Can an action cease to be required of a moral agent solely because it comes too costly ? Can self-sacrifice or risk of self-sacrifice serve as a limit on our moral obligations? Two recent articles in Philosophy , concerned primarily with the possibility of supererogatory action, suggest very different answers to these questions.

Populists are often cast as deniers of rationality, creators of a climate of “post-truth,” and valuing tribe over truth and the rigors of science. Their critics claim the authority of rationality and empirical facts. Yet the critics no less than populists enable an environment of spurious claims and defective argumentation. This is especially true in the realm of science. An important case study is the account of scientific trust offered by a leading public intellectual and historian of science, Naomi Oreskes, (...) and the misapplication of that theory during the coronavirus pandemic. (shrink)

Foundation models such as GPT-4 are fine-tuned to avoid unsafe or otherwise problematic behavior, so that, for example, they refuse to comply with requests for help with committing crimes or with producing racist text. One approach to fine-tuning, called reinforcement learning from human feedback, learns from humans' expressed preferences over multiple outputs. Another approach is constitutional AI, in which the input from humans is a list of high-level principles. But how do we deal with potentially diverging input from humans? How (...) can we aggregate the input into consistent data about "collective" preferences or otherwise use it to make collective choices about model behavior? In this paper, we argue that the field of social choice is well positioned to address these questions, and we discuss ways forward for this agenda, drawing on discussions in a recent workshop on Social Choice for AI Ethics and Safety held in Berkeley, CA, USA in December 2023. (shrink)

Martin-Löf's constructive type theory forms the basis of this paper. His central notions of category and set, and their relations with Russell's type theories, are discussed. It is shown that addition of an axiom - treating the category of propositions as a set and thereby enabling higher order quantification - leads to inconsistency. This theorem is a variant of Girard's paradox, which is a translation into type theory of Mirimanoff's paradox (concerning the set of all well-founded sets). The occurrence (...) of the contradiction is explained in set theoretical terms. Crucial here is the way a proof-object of an existential proposition is understood. It is shown that also Russell's paradox can be translated into type theory. The type theory extended with the axiom mentioned above contains constructive higher order logic, but even if one only adds constructive second order logic to type theory the contradictions arise. (shrink)

Entre les deux guerres mondiales, l’empirisme logique se donna pour but de concilier le rôle de l’expérience dans la connaissance scientifique et l’existence des lois logiques. Ses représentants empruntèrent à Frege et Russell les techniques qu’ils venaient de créer et à Wittgenstein son interprétation des vérités logiques. Depuis cinquante ans, leurs héritiers ont modifié à la fois leur idée de l’expérience et leur conception de ses rapports avec la logique. Et si, ainsi que le suggère Quine, l’adhésion de l’esprit (...) humain à la logique classique était semblable à la croyance périmée dans le caractère euclidien de l’espace physique... Pourrions-nous encore penser dans une logique non classique? L’analyse aura fécondé le renouveau de l’empirisme. Elle en aura aussi dessiné les limites, au cours d’une histoire aussi mouvementée que l’histoire de l’Europe et des États-Unis au vingtième siècle. (shrink)

This edited volume examines the realizations between theological considerations and natural law theorizing, from Plato to Spinoza.Theological considerations have long had a pronounced role in Catholic natural law theories, but have not been as thoroughly examined from a wider perspective. The contributors to this volume take a more inclusive view of the relation between conceptions of natural law and theistic claims and principles. They do not jointly defend one particular thematic claim, but articulate diverse ways in which natural law has (...) both been understood and related to theistic claims.In addition to exploring Plato and the Stoics, the volume also looks at medieval Jewish thought, the thought of Aquinas, Scotus, and Ockham, and the ways in which Spinoza's thought includes resonances of earlier views and intimations of later developments. Taken as a whole, these essays enlarge the scope of the discussion of natural law through study of how the naturalness of natural law has often been related to theses about the divine. The latter are often crucial elements of natural law theorizing, having an integral role in accounting for the metaethical status and ethical bindingness of natural law. At the same time, the question of the relation between natural law and God-and the relation between natural law and divine command-has been addressed in a multiplicity of ways by key figures throughout the history of natural law theorizing, and these essays accord them the explanatory significance they deserve. (shrink)

The concept of “representation” is used broadly and uncontroversially throughout neuroscience, in contrast to its highly controversial status within the philosophy of mind and cognitive science. In this paper I first discuss the way that the term is used within neuroscience, in particular describing the strategies by which representations are characterized empirically. I then relate the concept of representation within neuroscience to one that has developed within the field of machine learning. I argue that the recent success of artificial neural (...) networks on certain tasks such as visual object recognition reflects the degree to which those systems exhibit inherent inductive biases that reflect the structure of the physical world. I further argue that any system that is going to behave intelligently in the world must contain representations that reflect the structure of the world; otherwise, the system must perform unconstrained function approximation which is destined to fail due to the curse of dimensionality, in which the number of possible states of the world grows exponentially with the number of dimensions in the space of possible inputs. An analysis of these concepts in light of philosophical debates regarding the ontological status of representations suggests that the representations identified within both biological and artificial neural networks qualify as legitimate representations in the philosophical sense. (shrink)

ExcerptAll rational liberal philosophic positions have lost their significance and power. One may deplore this but I for one cannot bring myself to clinging to philosophic positions which have been shown to be inadequate. Leo Strauss, “Existentialism”1The Supreme Court decision on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the Obama administration's signature legislation on health care, attracted exceptional public attention, and rightly so. Health is a vital concern, and the topic is charged with acerbic party politics. More importantly, the terms (...) of the debate give evidence of a widespread awareness, across the political spectrum, that…. (shrink)

ExcerptProfound change in society may involve shifting control of political power, the character of economic systems, or access to resources, but it can also have to do with the structures of meaning we bundle together in various understandings of culture. This issue of Telos looks at the explosive forces located specifically in the intangible dimensions of culture and how they may play out in revolutionary or counter-revolutionary processes. No process has been more disruptive of inherited traditions and stable structures than (...) globalization, the spread of the dynamic economy of capitalism coupled with liberal democracy. In a bold account, Jörg Friedrichs…. (shrink)

The concept of the public sphere is the touchstone of Peter Hohendahl's scholarship, which has been profoundly influential on both sides of the Atlantic. One is tempted to suggest that the public sphere is the central concept of Atlanticism. Historically, the urgency of publicness emerged, via Jürgen Habermas's foundational study, in the Federal Republic against the backdrop of the Nazi dictatorship.1 The pursuit of a public sphere represented an insistence on the desideratum of liberal democratic institutions in contrast to totalitarian (...) domination—whether the latter was understood as the absence of a public sphere or, alternatively, as the hyperpoliticization of the…. (shrink)

The “nation” has been the primary unit of political membership in modernity, typically stronger than “region” (the American 1865) and almost always stronger than “class” (the European 1914). Membership in the nation has meant citizenship, the basis of civil rights and civic responsibility within the rule of law. However “nation” is also related to the “people,” the source of all democratic power. The “people” was the population in the age of the democratic revolutions before anything like contemporary mass immigration. While (...) the Enlightenment notion of “the people” was not an ethnic definition, the romanticization of the term and its metamorphosis.. (shrink)

Are the arguments of the Frankfurt School still relevant? Modern Culture and Critical Theory investigates this question in the context of important issues in contemporary cultural politics: neoconservatism and new social movements, discontents with modernity and debates on postmodernism, the political hegemony of Ronald Reagan, and the cultural hegemony of structuralism and poststructuralism. Russell Berman thoughtfully explores the theories of Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, Lyotard, and Foucault and their relevance to both historical and contemporary issues in literature, politics, and the (...) arts. (shrink)

A study probing the ambiguities of German nationhood. Berman takes a theoretical perspective of cultural studies, exploring such themes as: the constitution of nationhood; what holds a citizenry together; and history's role in providing a framework for current identities and institutions.

It is difficult to start a discussion about religion. The topic irritates the modern public, especially the part that has been schooled in Critical Theory. Enlightenment hostility toward religion, which regularly goes far beyond skepticism, has profoundly shaped sensibilities and the habits of debate. Spoken or unspoken assumptions in the secular public sphere relegate religion to a fully private matter, and, therefore, not an appropriate topic for consideration, let alone a possible source for reflection on current theoretical or political matters. (...) The elaboration of theory within the project of modernity is taken to be fully separate from religion, or perhaps…. (shrink)

Matthias Küntzel's account of the centrality of anti-Semitism within jihadist ideology appeared in German in 2002. The text has been expanded and updated for this translation. The volume includes a foreword by Jeffrey Herf, who highlights key aspects of the argument and the context. Heir to the tradition of Critical Theory—the website of the original publisher, Ça ira, carries a quotation by Hans-Jürgen Krahl, Adorno's student and antagonist—Küntzel's forcefully argued presentation stretches from the origins of twentieth-century Islamism, with the founding (...) of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928, to the worldwide wave of anti-Semitism that followed the 9/11 attacks. Küntzel demonstrates…. (shrink)