All too often, the requirements for actionability and accountability of data infrastructures are conceptualised as incompatible and leading to a trade-off situation where increasing one will unavoidably decrease the other. Through a comparative analysis of two data infrastructures used to share genomic data about the SARS-COV-2 virus, we argue that making data actionable for knowledge development involves a commitment to ensuring that the data in question are representative of the phenomena being studied and accountable to data subjects and users. This (...) in turn presupposes that: (1) enough data are contributed by a wide and diverse set of relevant sources; (2) mechanisms of feedback and inclusion are set up to ensure that data contributors can participate data governance and interpretation, thereby helping to adequately contextualise data; and (3) accountability extends to the ways in which data infrastructures are run, financed and positioned vis-à-vis the communities they are meant to serve. Such a model of data sharing can only work on the understanding that data do not need to be easily accessible to be actionable; rather, actionability depends on the responsiveness and accountability of data infrastructures, and the efforts invested in ensuring open communication among contributors. (shrink)

Currently, research ethics committees in the UK meet behind closed doors—their workings and most of the content of their decisions are unavailable to the general public. There is a significant tension between this current practice and a broader societal presumption of openness. As a form of public institution, the REC system exists to oversee research from the perspective of society generally.An important part of this tension turns on the kind of justification that might be offered for the REC system. In (...) this paper I adapt Daniels and Sabin’s accountability for reasonableness model for just resource allocation to the research ethics context to provide some structural legitimacy and to enable progress on the question of openness. After considering the consequences of adopting this model for open REC meetings, I then examine some reasons that might be offered against open meetings. These arguments do not overwhelm the core intuitions behind the presumption of openness but they do, I suggest, give us reason to retreat from fully public meetings. I conclude that there should be important adjustments to the system towards public accountability and that there are grounds for stopping short of fully public meetings. (shrink)

Can films philosophize rather than simply represent philosophical ideas developed outside of the cinematic medium? Taking up this question crucial to the emergent field of film philosophy, this book argues that the films of the American avant-garde do "do" philosophy and illuminates the ethical and political stakes of their aesthetic interventions. The book traces the avant-garde's philosophy by developing a history and theory of its investment in dimensional, conceptual, and material in-betweens, clarifying how this cinema's reflections on the creation and (...) reception of images construct an ethics of perception itself, a responsibility to perpetuate thought in an enduring re-encounter with the world and with meaning's unfinished production. This entails the avant-garde's locating of cinema's-and thought's-ends or meanings in their means, and their advancement of an image of truth that is made rather than found that unites their films with the philosophies of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Ralph Waldo Emerson who believed the "journey's end is found in every step of the road" (Cavell). Rectifying film-philosophy's neglect of the American avant-garde, the book demonstrates how rather than showing their interest in the revelation of authoritative truths, the avant-garde's interest in the re-encounter and review of the seen and known emerges from an American Transcendentalist tradition that opposes such notions. Sheehan reads the avant-garde's interest in the contingencies of spectatorial experience as also an extension of Pragmatism's commitment to replacing the authority of a priori knowledge with that of individual experience. She also shows how Emerson's influence on Friedrich Nietzsche connects the American avant-garde's philosophies to Deleuze's time-image, premised largely upon Nietzsche's "powers of the false.". (shrink)

Many people consider Martin Heidegger the most important German philosopher of the twentieth century. He is indisputably controversial and influential. Athough much has been written about Heidegger, this may be the best single volume covering his life, career, and thought. For all its breadth and complexity, Heidegger's perspective is quite simple: he is concerned with the meaning of Being as disclosure. Heidegger's life was almost as simple. He was a German professor, except for a brief but significant period in which (...) he supported the Nazi regime. While that departure from philosophy continues to haunt his name and work, one must question whether his thought from 1912 to 1976 should be measured by the yardstick of his politics from May, 1933, through February, 1934. Th is anthology addresses his complex but simple thought and his simple but complex life. In a real sense, Sheehan claims, there is no content to Heidegger's topic and legacy, only a method. But method must not be taken to mean a technique or procedure for philosophical thinking. Rather, the topic of Heidegger's thought and his pursuit of that topic, the "what" and the "how," are one and the same thing. Heidegger writes, "Alles ist Weg," "Everything is way," and man's Being is to be on-the-way in essential movement. Heidegger, argues in our essence we humans are the topic and the point is not to be led there so much as to come to know what we already know and to become what we already are. This brilliant collection confirms this truism, and is an excellent introduction to the work of this seminal thinker. (shrink)

An examination of the evidence for and the theoretical implications of a universal word order constraint, with data from a wide range of languages. This book presents evidence for a universal word order constraint, the Final-over-Final Condition (FOFC), and discusses the theoretical implications of this phenomenon. FOFC is a syntactic condition that disallows structures where a head-initial phrase is contained in a head-final phrase in the same extended projection/domain. The authors argue that FOFC is a linguistic universal, not just a (...) strong tendency, and not a constraint on processing. They discuss the effects of the universal in various domains, including the noun phrase, the adjective phrase, the verb phrase, and the clause. The book draws on data from a wide range of languages, including Hindi, Turkish, Basque, Finnish, Afrikaans, German, Hungarian, French, English, Italian, Romanian, Arabic, Hebrew, Mandarin, Pontic Greek, Bagirmi, Dholuo, and Thai. FOFC, the authors argue, is important because it is the only known example of a word order asymmetry pertaining to the order of heads. As such, it has significant repercussions for theories connecting the narrow syntax to linear order. (shrink)

Interpretations of Heidegger often fail to distinguish between two very different matters -- on the one hand “the turn” (die Kehre), and on the other hand “the change in Heidegger’s thinking” (die Wendung im Denken), that is, the shift in the way Heidegger formulated and presented his philosophy beginning in the 1930s. Failure to make this distinction can be disastrous for understanding Heidegger, and the danger becomes more acute the closer one gets to texts like Introduction to Metaphysics, where both (...) the “turn” and the “change” begin to come into their own.1.. (shrink)

by Victor Farías, translated from Spanish and German into French by Myriam Benarroch and Jean-Baptiste Grasset, preface by Christian Jambet. Editions Verdier, 332 pp., Fr125 (paper).

Martin Heidegger's 1925–26 lectures on truth and time provided much of the basis for his momentous work, Being and Time. Not published until 1976 as volume 21 of the Complete Works, three months before Heidegger's death, this work is central to Heidegger's overall project of reinterpreting Western thought in terms of time and truth. The text shows the degree to which Aristotle underlies Heidegger's hermeneutical theory of meaning. It also contains Heidegger’s first published critique of Husserl and takes major steps (...) toward establishing the temporal bases of logic and truth. Thomas Sheehan's elegant and insightful translation offers English-speaking readers access to this fundamental text for the first time. (shrink)

For the past 3 years, since acquiring formal training in healthcare ethics and philosophy, I have been one of those physicians who “does” ethics. I teach medical students and residents, write articles, speak at conferences, chair an ethics committee, and informally consult with colleagues on cases where they request advice related to ethical issues in the care of patients. These activities have been a rewarding and challenging part of my practice. There has also been a fair amount of frustration. Unfortunately, (...) both in teaching and patient care, it has been a frequent experience to finish a discussion with physicians only to be told that what I said was nice but had no bearing in the real world. In the words of a medical resident: 'You know, this ethics stuff is really a lot of crap, isn't it?'. (shrink)

In 1987 Victor Farías' Heidegger et le nazisme dropped like a bomb on the quiet chapel where Heidegger's disciples were gathered, and blew the place to bits. The myth Heidegger had concocted after the war -- that he supported the Nazis briefly and only to protect the university -- was shattered by the evidence Farías mustered of Heidegger's deep and long-lasting commitment to National Socialism, his blatant anti-Semitism, his blackballing of colleagues for no more than holding pacifist convictions, associating with (...) Jews, or being "unfavorably disposed" toward the Nazi regime. (shrink)

A masterful survey of the history of Marxist philosophy of science. Now with a new afterword. Skillfully deploying a large cast of characters, Sheehan retraces the development of Marxist philosophy of science through detailed and highly readable accounts of the debates that have characterized it. Approaching Marxism from the perspective of the philosophy of science, Sheehan shows how Marx's and Engel's ideas on the development and structure of natural science had a crucial impact on the work of early (...) twentieth-century natural philosophers, historians of science, and natural scientists. From the ideas of Marx and Engels, those of the Marxist theoreticians of the Second International to the debates within Russian Marxism up to World War II, Sheehan masterfully surveys the history of marxist philosophy of science, concluding with a close analysis of the development of the debate among non-Soviet Marxists, placing particular emphasis on the contributions of leading British Marxists in the 1930s. (shrink)

The period after World War Two saw the emergence both of the so-called later Heidegger and of the corresponding problem of the unity of his thought. Although his major work, Sein und Zeit, 1927 (=SZ) had announced Heidegger's intention of working out the meaning of being (Sein), his publications up through 1943, with the exception of the brief Vom Wesen der Wahrheit, presented only his preparatory analysis of human openness (Dasein). However, Heidegger's post-war publications seemed to emphasize “being itself” (the (...) history of being, being as language, pre-Socratic notions of being, the withdrawal of being in the modern world) and indeed almost seemed to hypostasize being into an "other" with a life of its own. This state of affairs, combined with Heidegger's announcement in 1953 that SZ would be left a torso, gave rise to such questions as whether his later thought was still phenomenological, how it might be continuous with his earlier writings, and how, if indeed at all, it was to be understood. (shrink)

Aristotle's treatment of logos apophantikos is found within the treatise that bears the title Peri Hermeneias, On Hermeneia. And it was to this treatise -- or, more accurately, to the first four sections of it -- that the early Heidegger turned again and again in his courses during the 1920s in an effort to retrieve from this phenomenon a hidden meaning.

Two traps currently ensnare Heideggerian scholarship: the “language trap” and the “being trap”. To avoid them, the text argues we should follow Heidegger’s important indication that movement (aka ex-sistential becoming or Zeit) determines all forms of meaning (aka the significance of things or Sein). This requires a radical rewriting of the terminology and the structure of Zeitlichkeit in § 65 of Sein und Zeit. The text also argues for moving beyond Heidegger’s early and late formulations of fundamental ontology and into (...) a meta- ontological ethics that would apply to the economic, social, and political worlds in which we live our daily lives. (shrink)

In the decades since Martin Heidegger's death, many of his early writings--notes and talks, essays and reviews--have made it into print, but in such scattershot fashion and erratic translation as to mitigate their usefulness for understanding the development, direction, and ultimate shape of his work. This timely collection, edited by two preeminent Heidegger scholars, brings together in English translation the most philosophical of Heidegger's earliest occasional writings from 1910 to the end of 1927. These important philosophical documents fill out the (...) context in which the early Heidegger wrote his major works and provide the background against which they appeared. Accompanied by incisive commentary, these pieces from Heidegger's student days, his early Freiburg period, and the time of his Marburg lecture courses will contribute substantially to rethinking the making and meaning of _Being and Time. _The contents are of a depth and quality that make this volume the collection for those interested in Heidegger's work prior to his masterwork. The book will also serve those concerned with Heidegger's relation to such figures as Aristotle, Dilthey, Husserl, Jaspers, and Löwith, as well as scholars whose interests are more topically centered on questions of history, logic, religion, and truth. Important in their own right, these pieces will also prove particularly useful to students of Heidegger's thought and of twentieth-century philosophy in general. (shrink)

These are two of the questions that inform the extraordinary open letter that Martin Heidegger published in 1955 in a Festschrift celebrating Ernst Jünger's sixtieth birthday.2 Heidegger's letter was in response to an essay that Jünger had contributed six years earlier, in 1949, to a Festschrift on Heidegger's own sixtieth birthday. So there was a certain reciprocity in the exchange: a favor returned, a public gesture of respect mirroring an earlier one.

"Dissecting Bioethics," edited by Tuija Takala and Matti Häyry, welcomes contributions on the conceptual and theoretical dimensions of bioethics. The section is dedicated to the idea that words defined by bioethicists and others should not be allowed to imprison people's actual concerns, emotions, and thoughts. Papers that expose the many meanings of a concept, describe the different readings of a moral doctrine, or provide an alternative angle to seemingly self-evident issues are therefore particularly appreciated. The themes covered in the section (...) so far include dignity, naturalness, public interest, community, disability, autonomy, parity of reasoning, symbolic appeals, and toleration. (shrink)

A Select Bibliography Michael McMahon Sheehan Jacqueline Murray. 16 Ritual and Iconography 134 12-14c Studies in Medieval Domestic Architecture ed M.J. Swanton (London 1975). [English aristocratic housing] 135 11-12c WEDZKI,...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 67.4 (2006) 561-569 MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]Introduction: Thinking about Idols in Early Modern EuropeJonathan Sheehan University of MichiganAbstractThis essay is an introduction to a collection of six articles on early modern debates about idolatry. If the debates started in religion, however, they quickly generated political, philosophical, anthropological, and even scientific corollaries. These may appear to be abstract and theoretical questions, but (...) they produced a complex set of answers with important consequences for many people. To see what was at stake, we need look no further than the New World and its missions. If the most frequently cited texts in the collection of articles are Bartolomé de las Casas and José de Acosta, it is because the New World forced the reality of idolatry onto the wider European stage.When does an image become a god? The early Christian apologist Minucius Felix had an answer. A log "is cut, is hewn, is planed," and is still no god. A stone "is sculptured, and is polished by some abandoned man" and still is no god. A sculpture "is set up, and even yet it is not a god." But, "lo, it is adorned, it is consecrated, it is prayed to—then at length it is a god, when man has chosen it to be so, and for the purpose has dedicated it." 1If only it were that easy. Felix offered just half of the story as David Freedberg has argued. Veneration does not produce that unhealthy power that idols exert over the attentive viewer. Rather, the opposite is true: idols are venerated because they exert this power. All images seem to contain at least traces of it. They draw our eye with ineluctable command, and force themselves on our attention. The image is just a representation, of course. It has been made by humans and can only ever gesture to an absent presence. And yet, images are also effective. Their ability to move us depends on "the possibility of fusion" between image and prototype. The crucifix is always only wood or stone, but its power comes from what might be called, with Freedberg, a "sacred contagion" that penetrates from behind the veil of representation. Indeed, its value as a religious object depends on this [End Page 561] contagion. Worshipers know that those tears shed by the Virgin in anguish at Christ's broken body are, in reality, just paint over mute stone and wood. Nevertheless, they are moved by those specks of material. If not, why have a statue in the first place? "The miraculous object has an effectiveness that proceeds as if the original body were present," Freedberg notes, "but the difficulty lies in cognitively grasping that 'as if.'" 2 Men do not choose to invest images with power over their imaginations and intellects. Even before images are prayed to, before they are consecrated, they already have that power.Whatever one thinks of the phenomenology of images, there is no doubt that this super-human power of idols obsessed many people in the early modern period. An object that had no power to inspire attention and devotion was hardly a threat, after all. The enormous waves of iconoclasm that swept across Europe—Germany in the 1520s, Scotland in the late 1550s, the Netherlands in the 1560s, England in the 1640s—were not directed at decorative tiles, pews, or doorstops. They were directed exactly at those things that made the devout feel the presence of the divine. And no one was quicker to identify these powerful images than the breakers themselves, who, in their extreme acts of rage, confirmed the effects that these supposedly dead bits of wood and stone exerted over them. The man in Ulm in 1534 who defecated into "the mouth of an effigy of Christ" demonstrated his extreme revulsion at what was, in reality, merely a lump of brute material. 3 Perhaps, if asked, he would have insisted that his scatological exuberance was designed to show definitively the impotence of the... (shrink)

This interdisciplinary book considers the relationship between language and thought from a philosophical perspective, drawing both on the philosophical study of language and the purely formal study of grammar, and arguing that the two should align. The claim is that grammar provides homo sapiens with the ability to think in certain grammatical ways and that this in turn explains the vast cognitive powers of human beings. Evidence is considered from biology, the evolution of language, language disorders, and linguistic phenomena.

Traditional causation posits that the past alone influences the present. In principle, however, the basic laws of physics permit the future an equal measure of influence: retrocausation. This symposium explores theoretical developments and experimental evidence for retrocausation. It is unique in stressing recent experiments in this exciting and potentially important new field.

In the Early Modern era of encyclopedias, the Bible functioned as a tool for managing and organizing the superabundance of information. From Johann Alsted to Johann Scheuchzer, this paper traces the use of the Biblical encyclopedia and the ways that the Bible was deployed to control the data that flooded the world of Early Modern scholarship. In a variety of contexts, the Bible served as a structure for generating meaningful statements from informational noise. In turn, the use of the Bible (...) as a principle of organization would have profound implications for the status of the Bible in Early Modern scholarly culture. (shrink)

This essay is an attempt to think through some of the problems of idolatry and sacrifice for the early modern period and more generally, for the constitution of religious and political community. In particular, it argues that the altars of the idols condensed two problems: first, the problem of communion, and specifically the Protestant ability to communicate with God; and second, the problem of distinction. At a time when the nature of the religious polity was in question, the analysis of (...) idolatry and sacrifice produced a conceptual structure for understanding, in anthropological fashion, the very constitution of religious and political community. In fact, this essay will suggest, this structure lives on, alive and well, among modern theorists seeking to diagnose the ailments of modernity. (shrink)

Engages the problem of finding purpose and meaning in a perplexing and postmodern world, utilizing disciplines including philosophy, literature, sociology, and ...

Engelbert Krebs, a Catholic priest and professor of theology at Freiburg University, was a close friend of her husband, the philosophy lecturer Martin Heidegger. In fact, Krebs was the minister who had officiated at the Heideggers' Catholic wedding in Freiburg Cathedral on March..

[164] As is well known, over the last decade some of the younger generation of German philosophers have been gravitating with ever increasing speed toward philosophical anthropology. Currently Wilhelm Dilthey's philosophy of life, a new form of anthropology, exercises a great deal of influence. But even the so-called "phenomenological movement" has got caught up in this new trend, which alleges that the true foundation of philosophy lies in human being alone, and more specifically in a doctrine of the essence of (...) human being's concrete worldly Dasein. Some view this as a necessary reform of the original constitutive phenomenology, one that for the very first time would supposedly permit phenomenology to attain the level of authentic philosophy. All of this constitutes a complete reversal of phenomenology's fundamental standpoint. Original phenomenology, which has matured into transcendental phenomenology, denies to any science of human being, whatever its form, a share in laying the foundations for philosophy, and opposes all related attempts at foundation-laying as being anthropologism or psychologism. Nowadays, however, the exact opposite is supposed to hold. Phenomenological philosophy is supposedly now to be constructed entirely anew from out of human Dasein. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger taught philosophy at Freiburg University (1915-1923), Marburg University (1923-1928), and again at Freiburg University (1928-1945). Early in his career he came under the influence of Edmund Husserl, but he soon broke away to fashion his own philosophy. His most famous work, Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) was published in 1927. Heidegger's energetic support for Hitler in 1933-34 earned him a suspension from teaching from 1945 to 1950. In retirement he published numerous works, including the first volumes of (...) his Collected Edition. His thought has had strong influence on trends in philosophy ranging from existentialism through hermeneutics to deconstruction as well as on the fields of literary theory and theology. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The Gorgias presents us with a mystery and an enigma: Who was Callicles? And, what was Plato trying to accomplish in this dialogue? While searching for the identity of Callicles, we gain a better understanding of Plato's purpose for this dialogue, which is to use justice as a means for staking out the boundaries of four types of rhetoric. This article argues that Plato uses the Gorgias to reveal the deficiencies of sophistic nomos-centered rhetorics and an unjust sophistic phusis-centered (...) rhetoric, opening the door for a “true” rhetoric that he articulates in the Phaedrus and a universal justice based on virtue that he describes in the Republic. (shrink)

In Invisible Hands, the historians Jonathan Sheehan and Dror Wahrman identify a defining feature of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment: the decline of God as a source of order in favor of a new model of self-organization.” Sheehan and Warhman provide a novel account of how people on the threshold of modernity understood the continuing presence in the world of apparent disorder, randomness, and chance. If God no longer actively guaranteed that order will always prevail, what or whom did? The (...) answer, the authors argue, was a new appreciation for complexity, new understandings of causality, and new functions for the divine hand. At the foundation of this novel way of thinking was the ability to imagine complex systems--be they natural or human--asself-organizing. Invisible Hands maps and explains the intensifying presence of the languages of self-organization throughout the eighteenth century, proliferating as they did with ever greater sophistication across numerous intellectual domains and cultural arenas. For self-organization was less a theory than a field of new insights: insights into the dynamics of chance and randomness, into the relationship between agency and determinism, into the role of God in a world without hands-on providence. (shrink)

The language of ethics expertise has become particularly important in bioethics in light of efforts to establish the value of the clinical ethics consultation, to specify who is qualified to function as a clinical ethics consultant, and to characterize how one should evaluate whether or not a person is so qualified. Supporters and skeptics about the possibility of ethics expertise use the language of ethics expertise in ways that reflect competing views about what ethics expertise entails. We argue for clarity (...) in understanding the nature of expertise and ethics expertise. To be an ethics expert, we argue, is to be an expert in knowing what ought to be done. Any attempt to articulate expertise with respect to knowing what ought to be done must include an account of ethics that specifies the nature of moral truth and the means by which we access this truth or a theoretical account of ethics such that expertise in another domain is linked to knowing or being better at judging what ought to be done and the standards by which this “knowing” or “being better at judging” is determined. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of our analysis for the literature on ethics expertise in CEC. We do think that there are clear domains in which a clinical ethics consultant might be expert but we are skeptical about the possibility that this includes ethics expertise. Clinical ethics consultants should not be referred to as ethics experts. (shrink)

Skillfully deploring a large cast of characters, Sheehan retraces the development of Marxist philosophy of science through detailed and highly readable accounts of the debates that have characterized it. The opening chapter discussed the ideas of Marx and Engels, and the second, Marxist theoreticians of the Second International. In the third chapter Sheehan covers Russian Marxism up to World War II. Sheehan concludes with a close analysis of the development of the debate among non-Soviet Marxists, placing particular (...) emphasis on the contributions of leading British in the 1930s. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger's 1925–26 lectures on truth and time provided much of the basis for his momentous work, Being and Time. Not published until 1976 as volume 21 of the Complete Works, three months before Heidegger's death, this work is central to Heidegger's overall project of reinterpreting Western thought in terms of time and truth. The text shows the degree to which Aristotle underlies Heidegger's hermeneutical theory of meaning. It also contains Heidegger’s first published critique of Husserl and takes major steps (...) toward establishing the temporal bases of logic and truth. Thomas Sheehan's elegant and insightful translation offers English-speaking readers access to this fundamental text for the first time. (shrink)

In 1983 Otto Pöggeler wrote: "Regrettably, even today there is still no reliable overview of Heidegger's early lecture courses based on the extant student transcripts and Heidegger's manuscripts." Ten years later, and the lacuna has been filled with Theodore Kisiel's The Genesis of Heidegger's BEING AND TIME. This brilliant and complex work provides, in its own words, the first "reliable, complete, and relatively uninterrupted story" of how Heidegger got from there to here, where "there" is 1915 and "here" is the (...) spring of 1926. By the end of his treatise Kisiel can make the justifiably proud claim: "BT can now be understood genealogically." (K 457). (shrink)