Women's exclusion from political enfranchisement in Kant's political writings has frequently been noted in the literature, and yet has not been closely scrutinized. More often than not, commentators suggest that this reflects little more than Kant's sharing in the prejudices of his era. This paper argues that, for Kant, women's civil incapacities stem from defects relating to their capacities as moral agents, and more specifically, to his teleological account of the conditions within which we, as imperfect beings, develop our moral (...) capacities. Women are not incidentally or tangentially excluded from the boundaries of political and moral agency, but rather must adopt an explicitly nonmoral character if we are to understand humanity as moving toward its naturally given, moral ends. I argue (1) that Kant's teleological view of human development requires women to develop an explicitly nonmoral character; (2) that this teleology is inextricable from his view of the moral agency that human—and not merely rational—beings are capable of; and (3) that taken together, these suggest that women's subordinate status is internally connected to Kant's view of moral personhood. (shrink)

This study addresses the complex and often fractious relationship between liberal political theory and difference by examining how distinctive liberalisms respond to human diversity. Drawing on published and unpublished writings, private correspondence and lecture notes, the study offers comprehensive reconstructions of Immanuel Kant's and John Stuart Mill's treatment of racial, cultural, gender-based and class-based difference to understand how two leading figures reacted to pluralism, and what contemporary readers might draw from them. The book mounts a qualified defence of Millian liberalism (...) against Kantianism's predominance in contemporary liberal political philosophy, and resists liberalism's implicit association with imperialist domination by showing different divergent responses to diversity. Here are two distinctive liberal visions of moral and political life. (shrink)

This article examines how Kant’s conceptualizations of natural history and teleological judgement shape his understanding of human difference and race. I argue that the teleological framework encasing Kant’s racial theory implies constraints on the capacity of non-whites to make moral progress. While commentators tend to approach Kant’s racial theory in relation to his political theory, his late-life cosmopolitanism, and his treatments (or non-treatments) of colonialism, empire and slavery, the problem I focus on here is that race is itself only intelligible (...) in relation to a teleological natural history limiting certain races’ capacities to engage in humanity’s moral vocation. (shrink)

In recent years, Kant’s lesser-known works on anthropology, education, and history have received increasing scholarly attention, illuminating his views on human nature, moral psychology, and historical development. This paper contributes to this literature by exploring Kant's conceptualization of culture. While recent commentary has drawn on Kant's “impure ethics” to suggest that his anti-imperialism and cosmopolitanism reflect a concern for the preservation of different cultures, I argue that this misinterprets the nature and function of culture in Kant’s thought. Rather than regarding (...) culture as a constitutive good, I argue that Kant understands culture as a transitory good, as a sphere of individual and collective cultivation drawing humanity towards its teleologically given end: the perfection of our rational capacities. This suggests that only certain kinds of culture--those that “prepare [humanity] for a sovereignty in which reason alone is to dominate”--are valuable for Kant. Given this, I argue that Kant’s view of culture in fact presents far greater problems than prospects for theorizing an anti-imperial and cosmopolitan politics. (shrink)

Recent critics have declaimed against John Stuart Mill's liberalism, arguing that his conception of civilization is inexorably bound to a hierarchal conception of social progress justifying Europeans' moral right to 'civilize' barbarian peoples. Without exonerating him from his undoubtedly problematic views regarding non-European cultures, I would like to argue that Mill in fact has a much subtler view of historical development and of civilization than such critics attribute to him. Central to these critics' charges is an 'aggregative' view of Mill's (...) conceptualization of historical development--suggesting that Mill understood societies to move through discrete stages of social development, characterized by internally-correlated stages of economic, political, cultural and moral development--which fails to be borne out under close examination. I argue that Mill's view of historical development and his liberalism more generally are in fact significantly more capacious than is often recognized and are not inextricably bound to the project of imperialism. (shrink)

The West has a stereotypical image of businesses, officials, and politicians, etc., in the East (Third World) countries being pervasively corrupt while it views itself as being almost completely uncorrupt. One closer look, however, realities turn out to be quite different. Business corruption is much more universal that Westerners are generally willing to accept. The major differences are that corruption in the East is practiced so blatantly that it makes major news. Western businesses, on the other hand, have, over time, (...) developed sophisticated techniques whereby corruption becomes almost invisible. This paper discusses the myths and realities of Eastern versus Western corruption and discusses several means which have allowed Western companies to exploit others through subtle and, almost invisible means. The overall advantage, however, still goes to the West where petty corruption has been pretty much eliminated. (shrink)

“Developmentalism” is often regarded as the bête noire haunting liberal political theory, justifying modern civilizational hierarchies and liberal imperialism. But are all developmentalisms equally tied to Eurocentric, imperialist philosophies? I consider this question through a close reading of two of the most prominent, influential, and divisive modern accounts of historical development: those of Kant and J. S. Mill. I argue that Kant's philosophy of history is embedded in an Enlightenment idealism treating non-Europeans as bound to either adopt Western norms or (...) fade into obscurity. Conversely, the influences of Romanticism and sociology led Mill to recognize cultural differences as indelibly affecting any society's development. Given this, I argue, against much of the current literature, that Mill provides us with a significantly more capacious liberalism than Kant's; that his developmentalism holds the conceptual resources to understand progress as a pluralistic and culturally differentiated process; and so, more broadly, that not all liberal developmentalisms are equally bound to imperialist politics. (shrink)

Kant's ethics has long been bedevilled by a peculiar tension. While his practical philosophy describes the moral obligations incumbent on all free, rational beings, Kant also understands moral anthropology as addressing to our moral advancement. How are we to reconcile Kant's Critical account of a transcendentally free human will with his developmental view of anthropology, history and education as assisting in our collective progress towards moral ends? I argue that Kant in fact distinguishes between the objective determination of moral principles (...) and subjective processes of moral acculturation developing human beingsempirical ethics’ as attending to the unsystematizable facets of a properly human moral life. (shrink)

Gluten ataxia is a rare immune-mediated neurological disorder caused by the ingestion of gluten. The diagnosis is not straightforward as antibodies are present in only up to 38% of patients, but often at lower titers. The symptoms of ataxia may be mild at the onset but lead to permanent damage if remain untreated. It is characterized by damage to the cerebellum however, the pathophysiology of the disease is not clearly understood. The present study investigated the neurochemical profile of vermis and (...) right cerebellum and structural changes in various brain regions of patients with gluten ataxia and compared it with healthy controls. Volumetric 3-D T1 and T1-weighted magnetic resonance imaging in the three planes of the whole brain and single-voxel 1H- magnetic resonance spectroscopy of the vermis and right cerebellum were acquired on 3 T human MR scanner. The metabolite concentrations were estimated using LC Model while brain volumes were estimated using the online tool volBrain pipeline and CERES and corrected for partial volumes. The levels of neuro-metabolites were found to be significantly lower in vermis, while N-acetyl aspartate + N-acetyl aspartate glutamate and glycerophosphocholine + phosphocholine was lower in cerebellum regions in the patients with gluten ataxia compared to healthy controls. A significant reduction in the white matter of ; reduction in the volumes of cerebellum lobe and thalamus while lateral ventricles were increased in the patients with gluten ataxia compared to healthy controls. The reduced neuronal metabolites along with structural changes in the brain suggested neuronal degeneration in the patients with gluten ataxia. Our preliminary findings may be useful in understanding the gluten-induced cerebral damage and indicated that MRI and MRS may serve as a non-invasive useful tool in the early diagnosis, thereby enabling better management of these patients. (shrink)

The design process in Kashmiri carpet weaving is distributed over a number of actors and artifacts and is mediated by a weaving notation called talim. The script encodes entire design in practice-specific symbols. This encoded script is decoded and interpreted via design-specific conventions by weavers to weave the design embedded in it. The cognitive properties of this notational system are described in the paper employing cognitive dimensions (CDs) framework of Green (People and computers, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1989) and Blackwell (...) et al. (Cognitive technology: instruments of mind—CT 2001, LNAI 2117, Springer, Berlin, 2001). After introduction to the practice, the design process is described in ‘The design process’ section which includes coding and decoding of talim. In ‘Cognitive dimensions of talim’ section, after briefly discussing CDs framework, the specific cognitive dimensions possessed by talim are described in detail. (shrink)

The concept of lived experience plays a significant role in the social sciences in general and in philosophy in particular. The idea of lived experience as a social reality has been philosophized and given prime importance in the phenomenological tradition of philosophy. However, the work of Alfred Schutz, one of the phenomenologists on lived experience, has not been given adequate attention by either sociologists or philosophers. This paper attempts to understand how lived experiences are not merely individual or subjective experiences (...) but are also collective or social. Firstly, it suggests that lived experiences need to be understood in a broader context, namely that of the social and inter-subjectivity, which can be found in the Philosophy of Alfred Schutz. Thus, there is an attempt to show how Schutz’s philosophy broadly helps us understand lived experience as a social reality. Secondly, to justify how lived experiences are social and collective experiences, illustrations of the studies related to race, gender, and caste are given as a marker for lived experiences throughout the paper. So far, lived experience has been understood within the domain of individual or the subjective or merely in the first-person perspective. Hence, this paper provides some insights into investigating lived experience from the third-person perspective. (shrink)

Consumer complaining behavior (CCB) is an important stream of research and practice, as it links the domains of service failure and service recovery. CCB research, although extensive and temporally wide, exhibits a lack of concern for the underlying assumptions of scholarly inquiry. Researchers neither explicitly mention, nor consciously indicate their ontological, epistemological, and methodological assumptions. We systematically identify the extant CCB literature and map it to two well-accepted paradigmatic classifications (Burrell and Morgan 1979; Deetz Organization Science 7(2): 191–207, 1996). Normative (...) or functionalist paradigm with the assumptions of an objective external reality, a positivist epistemology, a determinist view of human nature, and nomothetic methodology emerges as the dominant CCB research paradigm. The implications of this dominance are discussed as a barometer of the future of CCB research and practice. (shrink)

Cognition is predominantly seen as information processing in multidisciplinary landscape of cognition studies, despite having had a formidable opposition from embodied and embedded perspectives in the last few decades. This paper analyses cognitive processes involved in different task domains of Kashmiri carpet weaving practice from the theoretical frameworks of cognitivism and situated-distributed cognition. After introducing the practice and its task domains (Section −1), paradigmatic cognitive activities involved in them are discussed and how these are explained by the two theoretical paradigms (...) and why the latter framework explains these processes better (Section-2). During this discussion (Section – 3), a way via culture impacts the practice and resultant cognitive operations turns out to be workspace of the actors. (shrink)

This article describes various ways actors in Kashmiri carpet weaving practice deploy a range of artifacts, from symbolic, to material, to hybrid, in order to achieve diverse cognitive accomplishments in their particular task domains: information representation, inter and intra-domain communication, distribution of cognitive labor across people and time, coordination of team activities, and carrying of cultural heritage. In this repertoire, some artifacts position themselves as naïve tools in the actors’ environment to the point of being ignored; however, their usage-in-context unfolds (...) their cognitive involvement in the tasks. These usages-in-context are shown through artifact analysis of their routine, improvised, and opportunistic uses, where cognitive artifacts like talim—the central artifact of this practice—are shown to play not only multifunctional roles beyond representation, but are also complemented by trade-specific skills bearing strong cognitive implications in a task. (shrink)

Cet article propose une sélection de bonnes feuilles du livre de 2013 The Undercommons, actuellement en voie de traduction pour une publication française en 2021. Y sont abordés les thèmes de la politique « encerclée » ( surrounded ), de la gouvernance, du planning et de la policy, de la logistique, ainsi que de ce qui fait de l’étude consacrée aux undercommons une philosophie du toucher.

The design process in Kashmiri carpet weaving is a distributed process encompassing a number of actors and artifacts. These include a designer called naqash who creates the design on graphs, and a coder called talim-guru who encodes that design in a specific notation called talim which is deciphered and interpreted by the weavers to weave the design. The technological interventions over the years have influenced these artifacts considerably and triggered major changes in the practice, from heralding profound cognitive accomplishments in (...) manually driven design process causing major alterations in the overall structure of the practice. The recent intervention is by the digital technology: on the one hand, it has brought precision and speedy processing in the design process, and on the other, it has eliminated some of the crucial actors from the practice. This paper, which forms part of a larger study on the situated and distributed cognitive process in Kashmiri carpet-weaving practice, describes the technological makeover of the design artifacts involved in this practice over the years and their resultant cognitive impact on the design process as well as on the practice. (shrink)

Si les publics improbables sont, fondamentalement, des publics faibles, ils nous surprennent aussi – et c’est leur principal cadeau, leur caractère exemplaire. Par un art de la transgression, ils rappellent combien la vie publique est une affaire commune, façonnée par les gens à certains moments, en certains lieux, animés par la lutte et l’imagination, et par la joie de se découvrir les uns les autres. Cet article identifie quatre figures d’agentivité sonique pratiquées par ces improbables publics : l’invisible, l’entendu par-dessus (...) l’épaule, l’itinérant et le faible. (shrink)

Plutôt que d’abandonner ou d’écraser l’idée de la liberté de la presse – en la considérant comme naïve ou anachronique – mon but est de la faire revivre et de la redéployer pour plaider en faveur d’une valeur normative particulière : le droit du public à entendre. Je prétends que l’image dominante, historique et professionnalisée de la liberté de la presse – généralement définie comme toutes les libertés dont doivent bénéficier les journalistes pour poursuivre un intérêt public évident – privilégie (...) le droit individuel à la parole sur le droit du public à entendre, alors que ce dernier mérite d’être remis au cœur de nos débats. (shrink)

Si on analyse les stratégies publicitaires de la plateforme Netflix il devient possible de mieux comprendre le modèle de spectateur que celles-ci façonnent. En étudiant la comparaison avec la chaine câblée HBO mais aussi le matériel de la campagne promotionnelle TV Got Better, nous observons les promesses que Netflix adresse à son public potentiel (plénitude, participation, prestige et personnalisation) ainsi que son encouragement des pratiques de visionnement « en rafale ».

The design process in Kashmiri carpet weaving is a distributed process encompassing a number of actors and artifacts. These include a designer called naqash who creates the design on graphs, and a coder called talim-guru who encodes that design in a specific notation called talim which is deciphered and interpreted by the weavers to weave the design. The technological interventions over the years have influenced these artifacts considerably and triggered major changes in the practice, from heralding profound cognitive accomplishments in (...) manually driven design process causing major alterations in the overall structure of the practice. The recent intervention is by the digital technology: on the one hand, it has brought precision and speedy processing in the design process, and on the other, it has eliminated some of the crucial actors from the practice. This paper, which forms part of a larger study on the situated and distributed cognitive process in Kashmiri carpet-weaving practice, describes the technological makeover of the design artifacts involved in this practice over the years and their resultant cognitive impact on the design process as well as on the practice. (shrink)

Computational imagination (CI) conceives imagination as an agent’s simulated sensorimotor interaction with the environment in the absence of sensory feedback, predicting consequences based on this interaction (Marques and Holland in Neurocomputing 72:743–759, 2009). Its bedrock is the simulation hypothesis whereby imagination resembles seeing or doing something in reality as both involve similar neural structures in the brain (Hesslow in Trends Cogn Sci 6(6):242–247, 2002). This paper raises two-forked doubts: (1) neural-level equivalence is escalated to make phenomenological equivalence. Even at an (...) abstract level, many imagined and real actions turn out to be dissimilar. More so, some imagined actions have no corresponding real actions and vice versa, even though neural regions involved in imaginings and real action-perception are the same (Sect. 1). (2) At the implementation level, the hypothesis presents a mutually exclusive view of imagination and perception whereby imagination functions in the absence of the sensory feedback and is action based. Both these issues are contested here: Neither imagination functions in the absence of perception nor all forms of imaginings are action based; it is, rather, about conceiving possibilities which emerge during the perceptual stage itself (Sect. 2). For the modal aspect to arise, it is submitted that an integrative framework is required which Kant can provide for whom imagination is an indispensable part of perception. Kant’s views on concept-formation are presented here to illustrate this aspect (Sect. 3). The Paper is concluded with emphasizing the relevance of Kant’s views to the problems identified in the two sections. (shrink)

The squared paper or graphs are grid-based design representations used in engineering, industrial and craft design practices wherein designs are drawn over symmetrical grids. This paper reports grid-processing strategies undertaken by actors in a native craft practice, viz. Kashmiri carpet-weaving having three task contexts: (1) _design_, wherein designs are drawn on graph sheets and color scheme given by assigning practice-specific symbolic codes to the motifs by designers; (2) _coding_, wherein a cryptic script, called _talim_, is generated from these encoded graphs (...) by talim-writers; and (3) _weaving_, wherein this script is read, decoded and communicated in an equally cryptic trade-language by weavers among their teams. 32 video-recorded think-aloud sessions were conducted with talim-writers to understand their graph-processing and resultant coding strategies. The observations and qualitative analysis of transcripts revealed highly _situated_ strategies undertaken by experts keen on imbibing visuality of design embedded in the grids, in contrast to _embodied_ strategies undertaken by less-experienced coders keen on processing grids’ structural features and getting overwhelmed by grid-clutter in the process. In this landscape, the findings revealed a negotiated nature of errors instead of being deviations from the underlying grid and thereby objectively assessable. The paper makes recommendations for CAD systems to include more of those grid features exploited by experts during their graph processing to facilitate designers. (shrink)

Chaque époque se caractériserait par des dispositifs rituels de rassemblement des publics qui reflètent une certaine configuration socio-politique : du rassemblement collectif de la tradition théâtrale au modèle individualisé de l’exposition dans le contexte moderne. Comment rassembler des publics face aux défis de notre siècle?

“Deep Thoughts” and “Fuzzy Memories” were fan favorites as transitional pieces between larger set pieces on Saturday Night Live in the 1990s. Delivered over soothing music and serene images, Jack Handey's bits never showed his face on screen, calling to mind his observation that “the face of a child can say it all, especially the mouth part of the face.” Some dark and offbeat takes on the human condition often have an existentialist feel. Existentialism is a philosophy concerned with (...) “the individual, the experience of choice, and the absence of rational understanding of the universe with a consequent dread or sense of absurdity in human life.” In other words, human beings find themselves trying to live meaningful lives without truly comprehending the nature of what that meaning may be, or whether or not true meaning could even exist. (shrink)

Deep brain stimulation has been of considerable interest to bioethicists, in large part because of the effects that the intervention can occasionally have on central features of the recipient’s personality. These effects raise questions regarding the philosophical concept of authenticity. In this article, we expand on our earlier work on the concept of authenticity in the context of deep brain stimulation by developing a diachronic, value-based account of authenticity. Our account draws on both existentialist and essentialist approaches to (...) authenticity, and Laura Waddell Ekstrom’s coherentist approach to personal autonomy. In developing our account, we respond to Sven Nyholm and Elizabeth O’Neill’s synchronic approach to authenticity, and explain how the diachronic approach we defend can have practical utility, contrary to Alexandre Erler and Tony Hope’s criticism of autonomy-based approaches to authenticity. Having drawn a distinction between the authenticity of an individual’s traits and the authenticity of that person’s values, we consider how our conception of authenticity applies to the context of anorexia nervosa in comparison to other prominent accounts of authenticity. We conclude with some reflections on the prudential value of authenticity, and by highlighting how the language of authenticity can be invoked to justify covert forms of paternalism that run contrary to the value of individuality that seems to be at the heart of authenticity. (shrink)

What is the epistemological significance of deep disagreement? Part I explored the nature of deep disagreement, while Part II considers its epistemological significance. It focuses on two core problems: the incommensurability and the rational resolvability problems. We critically survey key responses to these challenges, before raising worries for a variety of responses to them, including skeptical, relativist, and absolutist responses to the incommensurability problem, and to certain steadfast and conciliatory responses to the rational resolvability problem. We then pivot (...) to the ethical and political dimensions of deep disagreement. We focus on whether an unwillingness to engage with positions one considers to be immoral or repugnant might be good, and conclude with some reflections on the moral risks of engagement. (shrink)

Philosophers have recently focused on critical, epistemological challenges that arise from the opacity of deep neural networks. One might conclude from this literature that doing good science with opaque models is exceptionally challenging, if not impossible. Yet, this is hard to square with the recent boom in optimism for AI in science alongside a flood of recent scientific breakthroughs driven by AI methods. In this paper, I argue that the disconnect between philosophical pessimism and scientific optimism is driven by (...) a failure to examine how AI is actually used in science. I show that, in order to understand the epistemic justification for AI-powered breakthroughs, philosophers must examine the role played by deep learning as part of a wider process of discovery. The philosophical distinction between the 'context of discovery' and the 'context of justification' is helpful in this regard. I demonstrate the importance of attending to this distinction with two cases drawn from the scientific literature, and show that epistemic opacity need not diminish AI's capacity to lead scientists to significant and justifiable breakthroughs. (shrink)

In this paper we analyse the conditions for attributing to AI autonomous systems the ontological status of “artificial moral agents”, in the context of the “distributed responsibility” between humans and machines in Machine Ethics (ME). In order to address the fundamental issue in ME of the unavoidable “opacity” of their decisions with ethical/legal relevance, we start from the neuroethical evidence in cognitive science. In humans, the “transparency” and then the “ethical accountability” of their actions as responsible moral agents is not (...) in contradiction with the unavoidable “opacity” (unawareness) of the brain process by which they perform their moral judgements on the right action to execute. In fact, the moral accountability of our actions depends on what is immediately before and after our “moral judgements” on the right action to execute (formally, deontic first order logic (FOL) decisions). I.e., our moral accountability depends on the “ethical constraints” we imposed to our judgement before performing it in an opaque way. Anyway, our moral accountability depends overall on the “ethical assessment” or explicit “moral reasoning” after and over the moral judgement before executing our actions (deontic higher order logic (HOL) assessment). In this way, in the light of the AI “imitation game”, the consistent attribution of the status of ethically accountable artificial moral agents to autonomous AI systems depends on two similar conditions. Firstly, it depends on the presence of “ethical constraints” to be satisfied in their Machine Learning (ML) supervised optimization algorithm during its training phase, to give the system ethical skills (“competences”) in its decisions. Secondly – and definitely—, it depends on the presence in an AI autonomous system of a deontic HOL “ethical reasoner” to perform an automatic, and fully transparent assessment (metalogical deontic valuation) about the decisions taken by the ethically skilled ML algorithm about the right action to execute, before executing it. Finally, we show that the proper deontic FOL and HOL for this class of artificial moral agents is Kripke’s modal relational logic, in its algebraic topological formalization. This is naturally implemented in the dissipative QFT unsupervised deep learning of our brains, based on the “doubling of the degrees of freedom” (DDF), and then in the so-called “deep-belief” artificial neural networks for the statistical data pre-processing. This unsupervised learning procedure is also compliant with the usage of the “maximin fairness principle”, used as a balancing aggregation principle of the statistical variables in Sen’s formal theory of fairness. (shrink)

Environmental theory and practice can benefit greatly from Emmanuel Levinas’ non-ontological philosophy of the Other in order to address the current global environmental crisis. From this viewpoint, this article focuses on 2 major positions within deep ecology. We discuss the significance of transitioning from one of them, which represents biocentric responsibility, to the other, which seeks to achieve environmental justice by challenging the hegemony of institutionalised environmentalism. In Levinasian terms, this is represented by moving from the anarchic realm of (...) ethics (face-to-face) to the totalising realm of politics (humanity), where the naked face of the Other becomes visible in the presence of a Third, and decision-making and concrete disputes resolution becomes necessary. Within this framework, historical and current inequalities compel the global North to degrow in order to allow the Others to weather the consequences of resource overconsumption and inequality. (shrink)