The human loss of the sense of sacred has been driven by a mechanization of the world that privileges the mundane and the material. Yet the earliest surviving history of the human mind reveals a widespread, embodied human faculty for perception of the cosmos and an intimate human relation to the cosmos. This history hints of an origin story that may be partly recovered by sacred relics of human prehistory.

This article introduces definitions for direct, means-end, oblique (or indirect) and ulterior intent which can be used to test for intent in an algorithmic actor. These definitions of intent are informed by legal theory from common law jurisdictions. Certain crimes exist where the harm caused is dependent on the reason it was done so. Here the actus reus or performative element of the crime is dependent on the mental state or mens rea of the actor. The ability to prosecute these (...) crimes is dependent on the ability to identify and diagnose intentional states in the accused. A certain class of auto didactic algorithmic actor can be given broad objectives without being told how to meet them. Without a definition of intent, they cannot be told not to engage in certain law breaking behaviour nor can they ever be identified as having done it. This ambiguity is neither positive for the owner of the algorithm or for society. The problem exists over and above more familiar debates concerning the eligibility of algorithms for culpability judgements that mens rea is usually associated with. Aside from inchoate offences, many economic crimes with elements of fraud or deceit fall into this category of crime. Algorithms operate in areas where these crimes could be plausibly undertaken depending on whether the intent existed in the algorithm or not. (shrink)

The flaws in social psychological research pointed out by Cesario have societal costs. These include ignoring crucial base rates thereby degrading the effectiveness of policy decisions, generalizing the conclusions derived from experiments on non-professionals thereby distorting the public's view of professional law enforcement personnel, questionable accusations of racism, and mis-attributions of the causes of racial differences in behavior.

According to a simple form of consequentialism, we should base decision on our judgments about their consequences for achieving out goals. Our goals give us reason to endorse consequentialism as a standard of decision making. Alternative standards invariably lead to consequences that are less good in this sense. Yet some people knowingly follow decision rules that violate consequentialism. For example, they prefer harmful omissions to less harmful acts, they favor the status quo over alternatives they would otherwise judge to be (...) better, they provide third-party compensation on the basis of the cause of an injury rather than the benefit from the compensation, they ignore deterrent effects in decisions about punishment, and they resist coercive reforms they judge to be beneficial. I suggest that nonconsequentialist principles arise from overgeneralizing rules that are consistent with consequentialism in a limited set of cases. Commitment to such rules is detached from their original purposes. The existence of such nonconsequentialist decision biases has implications for philosophical and experimental methodology, the relation between psychology and public policy, and education. (shrink)

Why do societies collapse? We use an individual-based evolutionary model to show that, in environmental conditions dominated by low-frequency variation (“red noise”), extirpation may be an outcome of the evolution of cultural capacity. Previous analytical models predicted an equilibrium between individual learners and social learners, or a contingent strategy in which individuals learn socially or individually depending on the circumstances. However, in red noise environments, whose main signature is that variation is concentrated in relatively large, relatively rare excursions, individual learning (...) may be selected from the population. If the social learning system comes to lack sufficient individual learning or cognitively costly adaptive biases, behavior ceases tracking environmental variation. Then, when the environment does change, fitness declines and the population may collapse or even be extirpated. The modeled scenario broadly fits some human population collapses and might also explain nonhuman extirpations. Varying model parameters showed that the fixation of social learning is less likely when individual learning is less costly, when the environment is less red or more variable, with larger population sizes, and when learning is not conformist or is from parents rather than from the general population. Once social learning is fixed, extirpation is likely except when social learning is biased towards successful models. Thus, the risk of population collapse may be reduced by promoting individual learning and innovation over cultural conformity, or by preferential selection of relatively fit individuals as models for social learning. © 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

In this article, I explore what it means to “serve somebody,” drawing from my own experience as a full-time chaplain. Chaplains must serve many different parties, but are ultimately called to care for their patients via a covenental relationship of care.

For the past thirty years, Hal Foster has pushed the boundaries of cultural criticism, establishing a vantage point from which the seemingly disparate agendas of artists, patrons, and critics have a telling coherence. In The Anti-Aesthetic, preeminent critics such as Jean Baudrillard, Rosalind Krauss, Fredric Jameson, and Edward Said consider the full range of postmodern cultural production, from the writing of John Cage, to Cindy Sherman's film stills, to Barbara Kruger's collages. With a redesigned cover and a new afterword that (...) situates the book in relation to contemporary criticism, The Anti-Aesthetic provides a strong introduction for newcomers and a point of reference for those already engaged in discussions of postmodern art, culture, and criticism. Includes a new afterword by Hal Foster and 12 black and white photographs. (shrink)

This essay is a review of Ronald Dworkin's recent essay on equality of resources. Many of the ideas discussed by Dworkin have also been examined by economists with, I believe, considerable insight. Unfortunately, economists tend to write for economists, not for philosophers, and their insights are seldom communicated properly to noneconomists. Of course, the same criticism can be levied on philosophers! But perhaps legal theorists are less subject to this criticism. One of the great contributions of Dworkin is that he (...) is very readable; and the quality of his exposition makes these ideas accessible to a wide audience of philosophers, lawyers, and social scientists in general. (shrink)

In all the arts a war is being waged between modernists and postmodernists. Radicals have tended to side with the modernists against the forces of conservatism. Postmodern Culture is a break with this tendency. Its contributors propose a postmodernism of resistance - an aesthetic that rejects hierarchy and celebrates diversity. Ranging from architecture, sculpture and painting to music, photography and film, this collection is now recognised as a seminal text on the postmodernism debate.The essays are by Hal Foster, Jürgen Habermas, (...) Kenneth Frampton, Rosalind Krauss, Douglas Crimp, Craig Owens, Gregory L. Ulmer, Fredric Jameson, Jean Baudrillard, and Edward W. Said. (shrink)

The ancient Greeks hard‑wired a tragic sensibility into their culture. By looking disaster squarely in the face, by understanding just how badly things could spiral out of control, they sought to create a communal sense of responsibility and courage—to spur citizens and their leaders to take the difficult actions necessary to avert such a fate. Today, after more than seventy years of great‑power peace and a quarter‑century of unrivaled global leadership, Americans have lost their sense of tragedy. They have forgotten (...) that the descent into violence and war has been all too common throughout human history. This amnesia has become most pronounced just as Americans and the global order they created are coming under graver threat than at any time in decades. In a forceful argument that brims with historical sensibility and policy insights, two distinguished historians argue that a tragic sensibility is necessary if America and its allies are to address the dangers that menace the international order today. Tragedy may be commonplace, Brands and Edel argue, but it is not inevitable—so long as we regain an appreciation of the world’s tragic nature before it is too late. (shrink)

_An eloquent call to draw on the lessons of the past to address current threats to international order_ The ancient Greeks hard‑wired a tragic sensibility into their culture. By looking disaster squarely in the face, by understanding just how badly things could spiral out of control, they sought to create a communal sense of responsibility and courage—to spur citizens and their leaders to take the difficult actions necessary to avert such a fate. Today, after more than seventy years of great‑power (...) peace and a quarter‑century of unrivaled global leadership, Americans have lost their sense of tragedy. They have forgotten that the descent into violence and war has been all too common throughout human history. This amnesia has become most pronounced just as Americans and the global order they created are coming under graver threat than at any time in decades. In a forceful argument that brims with historical sensibility and policy insights, two distinguished historians argue that a tragic sensibility is necessary if America and its allies are to address the dangers that menace the international order today. Tragedy may be commonplace, Brands and Edel argue, but it is not inevitable—so long as we regain an appreciation of the world’s tragic nature before it is too late. (shrink)

Social insects show us very little about the evolution of complex human society. As more relevant literature demonstrates, ultrasociality is a cause rather than an effect of human social evolution.

An anthropological view of the publishing industry sees it as a culture with its own assumptions and patterns, in which publishing companies are macro-communities associated with micro-communities of readers. Anthropology sees ‘digital culture’ in a comparable way. Awareness of the cultural characteristics of publishing as a culture and of digital culture can turn their differences into synergies that benefit both. Examples from anthropological research and from publishing show that some processes are comparable. One is the process in which material value (...) is transformed into cultural value, with the benefit of increasing the cohesion of a community. Another occurs when communities interlink their cultural processes in cultural–commercial ecosystems, to mutual benefit. Anthropological insights suggest how strategies, at project level and at the level of international cooperation, can bridge the cultural divide between traditional publishing values and digital opportunities and so help businesses survive and succeed in times of change. (shrink)

There is a presumption in some circles that the identification of an externality or a public good presents a prima facie case for government intervention. Tyler Cowen has assembled a group of articles that challenge this view by arguing that the market, broadly construed, can handle many problems of public goods and externalities that are normally considered the province of the state. Although these articles present a stimulating perspective on problems of externalities and public goods, several of the essays overstate (...) their case and misrepresent the standard theory of public goods and externalities. (shrink)

Getting everything you want out of life isn't about doing more. It's about becoming more. Hal Elrod and The Miracle Morning have helped millions of people become the person they need to be to create the life they've always wanted. Now, it's your turn.

Data fraud and selective reporting both present serious threats to the credibility of science. However, there remains considerable disagreement among scientists about how best to sanction data fraud, and about the ethicality of selective reporting. The public is arguably the largest stakeholder in the reproducibility of science; research is primarily paid for with public funds, and flawed science threatens the public’s welfare. Members of the public are able to make meaningful judgments about the morality of different behaviors using moral intuitions. (...) Legal scholars emphasize that to maintain legitimacy, social control policies must be developed with some consideration given to the public’s moral intuitions. Although there is a large literature on popular attitudes toward science, there is no existing evidence about public opinion on data fraud or selective reporting. We conducted two studies—a survey experiment with a nationwide convenience sample, and a follow-up survey with a representative sample of US adults —to explore community members’ judgments about the morality of data fraud and selective reporting in science. The findings show that community members make a moral distinction between data fraud and selective reporting, but overwhelmingly judge both behaviors to be immoral and deserving of punishment. Community members believe that scientists who commit data fraud or selective reporting should be fired and banned from receiving funding. For data fraud, most Americans support criminal penalties. Results from an ordered logistic regression analysis reveal few demographic and no significant partisan differences in punitiveness toward data fraud. (shrink)

This paper takes issue with those commentators of Heidegger's philosophy whose point of entry into his thinking is the inherited prejudices of others. It demonstrates that if prior judgments are suspended, so that Heidegger's texts are permitted to speak for themselves, the truth of his `position', more a wege than a static motionless point, gradually and inexorably begins to emerge. I take Pope Benedict's first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, to draw the theological contours of a truly post-modern ethic. I then (...) hold up Heidegger's philosophy, as this is characterized principally though not exclusively in his lecture Der Satz Der Identität, to consider possible symmetries. Finally I offer an answer to the question: does Heidegger's thought have ethical consequences? (shrink)

In vocational rehabilitation, empowerment is understood as the notion that people should make an active, autonomous choice to find their way back to the labour process. Following this line of reasoning, the concept of empowerment implicitly points to a specific kind of activation strategy, namely labour participation. This activation approach has received criticism for being paternalistic, disciplining and having a one-sided orientation on labour participation. Although we share this theoretical criticism, we want to go beyond it by paying attention to (...) the practical consequences of understanding empowerment as an activation strategy. Inspired by the field of Science and Technology Studies, we will explore the meaning of empowerment and activation in concrete practices of vocational rehabilitation in the Netherlands. Our analysis is based on the narratives of people with a work disability about their lives and the vocational rehabilitation programmes they participated in. We present five illustrative cases that how empowerment is ‘done’ in the practice of vocational rehabilitation and its unintended effects. Our analysis demonstrates that activation strategies seem to be caught in a paradox: instead of including people in society, they have excluding consequences. Vocational rehabilitation professionals can go beyond this paradox by learning from the ways in which empowerment is ‘done’ by clients in vocational rehabilitation programmes. (shrink)

The recent renewed interest in the foundation of quantum statistical mechanics and in the dynamics of isolated quantum systems has led to a revival of the old approach by von Neumann to investigate the problem of thermalization only in terms of quantum dynamics in an isolated system [1, 2]. It has been demonstrated in some general or concrete settings that a pure initial state evolving under quantum dynamics indeed approaches an equilibrium state [3–9]. The underlying idea that a single pure (...) quantum state can fully describe thermal equilibrium has also become much more concrete [10–12]. (shrink)

Scholars have recently noted the interest of Guibert of Tournai’s sermons on Francis of Assisi. Nicole Bériou partially edited Guibert’s sermon Surrexit Helyas, focusing on the theme of prophecy, in 1994,1 and Sean Field edited two more, Inflammatum est cor meum and Veni columba mea, highlighting the theme of Francis as a perfected soul through annihilation, in 1999.2 The two yet unexamined works in Guibert’s corpus of sermons discussing Francis hold their own interest, as they discuss an important topos in (...) Franciscan literature of the mid-thirteenth century. The present article edits and analyzes these two previously unedited sermons for the first time.3 This topos is the Biblical quotation Vidi .. (shrink)

Studies of animal culture have not normally included a consideration of cetaceans. However, with several long-term field studies now maturing, this situation should change. Animal culture is generally studied by either investigating transmission mechanisms experimentally, or observing patterns of behavioural variation in wild populations that cannot be explained by either genetic or environmental factors. Taking this second, ethnographic, approach, there is good evidence for cultural transmission in several cetacean species. However, only the bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops) has been shown experimentally to (...) possess sophisticated social learning abilities, including vocal and motor imitation; other species have not been studied. There is observational evidence for imitation and teaching in killer whales. For cetaceans and other large, wide-ranging animals, excessive reliance on experimental data for evidence of culture is not productive; we favour the ethnographic approach. The complex and stable vocal and behavioural cultures of sympatric groups of killer whales (Orcinus orca) appear to have no parallel outside humans, and represent an independent evolution of cultural faculties. The wide movements of cetaceans, the greater variability of the marine environment over large temporal scales relative to that on land, and the stable matrilineal social groups of some species are potentially important factors in the evolution of cetacean culture. There have been suggestions of gene-culture coevolution in cetaceans, and culture may be implicated in some unusual behavioural and life-history traits of whales and dolphins. We hope to stimulate discussion and research on culture in these animals. (shrink)

The myth for today is an axiom of what we may call Leninology — a branch of Kremlinology that has rapidly grown in the hands of the various university Russian Institutes, doctoral programs, political journalists, et al. According to this axiom, Lenin's 1902 book What Is To Be Done? represents the essential content of his ‘operational code’ or ‘concept of the party’: all of Bolshevism and eventually Stalinism lies in ambush in its pages; it is the canonical work of ‘Leninism’ (...) on party organisation, which, in turn, bears the original sin of totalitarianism. It establishes the ‘Leninist type of party’ as an authoritarian structure controlled from the top by ‘professional revolutionaries’ of upper-class provenance lording over a proletarian rank and file. (shrink)

Provides information on all of the writings of Socialists Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

Despite the strength of arguments for veganism in the animal rights literature, alongside environmental and other anthropocentric concerns posed by industrialised animal agriculture, veganism remains only a minority standpoint. In this paper, I explore the moral motivational problem of veganism from the perspectives of moral psychology and political false consciousness. I argue that a novel interpretation of the post-Marxist notion of political false consciousness may help to make sense of the widespread refusal to shift towards veganism. Specifically, the notion of (...) false consciousness fills some explanatory gaps left by the moral psychological notion of akrasia, often understood to refer to a weakness of will. Central to my approach is the idea that animal exploitation is largely systemic and the assumption that moral motivation is inseparable from moral thinking. In this light, the primary obstacle to the adoption of veganism arises not so much from a failure to put genuine beliefs into action, but rather in a shared, distorted way of thinking about animals. Thus, common unreflective objections to veganism may be said to be manifestations of false consciousness. (shrink)

On the Use and Abuse of Foucault for Politics provides an accessible interpretation of Foucault's political philosophy, demonstrating how Foucault is relevant for contemporary democratic theory. Brent Pickett lays out an overview of Foucault's politics, including a comprehensive overview of the reasons for various conflicting interpretations, and then explores how well the different "Foucaults" can be used in progressive politics and democratic theory.