This book brings together some of the best minds in neurology and philosophy to discuss the concept of personal identity and the moral dimensions of treating ...

This paper scrutinises the many ways in which ‘success’ is portrayed in representing assisted reproductive technology (ART) services and illuminates how these definitions differ from those held by participant couples. A qualitative approach informed by feminist perspectives guided this study and aimed to problematise the concept of ‘success’ by examining literature from ART clinics, government reports on ART, and by analysing narratives of couples who have accessed ART services. As many ART services have varying definitions of ‘success’ and as statistics (...) are manipulated to promote further patronage of ART services, the likelihood of ‘success’ is often overstated. This paper is concerned with the effects this promotion has on the participants. We suggest that this very mobilisation of statistical success changes the ability of those who access ART services to make productive decisions about themselves inside these treatment regimes, as the basis for decision‐making is hidden by the way numbers, objectivity and clinical reasoning operate to maintain participation in the program. In such an operation, the powerful mix of hope and technology kept participants enrolled far longer than they originally planned. Moreover, how success rates are manipulated raises ethical issues for all involved: clients, counsellors, and nursing and medical professionals. (shrink)

The prospect of using genome technologies to modify the human germline has raised profound moral disagreement but also emphasizes the need for wide-ranging discussion and a well-informed policy response. The Hinxton Group brought together scientists, ethicists, policymakers, and journal editors for an international, interdisciplinary meeting on this subject. This consensus statement formulated by the group calls for support of genome editing research and the development of a scientific roadmap for safety and efficacy; recognizes the ethical challenges involved in clinical reproductive (...) applications of genome editing but, importantly, rejects the idea that human reproductive germline modification is necessarily morally unacceptable; and highlights the importance of meaningful engagement in discussions of genome editing and the development of regulation and oversight mechanisms to govern future uses of such technologies. (shrink)

Nietzsche's use of metaphor has been widely noted but rarely focused to explore specific images in great detail. A Nietzschean Bestiary gathers essays devoted to the most notorious and celebrated beasts in Nietzsche's work. The essays illustrate Nietzsche's ample use of animal imagery, and link it to the dual philosophical purposes of recovering and revivifying human animality, which plays a significant role in his call for de-deifying nature.

The phenomenal character of conscious experience has long been regarded as the major problem for physicalist accounts of consciousness. In recent years, defenders of physicalism have typically been relying on the so-called Phenomenal Concept Strategy to avoid dualism. In this paper, we argue with PCS that cognitive-physicalistic explanations can account for the peculiarities of phenomenal character. However, we think that the conceptual features PCS investigates are not the genuine causes of the special characteristics of phenomenal consciousness but only symptoms, which (...) can themselves be explained in terms of the features of the sensory-perceptual representations underlying conscious experiences, namely that some, but not all, of these states are representationally unstructured. (shrink)

The power PC theory postulates a normative procedure for making causal inferences from contingency information, and offers this as a descriptive model of human causal judgement. The inferential procedure requires a set of assumptions, which includes the assumption that the cause being judged is distributed independently of the set of other possible causes of the same outcome. It is argued that this assumption either never holds or can never be known to hold. It is also argued that conformity of judgements (...) to the prescriptions of the model requires a sophisticated appreciation of methodological factors and acquired domain-specific knowledge of causes, and that the theory is disconfirmed by a finding that an objective contingency that equally supports two causal inferences results in only one of them actually being made. An alternative proposal based on the hypothesis that causal understanding originates with experiences of forces exerted while acting on objects is briefly sketched. (shrink)

Committee: Fred Dretske (Advisor), Michael Bratman, Debra Satz, Ken Taylor. My thesis is that testimonial knowledge of particular matters of fact is a species of perceptual (non-inferential) knowledge. There are two rival views. The first holds that testimonial knowledge is a species of inductive knowledge. According to inductivism, we learn from others because we have inductively established that testimony is a reliable source. I argue that this view is too demanding. The second holds that testimonial knowledge is, like memory, (...) preservative. According to preservativism, a hearer learns from a speaker because the speaker's knowledge is transferred to the hearer. Testimony preserves knowledge across subjects at a time as memory preserves knowledge within a subject over time. This view is subject to counter-example. What matters to whether the hearer teams is not whether the speaker knows, but whether the hearer's cognitive state of taking the speaker to state that P adequately grounds the belief that P. One way to account for "adequate grounds" is in terms of Information-carrying I argue that knowledge is not preserved or transferred through testimony, rather Information is conveyed. This shows that testimonial knowledge is perceptual knowledge, for perceptual knowledge depends on adequate grounds and not prior knowledge. Testimonial knowledge, like standard cases of perceptual knowledge, is original. Call my position originalism. ;There are three main sources of opposition. First, linguistic acceptance is inferential in a way that perceptual belief is not. Second, acceptance, if reliable, is reliable in a way that perceptual belief is not. Third, testimony involves agency, free will, and the following of norms and perceptual belief does not. In reply I argue that linguistic acceptance that the world is a certain way does not depend on believing that the speaker stated that it is that way, that even if there are differences between the way in which testimony is reliable and the way standard cases of perception are reliable, those differences are only contingent or epistemologically irrelevant, and that even though testimony does involve agency and norms in a way that vision, taste, and so on do not, that fact does not matter to whether testimonial knowledge is a species of perceptual (non-inferential) knowledge. (shrink)

As we have seen, natural antibodies first emerged as an experimental phenomenon without a plausible theoretical explanation. They were originally denied the status of antibody; then, adjustments to the side-chain theory transformed them from a curiosity into a foundation of the theory. However, in accommodating natural antibodies, Ehrlich had opened several holes in his mechanism of antibody formation.Thus, by 1905, natural antibodies were clearly established as problematic. From the practical standpoint, it seemed unwise to maintain an identity between normal and (...) immune antibodies, given the therapeutic differences in their avidity. With the decline of Ehrlich's theory of antibody formation and the spread of Landsteiner's hapten technique for the production of antibodies against artificial antigens after World War I, the theoretical possibility of their existence as other than anomaly seemed more remote than ever. However, outside the theory and despite clinical considerations, natural antibodies remained a perplexing experimental phenomenon.49This is a somewhat different picture from that usually offered by historians of immunology. Debra Jan Bibel, for example, has recently written: “Ehrlich had no problem in accepting natural antibodies, since they were even predicted by his side-chain theory of antibody formation.:50 However, we have seen that far from being predicted by Ehrlich's side-chain theory, natural antibodies emerged as an anomaly and caused Ehrlich to significantly modify his theory in order to accommodate them. We have also seen that researchers opposed to Ehrlich's school, such as Bordet, initially accepted the existence of natural antibodies, before realizing what an important tool they would be for Ehrlich. Once natural antibodies came to be seen as a confirmation of Ehrlich's theory, attitudes changed and the very existence of natural antibodies was called into question. Other opponents of Ehrlich, such as Landsteiner, opposed natural antibodies from the beginning, before it came to be believed that there was an “infinity of antibodies,” which would make their existence impossible.51. (shrink)

Despite its uniform appearance, the cerebellar cortex is highly heterogeneous in terms of structure, genetics and physiology. Purkinje cells (PCs), the principal and sole output neurons of the cerebellar cortex, can be categorized into multiple populations that differentially express molecular markers and display distinctive physiological features. Such features include action potential rate, but also their propensity for synaptic and intrinsic plasticity. However, the precise molecular and genetic factors that correlate with the differential physiological properties of PCs remain elusive. In this (...) article, we provide a detailed overview of the cellular mechanisms that regulate PC activity and plasticity. We further perform a pathway analysis to highlight how molecular characteristics of specific PC populations may influence their physiology and plasticity mechanisms. (shrink)

Most causal discovery algorithms in the literature exploit an assumption usually referred to as the Causal Faithfulness or Stability Condition. In this paper, we highlight two components of the condition used in constraint-based algorithms, which we call “Adjacency-Faithfulness” and “Orientation- Faithfulness.” We point out that assuming Adjacency-Faithfulness is true, it is possible to test the validity of Orientation- Faithfulness. Motivated by this observation, we explore the consequence of making only the Adjacency-Faithfulness assumption. We show that the familiar PC algorithm has (...) to be modified to be correct under the weaker, Adjacency-Faithfulness assumption. The modified algorithm, called Conservative PC (CPC), checks whether Orientation- Faithfulness holds in the orientation phase, and if not, avoids drawing certain causal conclusions the PC algorithm would draw. Howtion: ever, if the stronger, standard causal Faith-. (shrink)

In recent years Vietnam has experienced a high sex ratio at birth SRB) amidst rapid socioeconomic and demographic changes. However, little is known about the differentials in SRB between maternal socioeconomic and demographic groups. The paper uses data from the annual Population Change Survey (PCS) in 2006 to examine the relationship of the sex ratio of the most recent birth with maternal socioeconomic and demographic characteristics and the number of previous female births. The SRB of Vietnam was significantly high at (...) 111.4 (95% CI 109.7–113.1) for the period 1st April 2000 to 31st March 2006. Multivariate analysis reveals that sex of the most recent birth is strongly related with the number of previous female births. This association is consistent across different socioeconomic and demographic groups of women. Given the high SRB in Vietnam, further research into the reasons for high SRB in these groups is required, as are intervention programmes such as those raising the public awareness of its negative consequences. © Cambridge University Press, 2010. (shrink)

Cultural Semiosis traces the theoretical itinerary of the signifier in the continental tradition. Cultural semiosis provides links for cultural studies to the philosophical, the literary, the historical and the social. Understood semiotically, cultural signs and signifiers are inscribed in the fabric of cultural practices. Cultural semiosis enters the spaces of everyday language, visuality, sexuality and symbolization. These original essays interpret and provide tools for the understanding of cultural studies within a philosophical framework. Contributors: M. Alison Arnett, Debra Bergoffen, Peter (...) Carravetta, Alessandro Carrera, Julia Kristeva, John Llewelyn, Michael Naas, Kelly Oliver, Adi Ophir, Francois Raffoul, Mark Roberts, Stephanie Sage, Hugh J. Silverman. (shrink)

Many ethical frameworks require artificial intelligence (AI) systems to be explainable. Explainable AI (XAI) models are frequently tested for their adequacy in user studies. Since different people may have different explanatory needs, it is important that participant samples in user studies are large enough to represent the target population to enable generalizations. However, it is unclear to what extent XAI researchers reflect on and justify their sample sizes or avoid broad generalizations across people. We analyzed XAI user studies (N = (...) 220) published between 2012 and 2022. Most studies did not offer rationales for their sample sizes. Moreover, most papers generalized their conclusions beyond their target population, and there was no evidence that broader conclusions in quantitative studies were correlated with larger samples. These methodological problems can impede evaluations of whether XAI systems implement the explainability called for in ethical frameworks. We outline principles for more inclusive XAI user studies. (shrink)

The phenomenal concept strategy (PCS) is widely regarded as the most promising physicalist defence against the so-called epistemic arguments—the anti-physicalist arguments that establish an ontological gap between physical and phenomenal facts on the basis of the occurrence of epistemic gaps in our descriptions of these facts. The PCS tries to undercut the force of the epistemic arguments by attributing the occurrence of the epistemic gaps to the special character of phenomenal concepts—the concepts by means of which we think about our (...) phenomenal experiences. In this essay, the author examines David Chalmers' master argument against the PCS and the objections raised against this argument by Peter Carruthers, Bénédicte Veillet and Katalin Balog in defending the PCS. While the author finds these objections to be successful defences of the PCS, the author shares Balog's belief that in this regard, the debate between the physicalists and anti-physicalists is a stalemate. (shrink)

Introduction: education, philosophy and politics -- Writing the self: Wittgenstein, confession and pedagogy -- Nietzsche, nihilism and the critique of modernity: post-Nietzschean philosophy of education -- Heidegger, education and modernity -- Truth-telling as an educational practice of the self: Foucault and the ethics of subjectivity -- Neoliberal governmentality: Foucault on the birth of biopolitics -- Lyotard, nihilism and education -- Gilles Deleuze's 'societies of control': from disciplinary pedagogy to perpetual training -- Geophilosophy, education and the pedagogy of the concept - (...) Humanism, Derrida and the new humanities -- Politics and deconstruction: Derrida, neoliberalism and democracy -- Neopragmatism, ethnocentrism and the politics of the ethnos: Rorty's 'postmodernist bourgeois liberalism' -- Achieving America: postmodernism and Rorty's critique of the cultural left -- Deranging the investigations: Cavell on the philosophy of the child -- White philosophy in/of America. (shrink)

Does algorithmic political bias contribute to an entrenchment and polarization of political positions? Franke argues that it may do so because the bias involves classifications of people as liberals, conservatives, etc., and individuals often conform to the ways in which they are classified. I provide a novel example of this phenomenon in human–computer interactions and introduce a social psychological mechanism that has been overlooked in this context but should be experimentally explored. Furthermore, while Franke proposes that algorithmic political classifications entrench (...) political identities, I contend that they may often produce the opposite result. They can lead people to change in ways that disconfirm the classifications. Consequently and counterintuitively, algorithmic political bias can in fact decrease political entrenchment and polarization. (shrink)

A growing interest in and concern about the adequacy and fairness of modern peer-review practices in publication and funding are apparent across a wide range of scientific disciplines. Although questions about reliability, accountability, reviewer bias, and competence have been raised, there has been very little direct research on these variables.The present investigation was an attempt to study the peer-review process directly, in the natural setting of actual journal referee evaluations of submitted manuscripts. As test materials we selected 12 already published (...) research articles by investigators from prestigious and highly productive American psychology departments, one article from each of 12 highly regarded and widely read American psychology journals with high rejection rates (80%) and nonblind refereeing practices.With fictitious names and institutions substituted for the original ones (e.g., Tri-Valley Center for Human Potential), the altered manuscripts were formally resubmitted to the journals that had originally refereed and published them 18 to 32 months earlier. Of the sample of 38 editors and reviewers, only three (8%) detected the resubmissions. This result allowed nine of the 12 articles to continue through the review process to receive an actual evaluation: eight of the nine were rejected. Sixteen of the 18 referees (89%) recommended against publication and the editors concurred. The grounds for rejection were in many cases described as “serious methodological flaws.” A number of possible interpretations of these data are reviewed and evaluated. (shrink)

First published in 1966, this book was written to serve as an introductory textbook in the philosophy of education, focusing on ethics and social philosophy. It presents a distinctive point of view both about education and ethical theory and arrived at a time when education was a matter of great public concern. It looks at questions such as ‘What do we actually mean by education?’ and provides a proper ethical foundation for education in a democratic society. The book will appeal (...) to both teachers and students of philosophy as well as education. (shrink)

The current COVID-19 pandemic has affected the entire globe, including the world of high-performance sports. Accordingly, it has been widely assumed that the thereby caused postponement of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games could have negative psychological impacts for aspirants, since they were halted abruptly in the pursuit of their Olympic endeavors and their daily lives drastically altered. Considering the sudden nature of the pandemic, few researchers, if any, have yet scrutinized the individual experience of Olympic aspirants. This qualitative study examines (...) the subjective perceptions of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games postponement among Austrian Olympic athletes and coaches. To this end, 21 Austrian athletes (13 male, 8 female; mean age = 26.67 ± 4.93 years) and six male coaches were recruited through a criterion-based purposive sampling strategy. Five athletes had already qualified for the Olympic Games in Tokyo 2020 and 15 athletes were still in an ongoing qualification process. Data was collected by means of short written statements, elicited via open-format questions on an anonymous online survey platform. In order to infer meaning from the text, a qualitative content analysis with an interpretative focus was conducted inductively, which allowed for deriving alternative explanations of findings. The results support the notion that the Olympic postponement was experienced in myriad ways by affected participants. Three general themes comprised of several meaning units of different levels of abstraction were created from the text data. Many respondents experienced an immediate emotional reaction to the postponement characterized by confusion, disappointment and/or relief. Participants associated multiple consequences with the postponement, such as the prolongation of physical and psychological pressure, a lack of motivation, concerns about future performance, living and their occupational career, but also the opportunity for performance improvement and recovery. Respondents displayed various coping strategies, such as distancing themselves from sports, cognitive reframing, appealing for acceptance, and planning behavior. This study gleans first insights into the idiosyncratic experience of the Olympic Games 2020 postponement among Austrian aspirants. The findings could serve to assist sport psychologists in their applied practice by informing them about athletes’ and coaches’ needs in their Olympic preparation during the ongoing pandemic. (shrink)

Improvisation is usually either lionized as an ecstatic experience of being in the moment or disparaged as the thoughtless recycling of clichés. Eschewing both of these orthodoxies, _The Philosophy of Improvisation_ ranges across the arts—from music to theater, dance to comedy—and considers the improvised dimension of philosophy itself in order to elaborate an innovative concept of improvisation. Gary Peters turns to many of the major thinkers within continental philosophy—including Heidegger, Nietzsche, Adorno, Kant, Benjamin, and Deleuze—offering readings of their reflections (...) on improvisation and exploring improvisational elements within their thinking. Peters’s wry, humorous style offers an antidote to the frequently overheated celebration of freedom and community that characterizes most writing on the subject. Expanding the field of what counts as improvisation, _The Philosophy of Improvisation_ will be welcomed by anyone striving to comprehend the creative process. (shrink)

It would be interesting to speculate why particular lines of enquiry flourish and fade. The study of ‘character’ is a case in point. In the '20s and early '30s the study of ‘character’ was quite a flourishing branch of psychology. It then came to an abrupt halt and, until recent times, there has been almost nothing in the literature on the subject. Perhaps it was the notorious Hartshorne and May Character Education Enquiry, and the inferences that were mistakenly drawn from (...) it, that killed it; perhaps it was the pre-occupation with something more general and amorphous called ‘personality’; perhaps it was the mixture of metaphysics and methodological neurosis centred around the rat. Who knows? Anyway, the study of character is very much with us again as is revealed not merely by Riesman's Lonely Crowd but also by the recent study by Peck and Havighurst called The Psychology of Character Development . The British Journal of Educational Psychology has also, for some time, been running a symposium on The Development of Moral Values in Children. (shrink)

This paper examines the underlying genres of philosophy focusing especially on their pedagogical forms to emphasize the materiality and historicity of genres, texts and writing. It focuses briefly on the history of the essay and its relation to the journal within the wider history of scientific communication, and comments on the standardized forms of academic writing and the issue of ‘bad writing’.

R S Peters; Postscript 2, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 7, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 179–180, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.1973.tb00480.x.

This book offers a comprehensive roadmap for determining when and how to regulate risky reproductive technologies on behalf of future children. First, it provides three benchmarks for determining whether a reproductive practice is harmful to the children it produces. This framework synthesizes and extends past efforts to make sense of our intuitive, but paradoxical, belief that reproductive choices can be both life-giving and harmful. Next, it recommends a process for reconciling the interests of future children with the reproductive liberty of (...) prospective parents. The author rejects a blanket preference for either parental autonomy or child welfare and proposes instead a case-by-case inquiry that takes into account the nature and magnitude of the proposed restrictions on procreative liberty, the risk of harm to future children, and the context in which the issue arises. Finally, he applies this framework to four past and future medical treatments with above average risk, including cloning and genetic engineering. Drawing lessons from these case studies, Peters criticizes the current lack of regulatory oversight and recommends both more extensive pre-market testing and closer post-market monitoring of new reproductive technologies. His moderate pragmatic approach will be widely appreciated. (shrink)

Jason Brennan and Peter M. Jaworski have recently developed an argument against semiotic objections to markets. They argue that all such semiotic arguments are unsound because they fail to recognize that the meaning of market transactions is a contingent socially-constructed fact. They attribute this type of argument to Debra Satz. This paper argues both that Brennan and Jaworski are mistaken to attribute this particular semiotic objection to Satz and that they are mistaken to attribute to her a semiotic objection (...) of this type. It then argues that Brennan and Jaworski have fundamentally misunderstood the nature of Satz’s project. It concludes by defending Satz against Brennan and Jaworski’s charge that one of her criticisms of markets is based on an equivocation. (shrink)

In this article, I respond to important questions raised by Gallagher and Jacobson in the field of cognitive science about face-to-face interactions in Heidegger’s account of ‘intersubjectivity’ in Being and Time. They have criticized his account for a lack of attention to primary intersubjectivity, or immediate, face-to-face interactions; he favours, they argue, embodied interactions via objects. I argue that the same assumption underlies their argument as did earlier critiques of a lack of an account of the body in Heidegger ; (...) namely that because the body is not explicitly discussed in Being and Time, embodiment, rather than stressing the immediacy of experience, is insufficiently acknowledged in his emphasis on ‘being-in-the-world’. Through placing Gallagher and Jacobson’s accounts of intersubjectivity and the body alongside Heidegger’s accounts of Mitsein and Leib, this article shows Heidegger’s radical position on the body as immersed in a holistic environment, and its reverberations on his account of intersubjectivity. I argue that Dasein’s embodied engagement in the world is always one of immediacy and that the body of the other is perceived as ‘tied into’ its context, as well. In so doing, I offer an Heideggerian account of ecstatic involvement which moves away from the distinction between primary and secondary intersubjectivity toward an immediate engagement with objects and people always already ‘tied into’ a context; an account that, through the concept of Fürsorge, includes shifts of attention between objects and people that allow for the ethical distinctions Gallagher and Jacobson are looking for. (shrink)

educated man1 Some further reflections 1 The comparison with 'reform' In reflecting, in the past, on the sort of term that 'education' is I have usually ...

This chapter contains sections titled: The Meanings of “Postmodernism” The Meanings of Post‐structuralism Education and the Politics of Post‐structuralism.

A principal goal of this book is to develop and apply the Situation Semantics framework. Jean Mark Gawron and Stanley Peters adopt a version of the theory in which meanings are built up via syntactically driven semantic composition rules. They provide a substantial treatment of English incorporating treatments of pronomial anaphora, quantification, donkey anaphora, and tense. The book focuses on the semantics of pronomial anaphora and quantification. The authors argue that the ambiguities of sentences with pronouns cannot be adequately (...) accounted for with a theory that represents anaphoric relations only syntactically; their relational framework uniformly deals with anaphoric relations as relations between utterances in context. They argue that there is no need for a syntactic representation of anaphoric relations, or for a theory that accounts for anaphoric ambiguities by resorting to two or more kinds of anaphora. Quantifier scope ambiguities are handled analogously to anaphoric ambiguities. This treatment integrates the Cooper Store mechanism with a theory of meaning that provides both a natural setting for it and a convincing account of what, semantically, is going on. Jean Mark Gawron is a researcher for Hewlett Packard Laboratories, Palo Alto. Stanley Peters is professor of linguistics and symbolic systems at Stanford University and is director of the Center for the Study of Language and Information. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

Reality has become an increasingly prominent topic in contemporary philosophy. The book’s contributors are responding to the challenge to use the philosophically underexplored potential of film to disclose what the editors propose to call “the real of reality.”.

In this paper I investigate ‘the confessional’ as an aspect of Wittgenstein's style both as a mode of philosophising and as a mode of ‘writing the self’, tied explicitly to pedagogical practices. There are strong links between Wittgenstein's confessional mode of philosophising and his life—for him philosophy is a way of life —and interesting theoretical connections between confessional practices and pedagogy, usefully explored in the writings of the French philosopher, Michel Foucault. The Investigations provides a basis and springboard for understanding (...) the notion of ‘writing the self’ as a pedagogical practice which encourages a confessional mode compelling us to tell the truth about ourselves and, thus, creating the conditions for ethico-poetical self-constitution. (shrink)