ABSTRACT: So far in this book, we have examined algorithmic decision systems from three autonomy-based perspectives: in terms of what we owe autonomous agents (chapters 3 and 4), in terms of the conditions required for people to act autonomously (chapters 5 and 6), and in terms of the responsibilities of agents (chapter 7). -/- In this chapter we turn to the ways in which autonomy underwrites democratic governance. Political authority, which is to say the ability of a government to exercise (...) power, may be justifiable or not. Whether it is justified and how it can come to be justified is a question of political legitimacy. Political legitimacy is another way in which autonomy and responsibility are linked. This relationship is the basis of the current chapter, and it is important in understanding the moral salience of algorithmic systems. We will draw the connection as follows. We begin, in section 8.1, by describing two uses of technology: crime predicting technology used to drive policing practices and social media technology used to influence elections (including by Cambridge Analytica and by the Internet Research Agency). In section 8.2 we consider several views of legitimacy and argue for a hybrid version of normative legitimacy based on one recently offered by Fabienne Peter. In section 8.3 we will explain that the connection between political legitimacy and autonomy is that legitimacy is grounded in legitimating processes, which are in turn based on autonomy. Algorithmic systems—among them PredPol and the Cambridge Analytica-Facebook-Internet Research Agency amalgam—can hinder that legitimation process and conflict with democratic legitimacy, as we argue in section 8.4. We will conclude by returning to several cases that serve as through-lines to the book: Loomis, Wagner, and Houston Schools. -/- The link below is to an open-access copy of the chapter. (shrink)

The distinction between concept and intuition is of the utmost importance for understanding Kant’s critical philosophy. For, as Kant himself claimed, all the distinctive claims of this philosophy rest on, and develop out of, a detailed account of the way all our cognition of things requires both intuitions and concepts.

In this essay, we examine the grounds, nature and content, status, acquisition and role, and justification of gratitude in Kant's ethical system, making use of student notes from Kant's lectures on ethics. We are especially interested in questions about the significance of gratitude in Kant's ethics. We examine Kant's claim that gratitude is a sacred duty, because it cannot be discharged, and explain how this claim is consistent with his insistence that “ought” implies “can.” We argue that for Kant a (...) proper understanding of self-esteem is importantly related to, if not necessary for, possession of the virtue of gratitude. (shrink)

There are two prevailing interpretations of the status which Kant accorded his claims in the Critique of Pure Reason: 1) he is analyzing our concepts of cognition and experience; 2) he is making empirical claims about our cognitive faculties. I argue for a third alternative: on Kant's account, all cognition consists in a reflective consciousness of our cognitive faculties, and in critique we analyze the content of this consciousness. Since Strawson raises a famous charge of incoherence against such a position, (...) I begin by showing that this charge is misplaced. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper relates Kant’s account of pure apperception to the agential approach to self-knowledge. It argues that his famous claim ‘The I think must be able to accompany all of my represent...

What makes a subject''s motivationrational is its originating in her practicalreasoning. I explain the appeal of this thesisabout rational motivation, and explore itsrelation to recent discussions of internalismabout reasons for action. I do so in theservice of clarifying an important meta-ethicaldebate between Humean motivational skeptics andtheir Kantian opponents. This debate is oneover whether, as this skeptic contends andKantians deny, considerations about ourmotivational capacities, together withinternalism, restrict genuine reasons foraction to merely instrumental ones. I arguethat properly adjudicating this debate requiresidentifying one (...) particular way in which thethesis about rational motivation has beendeveloped – namely, as a part of what I term``the traditional conception'''' of themotivational efficacy of practical reason. Onthis conception, rational motivation consistsin choosing some course of conduct out of one''scognitive appreciation of the way its relationto one''s practicable good gives one reason todo so. And I side with Kantians against theHumean motivational skeptic in part on groundsthat Kant himself – though not all Kantians –would find congenial: namely, that we shouldaccept the traditional conception. (shrink)

Smart cities are now an established area of technological development and theoretical inquiry. Research on smart cities spans from investigations into its technological infrastructures and design scenarios, to critiques of its proposals for citizenship and sustainability. This article builds on this growing field, while at the same time accounting for expanded urban-sensing practices that take hold through citizen-sensing technologies. Detailing practice-based and participatory research that developed urban-sensing technologies for use in Southeast London, this article considers how the smart city as (...) a large-scale and monolithic version of urban systems breaks down in practice to reveal much different concretizations of sensors, cities, and people. By working through the specific instances where sensor technologies required inventive workarounds to be setup and continue to operate, as well as moments of breakdown and maintenance where sensors required fixes or adjustments, this article argues that urban sensing can produce much different encounters with urban technologies through lived experiences. Rather than propose a “grassroots” approach to the smart city, however, this article instead suggests that the smart city as a figure for urban development be contested and even surpassed by attending to workarounds that account more fully for digital urban practices and technologies as they are formed and situated within urban projects and community initiatives. (shrink)

In what follows, I argue that Hume works with a notion of the a priori that, though unfamiliar today, was standard in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. On this notion of the a priori, to know (consider, prove) something a priori is to know (consider, prove) it from the grounds that make it true. I will refer to this as the "from-grounds" notion of the a priori, and to the now-familiar and dominant notion—on which to know something a priori is (...) to know it with a justification that is independent of experience—as the "non-empirical" notion.Hume holds, as a substantive thesis, that one knows something a priori, where 'a priori' is understood in the from-grounds sense, only if one knows it independently of .. (shrink)

Invitation to Peace Studies is the first textbook in the field to emphasize 21st-century research and controversies and to encourage the more frequent use of a gender perspective in analyzing peace, war, and violence. Recent empirical research forms the core of most chapters, but substantial attention is also given to faith-based ideas, movements, and peace pioneers. The book examines compelling contemporary topics like cyber warfare, drones, robots, digital activism, hactivism, the physiology of peace, rising rates of suicide, and peace through (...) health. It is also unique in its use of a single coherent perspective--that of a global peace network--to make sense of the historically unprecedented and interconnected web of diverse ideas, individuals, groups, organizations, and movements currently promoting peace across the world. (shrink)

Many explanations in science make use of mathematics. But are there cases where the mathematical component of a scientific explanation is explanatory in its own right? This issue of mathematical explanations in science has been for the most part neglected. I argue that there are genuine mathematical explanations in science, and present in some detail an example of such an explanation, taken from evolutionary biology, involving periodical cicadas. I also indicate how the answer to my title question impacts on broader (...) issues in the philosophy of mathematics; in particular it may help platonists respond to a recent challenge by Joseph Melia concerning the force of the Indispensability Argument. (shrink)

In spite of a powerful tradition, more than two thousand years old, that in a valid argument the premises must be relevant to the conclusion, twentieth-century logicians neglected the concept of relevance until the publication of Volume I of this monumental work. Since that time relevance logic has achieved an important place in the field of philosophy: Volume II of Entailment brings to a conclusion a powerful and authoritative presentation of the subject by most of the top people working in (...) the area. Originally the aim of Volume II was simply to cover certain topics not treated in the first volume--quantification, for example--or to extend the coverage of certain topics, such as semantics. However, because of the technical progress that has occurred since the publication of the first volume, Volume II now includes other material. The book contains the work of Alasdair Urquhart, who has shown that the principal sentential systems of relevance logic are undecidable, and of Kit Fine, who has demonstrated that, although the first-order systems are incomplete with respect to the conjectured constant domain semantics, they are still complete with respect to a semantics based on "arbitrary objects." Also presented is important work by the other contributing authors, who are Daniel Cohen, Steven Giambrone, Dorothy L. Grover, Anil Gupta, Glen Helman, Errol P. Martin, Michael A. McRobbie, and Stuart Shapiro. Robert G. Wolf's bibliography of 3000 items is a valuable addition to the volume. (shrink)

'Working Memory, Thought, and Action' is the magnum opus of one of the most influential cognitive psychologists of the past 50 years. This new volume on the model he created discusses the developments that have occurred within the model in the past twenty years, and places it within a broader context.

Does mathematics ever play an explanatory role in science? If so then this opens the way for scientific realists to argue for the existence of mathematical entities using inference to the best explanation. Elsewhere I have argued, using a case study involving the prime-numbered life cycles of periodical cicadas, that there are examples of indispensable mathematical explanations of purely physical phenomena. In this paper I respond to objections to this claim that have been made by various philosophers, and I discuss (...) potential future directions of research for each side in the debate over the existence of abstract mathematical objects. (shrink)

With essays by David Hume, Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel kant, William Blake, Jeremy Bentham, Richard Whately, John Henry Newman, Karl Marx, James Whistler, Friedrich Nietzsche, William James, etc.

With essays by David Hume, Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel kant, William Blake, Jeremy Bentham, Richard Whately, John Henry Newman, Karl Marx, James Whistler, Friedrich Nietzsche, William James, etc.

According to St. Thomas, the natures of material things are the proper objects of human understanding.Thomas claims only that the natures of things are the proper objects of the intellect, not that they are its only objects: he does not deny that we have intellective cognition also of the contingent states and situations of particular material things. And he holds that, at least in this life, humans cognize these natures, not through innate species or by perceiving the divine exemplars, but (...) only by abstraction from phantasms (ST Ia, 84.7, 85.1).This claim applies to the exercising of concepts already acquired, as well as their initial acquisition (ST Ia 84.7). Here and throughout, I use “cognition” to translate “cognitio.” As Scott MacDonald (“Theory of Knowledge” in Cambridge Companion to Aquinas, ed., N. Kretzmann and E. Stump [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993], p. 162) points out, translating “cognitio” with “knowledge” is misleading, given that cognitiones can, on Thomas’s account, be false (see, for example, ST Ia 17.3). I discuss Aquinas’s conception of cognition in section I.1. More precisely, the human intellect’s active component, the agent intellect, produces cognition of the natures of material things by abstracting intelligible forms from phantasms and informing them on its passive component, the possible intellect, to actualize the latter’s potency to understand.This division of the intellect into an active and a passive component originates in Aristotle’s cryptic remark that in the soul “there is a mind for becoming all things” and “a mind for producing all things” (DA III 5, 430a10). This passage has been subject to myriad interpretations. Aristotle’s Arabic commentators read him as saying that (one or both) of these intellects are single and separate from individual human souls. In opposition to these interpretations, Aquinas holds that the agent and possible intellects are both immanent powers of each individual soul. Since these interpretations enjoyed considerable popularity in Aquinas’s day, we often find him developing his account of the human intellect in explicit opposition to them (cf. OUIAA). The aim of the present piece is to clarify Thomas’s account of this intellective abstraction, and thereby the precise force of the conceptual empiricism it asserts.Important recent work by several scholars has advanced our understanding of many central aspects of Aquinas’s philosophy of mind and epistemology, including his account of intellective abstraction. See Eleonore Stump, “Aquinas on the Foundations of Knowledge,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy (Supplementary Volume) 17 (1992); “Aquinas’s Account of the Mechanisms of Intellective Cognition,” Revenue Internationale de Philosophie 52 (1998): 287–307; “Aquinas on Sensory Cognition,” in Medieval Analyses in Language and Cognition, eds. Sten Ebbesen and Russell L. Friedman, volume 77 in the series Det Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab, Historisk-Filosofiske Meddelelser (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1999), pp. 377–395. Norman Kretzmann, “Infallibility, Error, and Ignorance,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 17 (1992); Kretzmann, “Philosophy of Mind,” in Cambridge Companion to Aquinas; Robert Pasnau, Theories of Cognition in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and Scott MacDonald (“Theory of Knowledge,” in Cambridge Companion to Aquinas).Many of these discussions share a salutary focus on Aquinas’s claims regarding the reliability of our faculties, so that their treatments of intellective abstraction tend to center on his prima faciae wildly implausible claim to its infallibility: “The proper object of intellect is the quiddity of a thing, and this is why intellect is not fallible regarding the quiddity of a thing, speaking of it just as such” (ST Ia 85.6). Kretzmann provides an interesting and detailed treatment of this claim. Drawing on a range of texts, he argues that the intellect’s apprehension of the quiddity of a thing is such that one acquires an initial, crude concept of that thing, and that this apprehension must be distinguished from the intellect’s act of compounding, in judgments, the aspects of things so apprehended: it is only through a fallible, and extended process of making such judgments that we arrive at more adequate concepts of things (see the final section of “Infallibility, Error, and Ignorance”). MacDonald also makes insightful, and complementary, observations along similar lines (pp. 183–84). However, though helpful, these points do not suffice to explain, let alone render defensible, Thomas’s claim of infallibility: why can’t some of our acts of intellective abstraction yield false cognitions (however rudimentary), in the sense Thomas specifies?; in other words; why can’t the agent intellect sometimes produce in the possible intellect forms which do not correspond to the forms that actually inhere, or even could inhere, in material things? I think that Stump is right to take this optimism to be one striking instance of Thomas’s general epistemic optimism rooted in his conviction that God designed our cognitive faculties (Stump, “Foundations of Knowledge,” pp. 145–48).The interpretation of his intellective abstraction provided here complements Stump’s insight. For it, in effect, elaborates how Aquinas’s theistic metaphysics grounds his epistemic optimism about the first operation of our intellect. In particular, it explains how the agent intellect, as the human participating likeness in the divine light of understanding, has the active potency to order phantasms in such a way that it can produce in the possible intellect intelligible species which are determinate likenesses of the particular material things of which we have experience (cf. Section III iv, below). Examining his distinction between sensible and intellectual cognition, and his account of the way the former, in phantasms, supplies the data for intellective abstraction, will lead us to reassess the nature of Thomas’s antinativism—arguably the most important historical and philosophical legacy of his cognitive psychology. (shrink)

This volume explores what phenomenology adds to the enterprise of anthropology, drawing on and contributing to a burgeoning field of social science research inspired by the phenomenological tradition in philosophy. Essays by leading scholars ground their discussions of theory and method in richly detailed ethnographic case studies. The contributors broaden the application of phenomenology in anthropology beyond the areas in which it has been most influential—studies of sensory perception, emotion, bodiliness, and intersubjectivity—into new areas of inquiry such as martial arts, (...) sports, dance, music, and political discourse. (shrink)

We discuss a recent attempt by Chris Daly and Simon Langford to do away with mathematical explanations of physical phenomena. Daly and Langford suggest that mathematics merely indexes parts of the physical world, and on this understanding of the role of mathematics in science, there is no need to countenance mathematical explanation of physical facts. We argue that their strategy is at best a sketch and only looks plausible in simple cases. We also draw attention to how frequently Daly and (...) Langford find themselves in conflict with mathematical and scientific practice. (shrink)

Joseph Houston’s book is a fine contribution to the philosophical investigation of the value of miracle reports for religious apologetics. It covers a wide range of arguments of interest to philosophers about the concept of miracles and the justifiability of belief in their occurrence, but it is also rich in theological and biblical sources. Houston’s reasoning throughout is careful and subtle, but neither technical nor excessively pedantic. So while the book is primarily intended for scholars, students should find (...) it within their reach. (shrink)

Philosophers of mathematics have become increasingly interested in the explanatory role of mathematics in empirical science, in the context of new versions of the Quinean ‘Indispensability Argument’ which employ inference to the best explanation for the existence of abstract mathematical objects. However, little attention has been paid to analysing the nature of the explanatory relation involved in these mathematical explanations in science (MES). In this paper, I attack the only articulated account of MES in the literature (an account sketched by (...) Mark Steiner), according to which a genuine MES incorporates an explanatory proof of the mathematical result being used. The central case study involves an explanation for why bees build the cells of their honeycombs in the shape of hexagons. I make a distinction between two kinds of MES, mathematics-driven explanation in science and science-driven mathematical explanation, and argue that it is the second category which is both scientifically and philosophical more central. I conclude that the explanatory relation involved in MES is genuinely scientific and hence that the phenomenon of MES poses a challenge to general accounts of scientific explanation. (shrink)

According to St. Thomas, the natures of material things are the proper objects of human understanding. 1 And he holds that, at least in this life, humans cognize these natures, not through innate species or by perceiving the divine exemplars, but only by abstraction from phantasms (ST Ia, 84.7, 85.1). 2 More precisely, the human intellects potency to understand. 3 The aim of the present piece is to clarify Thomass antinativism—arguably the most important historical and philosophical legacy of his cognitive (...) psychology. (shrink)