Throughout the biological and biomedical sciences there is a growing need for, prescriptive ‘minimum information’ (MI) checklists specifying the key information to include when reporting experimental results are beginning to find favor with experimentalists, analysts, publishers and funders alike. Such checklists aim to ensure that methods, data, analyses and results are described to a level sufficient to support the unambiguous interpretation, sophisticated search, reanalysis and experimental corroboration and reuse of data sets, facilitating the extraction of maximum value from data sets (...) them. However, such ‘minimum information’ MI checklists are usually developed independently by groups working within representatives of particular biologically- or technologically-delineated domains. Consequently, an overview of the full range of checklists can be difficult to establish without intensive searching, and even tracking thetheir individual evolution of single checklists may be a non-trivial exercise. Checklists are also inevitably partially redundant when measured one against another, and where they overlap is far from straightforward. Furthermore, conflicts in scope and arbitrary decisions on wording and sub-structuring make integration difficult. This presents inhibit their use in combination. Overall, these issues present significant difficulties for the users of checklists, especially those in areas such as systems biology, who routinely combine information from multiple biological domains and technology platforms. To address all of the above, we present MIBBI (Minimum Information for Biological and Biomedical Investigations); a web-based communal resource for such checklists, designed to act as a ‘one-stop shop’ for those exploring the range of extant checklist projects, and to foster collaborative, integrative development and ultimately promote gradual integration of checklists. (shrink)

pt. I. Historical criticism and reconstruction.--pt. II. The spiritual note in modern literature, art, and music.--pt. III. The spirit of modern philosophy.--pt. IV. The Christ that was and is to be.

This paper will argue that intellectualism about skill—the contention that skilled performance is without exception guided by proposition knowledge—is fundamentally flawed. It exposes that intellectualists about skill run into intractable theoretical problems in explicating a role for their novel theoretical conceit of practical modes of presentation. It then examines a proposed solution by Carlotta Pavese which seeks to identify practical modes of presentation with motor representations that guide skilled sensorimotor action. We argue that this proposed identification is problematic on empirical (...) and theoretical grounds, and—as such—it fails to deliver on its explanatory ambitions. In the final analysis, it will be argued that intellectualism about skill is, in any case, superfluous when it comes to accounting for the aspects of skilled performance it purports to explain. (shrink)

The duty to protect patient welfare underpins undergraduate medical ethics and patient safety teaching. The current syllabus for patient safety emphasises the significance of organisational contribution to healthcare failures. However, the ongoing over-reliance on whistleblowing disproportionately emphasises individual contributions, alongside promoting a culture of blame and defensiveness among practitioners. Diane Vaughan’s ‘Normalisation of Deviance’ provides a counterpoise to such individualism, describing how signals of potential danger are collectively misinterpreted and incorporated into the accepted margins of safe operation. NoD is an (...) insidious process that often goes unnoticed, thus minimising the efficacy of whistleblowing as a defence against inevitable disaster. In this paper, we illustrate what can be learnt by greater attention to the collective, organisational contributions to healthcare failings by applying NoD to The Morecambe Bay Investigation. By focusing on a cluster of five ‘serious untoward incidents’ occurring in 2008, we describe a cycle of NoD affecting trust handling of events that allowed poor standards of care to persist for several years, before concluding with a poignant example of the limitations of whistleblowing, whereby the raising of concerns by a senior consultant failed to generate a response at trust board level. We suggest that greater space in medical education is needed to develop a thorough understanding of the cultural and organisational processes that underpin healthcare failures, and that medical education would benefit from integrating the teaching of medical ethics and patient safety to resolve the tension between systems approaches to safety and the individualism of whistleblowing. Data sharing not applicable as no datasets generated and/or analysed for this study. (shrink)

As scholars have recently suggested, rhetoric has long been remiss when it comes to nondiscursive concerns beyond its traditional purview. While many have sought to broaden rhetoric's scope, no one has yet undertaken a nondiscursive rhetorical investigation of social change in an effort to reconcile the tension between a critique of agency and the perception of human responsibility. This article undertakes such a critique through Alain Badiou's concept of the event, a concept that, I contend, offers the discipline a means (...) of rethinking the opposition between relativism and flat ontology. Analyzing the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi through the frame of the event, I regard Bouazizi's act as an ontic occurrence exerting influence over protestors across the Arab world while demanding collective recognition to emerge as an event. (shrink)

Discussions of the principle of alternative possibilities have largely ignored the limits of what Frankfurt-style counter-examples can show. Rather than challenging the coherence of the cases, I argue that even if they are taken to demonstrate the falsity of the principle, they cannot advance the compatibilist cause. For a forceful incompatibilist argument can be constructed from the Frankfurtian premise that agents in Frankfurtian circumstances would have done what they did even if they could have done something else. This 'counterfactual stability' (...) meets the same fate under determinism as does the ability to do otherwise. Thus the cases are irrelevant to the compatibility debate. (shrink)

This paper is an examination of Reinhold Niebuhr's embrace of the paradoxical in relation to his conception of the self. While it explores the theoretical and practical difficulties entailed in Niebuhr's account, it also seeks to defend his position, suggesting that in the light of Niebuhr's negative apologetic, the paradoxical self represents the only intelligible means of self-understanding available. Though Niebuhr never develops this epistemological ground, it may provide a way of avoiding the moral consequentialism to which Niebuhr appears to (...) be resigned. The resulting framework points toward moral pragmatism, retaining its orientation and relevance in the midst of deliberations concerning means and ends. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 11, Issue 2, pp 149 - 172 Even among sympathetic readers, there abides a sense that Proclus’ attachment to his authorities at least partially blinds him to Socratic irony. This has serious implications for his conciliation of Homer and Plato in the Sixth Essay of his _Commentary on the Republic_. A significant number of the passages in Plato’s dialogues, which Proclus takes as necessitating their agreement, appear to be examples of Socrates’ ironic mode. If this apparent necessity (...) exists only through a failure to recognize the ironic character of these statements, it would seem to indicate the truth of E.R. Dodds’ famous judgement of Proclus, that he is properly philosophical only insofar as his thought is not subject to the irrationalisms of his pagan piety. The contention of this essay is that Proclus’ project of conciliation is not, in fact, driven by a refusal to recognize Socratic irony, but by his nuanced interpretation of it, an interpretation that is clarified through a consideration of the striking parallels it has with his understanding of poetic symbol. In following this path of inquiry, it will become evident that Proclus’ position on Socratic irony, and the theological conciliation it necessitates, is not an irrational interruption of his otherwise rational system, but an integral feature of its philosophical coherence. (shrink)

This paper develops a new interpretation of the “table of nothing” that appears at the end of the transcendental aesthetic in the Critique of Pure Reason. In contrast to previous interpretations, which have taken it to be part of Kant’s account of the failures of reason, this paper argues that it should be understood as proffering Kant’s positive account of the objects he will be concerned with in the transcendental dialectic, namely objects that, properly understood, are nothing. I examine the (...) four nothings in turn, showing how Kant’s concern is to develop a positive account of each one that allows him to determine its object while recognizing that it in some sense is not. I introduce Allison’s distinction between error and illusion and argue that the table of nothing is Kant’s theoretical account of what illusions are as objects, and thereby explains how something like a transcendental dialectic is possible at all. (shrink)

In this paper I consider two accounts of scientific discovery, Robert Hudson's and Peter Achinstein's. I assess their relative success and I show that while both approaches are similar in promising ways, and address experimental discoveries well, they could address the concerns of the discovery sceptic more explicitly than they do. I also explore the implications of their inability to address purely theoretical discoveries, such as those often made in mathematical physics. I do so by showing that extending Hudson's or (...) Achinstein's account to such cases can sometimes provide a misleading analysis about who ought to be credited as a discoverer. In the final sections of the paper I work out some revisions to the Hudson/Achinstein account by drawing from a so-called structural realist view of theory change. Finally, I show how such a modified account of discovery can answer sceptical critics such as Musgrave or Woolgar without producing misleading analyses about who ought to receive credit as a discoverer in cases from the mathematical sciences. I illustrate the usefulness of this approach by providing an analysis of the case of the discovery of the Casimir effect. (shrink)

For years, tour guide Daniel Lum has brought visitors as well as his children out to the remote corners of Barrow, Alaska, one of the northernmost cities in the world, to witness polar bears and walrus on the dark, sandy beaches. Over time, snapping pictures for tourists and shooting photographs of his own, he has been a first-hand witness to the profound environmental changes taking place as his homeland shifts and disappears before his eyes. As arguments over climate change (...) rage in more temperate locales, Nuvuk, the Northernmost is a poignant snapshot of life in a town where these changes are impossible to overlook. Lum's vivid photographs of wildlife, such as whales, polar bears, and birds, offer rare close-ups of animals few ever see. In addition, Lum provides vivid descriptions and pictures of daily life in and around Barrow, offering a compelling insider's introduction to living on the tip of the world. With Lum as a capable guide, Nuvuk, the Northernmost is a chance to see a rare world before it changes forever. (shrink)

Basic Emotion Theory, or BET, has dominated the affective sciences for decades (Ekman, 1972, 1992, 1999; Ekman and Davidson, 1994; Griffiths, 2013; Scarantino and Griffiths, 2011). It has been highly influential, driving a number of empirical lines of research (e.g., in the context of facial expression detection, neuroimaging studies and evolutionary psychology). Nevertheless, BET has been criticized by philosophers, leading to calls for it to be jettisoned entirely (Colombetti, 2014; Hufendiek, 2016). This paper defuses those criticisms. In addition, it shows (...) that we have good reason to retain BET. Finally, it reviews and puts to rest worries that BET’s commitment to affect programs renders it outmoded. We propose that, with minor adjustments, BET can avoid such criticisms when conceived under a radically enactive account of emotions. Thus, rather than leaving BET behind, we show how its basic ideas can be revised, refashioned and preserved. Hence, we conclude, our new BET is still a good bet. (shrink)

In a recent exchange, John M. Fischer and David Widerker have debated whether or not it is appropriate to employ Frankfurt-style examples in efforts to challenge the intuitively plausible “principle of alternative possibilities.” Most recently, David Widerker and Charlotte Katzoff have tried to defend Widerker’s initial claim that such examples beg the question against libertarianism. As a libertarian sympathizer, I would like very much for these arguments to go through. However, I argue here that (1) their “molinist” critique is off-target, (...) (2) their demonstration of the general falsity of Fischer’s libertarianism misses the point, and (3) they infer the relevance of alternative possibilities from the mere existence of such alternatives in a way that requires unprovided justification. (shrink)

My dissertation is a systematic defense of the moral relevance of alternative possibilities. As such, it constitutes an attack on semi-compatibilism. ;To begin, then, I defend alternative possibilities against three related but independent lines of criticism. The most prominent of these is Harry Frankfurt's now famous counterexample strategy in which cases are constructed that purport to show that a person can, in fact, be responsible even when he cannot do otherwise. Another line of criticism is John Fischer's "flicker of freedom" (...) argument, which builds on Frankfurt-type argumentation by challenging the "robustness" of alternative possibilities. Finally, some recent critics of alternative possibilities have developed "reasons-responsiveness" accounts of moral responsibility that seem further to invalidate the importance of the power to do otherwise. By extending traditional concerns and developing new objections, I argue that room remains for the possible relevance of an alternative possibilities condition on moral responsibility. ;I try to make a positive case for the plausibility of relevance by offering reasons to think that the ability to do otherwise plays an important role in our moral life. Alternatives are important, I argue, because giving up a "freedom to do otherwise" condition would put us in an epistemic bind with respect to our responsibility. That is, the kind of confidence we ordinarily have in our own moral responsibility would be unjustified if it turned out that we do not have alternatives. A second consideration in favor of the relevance of alternatives is distinctively moral. I explore and exploit the relationship between the ability to do otherwise and the putatively Kantian idea that "ought" implies "can," concluding that the semi-compatibilist must either reject both alternative possibilities and the Kantian thesis, or accept that people would not be blameworthy for their moral failures under determinism. Neither option is attractive. ;I conclude, then, that there is good reason to believe that alternative possibilities are necessary for moral responsibility and that semi-compatibilism should be rejected. Our intuitions about the importance of being able to do otherwise can still factor into the traditional arguments to the conclusion that moral responsibility is incompatible with causal determinism. (shrink)

This study in progress addresses the question of how market competition affects corporate social performance. An empirical analysis is described designed to shed light on recent theoretical developments on the relation between market structure and stakeholder responsiveness and to inform on the old debate between Friedman and Corporate Social Responsibility.

We thank the commentators for their thoughtful engagement with our paper.1 In different ways, they make the same substantial point: our suggested interventions are not enough to solve the problems of organisational failure. On this we wholeheartedly agree. Organisational failure in healthcare is complex and multifaceted, it cannot be solved by one intervention in medical education. We did not intend to imply that our proposals alone would solve organisational failure, and this positioning misconstrues the aims of our paper. We had (...) more modest ambitions, we wanted to shift the analytical emphasis away from the individual and explore the implications raised by our analysis for our piece of the jigsaw—medical education. Having stepped away from such grand claims, the commentators make some valid points to which we would like to respond more specifically. Jesudason makes the distinction that normalisation of deviance (NoD) is well suited to understand institutional misfeasance but not malfeasance.2 We are inclined to agree; NoD can do some things but not all. Likewise, …. (shrink)

The Snowden revelations in 2013 redrew the lines of debate surrounding surveillance, exposing the extent of state surveillance across multiple nations and triggering legislative reform in many. In the UK, this was in the form of the Investigatory Powers Act. As a contribution to understanding resistance to expanding state surveillance activities, this article reveals the intertwining of diverse interests and voices which speak in opposition to UK state surveillance. Through a computational topic modelling-based mixed methods analysis of the submissions made (...) to the draft Investigatory Powers Bill consultation, the article demonstrates the diversity and intersection of discourses within different actor groups, including civil society and the technology industry. We demonstrate that encryption is a key issue for these groups, and is additionally conflated with a human rights discourse. This serves to unite seemingly disparate interests by imbuing encryption with a responsibility for the protection of human rights, but also threatens to legitimate corporate interests and distract from their own data-driven activities of surveillance capitalism. (shrink)

Ladyman, Presnell, and Short proposed a model of the implementation of logical operations by physical processes in order to clarify the exact statement of Landauer's Principle, and then offered a new proof of the latter based on the construction of a thermodynamic cycle, arguing that if Landauer's Principle were false it would be possible to harness a machine that violated it to produce a violation of the second law of thermodynamics. In a recent paper in this journal, John Norton directly (...) challenges the consistency of that proof. In the present paper we defend the proof given by Ladyman et al. against his critique. In particular, contrary to what Norton claims, we argue that the processes used in the proof cannot be used to construct a cycle that enacts erasure in a thermodynamically reversible way, and that he does not show that the processes used in the proof violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics. (shrink)

How can health plans make fair determinations about when “experimental” (and costly) treatments such as high dose chemotherapy with autologous bone marrow transplantation should be covered despite lack of clear clinical consensus about their benefits? Different models for managing “last chance” therapies evolving in some health plans offer promising examples of how issues of fairness and legitimacy in decisionmaking can be addressed.

The subject of this edited volume is the idea of levels of organization: roughly, the idea that the natural world is segregated into part-whole relationships of increasing spatiotemporal scale and complexity. The book comprises a collection of essays that raise the idea of levels into its own topic of analysis. Owing to the wide prominence of the idea of levels, the scope of the volume is aimed at theoreticians, philosophers, and practicing researchers of all stripes in the life sciences. The (...) volume’s contributions reflect this diversity, and draw from fields such as developmental biology, evolutionary biology, molecular biology, ecology, cell biology, and neuroscience. The book presents wide-ranging novel insights on causation and levels, the hierarchical structure of evolution, the role of levels in biological theory, and more. (shrink)

This essay explains what the Causal Markov Condition says and defends the condition from the many criticisms that have been launched against it. Although we are skeptical about some of the applications of the Causal Markov Condition, we argue that it is implicit in the view that causes can be used to manipulate their effects and that it cannot be surrendered without surrendering this view of causation.

A brief self-report scale was developed to assess everyday performance failures arising directly or primarily from brief failures of sustained attention . The ARCES was found to be associated with a more direct measure of propensity to attention lapses and to errors on an existing behavioral measure of sustained attention . Although the ARCES and MAAS were highly correlated, structural modelling revealed the ARCES was more directly related to SART errors and the MAAS to SART RTs, which have been hypothesized (...) to directly reflect the lapses of attention that lead to SART errors. Thus, the MAAS and SART RTs appear to directly reflect attention lapses, whereas the ARCES and SART errors reflect the mistakes these lapses are thought to cause. Boredom proneness was also assessed by the BPS, as a separate consequence of a propensity to attention lapses. Although the ARCES was significantly associated with the BPS, this association was entirely accounted for by the MAAS, suggesting that performance errors and boredom are separate consequences of lapses in attention. A tendency to even extraordinarily brief attention lapses on the order of milliseconds may have far-reaching consequences not only for safe and efficient task performance but also for sustaining the motivation to persist in and enjoy these tasks. (shrink)

Deflationism about truth, what is often simply called “deflationism”, is really not so much a theory of truth in the traditional sense, as it is a different, newer sort of approach to the topic. Traditional theories of truth are part of a philosophical debate about the nature of a supposed property of truth. Philosophers offering such theories often make suggestions like the following: truth consists in correspondence to the facts; truth consists in coherence with a set of beliefs or propositions; (...) truth is what is acceptable in the ideal limit of inquiry. According to deflationists, such suggestions are mistaken, and, moreover, they all share a common mistake. The common mistake is to assume that truth has a nature of the kind that philosophers might find out about and develop theories of. The main idea of the deflationary approach is (a) that all that can be significantly said about truth is exhausted by an account of the role of the expression ‘true’ or of the concept of truth in our talk and thought, and (b) that, by contrast with what traditional views assume, this role is neither metaphysically substantive nor explanatory. For example, according to deflationary accounts, to say that ‘snow is white’ is true, or that it is true that snow is white, is in some sense strongly equivalent to saying simply that snow is white, and this, according to the deflationary approach, is all that can be said significantly about the truth of ‘snow is white’. Philosophers looking for some underlying nature of some truth property that is attributed with the use of the expression ‘true’ are bound to be frustrated, the deflationist says, because they are looking for something that isn’t there. Deflationism comprises a variety of different versions, each of which have gone by different names, including at least the following: disquotationalism, minimalism, prosententialism, the redundancy theory, the disappearance theory, the no-truth theory. There has not always been terminological consensus in the literature about how to use these labels: sometimes they have been used interchangeably; sometimes they have been used to mark distinctions between different developments of the same general approach. The actual variety of deflationary views has not always been clear in discussions of this approach, especially in the earlier literature, where important differences are occasionally missed. To help clear this up, we will use ‘deflationism’ to denote the general approach we want to discuss and reserve other names for specific versions of that approach. (shrink)

Many forms of Buddhism, divergent in philosophy and style, emerged as Buddhism filtered out of India into other parts of Asia. Nonetheless, all of them embodied an ethical core that is remarkably consistent. Articulated by the historical Buddha in his first sermon, this moral core is founded on the concept of karma--that intentions and actions have future consequences for an individual--and is summarized as Right Speech, Right Action, and Right Livelihood, three of the elements of the Eightfold Path. Although they (...) were later elaborated and interpreted in a multitude of ways, none of these core principles were ever abandoned. The Oxford Handbook of Buddhist Ethics provides a comprehensive overview of the field of Buddhist ethics in the twenty-first century. The Handbook discusses the foundations of Buddhist ethics focusing on karma and the precepts looking at abstinence from harming others, stealing, and intoxication. It considers ethics in the different Buddhist traditions and the similarities they share, and compares Buddhist ethics to Western ethics and the psychology of moral judgments. The volume also investigates Buddhism and society analysing economics, environmental ethics, and Just War ethics. The final section focuses on contemporary issues surrounding Buddhist ethics, including gender, sexuality, animal rights, and euthanasia. This groundbreaking collection offers an indispensable reference work for students and scholars of Buddhist ethics and comparative moral philosophy. (shrink)

We apply the author's computational approach to groups to our empirical work studying and modelling riots. We suggest that assigning roles in particular gives insight, and measuring the frequency of bystander behaviour provides a method to understand the dynamic nature of intergroup conflict, allowing social identity to be incorporated into models of riots.

Should mental health insurance cover only disorders found in DSM‐IV, or should it be extended to treatment for ordinary shyness, unhappiness, and other responses to life's hard knocks?

We investigate the processes underlying the feeling of control over one’s actions . Sense of agency may depend on internal motoric signals, and general inferences about external events. We used priming to modulate the sense of agency for voluntary and involuntary movements, by modifying the content of conscious thought prior to moving. Trials began with the presentation of one of two supraliminal primes, which corresponded to the effect of a voluntary action participants subsequently made. The perceived interval between movement and (...) effect was used as an implicit measure of sense of agency. Primes modulated perceived intervals for both voluntary and involuntary movements, but the modulation was greatest for involuntary movements. A second experiment showed that this modulation depended on prime–movement contiguity. We propose that sense of agency is based on a combination of internal motoric signals and external sensory evidence about the source of actions and effects. (shrink)

expose some gaps and difficulties in the argument for the causal Markov condition in our essay ‘Independence, Invariance and the Causal Markov Condition’ ([1999]), and we are grateful for the opportunity to reformulate our position. In particular, Cartwright disagrees vigorously with many of the theses we advance about the connection between causation and manipulation. Although we are not persuaded by some of her criticisms, we shall confine ourselves to showing how our central argument can be reconstructed and to casting doubt (...) on Cartwright's claim that the causal Markov condition typically fails when there are indeterministic by-products. Why believe the causal Markov condition? Causation and manipulation The argument Indeterministic by-products and the causal Markov condition The chemical factory counterexample and PM2 Conclusions: causation and manipulability. (shrink)

In a seminal 1977 article, Rumelhart argued that perception required the simultaneous use of multiple sources of information, allowing perceivers to optimally interpret sensory information at many levels of representation in real time as information arrives. Building on Rumelhart's arguments, we present the Interactive Activation hypothesis—the idea that the mechanism used in perception and comprehension to achieve these feats exploits an interactive activation process implemented through the bidirectional propagation of activation among simple processing units. We then examine the interactive activation (...) model of letter and word perception and the TRACE model of speech perception, as early attempts to explore this hypothesis, and review the experimental evidence relevant to their assumptions and predictions. We consider how well these models address the computational challenge posed by the problem of perception, and we consider how consistent they are with evidence from behavioral experiments. We examine empirical and theoretical controversies surrounding the idea of interactive processing, including a controversy that swirls around the relationship between interactive computation and optimal Bayesian inference. Some of the implementation details of early versions of interactive activation models caused deviation from optimality and from aspects of human performance data. More recent versions of these models, however, overcome these deficiencies. Among these is a model called the multinomial interactive activation model, which explicitly links interactive activation and Bayesian computations. We also review evidence from neurophysiological and neuroimaging studies supporting the view that interactive processing is a characteristic of the perceptual processing machinery in the brain. In sum, we argue that a computational analysis, as well as behavioral and neuroscience evidence, all support the Interactive Activation hypothesis. The evidence suggests that contemporary versions of models based on the idea of interactive activation continue to provide a basis for efforts to achieve a fuller understanding of the process of perception. (shrink)

Background Our objective was to evaluate whether the description of a machine learning (ML) app or brain imaging technology to predict the onset of schizophrenia or alcohol use disorder (AUD) influences healthcare professionals’ judgments of stigma, empathy, and compassion.Methods We randomized healthcare professionals (N = 310) to one vignette about a person whose clinician seeks to predict schizophrenia or an AUD, using a ML app, brain imaging, or a psychosocial assessment. Participants used scales to measure their judgments of stigma, empathy, (...) and compassion.Results Participants randomized to the ML vignette endorsed less anger and more fear relative to the psychosocial vignette, and the brain imaging vignette elicited higher pity ratings. The brain imaging and ML vignettes evoked lower personal responsibility judgments compared to the psychosocial vignette. Physicians and nurses reported less empathy than clinical psychologists.Conclusions The use of predictive technologies may reinforce essentialist views about mental health and substance use that may increase specific aspects of stigma and reduce others. (shrink)

This article interprets Hegel's hierarchical theory of race as an application of his general views about the metaphysics of classification and explanation. We begin by offering a reconstruction of Hegel's hierarchical theory of race based on the critical edition of relevant lecture transcripts: we argue that Hegel's position on race is appropriately classified as racist, that it postulates innate mental deficits of some races, and that it turns racism from an anthropological into a metaphysical doctrine by claiming that the division (...) of humankind into races (at least in the Old World) is not a brute fact, but follows a ‘higher necessity’. We then summarize our interpretation of the relevant metaphysical background to this theory. On our reading, Hegel postulates an essentialist form of explanation that explains given kinds as stages in a teleological, non-temporal process through which the nature of a superordinate kind is realized. We argue that Hegel's views about a hierarchical and necessary division of humankind into races are an application of this model to the case of human diversity, motivated by explanatory considerations and subject to confirmation bias. By way of conclusion, we address two possible attempts to ‘save’ Hegelian philosophy from its racist baggage. (shrink)