Over the last decade, our appreciation of the importance of the nucleolus for cellular function has progressed from the ordinary to the extraordinary. We no longer think of the nucleolus as simply the site of ribosome production, or a dynamic subnuclear body noted by pathologists for its changes in size and shape with malignancy. Instead, the nucleolus has emerged as a key controller of many cellular processes that are fundamental to normal cell homeostasis and the target for dysregulation in many (...) human diseases; in some cases, independent of its functions in ribosome biogenesis. These extra‐nucleolar or new functions, which we term “non‐canonical” to distinguish them from the more traditional role of the nucleolus in ribosome synthesis, are the focus of this review. In particular, we explore how these non‐canonical functions may provide novel insights into human disease and in some cases new targets for therapeutic development. (shrink)

The molecular mechanism of temperature‐dependent sex determination (TSD) is a long‐standing mystery. How is the thermal signal sensed, captured and transduced to regulate key sex genes? Although there is compelling evidence for pathways via which cells capture the temperature signal, there is no known mechanism by which cells transduce those thermal signals to affect gene expression. Here we propose a novel hypothesis we call 3D‐TSD (the three dimensions of thermolabile sex determination). We postulate that the genome has capacity to remodel (...) in response to temperature by changing 3D chromatin conformation, perhaps via temperature‐sensitive transcriptional condensates. This could rewire enhancer–promoter interactions to alter the expression of key sex‐determining genes. This hypothesis can accommodate monogenic or multigenic thermolabile sex‐determining systems, and could be combined with upstream thermal sensing and transduction to the epigenome to commit gonadal fate. (shrink)

Résumé Cet article rend compte d’une recherche sur le vécu des couples confrontés au cancer. La qualité de vie du patient et de son entourage devient de plus en plus cruciale au fur et à mesure que s’accroît l’espérance de vie des personnes atteintes. Le couple constitue une entité psychique spécifique qui résulte de la dynamique intersubjective entre conjoints. Cette entité peut être atteinte en cas de maladie grave. L’étude servant d’appui à cet article porte sur l’annonce de la maladie, (...) la période des traitements et la rémission. Il est ainsi mis en évidence que le « syndrome de Lazare » ne concerne pas que la personne malade, mais également le conjoint et que l’homéostasie du couple est perturbée bien au-delà de l’annonce de la rémission. (shrink)

Résumé Cet article rend compte d’une recherche sur le vécu des couples confrontés au cancer. La qualité de vie du patient et de son entourage devient de plus en plus cruciale au fur et à mesure que s’accroît l’espérance de vie des personnes atteintes. Le couple constitue une entité psychique spécifique qui résulte de la dynamique intersubjective entre conjoints. Cette entité peut être atteinte en cas de maladie grave. L’étude servant d’appui à cet article porte sur l’annonce de la maladie, (...) la période des traitements et la rémission. Il est ainsi mis en évidence que le « syndrome de Lazare » ne concerne pas que la personne malade, mais également le conjoint et que l’homéostasie du couple est perturbée bien au-delà de l’annonce de la rémission. (shrink)

This study explores how paradoxical tensions between economic growth and environmental protection are avoided through organizational mythmaking. By examining the European oil and gas supermajors’ “CEO-speak” about climate change, we show how mythmaking facilitates the disregarding, diverting, and/or displacing of sustainability tensions. In doing so, our findings further illustrate how certain defensive responses are employed: regression, or retreating to the comforts of past familiarities, fantasy, or escaping the harsh reality that fossil fuels and climate change are indeed irreconcilable, and projecting, (...) or shifting blame to external actors for failing to address climate change. By highlighting the discursive effects of enacting these responses, we illustrate how the European oil and gas supermajors self-determine their inability to substantively address the complexities of climate change. We thus argue that defensive responses are not merely a form of mismanagement as the paradox and corporate sustainability literature commonly suggests, but a strategic resource that poses serious ethical concerns given the imminent danger of issues such as climate change. (shrink)

Publication du 7e décret connu d'Entella (Sicile), qui comme les six autres a été gravé sur une plaque de bronze passée clandestinement dans le commerce. L'histoire de cette communauté sicilienne, en rapport avec les Grecs, les Carthaginois et les Romains, chassée de sa patrie et accueillie par des voisins compatissants ne pourra être étudiée qu'une fois tout le matériel publié.

Assistive systems based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) are bound to reshape decision-making in all areas of society. One of the most intricate challenges arising from their implementation in high-stakes environments such as medicine concerns their frequently unsatisfying levels of explainability, especially in the guise of the so-called black-box problem: highly successful models based on deep learning seem to be inherently opaque, resisting comprehensive explanations. This may explain why some scholars claim that research should focus on rendering AI systems understandable, rather (...) than explainable. Yet, there is a grave lack of agreement concerning these terms in much of the literature on AI. We argue that the seminal distinction made by the philosopher and physician Karl Jaspers between different types of explaining and understanding in psychopathology can be used to promote greater conceptual clarity in the context of Machine Learning (ML). Following Jaspers, we claim that explaining and understanding constitute multi-faceted epistemic approaches that should not be seen as mutually exclusive, but rather as complementary ones as in and of themselves they are necessarily limited. Drawing on the famous example of Watson for Oncology we highlight how Jaspers’ methodology translates to the case of medical AI. Classical considerations from the philosophy of psychiatry can therefore inform a debate at the centre of current AI ethics, which in turn may be crucial for a successful implementation of ethically and legally sound AI in medicine. (shrink)

As Charles Camosy observes, he and I agree more than we disagree. He believes with no less conviction than I do that deliberately killing infant children is profoundly morally wrong and a grave violation of human rights.1 So where do we disagree?I think that killing infant children, or promoting the moral permissibility of doing so, is moral madness, and that we should say so, rather than treating infanticide as just one more legitimate, albeit in the end morally mistaken view. We (...) owe this to potential victims of the potential mainstreaming of support for infanticide.Professor Camosy suggests that my view, or its public expression, is uncharitable towards advocates of infanticide and ‘at variance with a Christian …. (shrink)

Wilkinson and Savulescu did not agree with the court's decision to continue M's treatment and suggested in their recent commentary that the magnitude of benefits of being alive for M is small compared with the potential use of health resources for other patients. We argue that the benefits of being sensate to the surroundings for an otherwise unconscious person are not necessarily small. One cannot assess on behalf of another person the magnitude of benefits of being alive according to the (...) intensity or the duration of negative experiences. Denying life-sustaining treatment to patients in a minimally conscious state solely on the grounds that they are less capable of enjoying the benefits represents grave discrimination against disabled persons. For patients in a minimally conscious state who have not delegated a surrogate or made any advance decision about their medical treatment, the duty of doctors is to preserve their right to self-determination and maximise their capacity to enjoy their life. M should live on, and life-sustaining treatment should not be withdrawn. (shrink)

It is not just rhetoric to ask why we should still be reading the Young Hegelians today. In spite of their commitment to action, their influence on the politics of the times was marginal at best; and even as philosophers, the movement of thought which they represented was all but dead by 1848. Now that we read them at a distance of over a century, it is clear that for once at least the fate meted out by circumstances was well (...) deserved. The writings of the Young Hegelians appear painfully thin in insight and force of argument. This global judgment must of course be qualified. Protestant theology has not been the same since David Strauss, and Feuerbach’s conception of man stands as the first statement of modern scientific humanism. Still, the ideal of humanity that inspired either of them has none of the historical richness of Hegel’s “spirit”; in the case of Feuerbach there is also none of the scholarship that redeems at least some of Strauss’ work. The value of both men’s writings lay mostly in their iconoclastic nature. They cleared the air, though at the cost of grave oversimplifications, of the illusion that after Hegel things could quite ever be the same again - as if the speculative comprehension of the Christian faith that Hegel claimed to have achieved could have left that faith undisturbed. But now that the profane has become the commonplace, there is little to recommend them in our eyes; and now that we have also had plenty of opportunity to notice how quickly the spirit of revolution degenerates into faction and anarchy, there is even less to recommend the rest of the Young Hegelians. The later Marx stands out intellectually in comparison to them precisely because he succeeded in breaking free from their ideological hold. I sometimes wonder whether his figure has really been enhanced by the post-war attempt at reinterpreting Capital in the light of his supposed earlier “humanism.” Sidney Hook’s statement that the late Marx was a scientist, and that his theory is to be proven either right or wrong on strictly historical and empirical evidence, might be a bit far-fetched perhaps; it still is in my mind the best compliment that one can pay to Marx. (shrink)

Justified by spectacular achievements facilitated through applied deep learning methodology, the “Everything is possible” view dominates this new hour in the “boom and bust” curve of AI performance. The optimistic view collides head on with the “It is not possible”—ascertainments often originating in a skewed understanding of both AI and medicine. The meaning of the conflicting views can be assessed only by addressing the nature of medicine. Specifically: Which part of medicine, if any, can and should be entrusted to AI—now (...) or at some moment in the future? AI or not, medicine should incorporate the anticipation perspective in providing care. (shrink)

First published in 1903, this volume revolutionized philosophy and forever altered the direction of ethical studies. A philosopher’s philosopher, G. E. Moore was the idol of the Bloomsbury group, and Lytton Strachey declared that Principia Ethica marked the rebirth of the Age of Reason. This work clarifies some of moral philosophy’s most common confusions and redefines the science’s terminology. Six chapters explore: the subject matter of ethics, naturalistic ethics, hedonism, metaphysical ethics, ethics in relation to conduct, and the ideal. Moore's (...) simplicity of style and precise use of everyday language exercised an enormous influence on the development of analytic philosophy, and they contribute to the continuing resonance of his compelling arguments. (shrink)

Georges Bataille was a philosopher, writer, and literary critic whose work has had a significant impact across disciplines as diverse as philosophy, sociology, economics, art history and literary criticism, as well as influencing key figures in post-modernist and post-structuralist philosophy such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. In recent years, the number of works published on Georges Bataille, as well as the variety of contexts in which his work is invoked, has markedly increased. In _Georges Bataille: Key Concepts_ an international (...) team of contributors provide an accessible introduction to and survey of Bataille's thought. The editors’ introduction provides an overview of Bataille’s work, while the chapters in the first section cover the social, political, artistic and philosophical contexts that shaped his thought. In the second part, each chapter engages with a key theme in Bataille’s philosophy, including: art, eroticism, evil, inner experience, heterology, religion, sacrifice, and sovereignty. The final chapter addresses Bataille’s literary writings. Georges Bataille: Key Concepts is an invaluable guide for students from across the Humanities and Social Sciences, coming to Bataille’s work for the first time. Contributors: Giulia Agostini, Elisabeth Arnould-Bloomfield, Tiina Arppe, Marcus Coelen, Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Patrick ffrench, Marina Galletti, Nadine Hartmann, Mark Hewson, Andrew Hussey, Stuart Kendall, Claire Nioche, Gerhard Poppenberg, and Michèle Richman. (shrink)

The informed consent process presents challenges for psychological trauma research (e.g. Institutional Review Board [IRB] apprehension). While previous research documents researcher and IRB-member perspectives on these challenges, participant views remain absent. Thus, using a mixed-methods approach, we investigated participant views on consent guidelines in two convenience samples: crowdsourced (N = 268) and undergraduate (N = 265) participants. We also examined whether trauma-exposure influenced participant views. Overall, participants were satisfied with current guidelines, providing minor feedback and ethical reminders for researchers. Moreover, (...) participant views for consent were similar irrespective of trauma-exposure. Our study has implications for IRBs and psychological researchers. (shrink)

Global Economy, Global Justice explores a vital question that is suppressed in most economics texts: "what makes for a good economic outcome?" Neoclassical theory embraces the normative perspective of "welfarism" to assess economic outcomes. This volume demonstrates the fatal flaws of this perspective--flaws that stem from objectionable assumptions about human nature, society and science. Exposing these failures, the book obliterates the ethical foundations of global neoliberalism. George DeMartino probes heterodox economic traditions and philosophy in search of an ethically viable (...) alternative to welfarism. Drawing on the work of Amartya Sen, DeMartino proposes the egalitarian principle of the "global harmonization of capabilities" to guide economics. This principle provides a basis for resisting oppression the world over while nevertheless demanding respect for cultural diversity. DeMartino puts this principle to work adjudicating contemporary debates over global policy regimes, and completes thebook with a set of deeply egalitarian global policies for the year 2025. Global Economy, Global Justice 's engaging prose will appeal to those seeking to understand the intersection between economics and political philosophy. Its focus on the normative foundations of contemporary policy disputes makes it unique in the literature on globalization. (shrink)

How does the complex nature of ecological systems affect ecologists' ability to study them? This Element argues that ecological systems are complex in a rather special way: they are causally heterogeneous. The author presents an updated philosophical account with an optimistic outlook of the methods and status of ecological research.

George Berkeley (1685-1753) is the superstar of Irish Philosophy. He entered Trinity College, Dublin, in 1700 and became a fellow in 1707. In 1724 he resigned his Fellowship to become Dean of Derry, and in 1734 he was made Bishop of Cloyne. He settled in Oxford in 1752 and died the following year. The work of George Berkeley is marked by its diversity and range. His writings take in such topics as mathematics, psychology, politics, health, economics, deism and (...) education, as well as that with which he is most associated - philosophy. Whatever topic he dealt with, his grasp of the subject matter was always impressive and his criticisms of his contemporaries often acute. Among the most noteable of the British Empiricists, he took his starting point from Locke's new 'way of ideas', but he rejected abstract ideas and the possibility of real existence outside perception. It is for this doctrine that he is most known - that there is no such thing as matter, and that things are collections of ideas which can exist only in our minds and only for so long as they are perceived. This philosophy, summed up in his phrase 'to be is to be perceived', he termed 'immaterialism'. A.C. Fraser's collection includes a series of what were previously unpublished notes by Berkeley on all the main topics of his philosophy. This, the 1901 edition, was the first complete edition of his works. (shrink)

Fox and Spector use multiple instances of the exhaustivity operator EXH to derive the correct meaning of utterances that include pitch-focus marked disjunction in downward-entailing environments. They argue that the \ operator evaluates alternatives to be used by EXH. Though the method is sound and gets the right result, we argue that the way in which EXH would need to interact with other instances of EXH, as well as other focus-sensitive elements, is at odds with how EXH is used to (...) explain other phenomena. Specifically, the analysis in Fox and Spector predicts intervention effects for cases where EXH interacts with other focus-sensitive elements. This is problematic for many cases in which EXH is used to derive the desired inferences. We propose a different way of focus association for EXH that would work for the approach introduced in Fox and Spector as well as elsewhere. In addition, our account does not require a covert element to be focused. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Names Alive Are Like the Names in GravesBlack Life and Black Social Death in Terrance Hayes's American Sonnets for My Past and Future AssassinLee Spinks"After blackness was invented / people began seeing ghosts."1One of the most powerful and provoking responses to the political rise of Donald Trump appeared with the 2018 publication of Terrance Hayes's American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin. Hayes began writing these poems (...) straight after Trump's remarkable triumph in the 2016 presidential election, and they race to keep pace with the rapidly metastasizing effects of the Trump phenomenon, from his relentless radicalization of the modes and mores of political speech ("Newshounds ponder the tweets of a bullhorn"), his continuous assault on American democratic institutions, and his singular success in marshalling a newly cohesive political constituency seduced by the reactionary allure of resurgent white nationalism or what Hayes caustically calls "a mandate for whiteness, virility, sovereignty / stupidity" (AS: 38).2 As the phrase "mandate for whiteness" suggests, integral to the story of Trump's ascendancy in American Sonnets is another story, a story about race and social authority in the time of Black Lives Matter when blackness remains "the color of this country's current threat / advisory" (AS: 10). At home and abroad the appalling incandescence of Hayes's contemporary American political moment is reflected by the names of its black victims, names like Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and, perhaps most explosively of all, George Floyd, whose May 2020 police killing on a Minneapolis street reprised such a familiar configuration of racial power that Hayes had already glimpsed its spectral outline two years earlier: "A [End Page 60] brother has to know how to time travel & doctor / himself when a knee or shoe stalls against his neck" (AS: 77).3Without compromising the intensity of Hayes's focus on this contemporary social emergency, I want in what follows to expand our sense of the historical and metaphysical scene of his writing by reading it as an imaginative response to a larger and more fundamental question: What does it mean to live a black life in an antiblack world? I'm moved to do so by the double register of his writing vividly exemplified by the penultimate sonnet in the sequence which memorializes "All the black people I'm tired of losing / All the dead from parts of Florida, Ferguson / Brooklyn, Charleston, Cleveland, Chicago / Baltimore, where the names alive are / Like the names in graves" (AS: 81). What's remarkable, to my mind at least, about the phrase "the names alive are / like the names in graves" is its fusion of a directly contemporary perception of the precariousness of black existence within a culture of white supremacy (the perception that every black life could share the social fate of Tamir Rice at any particular moment) with an encompassing metaphysical vision of blackness as the embodiment of social death and the continuing afterlife of slavery. Paying close attention to several of Hayes's poems, I will trace this double register to explore a number of ideas central to his thinking in American Sonnets including the foundational role of antiblackness in organizing American reality for both black and white identities, the dialectical relationship between antiblackness and the libidinal economy of white supremacy, and the hope of imagining new possibilities of life capable of contesting the antiblack conditions of contemporary social existence.4 In doing so I will place particular emphasis on Hayes's development of a distinctively dialectical and dialogical style of poetic address that reimagines lyric subjectivity as a drama of racial becoming focused on the relationship between black social death and the culture of white supremacy.5Black Social Death and the Libidinal Economy of WhitenessBefore continuing let me briefly develop three ideas above which help shape my reading of American Sonnets: the social life of social death, the continuing afterlife of slavery, and what Hayes calls in my epigraph "the [End Page 61] invention of blackness." The first draws on the Afropessimist radicalization of Orlando Patterson's famous redescription of slavery as social death that sees the slave as a "social nonperson" whose relation to... (shrink)

Recent feminist criticism suggests that Hegel’s account of Antigone in the Phenomenology of Spirit is antithetical to feminism on two key counts: first, Hegel does not develop an authentic political representation of women’s agency and participation in the community, and second, he does not provide a model for a genuinely ethical order especially where relations between men and women are concerned. Patricia Jagentowicz Mills and Luce Irigaray are two feminist thinkers who have expressed these positions. They both take issue with (...) Hegel’s interpretation of Antigone’s actions, although each for different reasons. Mills argues that Hegel misrepresents the experience of women in the Greek community, symbolized by Antigone, as not self-conscious, unreflective, and incapable of enduring ethical conflict. The main reason for this mistaken identity, according to Mills, stems from Hegel’s beliefs that human law and man are ethically superior to divine law and woman, and that the former can legitimately rule over, indeed dominate, the latter. Irigaray asserts that the phallogocentric power of the masculine in Hegel’s text almost completely eliminates the possibility of an authentic feminine individual and action. According to this view, an autonomous feminine understanding of purpose and action is rendered impossible by the feminine’s very masculinization at the outset. At issue here is whether Antigone can indeed be understood as an ethical actor when she acts on behalf of the family and/or whether she can be understood as an ethical actor who represents the community. The conclusions drawn from these interpretations have been that, for Hegel, women are not genuine political actors, on the one hand, because their association with the family disqualifies them as such, and on the other hand, because their actions are constituted by consciousness which is masculine, and also instrumentalized for the masculine. (shrink)

This book explores the relation of John Henry Newman's idea of conscience to what he called conscience "in the ordinary sense of the word," examining such neglected difficulties in this area as the relation between individual conscience and the authority of the church, and rights of conscience.

Aus einer philosophisch-phanomenologischen und literaturwissenschaftlichen Perspektive heraus gewinnt Nadine Benz nahere Erkenntnisse uber das temporale Phanomen des Wartens. Zunachst wird die historische Entwicklung der Zeitvorstellung aus philosophisch-phanomenologischer Sicht thematisiert, spezifisch im Hinblick auf die Fragen nach Messbarkeit, Vermitteltheit und nach objektiven und subjektiven Komponenten von Zeiterfahrung in ihrer Aporetik. Im Anschluss wird vom Konzept der Lebenswelt zur Literatur ubergeleitet: Die vorliegende Studie bindet die Aporien der Zeit zunachst theoretisch in eine Narratologie von Zeiterfahrung ein, die vor allem den Faktor (...) des Fiktiven produktiv berucksichtigt. Schliesslich werden die gewonnenen Erkenntnisse und Instrumente fur eine Analyse von Erzahltexten des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts fruchtbar gemacht. Hier erlangen die literarischen Konfigurationen von Wartezeit als Semantiken des Wartens fur die Subjekte der fiktiven Zeiterfahrung einen konstitutiven Status. (shrink)

A brilliant and comprehensive history of the creation of the modern Western mind. Soul Machine takes us back to the origins of modernity, a time when a crisis in religious authority and the scientific revolution led to searching questions about the nature of human inner life. This is the story of how a new concept—the mind—emerged as a potential solution, one that was part soul and part machine, but fully neither. In this groundbreaking work, award-winning historian George Makari shows (...) how writers, philosophers, physicians, and anatomists worked to construct notions of the mind as not an ethereal thing, but a natural one. From the ascent of Oliver Cromwell to the fall of Napoleon, seminal thinkers like Hobbes, Locke, Diderot, and Kant worked alongside often-forgotten brain specialists, physiologists, and alienists in the hopes of mapping the inner world. Conducted in a cauldron of political turmoil, these frequently shocking, always embattled efforts would give rise to psychiatry, mind sciences such as phrenology, and radically new visions of the self. Further, they would be crucial to the establishment of secular ethics and political liberalism. Boldly original, wide-ranging, and brilliantly synthetic, Soul Machine gives us a masterful, new account of the making of the modern Western mind. (shrink)

This paper develops an account of the German discourse particle denn that captures the meaning contribution of this particle in polar questions, wh-questions, and certain conditional antecedents in a unified way. It is shown that the behavior of denn exhibits an asymmetry between polar and wh-interrogatives, which can be captured by treating the particle as sensitive to the property highlighted by its containing clause, in the sense of Roelofsen and Farkas :359–414, 2015). In addition, the paper argues that highlighting-sensitivity should (...) be incorporated in the account of another discourse particle, German überhaupt, and discusses how the proposed account of discourse particle denn may be extended to also cover the use of denn as a causal conjunction. (shrink)

A large number of feminist philosophers and social critics accept that Simone de Beauvoir's conception of transcendence in The Second Sex relies on masculinist ontology. In contrast with feminist interpretations that see Beauvoir claiming the success of masculinist ontology, this article argues that transcendence as masculinist ontology does not succeed in The Second Sex because it requires a relation of domination, something contrary to its own definition of freedom-producing relations. The Second Sex obliquely reveals this failure, but Beauvoir does not (...) ruminate upon it. Instead, Beauvoir turns to imagine freedom-producing gender relations in the future where the body and consciousness are already emancipated from constitutive domination. This is a future that resonates with G. W. F. Hegel's `Stoic Consciousness'. The significance of this finding is that the location of freedom neither resides in the intertwinement of the male body and consciousness previously argued to be the case, for Beauvoir, nor does it reside in the intertwinement of the female body and consciousness. Rather, freedom resides in the intertwinement of male and female bodies and consciousness where domination is already absent, that is, a place outside of history. Thus, the conclusion of The Second Sex can be read as a consolation and an escape from the inescapable limits of the present. (shrink)

Throughout The Blessed and Boundless God, he proves his doctrine by demonstrating God's incomparableness in His being, attributes, works, and words. Swinnock is a pastor-theologian who views theology as the means by which we grow in acquaintance with God and, consequently, in godliness.

Background The worldwide increase in older persons demands technological solutions to combat the shortage of caregiving and to enable aging in place. Smart home health technologies (SHHTs) are promoted and implemented as a possible solution from an economic and practical perspective. However, ethical considerations are equally important and need to be investigated. Methods We conducted a systematic review according to the PRISMA guidelines to investigate if and how ethical questions are discussed in the field of SHHTs in caregiving for older (...) persons. Results 156 peer-reviewed articles published in English, German and French were retrieved and analyzed across 10 electronic databases. Using narrative analysis, 7 ethical categories were mapped: privacy, autonomy, responsibility, human vs. artificial interactions, trust, ageism and stigma, and other concerns. Conclusion The findings of our systematic review show the (lack of) ethical consideration when it comes to the development and implementation of SHHTs for older persons. Our analysis is useful to promote careful ethical consideration when carrying out technology development, research and deployment to care for older persons. Registration We registered our systematic review in the PROSPERO network under CRD42021248543. (shrink)

With robots being introduced into caregiving, particularly for older persons, various ethical concerns are raised. Among them is the fear of replacing human caregiving. While ethical concepts like well-being, autonomy, and capabilities are often used to discuss these concerns, this paper brings forth the concept of social dignity to further develop guidelines concerning the use of robots in caregiving. By social dignity, we mean that a person’s perceived dignity changes in response to certain interactions and experiences with other persons. In (...) this paper, we will first present the concept of social dignity, and then identify a niche where robots can be used in caregiving in an ethical manner. Specifically, we will argue that, because some activities of daily living are performed in solitude to maintain dignity, a care recipient will usually prefer robotic assistance instead of human assistance for these activities. Secondly, we will describe how other philosophical concepts, which have been commonly used to judge robotic assistance in caregiving for the elderly so far, such as well-being, autonomy, and capabilities, are less useful in determining whether robotic assistance in caregiving is ethically problematic or not. To conclude, we will argue that social dignity offers an advantage to the other concepts, as it allows to ask the most pressing questions in caregiving. (shrink)

Recent feminist criticism suggests that Hegel’s account of Antigone in the Phenomenology of Spirit is antithetical to feminism on two key counts: first, Hegel does not develop an authentic political representation of women’s agency and participation in the community, and second, he does not provide a model for a genuinely ethical order especially where relations between men and women are concerned. Patricia Jagentowicz Mills and Luce Irigaray are two feminist thinkers who have expressed these positions. They both take issue with (...) Hegel’s interpretation of Antigone’s actions, although each for different reasons. Mills argues that Hegel misrepresents the experience of women in the Greek community, symbolized by Antigone, as not self-conscious, unreflective, and incapable of enduring ethical conflict. The main reason for this mistaken identity, according to Mills, stems from Hegel’s beliefs that human law and man are ethically superior to divine law and woman, and that the former can legitimately rule over, indeed dominate, the latter. Irigaray asserts that the phallogocentric power of the masculine in Hegel’s text almost completely eliminates the possibility of an authentic feminine individual and action. According to this view, an autonomous feminine understanding of purpose and action is rendered impossible by the feminine’s very masculinization at the outset. At issue here is whether Antigone can indeed be understood as an ethical actor when she acts on behalf of the family and/or whether she can be understood as an ethical actor who represents the community. The conclusions drawn from these interpretations have been that, for Hegel, women are not genuine political actors, on the one hand, because their association with the family disqualifies them as such, and on the other hand, because their actions are constituted by consciousness which is masculine, and also instrumentalized for the masculine. (shrink)

Graphical models are a powerful tool for causal model specification. Besides allowing for a hierarchical representation of variable interactions, they do not require any a priori specification of the functional dependence between variables. The construction of such graphs hence often relies on the mere testing of whether or not model variables are marginally or conditionally independent. The identification of causal relationships then solely requires some general assumptions on the relation between stochastic and causal independence, such as the Causal Markov Condition (...) and the Faithfulness Condition (Spirtes et al. 2000; Pearl 2000). However, a procedure would require further assumptions to hold. Namely those the independence tests themselves are based on. In continuous settings, Spirtes et al. (2000) suggest causal inference based on a very restrictive formulation of independence, that is, vanishing partial correlations. Such a measure does, however, limit the applicability of causal inference to linear systems. This constitutes a serious drawback especially for the social sciences where an a priori specification of the functional form proves difficult or at odds with linearity. In short: graphical models theoretically reduce specification uncertainty regarding functional dependence, but their implementation in practice deprives them of this virtue. In this paper we investigate how causal structures in continuous settings can be identified when both functional forms and probability distributions of the variables remain unspecified. We focus on tests exploiting the fact that if X and Y are conditionally independent given a set of variables Z, the two conditional densities f (X|Y, Z) and f (X|Z) must coincide. We start by estimating the conditional densities f(X|Y, Z) and f(X|Z) via nonparametric techniques (kernel methods). We proceed by testing if some metric expressing the distance between these very conditional densities is sufficiently close to zero. Out of several metrics available in the literature to express such distance we choose two, the Euclidean, and the Hellinger distance. We investigate in a Monte Carlo study how different tests involving either measure are able to detect statistical independence, conditioned on a small set of variables. One limitation may result from nonparametric density estimation being subject to the curse of dimensionality. As the number of variables increases, the estimated empirical density converges at a slower rate to its population value. To compensate this drawback we use a local bootstrap procedure which consists of resampling the data for each test. While local bootstrap strongly increases the computational time of the test, it succeeds in counterbalancing the curse of dimensionality. (shrink)

The display of artefacts always implies an external mediation that influences, and often codifies, the reception of the exhibits. Objects are manipulated, restored, appropriated, staged, in short displayed, through various representational strategies that include pedestals, labels, and showcases. These elements, that we could define as parerga, are often ignored because of their utilitarian function. Yet, they play an important role in the history of the artefacts and define the setting in which the objects can exert their agency. They not only (...) shape their meaning, but also determine the effect that these artefacts have on their viewers. Framing devices create the conditions for interactions between the individual and the object to take place. This publication aims to explore the relation between artefacts and viewers as they are manifested in framing devices, and to develop a new theoretical framework for thinking about the power of objects on display. (shrink)

Fake news is a scourge within modern society, brought about by foreign powers amplifying messages throughout the recently constructed echo chambers of social media and exacerbated by the lack of co...