Carbon monoxide intoxication leads to acute and chronic neurological deficits, but little is known about the specific noxious mechanisms. 1 H magnetic resonance spectroscopy may allow insight into the pathophysiology of CO poisoning by monitoring neurochemical disturbances, yet only limited information is available to date on the use of this protocol in determining the neurological effects of CO poisoning. To further examine the short-term and long-term effects of CO on the central nervous system, we have studied seven patients with CO (...) poisoning assessed by gray and white matter MRS, magnetic resonance imaging and neuropsychological testing. Five patients suffered from acute high-dose CO intoxication and were in coma for 1–6 days. In these patients, MRI revealed hyperintensities of the white matter and globus pallidus and also showed increased choline and decreased N -acetyl aspartate ratios to creatine, predominantly in the white matter. Lactate peaks were detected in two patients during the early phase of high-dose CO poisoning. Two patients with chronic low-dose CO exposure and without loss of consciousness had normal MRI and MRS scans. On follow-up. five of our seven patients had long-lasting intellectual impairment, including one individual with low-dose CO exposure. The MRS results showed persisting biochemical alterations despite the MRI scan showing normalization of morphological changes. In conclusion, the MRS was normal in patients suffering from chronic low-dose CO exposure; in contrast, patients with high-dose exposure showed abnormal gray and white matter levels of NAA/Cr, Cho/Cr and lactate, as detected by 1 H MRS, suggesting disturbances of neuronal function, membrane metabolism and anaerobic energy metabolism, respectively. Early increases in Cho/Cr and decreases of NAA/Cr may be related to a poor long-term outcome, but confirmation by future studies is needed. (shrink)

Maintaining systems of military plans is critical for military effectiveness, but is also challenging. Plans will become obsolete as the world diverges from the assumptions on which they rest. If too many ad hoc changes are made to intermeshed plans, the ensemble may no longer lead to well-synchronized and coordinated operations, resulting in the system of plans becoming itself incoherent. We describe in what follows an Adaptive Planning process that we are developing on behalf of the Air Force Research Laboratory (...) (Rome) with the goal of addressing problems of these sorts through cyclical collaborative plan review and maintenance. The interactions of world state, blue force status and associated plans are too complex for manual adaptive processes, and computer-aided plan review and maintenance is thus indispensable. We argue that appropriate semantic technology can 1) provide richer representation of plan-related data and semantics, 2) allow for flexible, non-disruptive, agile, scalable, and coordinated changes in plans, and 3) support more intelligent analytical querying of plan-related data. (shrink)

Cooperation is fundamentally moderated by the form of relationship between the actors involved, as is normative resource distribution. We argue that possessions are likely treated differently across different types of cooperative relationships. Whereas Boyer's computational model might in principle account for this, the theory would benefit from a specification of how different cooperative contexts can shape the representation of ownership.

We describe a prototype ontology-driven information system (ODIS) that exploits what we call Portion of Reality (POR) representations. The system takes both sensor data and natural language text as inputs and composes on this basis logically structured POR assertions. The goal of our prototype is to represent both natural language and sensor data within a single framework that is able to support both axiomatic reasoning and computation. In addition, the framework should be capable of discovering and representing new kinds of (...) situations and thematic roles, (e.g., roles such as agent, patient and instrument), based on new compositions of existing representations. We applied our prototype in an intelligence analysis use case to test the hypothesis that a framework of this sort can produce usefully structured information from combined natural language and sensor data inputs. We further tested our hypothesis by adding an enhanced US Air Force ontology framework to our ODIS in order to (1) process a collection of sensor data, intel reports, and mission plans; (2) build composite POR representations from these data; and (3) machine analyze the fused results to infer mission threats. (shrink)

An extended argument that cognitive phenomena—perceiving, imagining, remembering—can be best explained in terms of an interface between contentless and content-involving forms of cognition. -/- Evolving Enactivism argues that cognitive phenomena—perceiving, imagining, remembering—can be best explained in terms of an interface between contentless and content-involving forms of cognition. Building on their earlier book Radicalizing Enactivism, which proposes that there can be forms of cognition without content, Daniel Hutto and Erik Myin demonstrate the unique explanatory advantages of recognizing that only some (...) forms of cognition have content while others—the most elementary ones—do not. They offer an account of the mind in duplex terms, proposing a complex vision of mentality in which these basic contentless forms of cognition interact with content-involving ones. -/- Hutto and Myin argue that the most basic forms of cognition do not, contrary to a currently popular account of cognition, involve picking up and processing information that is then used, reused, stored, and represented in the brain. Rather, basic cognition is contentless—fundamentally interactive, dynamic, and relational. In advancing the case for a radically enactive account of cognition, Hutto and Myin propose crucial adjustments to our concept of cognition and offer theoretical support for their revolutionary rethinking, emphasizing its capacity to explain basic minds in naturalistic terms. They demonstrate the explanatory power of the duplex vision of cognition, showing how it offers powerful means for understanding quintessential cognitive phenomena without introducing scientifically intractable mysteries into the mix. (shrink)

This paper introduces the special issue on Formal Approaches to the Ontological Argument of the Journal of Applied Logics (College Publications). The issue contains the following articles: Formal Approaches to the Ontological Argument, by Ricardo Sousa Silvestre and Jean-Yves Béziau; A Brief Critical Introduction to the Ontological Argument and its Formalization: Anselm, Gaunilo, Descartes, Leibniz and Kant, by Ricardo Sousa Silvestre; A Mechanically Assisted Examination of Begging the Question in Anselm’s Ontological Argument, by John Rushby; A Tractarian Resolution to the (...) Ontological Argument, by Erik Thomsen; On Kant’s Hidden Ambivalence Toward Existential Generalization in his Critique of the Ontological Argument, by Giovanni Mion; The Totality of Predicates and the Possibility of the Most Real Being, by Srećko Kovač; An Even More Leibnizian Version of Gödel’s Ontological Argument, by Kordula Świętorzecka and Marcin Łyczak; A Case Study On Computational Hermeneutics: E. J. Lowe’s Modal Ontological Argument, by David Fuenmayor. (shrink)

Erik J. Wielenberg draws on recent work in analytic philosophy and empirical moral psychology to defend non-theistic robust normative realism, according to which there are objective ethical features of the universe that do not depend on God for their existence. He goes on to develop an empirically-grounded account of human moral knowledge.

Seite dualität: Anarchismus 121. Konsequenzen der individualitätszerstörenden Gleichheitstheorie: Stellung der Frau 123; unhistorische Denkweise 123; ...

Building on an overview of dual systems theories in behavioural economics, the paper presents a methodological assessment in terms of the mechanistic explanations framework that has gained prominence in philosophy of the neurosciences. I conclude that they fail to meet the standards of causal explanations and I suggest an alternative ‘dual functions’ view based on Marr’s methodology of computational neuroscience. Recent psychological and neuroscience research undermines the case for a categorization of brain processes in terms of properties such as relative (...) speed. I defend an interpretation of dualities as functional, without assigning them to specific neurophysiological structures. (shrink)

Daniel M. Hausman holds that preferences in economics are total subjective comparative evaluations—subjective judgments to the effect that something is better than something else all things told—and that economists are right to employ this conception of preference. Here, I argue against both parts of Hausman’s thesis. The failure of Hausman’s account, I continue, reflects a deeper problem, that is, that preferences in economics do not need an explicit definition of the kind that he seeks. Nonetheless, Hausman’s labors were not in (...) vain: his accomplishment is that he has articulated a useful model of the theory. (shrink)

The Radical Enactive/embodied view of Cognition, or REC, claims that all cognition is a matter of skilled performance. Yet REC also makes a distinction between basic and content-involving cognition, arguing that the development of basic to content-involving cognition involves a kink. It might seem that this distinction leads to problematic gaps in REC’s story. We address two such alleged gaps in this paper. First, we identify and reply to the concern that REC leads to an “interface problem”, according to which (...) REC has to account for the interaction of two minds co-present in the same cognitive activity. We emphasise how REC’s view of content-involving cognition in terms of activities that require particular sociocultural practices can resolve these interface concerns. The second potential problematic gap is that REC creates an unjustified difference in kind between animal and human cognition. In response, we clarify and further explicate REC’s notion of content, and argue that this notion allows REC to justifiably mark the distinction between basic and content-involving cognition as a difference in kind. We conclude by pointing out in what sense basic and content-involving cognitive activities are the same, yet different. They are the same because they are all forms of skilled performance, yet different as some forms of skilled performance are genuinely different from other forms. (shrink)

Although inclusion in formal value chains extends the prospect of improving the livelihoods of rural small-scale producers, such a step is often contingent on compliance with internationally-promoted food safety standards. Limited research has addressed the challenges this represents for small rural producers who, grounded in culturally-embedded food safety conceptions, face difficulties in complying. We address this gap here through a multiple case study involving four public school feeding programs that source meals from local rural providers in the Bolivian Altiplan. Institutional (...) logics theory is used to describe public food safety regulations and to compare them to food safety conceptions in the local indigenous Aymara rural setting. We identify a value-based conflict that leads to non-compliance of formal food safety rules that jeopardizes the participation of small farmers in the market. These include: partial adoption of formal rules; selective adoption of convenient rules; and ceremonial adoption to avoid compliance. Decoupling strategies allow local actors to largely disregard the formal food safety regulations while accommodating traditional cultural practices and continuing to access the market. However, these practices put the long-term sustainability of the farmers’ participation in potentially favorable opportunities at risk. (shrink)

We address some frequently encountered criticisms of Radical Embodied/Enactive Cognition. Contrary to the claims that the position is too radical, or not sufficiently so, we claim REC is just radical enough.

In The question concerning technology, Heidegger explores actuality in terms of danger. In chapter 3.6 ‘Who has forgotten Being?’ of his We have never been modern, Latour typically ridicules Heidegger and rejects no less than his whole thinking path. I contend that this criticism stems from an inadequate interpretation of Heidegger. By reading the latter in a modern register, Latour turns Heidegger into a modern thinker. Leaving aside the matter of modern elements in Heidegger’s thoughts, these are certainly not the (...) elements that Latour brings forth. Indeed, to understand the danger that hides in actuality, if any, we should turn to Heidegger and read Latour from there. (shrink)

Bioethicists frequently call for empirical researchers to engage participants and community members in their research, but don't themselves typically engage community members in their normative research. In this article, we describe an effort to include members of the public in normative discussions about the risks, potential benefits, and ethical responsibilities of social and behavioral genomics (SBG) research. We reflect on what might—and might not— be gained from engaging the public in normative scholarship and on lessons learned about public perspectives on (...) the risks and potential benefits of SBG research and the responsible conduct and communication of such research. We also provide procedural lessons for others in bioethics who are interested in engaging members of the public in their research. (shrink)

Previous research has found that more embodied insults are identified faster and more accurately than less embodied insults. The linguistic processing of embodied compliments has not been well explored. In the present study, participants completed two tasks where they identified insults and compliments, respectively. Half of the stimuli were more embodied than the other half. We examined the late positive potential component of event-related potentials in early, middle, and late time windows. Increased embodiment resulted in improved response accuracy to compliments (...) in both tasks, whereas it only improved accuracy for insults in the compliment detection task. More embodied stimuli elicited a larger LPP than less embodied stimuli in the early time window. Insults generated a larger LPP in the late time window in the insult task; compliments generated a larger LPP in the early window in the compliment task. These results indicate that electrophysiological correlates of emotional language perception are sensitive to both top-down and bottom-up processes. (shrink)

From _Almanac of Fall_ to _The Turin Horse_, renowned Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr has followed the collapse of the communist promise. The “time after” is not the uniform and morose time of those who no longer believe in anything. It is the time when we are less interested in histories and their successes or failures than we are in the delicate fabric of time from which they are carved. It is the time of pure material events against which belief will (...) be measured for as long as life will sustain it. (shrink)

Higher educational research has been bashed for its aloofness and isolation as individuals question its impact and its worth. This essay aims to highlight how the unbundling of academia, where research has become separate from teaching and service, has left a reduced conception of educational identity in the higher education sector. In becoming isolated, research has become an easier target. Instead, it is proposed that rebundling the three core aspects of higher education - research, teaching and service – would allow (...) for a more holistic conception of academic identity where the various components work together to offer a more robust, and less ‘bashable’, academic identity. (shrink)

Higher educational research has been bashed for its aloofness and isolation as individuals question its impact and its worth. This essay aims to highlight how the unbundling of academia, where research has become separate from teaching and service, has left a reduced conception of educational identity in the higher education sector. In becoming isolated, research has become an easier target. Instead, it is proposed that rebundling the three core aspects of higher education - research, teaching and service – would allow (...) for a more holistic conception of academic identity where the various components work together to offer a more robust, and less ‘bashable’, academic identity. (shrink)

REC, or the radical enactive/embodied view of cognition makes a crucial distinction between basic and content-involving cognition. This paper clarifies REC’s views on basic and content-involving cognition, and their relation by replying to a recent criticism claiming that REC is refuted by evidence on affordance perception. It shows how a correct understanding of how basic and contentless cognition relate allows to see how REC can accommodate this evidence, and thus can afford affordance perception.

The purpose of this paper is to show the pervasive, though often implicit, role of arguments in negotiation dialogue. This holds even for negotiations that start from a difference of interest such as mere bargaining through offers and counteroffers. But it certainly holds for negotiations that try to settle a difference of opinion on policy issues. It will be demonstrated how a series of offers and counteroffers in a negotiation dialogue contains a reconstructible series of implicit persuasion dialogues. The paper (...) is a sequel to van Laar and Krabbe, in which we showed that for some differences of opinion it may be reasonable to shift from persuasion dialogue, aimed at a resolution of the difference on the merits, to negotiation dialogue, aimed at compromise, whereas in the present paper we show that such a shift need not amount to the abandonment of argumentation. Our main aim in this paper as well as in the previous one is to contribute to the theory of argumentation within the context of negotiation and compromise formation. (shrink)

Grete Hermann’s essay “Die naturphilosophischen Grundlagen der Quantenmechanik” has received much deserved scholarly attention in recent years. In this paper, I follow the lead of Elise Crull who sees in Hermann’s work the general outlines of a neo-Kantian interpretation of quantum theory. In full support of this view, I focus on Hermann’s central claim that limited spatio-temporal, and even analogically causal, representations of events exist within an overall relational structure of entangled quantum mechanical states that defy any unified spatio-temporal description. (...) In my view, Hermann also advances an important transcendental argument that perspectival spatio-temporal representations of nature have their foundations in general relational networks that are not spatio-temporal. The key point is that the adoption of a perspectival system within the general network induces the representation but only for that context. These ideas are consistent with a perspectival subject–object principle in Kant and also with Weyl’s work on Lie groups and their representations. (shrink)

How to handle orphan drugs for rare diseases is a pressing problem in current health-care. Due to the group size of patients affecting the cost of treatment, they risk being disadvantaged in relation to existing cost-effectiveness thresholds. In an article by Niklas Juth it has been argued that it is irrelevant to take indirectly operative factors like group size into account since such a compensation would risk discounting the use of cost, a relevant factor, altogether. In this article we analyze (...) Juth’s argument and observe that we already do compensate for indirectly operative factors, both outside and within cost-effectiveness evaluations, for formal equality reasons. Based on this we argue that we have reason to set cost-effectiveness thresholds to integrate equity concerns also including formal equality considerations. We find no reason not to compensate for group size to the extent we already compensate for other factors. Moreover, groups size implying a systematic disadvantage also on a global scale, i.e. taking different aspects of the health condition of patients suffering from rare diseases into account, will provide strong reason for why group size is indeed relevant to compensate for. (shrink)

Frauds and misconduct have been common in the history of science. Recent events connected to the COVID-19 pandemic have highlighted how the risks and consequences of this are no longer acceptable. Two papers, addressing the treatment of COVID-19, have been published in two of the most prestigious medical journals; the authors declared to have analysed electronic health records from a private corporation, which apparently collected data of tens of thousands of patients, coming from hundreds of hospitals. Both papers have been (...) retracted a few weeks later. When such events happen, the confidence of the population in scientific research is likely to be weakened. This paper highlights how the current system endangers the reliability of scientific research, and the very foundations of the trust system on which modern healthcare is based. Having shed light on the dangers of a system without appropriate monitoring, the proposed analysis suggests to strengthen the existing journal policies and improve the research process using new technologies supporting control activities by public authorities. Among these solutions, we mention the promising aspects of the blockchain technology which seems a promising solution to avoid the repetition of the mistakes linked to the recent and past history of research. (shrink)

Why do corporations and wealthy philanthropists fund the human sciences? Examining the history of the Santa Fe Institute (SFI), a private research institute founded in the early 1980s, this article shows that funders can find as much value in the social worlds of the sciences they sponsor as in their ideas. SFI became increasingly dependent on funding from corporations and libertarian business leaders in the 1990s and 2000s. At the same time, its intellectual work came to focus on the underlying (...) principles of adaptation, innovation, and decentralized coordination supposedly at work in ‘complex systems’ from biological ecosystems to markets and firms. This research cast the ideas of the libertarian economist Friedrich Hayek into a new scientific idiom. SFI also became a space where figures in business, media, academia, and politics could come to learn to see the world in a particular way—to acquire the subjectivity of what I call ‘the Santa Fe Institute libertarian’. At SFI, visitors did not simply learn the principles of neo-Hayekian complex system science. They came to see themselves as agents of social evolution, providing the spark that the free-market system needed to produce new technologies and new solutions to social problems without top-down political direction. For the Institute's corporate and libertarian financiers, SFI was not just a space where intellectuals described the world in favored ideological terms, but a space where elite actors became committed to the project of making a new political-economic order. (shrink)

In this article, I want to make the following points, none of which are totally new, but their constellation here is meant to be challenging. First, world is not a thing but an event, the event of sense. This event is opening and meaning – verbal tense. God may be a philosophical name of this event. This is recognized by late-modern religious atheist thought. This thought differs from modern scientific rationalism in that the latter’s so-called areligious atheism is actually a (...) hyperreligious theism. On the way, the alleged opposition between philosophy and theology, between thought and faith is seen to erode. The core matter of this philosophy of religion will be the absolute reference, the system of objectivity and the holiness of the name. All this because of a prefix a- that has its sense turned inside out by the death of God. (shrink)

Theorizing about perception is often motivated by a belief that without a way of ensuring that our perceptual experience correctly reflects the external world we cannot be sure that we perceive the world at all. Historically, coming up with a way of securing such epistemic contact has been a foundational issue in psychology. Recent ecological and enactive approaches challenge the requirement for perception to attain epistemic contact. This article aims to explicate this pragmatic starting point and the new direction of (...) inquiry that this opens up for psychology. It does so by detailing the development of James J. Gibson’s ecological psychology. Securing epistemic contact has been a leitmotiv in Gibson’s early work, but subsequent developments in Gibson’s works can teach us what it takes to adopt a pragmatic approach to psychology. We propose a reading of the developments in Gibson’s original works that shows that, since perception is a mode of acting, perception aims for pragmatic contact before allowing for epistemic contact. Amplifying these pragmatist lines of thought in Gibson’s works we end by considering situations where an individual is adapted to the intricacies of specific social practices. These situations show how pragmatic contact can also afford attaining epistemic contact. (shrink)

New medical technologies promise to allow us to transform our core characteristics. Some see these technologies as filled with promise. Others see them as filled with existential risk. David DeGrazia argues that personal identity concerns raised by opponents to enhancement technology fail to impugn attempts by autonomous agents to bring about enhancements with which they autonomously identify. In advancing this argument DeGrazia evaluates five supposedly inviolable core narrative characteristics, concluding that none of these characteristics are in fact inviolable so long (...) as the individual contemplating transformation autonomously identifies with the change they decide to make. Employing insights gleaned from LA Paul’s recent work on the subject of transformative experiences I will argue that at least for some transformations, the prospects for autonomous identification are slim at best. The upshot will be that many of the core narrative traits discussed by DeGrazia will be inviolable in practice, if not in principle. (shrink)

We aim to further develop and evaluate the prospects of a uniquely Islamic extension of the Standard Aquinas/Calvin model. One obstacle is that certain Qur’an passages such as Surah 8:43–44 apparently suggest that Muslims have reason to think that Allah might be deceiving them. Consistent with perfect/maximally good being theology, Allah would allow such deceptions only if doing so leads to a greater good, so such passages do not necessarily give Muslims reason to doubt Allah’s goodness. Yet the possibility of (...) deception of the faithful threatens to provide a subjective defeater for the (epistemic) reliability of their cognitive faculties. (‘Even if Allah can be morally good while deceiving, how do you know you aren’t being deceived for a greater good on a more macro level, such as about the nature of the Qur’an?’) Similar in structure to Alvin Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN), this defeater threatens to undermine all of a Muslims warrant claims. We consider and evaluate the reply that there are other Qur’anic passages and/or additional conceptual resources in the Islamic tradition that provide grounds for thinking that God’s faithfulness or truthfulness is more centrally and securely embedded in a Muslim’s noetic structure than such doubts. Specifically, we will argue that under certain conditions, there exists a subjective defeater for some Muslims that, unlike McNabb’s approach, isn’t based off of the proper function condition but Plantinga’s truth aimed condition. (shrink)

Criticism may degenerate into quibbling or nitpicking. How can discussants keep quibblers under control? In the paper we investigate cases in which a battle about words replaces a discussion of the matters that are actually at issue as well as cases in which a battle about minor objections replaces a discussion of the major issues. We survey some lines of discussion dealing with these situations in profiles of dialogue.

ABSTRACTUnquestionably, philosophy has acquired a somewhat new register lately. First, I discuss the appearance of the theological virtues in contemporary philosophy. This appearance is heralded in Nietzsche’s famous preface to The Gay Science. The event remains at this point curious and without explanation. In a second step, I explore current French philosophy and culture as the frame and/or the effect of this appearance. At this point, I still cannot find the philosophical meaning of the virtues, only the condition of possibility (...) of their ‘extra-theological’ relevance. At most, I can reopen the religious nature, element or register of thought, of philosophy. I will do that by introducing eschatology and desecularisation, implying that modern rationalist allegedly areligious atheism is actually a hyper-religious theism. Desecularisation can only be understood within the frame of an ‘open world’, within a world-as-opening. World then becomes the event of meaning and the thought that thinks the opening, open thought as it were, is philosophical charity or philosophy-as-charity. The effect of all this is precisely philosophy turning into virtuous thought. Philosophy becomes, in ‘fact’, hope, faith and charity. (shrink)

One can be reproached for not remembering. Remembering and forgetting shows who and what one values. Indeed, memory is constitutively normative. Theoretical approaches to memory should be sensitive to this normative character. We will argue that traditional views that consider memory as the storing and retrieval of mental content, fail to consider the practices we need for telling the truth about our past. We introduce the Radically Enactive view of Cognition, or REC, as well-placed to recognize the central role of (...) norms in remembering. Crucially, REC construes all remembering as “something we do”, and the most sophisticated forms of remembering as things we collectively do, answerable to socioculturally established practices. On this view our mnemonic performances cannot avoid re-shaping our collective ways of doing and seeing going forward. By REC’s lights therefore, the “is” of memory is “oughty” through and through. (shrink)

Gianni Vattimo refers his weak interpretation of metaphysics to its Christian provenance. He argues that his nihilist secularization theory divulges the full and ultimate meaning of Christianity. This model understands Christianity as God who ‘returns,’ not as an eternal substance but as one who in his return reveals himself as becoming the current nihilist hermeneutic flux that is reality. Vattimo takes kenosis as the model of the destiny of ontology. God takes a distance from the eternal origin and lets go (...) of his transcendent divinity. From this, Vattimo learns that truth becomes a purely ‘wordly’ matter without any external, c.q. metaphysical or sacred reference. The Good message is: there are only messages, no facts. God’s return has to be understood epistmo-theologically. Revelation is now completely accomplished in a nihilist, endless way: Christianity means keeping thought away from petrifying into truth, fact, and reality. This is pure Christian caritas in that it does away with the violence of metaphysics and the sacred and thereby discourages all human attempts toward violence. Redeeming though this may sound, perhaps Vattimo is too naïve and too theologically shallow. (shrink)

What if in discussion the critic refuses to recognize an emotionally expressed argument of her interlocutor as an argument, accusing him of having presented no argument at all. In this paper, we shall deal with this reproach, which taken literally amounts to a charge of having committed a fallacy of non-argumentation. As such it is a very strong, if not the ultimate, criticism, which even carries the risk of abandonment of the discussion and can, therefore, not be made without burdening (...) oneself with correspondingly strong obligations. We want to specify the fallacies of non-argumentation and their dialectic, i.e., the proper way to criticize them, the appropriate ways for the arguer to react to such criticism, and the appropriate ways for the critic to follow up on these reactions. Among the types of fallacy of non-argumentation, the emphasis will be on the appeal to popular sentiments. Our aim is to reach, for cases of non-argumentation, a survey of dialectical possibilities. By making the disputants themselves responsible for the place of emotion in their dialogues, we hope to contribute to a further development of the theory of dialectical obligations. (shrink)

OVERVIEWWe ambitiously reexamine Smith’s moral theory in relation to Hume’s. We regard Smith's developments as glorious and important. We also see them as quite fully agreeable to Hume, as enhancement, not departure. But Smith represents matters otherwise! Why would Smith overstate disagreement with his best friend?One aspect of Smith’s enhancement, an aspect he makes very conspicuous, is that between moral approval and beneficialness there is another phase, namely, the moral judge's sense of propriety. With that phase now finding formulation, Smith, (...) if only implicitly, generates a spiral of beneficialness and propriety, a spiral shown in Figure 7 in the present paper. We consider Figure 7, illustrating the spiral, to be the most important arrival point in the present paper; it highlights the non-foundationalism of Smith's ethics. But to arrive at the spiral, we must engage in extensive exegesis.In Part IV of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith presents a foil against which he develops his own theory, a foil supposedly representing Hume. According to the foil, moral approval derives from ‘utility.’ But, in multiple ways, the foil is misleading. We provide an interpretation of Hume, notably his four-factor account of moral approval, before examining Smith's representation of Hume.One twist is that Smith used the words utility and useful differently than Hume did – Smith quietly stretched them to include species of agreeableness, thereby obscuring the importance of agreeableness in Hume’s theory.Another, more significant problem is that Smith allows the impression that in Hume moral approval derives quite determinately from beneficialness. In fact Hume conveys the interpretive and sentimental spaciousness of the operations that generate moral approval; here, Hume even speaks repeatedly of ‘proper sentiments’, thus almost using the term propriety himself.But the propriety phase in Smith opens up to a key facet of Smith’s development on Hume: He poeticizes a locus of sympathy not emphasized in Hume – namely, that between the moral judge and her own man within the breast; that locus enters the theory in addition to the sympathies emphasized in Hume, not in lieu of them. We distinguish lateral sympathy, which is important in Hume’s thought, and vertical sympathy, which is especially characteristic of Smith’s more inner-directed and allegorical thought. Smith embraces Hume’s lateral sympathy and enhances moral theory by adding formulations that elaborate vertical sympathy.Next, we come to something of a twist in the whole matter: We show that – as Smith well knew all along! – propriety is a species of agreeableness! Smith’s propriety phase represents another dimension within which such agreeableness lives: Smith’s vertical dimension thus gives rise to a spiral representing the diachronic development of the judge herself. It is a spiral of beneficialness and propriety: Each propriety phase in the next loop of the spiral engenders a species of agreeableness now as a part of beneficialness.Smith's developments on Hume, then, involve the following three facets: formulation of the propriety phase; the poetic elaboration of vertical sympathy; the diachronic spiral of propriety and beneficialness.The three facets come together, especially in Ed. 6 of The Theory of Moral Sentiments. The whole development goes beyond Hume, but, really, is agreeable to Hume – though Smith himself portrays his developments as disagreeing with features of Hume's moral theory.We speculate that Smith was more or less aware of all that that we say, including the absense of any really substantive disagreement. Why, in that case, would Smith have proceeded as he did? We address that question at the end of the piece. Our speculations suggest a method in the madness. (shrink)

The coronavirus pandemic made the biopolitics of infection control the core object of states around the world. Globally, states governed spheres usually free of state control, implementing various restrictions, closing down society in the process. This is possible due to the state's capacities to act through and over society, grounded in the state's powers. I argue that while the pandemic has led to useful and interesting state-centric Foucauldian literature on the politics of COVID-19, this literature has not fully taken the (...) theoretical lessons of the pandemic into account. Explicating these lessons, I discuss how the pandemic invites us to reconsider the Foucauldian approach to the state. The purpose of this article is to combine the Foucauldian theory of power with a Weberian state theory based on Michael Mann's work on the state and the sources of power, so to lay the foundations for a Weberian-Foucauldian theory of the state. (shrink)

In this paper we introduce the device perspective as a methodological contribution to platform studies. Through an engagement with debates about the notion of affordances, which focus on the relation between the technical and the social, we put forward an approach to study the production of data within platforms by engaging with the material properties of platforms as well as their interpretation and deployment by various types of users. As a case in point, we study how the affordances of Wikipedia (...) are deployed in the production of encyclopedic knowledge and how this can be used to study controversies. The analysis shows how Wikipedia affords unstable encyclopedic knowledge by having mechanisms in place that suggest the continuous negotiation of existing knowledge. We furthermore showcase the use of our open-source software, Contropedia, which can be utilized to study knowledge production on Wikipedia. (shrink)

It is hardly news to readers of this collection that in bioethics there has been a long-standing debate between people who can seem to be arguing "for" disability and people who can seem to be arguing "against" it. Those who have argued for have often been disability scholars and those who have argued against have often been philosophers of a utilitarian bent. At least since the mid 2000s, some disability scholars and some philosophers of a utilitarian bent have sought to (...) move beyond that debate, but achieving that aim is harder than it sounds. In this essay, I want to take two... (shrink)