfinds its moral basis in personal liberty,personal dignity, self-esteem, and othervalues. On the other hand, (...) the constitutionalright to privacy first established by Griswoldv. Connecticut finds its moral basis largelyin a single value, the value of autonomy ofdecision-making. I propose that an expandedconstitutional right to informational privacy,responsive to the escalating threats posed toonline privacy by developments in informationaltechnology, would be more likely to find asolid moral basis in the value of autonomyassociated with the constitutional right toprivacy found in Griswold than in the varietyof values forming the moral basis for the rightto privacy backed by the Fourth Amendment. (shrink)

In 2003, Peter Singer and others sounded a warning in the pages of the journal Nanotechnology that research into the ethical, social, and legal implications of nanotechnology was increasingly lagging behind research into nanotechnology itself. More recently, Alfred Nordmann and Arie Rip have argued that while the pace of ELSI inquiry has now picked up, the inquiry itself is focused far too much on hypothetical and futuristic scenarios. But might there be advantages for ethicists and philosophers of technology interested in (...) the ELSI of emerging technologies to continue to think in a speculative vein? Drawing upon some lessons learned from the development of environmental ethics, and looking primarily at information and computing technologies, I suggest three reasons as to how speculative thinking can add value to ELSI reflection. I argue that it can allow for critical values to emerge that might otherwise go unheeded, open up avenues to reframe issues that might otherwise go unnoticed, and, perhaps most importantly, permit questions to be raised that might otherwise go unvoiced. (shrink)

Philosophers and others concerned with the moral good of personal privacy most often see threats to privacy raised by the development of pervasive computing as primarily being threats to the loss of control over personal information. Two reasons in particular lend this approach plausibility. One reason is that the parallels between pervasive computing and ordinary networked computing, where everyday transactions over the Internet raise concerns about personal information privacy, appear stronger than their differences. Another reason is that the individual devices (...) which can become linked in a pervasive computing environment: PDAs, GPS sensors, RFID chips/readers, publicly-located video surveillance cameras, Internet-enabled mobile phones, and the like, each raise threats to individual privacy. Without discounting the value of this approach, this paper aims to propose an alternative; and, as a result of recasting the threat to individual privacy from pervasive computing, to identify other, and deeper, moral goods that pervasive computing puts at risk that otherwise might remain concealed. In particular, I argue that pervasive computing threatens to compromise what I call existential autonomy: the right to decide for ourselves at least some of the existential conditions under which we form and develop our ways of life, including our relations to information technology. From this perspective, some moral goods at stake in protecting privacy in an environment of pervasive computing emerge that have less to do with furthering human well-being through the promotion of self-identity and subjectivity, than with stimulating curiosity, receptivity to difference, and, most broadly, openness to the world. (shrink)

In this contribution to the philosophical debate over distracted driving, I defend the idea that talking on the cell phone while driving is an activity that ought neither to be regulated by public policy means nor addressed by means of automotive safety design features, such as the augmented-reality windshield. I arrive at this conclusion through taking a phenomenologically-influenced look at what an average driver pays attention to during the act of driving an automobile. More specifically, I suggest that if driving (...) while “celling” is taken to involve a single act of attention within a single experience, or taken to involve a “weak” form of multi-attention, a way opens up to see driving while “celling” as being “good” driving. (shrink)

Some kinds of technological change not only trigger new ethical problems, but also give rise to questions about those very approaches to addressing ethical problems that have been relied upon in the past. Writing in the aftermath of World War II, Hans Jonas called for a new ``ethics of responsibility,'' based on the reasoning that modern technology dramatically divorces our moral condition from the assumptions under which standard ethical theories were first conceived. Can a similar claim be made about the (...) technologies of cyberspace? Do online information technologies so alter our moral condition that standard ethical theories become ineffective in helping us address the moral problems they create? I approach this question from two angles. First, I look at the impact of online information technologies on our powers of causal efficacy. I then go on to consider their impact on self-identity. We have good reasons, I suggest, to be skeptical of any claim that there is a need for a new, cyberspace ethics to address the moral dilemmas arising from these technologies. I conclude by giving a brief sketch of why this suggestion does not imply there is nothing philosophically interesting about the ethical challenges associated with cyberspace. (shrink)

This volume, the result of an ongoing bridge building effort among engineers and humanists, addresses a variety of philosophical, ethical, and policy issues emanating from engineering and technology. Interwoven through its chapters are two themes, often held in tension with one another: “Exploring Boundaries” and “Expanding Connections.” “Expanding Connections” highlights contributions that look to philosophy for insight into some of the challenges engineers face in working with policy makers, lay designers, and other members of the public. It also speaks to (...) reflections included in this volume on the connections between fact and value, reason and emotion, engineering practice and the social good, and, of course, between engineering and philosophy. “Exploring Boundaries” highlights contributions that focus on some type of demarcation. Public policy sets a boundary between what is regulated from what is not, academic disciplines delimit themselves by their subjects and methods of inquiry, and professions approach problems with unique goals and by using concepts and language in particular ways that create potential obstacles to collaboration with other fields. These and other forms of boundary setting are also addressed in this volume. Contributors explore these two themes in a variety of specific contexts, including engineering epistemology, engineers’ social responsibilities, engineering and public policy-making, engineering innovation, and the affective dimensions of engineering work. The book also includes analyses of social and ethical issues with emerging technologies such as 3-D printing and its use in medical applications, as well as social robots. Initial versions of the invited papers included in this book were first presented at the 2014 meeting of the Forum on Philosophy, Engineering, and Technology, held at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia, USA. The volume furthers fPET’s intent of extending and developing the philosophy of engineering as an academic field, and encouraging conversation, promoting a sense of shared enterprise, and building community among philosophers and engineers across a diversity of cultural backgrounds and approaches to inquiry. (shrink)

This contributed volume examines ethical ramifications of the development and use of autonomous vehicles. From ethical emergencies akin to the classic trolley problem to more overarching effects on social and economic structures, this volume’s discussion appeal to philosophers, social scientists, engineers, urban planners, and policy makers.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Jacques Derrida INTERPRETING SIGNATURES (NIETZSCHE/HEIDEGGER): TWO QUESTIONS T1HE first question concerns die name Nietzsche, die second has to do with the concept of totality. Let us begin widi chapters 2 and 3 of Heidegger's Nietzsche — dealing with "The Eternal Recurrence of the Same" and "The Will to Power as Knowledge," respectively. We will be turning especially to the subsection on chaos ["The Concept of Chaos," I, pp. 562-70] (...) and to "The Alleged Biologism of Nietzsche" ["Nietzsches angeblicher Biologismus"]. In view ofme fact mat the same interpretation is regularly at work throughout, the risks involved in choosing diis strategy are, I hope, quite limited. In each instance, a single system of reading is powerfully concentrated and gadiered together. It is directed at gadiering togedier the unity and the uniqueness of Nietzsche's diinking, which, as a fulfilled unity, is itself in a fair way to being the culmination of occidental metaphysics. Nietzsche would be precisely at the crest, or ridge, atop the peak of diis fulfillment. And thus he would be looking at both sides, down both slopes. What about diis unity — diis doubled unity? What is its connection to the name — or rather, the signature — of Nietzsche? Does Heidegger take any account of this question — which others might call biographical, autobiographical, or autographical — of the singularity of a signature ostensibly the proper name of Nietzsche? To put the matter anodier way, if one can glimpse behind Heidegger's reading of Nietzsche the foundations of a general reading of Western metaphysics, men die question Translated by Diane Michelfelder and Richard E. Palmer. 246 Jacques Derrida247 arises: To what extent does this interpretation of metaphysics in its totality and as a whole contain an interpretive decision about die unity or singularity of thinking? And to what extent does this interpretive decision also presuppose a decision about die "biographical," about the proper name, the autobiographical, and about signature — about the politics of signature? ' Heidegger's position on this subject I will indicate first ofall widi a summarizing and simplifying statement, which one could, I hope, demonstrate is not wrong: there is a unity in Nietzschean thought even if it is not that of a system in the classical sense. This unity is also its uniqueness, its singularity. A thesis explicidy advanced by Heidegger is that every great thinker has only one thought. This uniqueness was neither constituted nor threatened, neither gadiered together nor brought about, through a name or proper name — nor by the life of Nietzsche, either normal or insane. This unique unity is something it draws from the unity of Western metaphysics which is gathered together mere at its crest, which one could also compare to the simple unity of a line created by a fold. The result of all this is that biography, autobiography, the scene or the powers of the proper name, of proper names, signatures, and so on, are again accorded minority status, are again given the inessential place diey have always occupied in the history ofmetaphysics. This points to the necessity and place of a questioning which I can only sketch here. Such would be a simplified version of the question. Now let us read Heidegger a little more closely and seek to confirm the strongest coherence of his interpretation or, beyond its coherence, his deepest thought. As a provisional concession to die classical norms of reading, let us take this book at its beginning, or even before its beginning at the beginning ofthe preface. Naturally, diis preface was, like so many odiers, written later. As we know, the book goes back to a series of lectures given between 1936 and 1940, and to some treatises written between 1940 and 1946. One should take most careful note of these dates if one is to bring this interpretation, as a whole and in detail, into connection with the historicopolitical and institutional field of its presentation. The preface, however, dates from 1961. The intention of the two pages in mis case, as almost always, is to justify the publication of this collection by reference to the essential unity ofits totality: "This publication, rethought (nachgedacht) as a whole (als Ganzes) should provide a glimpse ofthe path ofthought... (shrink)

This article is currently available as a free download on ingentaconnect.

Festivals, as Hans-Georg Gadamer once pointed out, differ from other events due to their special temporal structure. They allow whoever participates in them to experience time with reference to its lingering rather than its passing away, by marking off a space between the moments of everyday life--a "while" whose duration refuses to be measured by the clock.

In this book, which received an honorable mention for the Johnsonian Prize in 1981, the author wants to "make Being and Time more readily accessible to non-Heideggerians". Non-Heideggerians, by whom Guignon means philosophers in the Anglo-American tradition, ought to find here that he has done exactly that. Guignon's strategy is to re-work the metaphysically-rooted vocabulary of Being and Time into the language of beliefs, grounds and justifications familiar to the epistemologist. What emerges from this move is a carefully articulated critique (...) which should be unsettling both to non-Heideggerians and Heideggerians alike. (shrink)

This book provides an introduction to postphenomenology, an emerging school of thought in the philosophy of technology and science and technology studies, which addresses the relationships users develop with the devices they use.

This co-edited volume compares Chinese and Western experiences of engineering, technology, and development. In doing so, it builds a bridge between the East and West and advances a dialogue in the philosophy of engineering. Divided into three parts, the book starts with studies on epistemological and ontological issues, with a special focus on engineering design, creativity, management, feasibility, and sustainability. Part II considers relationships between the history and philosophy of engineering, and includes a general argument for the necessity of dialogue (...) between history and philosophy. It continues with a general introduction to traditional Chinese attitudes toward engineering and technology, and philosophical case studies of the Chinese steel industry, railroads, and cybernetics in the Soviet Union. Part III focuses on engineering, ethics, and society, with chapters on engineering education and practice in China and the West. The book’s analyses of the interactions of science, engineering, ethics, politics, and policy in different societal contexts are of special interest. The volume as a whole marks a new stage in the emergence of the philosophy of engineering as a new regionalization of philosophy. This carefully edited interdisciplinary volume grew out of an international conference on the philosophy of engineering hosted by the University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. It includes 30 contributions by leading philosophers, social scientists, and engineers from Australia, China, Europe, and the United States. (shrink)

[The book] offers instructors and students a well-balanced anthology for ethics courses of all kinds. Applied ethics, Social problems, Introduction to ethics, and Moral problems are just some of the courses that might use this up-to-date collection of readings on the most hotly debated issues of our time. The book also includes important readings in moral theory, providing students with the necessary framework to evaluate positions. The book juxtaposes several different viewpoints on [various] social issues. -Back cover. This book is (...) primarily intended for undergraduates taking philosophy courses that address contemporary moral problems. -Pref. (shrink)

A. NATURAL. HISTORY. OF. THE. SENSES. “This is one of the best books of the year—by any measure you want to apply. It is interesting, informative, very well written. This book can be opened on any page and read with relish.... thoroughly  ...

IntroductionThis case study describes the process faculty at a large research university undertook to build a stand-alone online academic integrity course for first-year and transfer students. Because academic integrity is decentralized at the institution, building a more systematic program had to come from the bottom-up (faculty developed) rather than from the top down (institutionally mandated).Case descriptionUsing the learning management system, faculty and e-learning designers collaborated to build the course. Incorporating nuanced scenarios for six different types of misconduct (consistent with the (...) University’s Code of Student Rights, Responsibilities & Conduct), a pre- and post-test, and assessments for each scenario, the course provides experience in recognizing and avoiding academic misconduct.Discussion and evaluationAs a stand-alone course, the faculty who created it maintain control over content and are able to analyze student performance across the institution. In the ten months since its launch, the course has been eagerly adopted by faculty (n = 1853 students have completed the course) and post-test scores indicate students are learning from the course.ConclusionsAfter the successful launch of the student course, the next step, already underway, is the launch of learning modules for faculty and teaching assistants. (shrink)

A network of think tanks—the ASEAN-Institutes of Strategic and International Studies and their researchers—have played a proactive and sometimes influential role in regional debates on Asian economic integration and security cooperation through informal diplomacy. This paper contributes to the literature on knowledge utilisation, specifically debates on the role of policy research institutes in policy-making. Paying attention to the debates and research on economic and security cooperation which preceded attempts at institutionalisation drives analytical attention to scholars, think tanks and others in (...) the ‘interpretive community’ who were engaged in a long term learning activity to shape domestic and regional agendas and institutionalise discourses of regional cooperation. (shrink)

Introduction : but is it ethics? -- Alterity : the problem of transcendence -- Singularity : the unrepresentable face -- Responsibility : the infinity of the demand -- Ethics : normativity and norms -- Scarce resources? : Levinas, animals, and the environment -- Failures of recognition and the recognition of failure : Levinas and identity politics.

Kant Trouble offers a highly original and incisive reading of some of the lesser known and less lucid aspects of Kantian thought. Diane Morgan focuses her investigation on a radical reappraisal of Kant's writings on architecture, monarchy and faith in progress. She challenges the widely held view of Kant as the exponent of concrete and rigid rationality, and argues that his airtight "architectonic" mode of reasoning, which Kant identified in The Critique of Pure Reason, overlooks certain topics which destabilize (...) it. Exploring such topics as temporary forms of architecture and the concept of radical evil, Morgan arrives at a fresh and ground-breaking perspective on Kant not as a concrete rationalist but as a daring thinker--willing to entertain subversive themes that threaten his own system and the humanistic legacy of the Enlightenment. (shrink)

Showing that a radical feminist analysis cuts across class, race, sexuality, region, and religion, the varied contributors in this collection reveal the global reach of radical feminism and analyze the causes and solutions to patriarchal oppression.

_Kant Trouble_ offers a highly original and incisive reading of some of the lesser known aspects of Kantian thought. Throughout Morgan challenges the widely held view of Kant as the exponent of concrete and rigid rationality and argues that his airtight 'architectonic' mode of reasoning overlooks certain topics which destabilise it. These include temporary forms of architecture, such as landscape gardening; examples which undermine the autonomy of the Kantian subject, for example, freemasonry; and the concept of radical evil, all of (...) which suggest that Kant's thought was capable of accommodating troubling and subversive themes. Morgan's compelling discussion arrives at a fresh and ground breaking perspective on Kant whereby he is no longer to be regarded as a concrete rationalist, but as a daring thinker, not afraid to entertain ideas highly threatening to his own system and to the humanistic legacy of the enlightenment. (shrink)

Feminism and Deconstruction incisively examines the contemporary relevance of setting these movements beside one another. Diane Elam has written an intelligent and accessible introduction, which explores how feminism and deconstruction have been linked -- as theories and movements, as philosophies and disciplines. Elam's work allows the reader to rethink the political and contemplate the possibility that there is indeed life after identity politics. Feminism and Deconstruction is essential reading for anyone who needs a no-nonsense but stimulating guide through one (...) of the mazes of contemporary theory. (shrink)

Kant stated that there are three mental faculties: cognition, feeling, and desire. The faculty of feeling has received the least scholarly attention, despite its importance in Kant's broader thought, and this volume of new essays is the first to present multiple perspectives on a number of important questions about it. Why does Kant come to believe that feeling must be described as a separate faculty? What is the relationship between feeling and cognition, on the one hand, and desire, on the (...) other? What is the nature of feeling? What do the most discussed Kantian feelings, such as respect and sublimity, tell us about the nature of feeling for Kant? And what about other important feelings that have been overlooked or mischaracterized by commentators, such as enthusiasm and hope? This collaborative and authoritative volume will appeal to Kant scholars, historians of philosophy, and those working on topics in ethics, aesthetics, and emotions. (shrink)

Henceforth "to transform" should mean "to change the sense of sense."The field of the entity … is structured according to the diverse—genetic and structural—possibilities of the trace.The first article in the first issue of Philosophy and Rhetoric is "The Rhetorical Situation," Lloyd Bitzer's critical exegesis on "the nature of those contexts in which speakers or writers create rhetorical discourse". Bitzer contends that the rhetor produces "the rhetorical text" when a "real" or "natural" —"objective and publicly observable" —situation "calls the discourse (...) into existence". That was 1968. Five volumes later, as you know, Richard E. Vatz flips the causal relation, maintaining instead that... (shrink)

Explores the political forces underlying shifts in thinking about the respective influence of heredity and environment in shaping human behavior, and the feasibility and morality of eugenics.

In two experiments, we tested whether fearful facial expressions capture attention in an awareness-independent fashion. In Experiment 1, participants searched for a visible neutral face presented at one of two positions. Prior to the target, a backward-masked and, thus, invisible emotional or neutral face was presented as a cue, either at target position or away from the target position. If negative emotional faces capture attention in a stimulus-driven way, we would have expected a cueing effect: better performance where fearful or (...) disgusted facial cues were presented at target position than away from the target. However, no evidence of capture of attention was found, neither in behavior, nor in event-related lateralizations. In Experiment 2, we went one step further and used fearful faces as visible targets, too. Thereby, we sought to boost awareness-independent capture of attention by fearful faces. However, still, we found no significant attention-capture effect. Our results show that fearful facial expressions do not capture attention in an awareness-independent way. Results are discussed in light of existing theories. (shrink)

In part I of this paper I argue that on his theory of the mind as the idea of an actually existing body Spinoza is unable to account for the ability of the mind to have adequate knowledge, and I suggest that his theory of the eternity of the mind can be viewed as his solution to this problem. In part II I deal with the question of the meaning of ‘eternity’ in Spinoza, in regard both to God and the (...) human mind, and I sketch a line of thought which I believe may have provided him with further motivation for his theory that a part of the mind is eternal. (shrink)

Previous plan‐based models of dialogue understanding have been unable to account for many types of subdialogues present in naturally occurring conversations. One reason for this is that the models have not clearly differentiated between the varoius ways that an utterance can relate to a plan structure representing a topic. In this paper we present a plan‐based theory that allows a wide variety of utterance‐plan relationships. We introduce a set of discourse plans, each one corresponding to a particular way that an (...) utterance can relate to a discourse topic, and distinguish such plans from the set of plans that are actually used to model the topics. By incorporating knowledge about discourse into a plan‐based framework, we can account for a wide variety of subdialogues while maintaining the computational advantages of the plan‐based approach. (shrink)

From domestic goddess to desperate housewife, this book explores the importance and centrality of postfeminism in contemporary popular culture.

In this article the central philosophical issues concerning human-level artificial intelligence (AI) are presented. AI largely changed direction in the 1980s and 1990s, concentrating on building domain-specific systems and on sub-goals such as self-organization, self-repair, and reliability. Computer scientists aimed to construct intelligence amplifiers for human beings, rather than imitation humans. Turing based his test on a computer-imitates-human game, describing three versions of this game in 1948, 1950, and 1952. The famous version appears in a 1950 article in Mind, ‘Computing (...) Machinery and Intelligence’ (Turing 1950). The interpretation of Turing's test is that it provides an operational definition of intelligence (or thinking) in machines, in terms of behavior. ‘Intelligent Machinery’ sets out the thesis that whether an entity is intelligent is determined in part by our responses to the entity's behavior. Wittgenstein frequently employed the idea of a human being acting like a reliable machine. A ‘living reading-machine’ is a human being or other creature that is given written signs, for example Chinese characters, arithmetical symbols, logical symbols, or musical notation, and who produces text spoken aloud, solutions to arithmetical problems, and proofs of logical theorems. Wittgenstein mentions that an entity that manipulates symbols genuinely reads only if he or she has a particular history, involving learning and training, and participates in a social environment that includes normative constraints and further uses of the symbols. (shrink)

In this paper the cognitive, cultural, and linguistic bases for a pattern of conventionalization of two types of iconic handshapes are described. Work on sign languages has shown that handling handshapes and object handshapes express an agentive/non-agentive semantic distinction in many sign languages. H-HSs are used in agentive event descriptions and O-HSs are used in non-agentive event descriptions. In this work, American Sign Language and Italian Sign Language productions are compared as well as the corresponding groups of gesturers in each (...) country using “silent gesture.” While the gesture groups, in general, did not employ an H-HS/O-HS distinction, all participants used iconic handshapes more often in agentive than in no-agent event descriptions; moreover, none of the subjects produced an opposite pattern than the expected one . These effects are argued to be grounded in cognition. In addition, some individual gesturers were observed to produce the H-HS/O-HS opposition for agentive and non-agentive event descriptions—that is, more Italian than American adult gesturers. This effect is argued to be grounded in culture. Finally, the agentive/non-agentive handshape opposition is confirmed for signers of ASL and LIS, but previously unreported cross-linguistic differences were also found across both adult and child sign groups. It is, therefore, concluded that cognitive, cultural, and linguistic factors contribute to the conventionalization of this distinction of handshape type. (shrink)