According to several recent studies, a big chunk of college students in North America and Europe uses so called ‘smart drugs' to enhance their cognitive capacities aiming at improving their academic performance. With these practices, there comes a certain moral unease. This unease is shared by many, yet it is difficult to pinpoint and in need of justification. Other than simply pointing to the medical risks coming along with using non-prescribed medication, the salient moral question is whether these practices are (...) troubling in and of themselves. In due consideration of empirical insights into the concrete effects of smart drugs on brain and behavior, our attempt is to articulate wherein this moral unease consists and to argue for why the authors believe cognitive enhancement to be morally objectionable. The authors will contend that the moral problem with these practices lies less in the end it seeks, than in the underlying human disposition it expresses and promotes. Some might ask, what is wrong with molding our cognitive capacities to achieve excellence, get a competitive edge, or, as the whim takes us? In all of these occasions, the usage of smart drugs serves a certain goal, a telos. The goal is, broadly speaking, this: outsmarting opponents in an arms race for limited resources and thereby yielding a competitive edge. In plain words: competition is valued higher than cooperation or solidarity. What is wrong with striving for this goal? The authors submit that the question whether people really want to live in a society that promotes the mentality ‘individual competition over societal cooperation' deserves serious consideration. In developing their answer, the authors draw on an ‘Ethics of Constraint' framework, arguing that widespread off-label use of smart drugs bears the risk of negative neural/behavioral consequences for the individual that might, in the long run, be accompanied by changing social value orientations for the worse. (shrink)

Ethical thought is articulated around normative concepts. Standard examples of normative concepts are good, reason, right, ought, and obligatory. Theorists often treat the normative as an undifferentiated domain. Even so, it is common to distinguish between two kinds of normative concepts: evaluative or axiological concepts, such as good, and deontic concepts, such as ought. This encyclopedia entry discusses the many differences between the two kinds of concepts.

Introduction: Chinese philosophy and the translation of disciplines -- The faces of masters literature until the Eastern Han -- Scenes of instruction and master bodies in the Analects -- From scenes of instruction to scenes of construction: Mozi -- Interiority, human nature, and exegesis in Mencius -- Authorship, human nature, and persuasion in Xunzi -- The race for precedence: polemics and the vacuum of traditions in Laozi -- Zhuangzi and the art of negation -- The self-regulating state, paranoia, and rhetoric (...) in Han Feizi -- Epilogue: a future for masters literature and Chinese philosophy. (shrink)

One difficulty in understanding recent debates is that not only have many terms been used to refer to weakness of will – “akrasia” and “incontinence” have often been used as synonyms of “weakness of will” – but quite different phenomena have been discussed in the literature. This is why the present entry starts with taxonomic considerations. The second section turns to the question of whether it is possible to freely and intentionally act against one’s better judgment.

Christine Battersby rethinks questions of embodiment, essence, sameness and difference, self and "other", patriarchy and power. Using analyses of Kant, Adorno, Irigaray, Butler, Kierkegaard and Deleuze, she challenges those who argue that a feminist metaphysics is a a contradiction in terms. This book explores place for a metaphysics of fluidity in the current debates concerning postmodernism, feminism and identity politics.

Health care in prison and particularly the health care of older prisoners are increasingly important topics due to the growth of the ageing prisoner population. The aim of this paper is to gain insight into the approaches used in the provision of equivalent health care to ageing prisoners and to confront the intuitive definition of equivalent care and the practical and ethical challenges that have been experienced by individuals working in this field. Forty interviews took place with experts working in (...) the prison setting from three Western European countries to discover their views on prison health care. Experts indicated that the provision of equivalent care in prison is difficult mostly due to four factors: variability of care in different prisons, gatekeeper systems, lack of personnel, and delays in providing access. This lack of equivalence can be fixed by allocating adequate budgets and developing standards for health care in prison. (shrink)

In recent years, AI research has become more and more computationally demanding. In natural language processing, this tendency is reflected in the emergence of large language models like GPT-3. These powerful neural network-based models can be used for a range of NLP tasks and their language generation capacities have become so sophisticated that it can be very difficult to distinguish their outputs from human language. LLMs have raised concerns over their demonstrable biases, heavy environmental footprints, and future social ramifications. In (...) December 2020, critical research on LLMs led Google to fire Timnit Gebru, co-lead of the company’s AI Ethics team, which sparked a major public controversy around LLMs and the growing corporate influence over AI research. This article explores the role LLMs play in the political economy of AI as infrastructural components for AI research and development. Retracing the technical developments that have led to the emergence of LLMs, we point out how they are intertwined with the business model of big tech companies and further shift power relations in their favour. This becomes visible through the Transformer, which is the underlying architecture of most LLMs today and started the race for ever bigger models when it was introduced by Google in 2017. Using the example of GPT-3, we shed light on recent corporate efforts to commodify LLMs through paid API access and exclusive licensing, raising questions around monopolization and dependency in a field that is increasingly divided by access to large-scale computing power. (shrink)

Emotions often misfire. We sometimes fear innocuous things, such as spiders or mice, and we do so even if we firmly believe that they are innocuous. This is true of all of us, and not only of phobics, who can be considered to suffer from extreme manifestations of a common tendency. We also feel too little or even sometimes no fear at all with respect to very fearsome things, and we do so even if we believe that they are fearsome. (...) Indeed, instead of shunning fearsome things, we might be attracted to them. Emotions that seem more thought-involving, such as shame, guilt or jealousy, can also misfire. You can be ashamed of your big ears even though we can agree that there is nothing shameful in having big ears, and even though you judge that having big ears does not warrant shame. And of course, it is also possible to experience too little or even no shame at all with respect to something that is really shameful. Many of these cases involve a conflict between one’s emotion and one’s evaluative judgement. Emotions that are thus conflicting with judgement can be called ‘recalcitrant emotions’. The question I am interested in is whether or not recalcitrant emotions amount to emotional illusions, that is, whether or not these cases are sufficiently similar to perceptual illusions to justify the claim that they fall under the same general heading. The answer to this depends on what emotions are. For instance, the view that emotions are evaluative judgments makes it difficult to make room for the claim that emotional errors are perceptual illusions. Fearing an innocuous spider would simply amount to making the error of judging that the spider is fearsome while it is in fact innocuous. This might involve an illusion of some sort, but it certainly does not amount to anything like a perceptual illusion. In this chapter, I argue that recalcitrant emotions are a kind of perceptual illusion.. (shrink)

Frames, i.e., recursive attribute-value structures, are a general format for the decomposition of lexical concepts. Attributes assign unique values to objects and thus describe functional relations. Concepts can be classified into four groups: sortal, individual, relational and functional concepts. The classification is reflected by different grammatical roles of the corresponding nouns. The paper aims at a cognitively adequate decomposition, particularly, of sortal concepts by means of frames. Using typed feature structures, an explicit formalism for the characterization of cognitive frames is (...) developed. The frame model can be extended to account for typicality effects. Applying the paradigm of object-related neural synchronization, furthermore, a biologically motivated model for the cortical implementation of frames is developed. Cortically distributed synchronization patterns may be regarded as the fingerprints of concepts. (shrink)

This paper analyses some current jurisprudential and conceptual issues in evidence and procedure from the perspective of a computational legal theory. It introduces a specific investigative device, Trojans operated by police during crime investigation, and analyses whether current formal approaches to legal reasoning can be modified in such a way that the software code underlying this device can represent the relevant legal constraints that should govern its operation. We will argue that traditional formalist theories of legal reasoning are typically restricted (...) to reasoning within a system, and incapable therefore of making the notion of “legal system” sufficiently explicit. We discuss possibilities to expand on these approaches and identify the necessary elements of a computational theory of legal reasoning in an age of porous borders.Resumen:En este ensayo se analizan algunos tópicos conceptuales y filosóficos de actualidad sobre el procedimiento y las pruebas desde la óptica de una teoría del derecho computacional. En él se presenta un mecanismo específico de investigación, relativo a los “troyanos” operados por la policía durante la investigación de delitos, y analiza si los enfoques formales contemporáneos sobre el razonamiento jurídico pueden ser modificados de tal modo que el código de sofware que subyace a este mecanismo puede representar las limitaciones jurídicas relevantes que deberían regir su operación. Los autores sostienen que las teorías formalistas tradicionales del razonamiento jurídico se limitan por lo general al razonamiento dentro de un sistema y, por lo tanto, son incapaces de hacer la noción de “sistema jurídico” suficientemente explícita. Asimismo, se discuten las posibilidades de ampliar estos enfoques e identificar los elementos necesarios de una teoría computacional del razonamiento jurídico en una era de fronteras porosas. (shrink)

Bewegungseinschränkende Maßnahmen werden in verschiedenen medizinischen Institutionen angewendet, um das Verhalten von Patienten durch physische bzw. mechanische oder chemische Eingriffe zu beeinflussen. Solche Maßnahmen stellen eine Art Freiheitsentziehung dar und bedürfen daher immer einer Rechtfertigung. Die Frage nach der Indikation für bewegungseinschränkende Maßnahmen ist abzuklären, da ein standardmäßiger Gebrauch nicht Ziel einer Behandlung sein sollte. Gesetze können als Richtschnur für behandelnde Ärzte und Pflegepersonal dienen. In der Schweiz ist am 1. Januar 2013 erstmals eine gesetzliche Regelung zu bewegungseinschränkenden Maßnahmen eingeführt (...) worden. Hauptziel dieser neuen Artikel im Schweizerischen Zivilgesetzbuch (Artikel 383 ff. ZGB) ist die Stärkung von Autonomie und persönlicher Freiheit von Patienten. Es ist wichtig, Vorschriften zu hinterfragen bzw. deren Auswirkungen für die betroffenen Personen zu analysieren und einen kritischen Dialog zu führen. Die vorliegende Publikation betrachtet bewegungseinschränkende Maßnahmen aus zwei verschiedenen Perspektiven: einerseits anhand einer medizinethischen Debatte, andererseits anhand einer Analyse der gesetzlichen Regelung in der Schweiz. Die neuen Artikel umfassen eine detaillierte Regelung zur „Einschränkung der Bewegungsfreiheit“. Dennoch schließen sie nicht alle bestehenden Regelungslücken. Die neue Schweizer Gesetzgebung kann daher nur als ein erster Schritt in die richtige Richtung betrachtet werden. Ausführungen zur praktischen Anwendung sind dringend nötig und sollten so schnell wie möglich ausgearbeitet werden. (shrink)

On Our Allotted Guardian Spirit is a lively and at times perplexing text combining general reflections on the nature of the soul with a discussion of the phenomenon of a personal guardian spirit. Plotinus wants to interpret Plato, and aims to integrate Plato's various statements about daimones into one comprehensive theory. This leads to some views that are, if not exotic, then at least strange on first encounter. However, a closer reading reveals that Plotinus is not interested in demonology per (...) se. Instead, the central concern of the treatise are ideas about the soul, the self, and self-consciousness. Plotinus' explorations produce a theory of the mind as the agent and activity responsible for a person’s ethical choices and conduct of life. The demon emerges as a philosophical tool passed down from Plato, but adapted and rationalized to try to explain motivation to action, the impulse toward the ethical life, and even the various differences in human ethical and psychological constitution. This innovative theory is a response to a strong and ongoing current of thought in the philosophical tradition. The introduction offers an overview of ancient demonologies, starting with Homer and the Presocratics, and is followed by an in-depth examination of Plato, the Stoics, Plotinus, and later Neoplatonic developments. As such the book presents Plotinus’ specific rationalizing response to the idea of a guardian spirit in the context of ancient philosophical demonologies. (shrink)

Christine M. Korsgaard presents a compelling new view of our moral relationships to the other animals. She offers challenging answers to such questions as: Are people superior to animals, and does it matter morally if we are? Is it all right for us to eat animals, experiment on them, make them work for us, and keep them as pets?

When Carol Gilligan (1982) first introduced the ethic of care she did so from the discipline of psychology using empirical data that questioned Kohlberg's (1981) negative assumptions about the mora...

Cet ouvrage est une réédition numérique d’un livre paru au XXe siècle, désormais indisponible dans son format d’origine.

In der Dissertation "Kausalität und Naturgesetze bei Hume und Kant" wird die These vertreten, dass sich in der Werken Kants vielfältige Antworten auf den Skeptizismus David Humes finden lassen. Kants Position zu Naturgesetzen und Kausalität wird insbesondere anhand seiner Theorien zu besonderen Naturgesetzen in der Kritik der reinen Vernunft, den Prolegomena, den Metaphysischen Anfangsgründen der Naturwissenschaft und in der Kritik der Urteilskraft untersucht. Geleitet wird die Untersuchung von der Frage, wie empirische Gesetze in Kants Philosophie gerechtfertigt werden. In diesem Zusammenhang (...) wird nicht nur gezeigt, wie Kants Transzendentalphilosophie ein Fundament für die Einzelwissenschaften bietet und diese legitimiert, sondern auch der epistemologische Aufbau von apriorischen zu empirischen Gesetzen und ihre Einordnung in Systeme. (shrink)

Algorithms play an increasing role within the process of digitalization of society. They are used for descriptions and predictions of consumers’ or citizens’ behavior. Sociologist Elena ….

The aim of this paper is to use a frame-based account to explain some empirical findings regarding the accessibility of synaesthetic metaphors. Therefore, some results of empirical studies will be discussed with regard to the question of how much it matters whether the concept of the source domain in a synaesthetic metaphor is a scalar or a quality concept. Furthermore, typed frames are introduced, and it is explained how the notion of a minimal upper attribute can be used in the (...) analysis of adjective-noun compounds. Finally, frames are used to analyze synaesthetic metaphors; it turns out that they offer an adequate basis for the explanation of different accessibility rates found in empirical studies. (shrink)

In Pninis grammar of Sanskrit one finds the ivastras, a table which defines the natural classes of phonological segments in Sanskrit by intervals. We present a formal argument which shows that, using his representation method, Pninis way of ordering the phonological segments to represent the natural classes is optimal. The argument is based on a strictly set-theoretical point of view depending only on the set of natural classes and does not explicitly take into account the phonological features of the segments, (...) which are, however, implicitly given in the way a language clusters its phonological inventory. The key idea is to link the graph of the Hasse-diagram of the set of natural classes closed under intersection to ivastra-style representations of the classes. Moreover, the argument is so general that it allows one to decide for each set of sets whether it can be represented with Pninis method. Actually, Pnini had to modify the set of natural classes to define it by the ivastras (the segment h plays a special role). We show that this modification was necessary and, in fact, the best possible modification. We discuss how every set of classes can be modified in such a way that it can be defined in a ivastra-style representation.1. (shrink)

What do psychedelics reveal about consciousness? What impact have psychedelics had on philosophy? In this rapidly growing area of study, this is the first volume to explore the philosophy of psychedelic experience, from a range of interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspectives. In doing so, Philosophy and Psychedelics reveals just why the place of psychedelics in our societies should not be left to medical sciences alone, as psychedelic experience opens up new perspectives on fundamental philosophical questions relating to human experience, ethics, and (...) the metaphysics of mind. Mapping a range of philosophical responses to the surge in studies into psychedelic drugs in the cognitive sciences, this go-to volume examines topics including psychedelics and the role of governance; psychedelics and mysticism; what psychedelics can tell us about dyadic thankfulness; and psychedelics as ways to gain new knowledge. Written by leading international scholars, the essays cover Western and non-Western traditions, from analytic philosophy to Zen Buddhism, and discuss a variety of hallucinogens, such as LSD, MDMA, and Ayahuasca, in order to build a much-needed bridge between the rapidly growing scientific research and the philosophy behind psychedelic experience. (shrink)

This volume examines works of the early Frankfurt School that are concerned with gender identities, institutions, and ideologies, as well as the ongoing relevance of early Frankfurt School ideas for contemporary feminist analyses of gender, sex, and sexuality.

Uncovering the theoretical and creative interconnections between posthumanism and philosophies of immanence, this volume explores the influence of the philosophy of immanence on posthuman theory; the varied reworkings of immanence for the nonhuman turn; and the new pathways for critical thinking created by the combination of these monumental discourses. With the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari serving as a vibrant node of immanence, this volume maps a multiplicity of pathways from Deleuze, Guattari and their theoretical allies - including (...) Spinoza and Nietzsche - to posthuman thought. As positions that insist, respectively, on the equal yet distinct powers of mind and body (immanence) and the urgent need to dismantle human privilege and exceptionality (posthumanism), each chapter reveals concepts for rethinking established notions of being, thought, experience, and life. The authors here take examples from a range of different media, including literature and contemporary cinema, featuring films such as Enthiran/The Robot (India, 2010) and CHAPPiE (USA/Mexico, 2015), and new developments in technology and theory. In doing so, they investigate Deleuzian and Guattarian posthumanism from a variety of political and ethical frameworks and perspectives, from afro-pessimism to feminist thought, disability studies, biopolitics, and social justice. Countering the dualisms of Cartesian philosophy and flattening the hierarchies imposed by Humanism, From Deleuze and Guattari to Posthumanism launches vital interrogations of established knowledge and sparks the critical reflection necessary for life in the posthuman era. (shrink)

Philosophical and sociological approaches in technology have increasingly shifted toward describing AI (artificial intelligence) systems as ‘(moral) agents,’ while also attributing ‘agency’ to them. It is only in this way – so their principal argument goes – that the effects of technological components in a complex human-computer interaction can be understood sufficiently in phenomenological-descriptive and ethical-normative respects. By contrast, this article aims to demonstrate that an explanatory model only achieves a descriptively and normatively satisfactory result if the concepts of ‘(moral) (...) agent’ and ‘(moral) agency’ are exclusively related to human agents. Initially, the division between symbolic and sub-symbolic AI, the black box character of (deep) machine learning, and the complex relationship network in the provision and application of machine learning are outlined. Next, the ontological and action-theoretical basic assumptions of an ‘agency’ attribution regarding both the current teleology-naturalism debate and the explanatory model of actor network theory are examined. On this basis, the technical-philosophical approaches of Luciano Floridi, Deborah G. Johnson, and Peter-Paul Verbeek will all be critically discussed. Despite their different approaches, they tend to fully integrate computational behavior into their concept of ‘(moral) agency.’ By contrast, this essay recommends distinguishing conceptually between the different entities, causalities, and relationships in a human-computer interaction, arguing that this is the only way to do justice to both human responsibility and the moral significance and causality of computational behavior. (shrink)

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