This text discusses aspects of Human-Machine Interaction from the perspectives of an engineer and a philosopher. Machines are viewed not so much as tools, but more as complex socio-technical systems. On this basis, the relation between production and use of such systems and its influence on the interaction between human and machine is examined. The concept of intentionality serves as a common thread, and its close connection with the concepts of usefulness, purpose, and functionality as well as the more socio-culturally (...) shaped concept of destination is shown. We also discuss the connection of these considerations to current philosophical debates around Floridi’s “Onlife Manifesto”. The core of our argumentation is the significance of the unintended in the interplay between justified expectations, the intended, and experienced results of real-world cooperative action. We extend the meaning of this term up to the negatively intended as harmful effect in order to highlight the prominent position of problem solving in the socio-cultural development of humankind. We focus on information processes in that Human-Machine Interaction and the concept of unintended information. With the advancing digital transformation and the growing possibilities of digital monitoring, the importance of information processes as forms of description is growing, too. We show how the concept of non-intended information is linked to such concepts of control of development, in which the non-intended is marginalised and thus an essential driver of socio-cultural development is deactivated. We compare this with Floridi’s reflections on “fears and risks in a hyperconnected era”. (shrink)

This is a peer reviewed chapter in the book The Persistence of Taste: Art, Museums and Everyday Life After Bourdieu, an interdisciplinary analysis of taste in the wake of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology. The chapter, ‘The configurational encounter and the problematic of beholding’, is in Part I of the book, entitled ‘Taste and Art’. Engaging the aesthetics of reception as its field of inquiry, the chapter draws upon the literary theorist Wolfgang Iser’s notion of the ‘blank’ as a staged suspension (...) of connectivity, arguing for a reassignment of the aesthetic in terms of a ‘configurational encounter’ that problematizes the work/beholder relation. This constitutes a rare attempt to apply reception aesthetics to contemporary art, a ‘gap’ first highlighted by the art historian Michael Ann Holly in her 2002 article ‘Reciprocity and Reception Theory’, published in A Companion to Art Theory. Utilising concrete examples of practice, the chapter asks whether the shift towards inter- or transmedia art practices, characterising postconceptual art, renders Bourdieu’s characterisation of the ‘autonomous’ artwork superfluous to the contemporary situation, and whether the kinds of judgments of taste associated with the acquisition of cultural capital are no longer relevant. The chapter argues that in revealing material processes, rules, instructions or appropriations – and/or its situated reception and apparatus of display – the configurational encounter problematizes the beholder’s bodily and ideological orientation toward an artwork, revealing our embodied dispositions or ‘habitus’. This counters philosopher Peter Osborne’s suggestion that a change in art’s ‘ontology’ post 1960s renders questions of aesthetics obsolete and reconceives the aesthetic as emerging from the oscillation of spatial and ideational perspective switches resulting from a calculated problematizing of the beholder’s position-taking. (shrink)

Pierre Bourdieu is arguably one of the twentieth century’s greatest socio-philosophical thinkers and his writings have much to offer anyone interested in the ways that people value, consume and produce architecture. Bourdieu spent much of his life attempting to understand cultural consumption and production through detailed empirical research that included studies of dwellings, art, museums, photography and aesthetics. This book introduces the architectural reader to Bourdieu’s key writings on culture and outlines the ways in which they offer powerful practical (...) tools and novel conceptual frameworks for understanding architectural value, taste, and practice. (shrink)

In traditional epistemology, psychological self-knowledge is taken to be the paradigm of privleged a priori knowledge. According to an influential incompatibilist line of thought, traditional epistemic features attributed to psychological self-knowledge are supposed to be inconsistent with content externalism. In this paper, I examine one prominent compatibilist response by an advocate of content externalism, i.e., Fred Dretske's answer tot he incompatibilist argument, based on the model of displaced perceptual knowledge. I discuss the costs and benefits of his answer.

This paper reviews Deleuze’s theory of language in Logic of Sense, and Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of language in A Thousand Plateaus. In the ontology informed by the Stoics described in those books, human being and language do not exist separately but in a mixture of words and things. The author argues that this flattened ontology of surfaces is incommensurable with the ontology of depth used in conventional humanist qualitative methodology and recommends beginning new empirical inquiry with a concept instead (...) of with method and methodology. (shrink)

Are there any advantages to thinking and speaking about ethical business in the language of citizenship? We will address this question in part by looking at the possible relevance of a vast literature on individual citizenship that has been produced by political philosophers over the last fifteen years. Some of the central elements of citizenship do not seem to apply straightforwardly to corporations. E.g., “citizenship” typically implies membership in a state and an identity akin to national identity; but this connotation (...) of citizenship is obviously problematic for multinational corporations. However, the language of citizenship does help to focus our attention on various legal and political virtues (or vices) for corporations—topics that have been largely neglected by discussions under other rubrics, such as CSR or sustainability. We finish with an evaluation of the potential benefits and costs of conceptualizing and talking about ethical business practices in the language of citizenship. (shrink)

Recent Work on Intrinsic Value brings together for the first time many of the most important and influential writings on the topic of intrinsic value to have appeared in the last half-century. During this period, inquiry into the nature of intrinsic value has intensified to such an extent that at the moment it is one of the hottest topics in the field of theoretical ethics. The contributions to this volume have been selected in such a way that all of the (...) fundamental questions concerning the nature of intrinsic value are treated in depth and from a variety of viewpoints. These questions include how to understand the concept of intrinsic value, what sorts of things can have intrinsic value, and how to compute intrinsic value. The editors have added an introduction that ties these questions together and places the contributions in context, and they have also provided an extensive bibliography. The result is a comprehensive, balanced, and detailed picture of current thinking about intrinsic value, one that provides an indispensable backdrop against which future writings on the topic may be assessed. (shrink)

Etrange personnage que Pierre Nicole. La postérité l'a rangé parmi les deuxièmes rôles de Port-Royal, une sorte de permanent du parti janséniste. Il a secondé le grand Arnauld, instruit Racine dans les Petites Ecoles, aidé Pascal et traduit en latin ses Provinciales. Fidèle entre les fidèles, et en même temps mal à l'aise dans cette atmosphère de fronde et de résistance que représente le milieu de Port-Royal, au sein de la France du XVII e siècle, ce latiniste timoré ne (...) songeait qu'aux Moyens de conserver la paix avec les hommes - titre de l'un de ses essais les plus célèbres. Dès que les tensions semblent s'apaiser, pendant la trêve appelée "la Paix de l'Eglise", Nicole peut enfin laisser libre cours à sa vocation de moraliste et de psychologue. Il publie, volume après volume ses Essais de morale : le succès sera tel que le libraire, après la mort de Pierre Nicole, s'ingéniera à en augmenter la série jusqu'à atteindre vingt-cinq volumes. Depuis la fin du XVIII e siècle, ce classique de la littérature morale était devenu pour ainsi dire inaccessible. On en publie parfois quelques pages choisies, défigurées par les coupures et les corrections. Il est proposé ici au lecteur moderne de redécouvrir dix essais de Nicole, donnés dans leur intégralité. Certains nous replongent dans les principes moraux d'un autre âge (et tirent de cet exotisme une part de leur valeur). D'autres présentent les qualités de finesse, le piquant, le goût du paradoxe qui ont longtemps fait juger Nicole comme un des grands représentants, à côté de Pascal et de La Rochefoucauld, de la littérature morale classique. L'oeuvre morale de Nicole s'avère ainsi demeurer passionnante pour un lecteur moderne, au moins à trois égards : 1/ ses considérations sur l'amour-propre, qui constituent les premiers jalons d'un utilitarisme économique ; 2/ ses réflexions sur la sociabilité et une approche originale de la civilité ; 3/ ses observations pédagogiques, émanant d'un des principaux maîtres des Petites Ecoles de Port-Royal. (shrink)

The involvement of developing countries in international clinical trials is necessary for the development of appropriate medicines for local populations. However, the absence of appropriate structures for ethical review represents a barrier for certain countries. Currently there is very little information available on existing structures dedicated to ethics in western and central Africa. This article briefly describes historical milestones in the development of networks dedicated to capacity building in ethical review in these regions and outlines the major conclusions of two (...) workshops on this issue, which were held in September and October 2002 in Libreville, Gabon, and Paris, France. The workshops were the culmination of collaboration between the African Malaria Network Trust (AMANET) and the Pan African Bioethics Initiative (PABIN). They produced an update on ethics organizations with regard to mission, function, activities, members, and contact people, in eight countries within the regions discussed. As a result of the commitment of mandated delegates, a further prominent outcome followed these workshops: the creation of national structures, where none existed before, dedicated to the ethical review of clinical trials. (shrink)

Pierre Maquet1,2,6, Steven Laureys1,2, Philippe Peigneux1,2,3, Sonia Fuchs1, Christophe Petiau1, Christophe Phillips1,6, Joel Aerts1, Guy Del Fiore1, Christian Degueldre1, Thierry Meulemans3, André Luxen1, Georges Franck1,2, Martial Van Der Linden3, Carlyle Smith4 and Axel Cleeremans5.

Examines differences in taste between modern French classes, discusses the relationship between culture and politics, and outlines the strategies of pretension.

In Gemes (1990) I examined certain formal versions of hypothetico-deductivism (H-D) showing that they have the unacceptable consequence that "Abe is a white raven" confirms "All ravens are black"! In Gemes (1992) I developed a new notion of content that could save H-D from this bizarre consequence. In this paper, I argue that more traditional formulations of H-D also need recourse to this new notion of content. I present a new account of the vexing notion of the natural axiomatization of (...) a theory. The notion is used to construct a form of H-D that allows for the type of selective confirmation without which Glymour (1980a,b) claims H-D is hopeless. (shrink)

This article explores Nietzsche’s interest in perspectives. Various epistemological and semantic interpretations of perspectivism are considered, including readings of it as a semantic claim about the nature of truth, and readings of perspectivism as an epistemological claim, that all knowledge depends on interests or affect. Nietzsche’s perspectivism is best interpreted as a kind of psychobiological claim that serves as an extension of his claim that all life is will to power. On this reading, perspectivism has neither semantic significance nor epistemological (...) import. (shrink)

The notion of sublimation is essential to Nietzsche and Freud. However, Freud's writings fail to provide a persuasive notion of sublimation. In particular, Freud's writings are confused on the distinction between pathological symptoms and sublimation and on the relation between sublimation and repression. After rehearsing these problems in some detail, it is proposed that a return to Nietzsche allows for a more coherent account of sublimation, its difference from pathological symptoms, and its relation to repression. In summary, on Nietzsche's account, (...) while repression and pathological symptoms involve a disintegration , sublimation involves integration. The article concludes with a brief consideration of some post-Freudian accounts of sublimation that represent a return to a more Nietzschean approach. (shrink)

Une enquête sur le statut et les usages du document sonore dans la musique contemporaine depuis les débuts de la phonographie, par le compositeur et musicologue qui travaille au croisement de la musique électroacoustique, de la composition contemporaine et de l'art sonore.

Em todos os textos de Deleuze sobre a psicanálise, o que lhe interessa mais é o instinto de morte. Ele dedica a esse tema um capítulo em Présentation de Sacher-Masoch, longas páginas de Différence et Répétition e inumeráveis passagens de l'Anti-Œdipe. A controvérsia com a psicanálise pode tocar em muitos aspectos, mas no fundo, é visível que ela se situa aí, sobre o elemento essencial que Guattari e Deleuze julgam o mais interessante, o mais revolucionário, o mais essencial. O que (...) eles foram procurar no instinto de morte? Por que todo o debate com a psicanálise devia condensar-se em torno desse conceito obscuro? Apresentamos aqui algumas considerações com vistas a analisar tais questões. (shrink)

Nietzsche never presented a worked-out normative ethical theory and appeared to regard any attempt to do so as woefully misguided. He poured scorn on the main contenders for such a theory in his day, and in ours – Kantian ethics and utilitarianism. Moreover, he repeatedly referred to himself as an 'immoralist' and gave one of his books the title Beyond Good and Evil, thus seeming only to confirm the impression that he was more interested in demolishing, and even abolishing morality (...) altogether than in making any constructive contribution to the subject. While the topic of morality appears as a central and almost obsessive interest in his works – especially in the sequence of books from Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality (1881) to On the Genealogy of Morality (1887) – it generally does so as the target of relentless criticism. Many have concluded, not surprisingly, that Nietzsche, rather than being interested in replacing an existing conception of morality with a better one of his own, was in the business of advising us to abandon morality altogether – to live, in some sense, without morality. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger's overt alliance with the Nazis and the specific relation between this alliance and his philosophical thought--the degree to which his concepts are linked to a thoroughly disreputable set of political beliefs--have been the topic of a storm of recent debate. Written ten years before this debate, this study by France's leading sociologist and cultural theorist is both a precursor of that debate and an analysis of the institutional mechanisms involved in the production of philosophical discourse. Though Heidegger is (...) aware of and acknowledges the legitimacy of purely philosophical issues, Bourdieu points out that the complexity and abstraction of Heidegger's philosophical discourse stems from its situation in the cultural field, where two social and intellectual dimensions--political thought and academic thought--intersect. Bourdieu concludes by suggesting that Heidegger should not be considered as a Nazi ideologist, that there is no place in Heidegger's philosophical ideas for a racist conception of the human being. Rather, he sees Heidegger's thought as a structural equivalent in the field of philosophy of the "conservative revolution," of which Nazism is but one manifestation. (shrink)

In his paper, "Explanations of Irrelevance" (1983), Paul Horwich proposes an amended version of hypothetico-deductivism, (H-D * ). In this discussion note it is shown that (H-D * ) has the consequence that "A is a non-black raven" confirms "All ravens are black" relative to any tautology! It is noted that Horwich's (H-D * ) bears a strong resemblance to Hempel's prediction criterion of confirmation and that the prediction criterion faces the same obstacle. A related problem for hypothetico-deductivism in its (...) simplest form--that is, E confirms H iff E is an (observational) consequence of H--is displayed. The discussion concludes with a suggestion about how (H-D * ) and simple hypothetico-deductivism might be amended in order to avoid these results. (shrink)

Are there any advantages to thinking and speaking about ethical business in the language of citizenship? We will address this question in part by looking at the possible relevance of a vast literature on individual citizenship that has been produced by political philosophers over the last fifteen years. Some of the central elements of citizenship do not seem to apply straightforwardly to corporations. E.g., “citizenship” typically implies membership in a state and an identity akinto national identity; but this connotation of (...) citizenship is obviously problematic for multinational corporations. However, the language of citizenship does help to focus our attention on various legal and political virtues for corporations—topics that have been largely neglected by discussions under other rubrics, such as CSR or sustainability. We finish with an evaluation of the potential benefits and costs of conceptualizing and talking about ethical business practices in thelanguage of citizenship.“Citizen” and “Citizenship” are powerful words. They speak of respect, of rights, of dignity.... We find no perjorative uses. It is a weighty, monumental, humanist word.—Fraser and Gordon 1994: 90[The rhetorical appeal to citizenship often] seems to have no purpose other than to add normative weight to a policy, institution or practice that could just asaptly be described without reference to citizenship.—Weinstock 2002: 244. (shrink)

The following is an essay on the notion of scientific explanation as unification. In it a new notion of content is used to explicate Michael Friedman's notion of "k-atomicity," and to explicate the notion of the surplus content of hypothesis h relative to evidence e. From this basis an analysis of unification as theoretical reduction is advanced. A second notion of unification, unification as reconciling prima facie incompatible statements, is introduced again with the aid of this new notion of content. (...) More generally, it is argued that rather than seek the essence of scientific explanation we should carefully catalog the various distinct explanatory virtues. Finally it is argue that in particular philosophical explanations put a high premium on the quality of unification through showing how to make compatible seemingly irreconcilable claims. (shrink)

We study the degree of (weak) Q-pointness, and that of (weak) P-pointness, of ideals on a regular infinite cardinal.

In this ground-breaking work, Allan Combs presents a wide-ranging survey of the nature and origins of consciousness research, viewing consciousness as a dynamic and self-organizing process with evolutionary potential. Combs reviews the work of evolutionary theorists such as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Ken Wilber, Jean Gebser, and Sri Aurobindo. What emerges is a fascinating study of consciousness that discloses itself as a rich and ongoing act of self-creation, poised at the edge of chaos between past and future.

The dissertation seeks to gain a comprehensive understanding of Frege's watershed work of logic, the 1879 Begriffsschrift . The treatise is the first since Aristotle's instauration of the discipline to have succeeded in completely recasting logic. Very generally stated, the dissertation aims at making explicit the conceptual origins of modern logic. To do that will require that each of the achievements of Concept-script be examined from one or more vantage points: either within the perspective of Frege's larger and guiding ambition, (...) that of providing a logical justification of arithmetic; or with respect to the horizon of modernity; or in relation to later developments in logical theory and the philosophy of language, developments stimulated, albeit not exclusively, by Frege's very work. The vantage point adopted in each case will depend on the nature of the topic and the extent to which it requires to be made explicit. One perspective will have preponderance, that of Frege's relationship to his early modern ancestors, a group that includes philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians. Since modernity is constituted in a nearly constant critical, if not polemical, relationship to the Ancients, they will also at times be drawn into the discussion. The elucidation of Frege's breakthrough work will be guided by the following thesis: Frege's attempt to justify arithmetic logically and the fine work of clarification he produced in actualizing this project; his discovery of function-theoretic logic and his fashioning of a concept-script ; and his critique of natural language and the attendant semantics developed over the course of that critique constitute an unfolding and an extension of the primacy of universal method over ontology that is the signature of modern inquiry. (shrink)

We study normal ideals on Pκ\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${P_{\kappa} }$$\end{document} that are defined in terms of games of uncountable length.

I examine and criticize John Searle's view of the relationships between consciousness, intentionality and function.

Various possibilities, that one is dreaming, that one is being deceived by a deceitful demon, that one is a brain in the vat being stimulated to think one has a body and is in a regular world, have been invoked to show that all one's experience-based beliefs might be false. Descartes in Meditation I advises that in order not to lapse into his careless everyday view of things he, or at least his meditator, should pretend that all his experience-based beliefs, (...) indeed all his …. (shrink)

Opacity, in Metzinger’s sense, is access to processed information _as_ processed, while transparency is only access to the _content _of our phenomenal states. I suspect that transparency conflates different notions. First I show that every conscious experience has a “transparent” core (involving intentionality, directedness and assumption of existence, insensitivity to some unconscious process). Anyway, to be sensitive to earlier processing steps does not imply to take the representation “as modeled by our simulator”. There are other ways of being sensitive to (...) this processing experience: experience of gaps in perceptive synthesis, experience of incompleteness, queerness of experience, phenomenal incoherence, searching consciousness. Many of them implies only to put in abeyance incoherence or incompleteness (to be laterally aware of a conflict without dealing with it), or even to put this abeyance into abeyance (not to take into account the absence of solution). But if the conflict becomes serious, we revise our assumption, and this requires the assumption that the conflict is about existing things. The self has a peculiar property here. Even when I revise one aspect of my self, I have to presuppose a self, in the sense that I put in abeyance other revisions of this presupposed self. Self is not a simulation, even if we have only this peculiar access to it. <b> </b>. (shrink)

Pierre André,Michel Bourban | : Dans un contexte d’urgence, les philosophes ne peuvent plus se contenter d’élaborer des théories idéales de la justice climatique fondées sur des motivations purement morales. Il est désormais nécessaire d’envisager des approches non idéales. Nous proposons ici de prendre au sérieux le problème de la motivation à l’action et nous mettons en avant certains motifs prudentiels pour lutter contre le changement climatique, en vue non pas de remplacer, mais de renforcer les motivations morales existantes, (...) mais insuffisantes. Nous commençons par présenter trois grandes approches idéales qui ont prévalu jusqu’ici dans la recherche sur la justice climatique et sont fondées respectivement sur l’éthique déontologique, sur l’éthique des vertus et sur l’utilitarisme. Nous mettons en évidence leurs limites pratiques, en ciblant le problème de la motivation à l’action. Nous proposons ensuite quelques pistes pour résoudre ce problème en esquissant une approche non idéale de la justice climatique. Cette approche est centrée sur les motivations amorales ressortant de l’examen attentif des perturbations systémiques globales et des contextes nationaux et locaux spécifiques. Elle est à notre sens incontournable pour motiver les États-nations, les entreprises et les individus. Il s’agit cependant moins de la substituer totalement aux théories idéales de la justice climatique que de compléter celles-ci pour établir une vision plus compréhensive qui distingue le problème de la justification morale de celui de la motivation. | : In a situation of urgency, philosophers can no longer rely exclusively on ideal theories of climate justice grounded on purely moral motives. It has become necessary to build nonideal approaches. We propose to give serious consideration to the problem of motivation to act by putting forward some prudential reasons for tackling climate change—with the aim not of replacing existing but inadequate moral motivations, but of strengthening them. First, we identify three major ideal approaches that have so far prevailed in climate justice research, grounded respectively on deontological ethics, on virtue ethics, and on utilitarianism. We highlight their practical limitations, particularly with regards to the problem of motivation to act. Second, we open the way for an alternative nonideal approach to climate justice based on amoral motivations issuing from a careful examination of global systemic disruptions as well as of specific national and local situations. This approach cannot be ignored if one wishes to motivate nation-states, corporations, and individuals to act. However, our goal is not to replace ideal theory with nonideal theory, but rather to complete the former with the latter for a more comprehensive account of climate justice that distinguishes the problem of moral justification from the problem of motivation. (shrink)

Examining the role of implicit, unconscious thinking on reasoning, decision making, problem solving, creativity, and its neurocognitive basis, for a genuinely psychological conception of rationality. This volume contributes to a current debate within the psychology of thought that has wide implications for our ideas about creativity, decision making, and economic behavior. The essays focus on the role of implicit, unconscious thinking in creativity and problem solving, the interaction of intuition and analytic thinking, and the relationship between communicative heuristics and thought. (...) The analyses move beyond the conventional conception of mind informed by extra-psychological theoretical models toward a genuinely psychological conception of rationality—a rationality no longer limited to conscious, explicit thought, but able to exploit the intentional implicit level. The contributors consider a new conception of human rationality that must cope with the uncertainty of the real world; the implications of abandoning the normative model of classic logic and adopting a probabilistic approach instead; the argumentative and linguistic aspects of reasoning; and the role of implicit thought in reasoning, creativity, and its neurological base. Contributors Maria Bagassi, Linden J. Ball, Jean Baratgin, Aron K. Barbey, Tilmann Betsch, Eric Billaut, Jean-François Bonnefon, Pierre Bonnier, Shira Elqayam, Keith Frankish, Gerd Gigerenzer, Ken Gilhooly, Denis Hilton, Anna Lang, Stefanie Lindow, Laura Macchi, Hugo Mercier, Giuseppe Mosconi, Ian R. Newman, Mike Oaksford, David Over, Guy Politzer, Johannes Ritter, Steven A. Sloman, Edward J. N. Stupple, Ron Sun, Nicole H. Therriault, Valerie A. Thompson, Emmanuel Trouche-Raymond, Riccardo Viale. (shrink)