This essay will examine an illuminating convergence in the thoughts of Pope John Paul II and the cultural anthropologist René Girard. It will be seen that this convergence is a consequence of the shared concern of both to understand the human person in terms of its relation to other persons. So while not a personalist philosopher in the strict sense, René Girard’s concern for the interpersonal brings him close to the personalism of John Paul II, who likewise understands human subjectivity (...) in terms of the relations by which it is constituted. Both practice what might be called an “interpersonalist” personalism, which this essay will argue ought to characterize the practice of personalism in a Christian context. The essay will make this observation the basis for further reflections on the nature of personalism and its relation to the Christian intellectual tradition. (shrink)

Developments in medical science have afforded us the opportunity to improve and enhance the human species in ways unthinkable to previous generations. Whether it's making changes to mitochondrial DNA in a human egg, being prescribed Prozac, or having a facelift, our desire to live longer, feel better and look good has presented philosophers, medical practitioners and policy-makers with considerable ethical challenges. But what exactly constitutes human improvement? What do we mean when we talk of making "better" humans? In this book (...) Michael Hauskeller explores these questions and the ideas of human good that underpin them. Posing some challenging questions about the nature of human enhancement, he interrogates the logic behind its processes and examines the justifications behind its criteria. Questioning common assumptions about what constitutes human improvement, Hauskeller asks whether the criteria proposed by its advocates are convincing. The book draws on recent research as well as popular representations of human enhancement from advertising to the internet, and provides a non-technical and accessible survey of the issues for readers and students interested in the ethics and politics of human enhancement. (shrink)

Michael Sandel's opposition to the project of human enhancement is based on an argument that centres on the notion of giftedness. Sandel claims that by trying to ?make better people? we fall prey to, and encourage, an attitude of mastery and thus lose, or diminish, our appreciation of the giftedness of life. Sandel's position and the underlying argument have been much criticised. In this paper I will try to make sense of Sandel's reasoning and give an account of giftedness (...) that defends its relevance for the ethical assessment of the human enhancement project. In order to do so, I will also look at virtue-related notions, such as gratitude and humility, and distinguish the gifted from the merely given. The failure to acknowledge this distinction gives rise to one of the most common objections to Sandel's argument. Other objections will be shown to rest on similar misunderstandings. (shrink)

Ramscar, Yarlett, Dye, Denny, and Thorpe (2010) showed how, consistent with the predictions of error‐driven learning models, the order in which stimuli are presented in training can affect category learning. Specifically, learners exposed to artificial language input where objects preceded their labels learned the discriminating features of categories better than learners exposed to input where labels preceded objects. We sought to replicate this finding in two online experiments employing the same tests used originally: A four pictures test (match a label (...) to one of four pictures) and a four labels test (match a picture to one of four labels). In our study, only findings from the four pictures test were consistent with the original result. Additionally, the effect sizes observed were smaller, and participants over‐generalized high‐frequency category labels more than in the original study. We suggest that although Ramscar, Yarlett, Dye, Denny, and Thorpe (2010) feature‐label order predictions were derived from error‐driven learning, they failed to consider that this mechanism also predicts that performance in any training paradigm must inevitably be influenced by participant prior experience. We consider our findings in light of these factors, and discuss implications for the generalizability and replication of training studies. (shrink)

:It has been argued that moral bioenhancement is desirable even if it would make it impossible for us to do what is morally required. Others find this apparent loss of freedom deplorable. However, it is difficult to see how a world in which there is no moral evil can plausibly be regarded as worse than a world in which people are not only free to do evil, but also where they actually do it, which would commit us to the seemingly (...) paradoxical view that, under certain circumstances, the bad can be better than the good. Notwithstanding, this view is defended here. (shrink)

The worst of all possible worlds: Arthur Schopenhauer -- The despair of not being oneself: Soren Kierkegaard -- The interlinked terrors and wonders of God: Herman Melville -- The hell of no longer being able to love: Fyodor Dostoyevsky -- The inevitable end of everything: Leo Tolstoy -- The joy of living dangerously: Friedrich Nietzsche -- The dramatic richness of the concrete world: William James -- The only life that is really lived: Marcel Proust -- Our hopeless battle against the (...) boundaries of language: Ludwig Wittgenstein -- The benign indifference of the world: Albert Camus. (shrink)

Nicholas Agar argues that it is possible, and even likely, that radically enhanced human beings will turn out to be ‘post-persons’, that is, beings with a moral status higher than that of mere persons such as us.1 This would mean that they will be morally justified in sacrificing our lives and well-being not merely in cases of emergency, but also in cases of ‘supreme opportunities’ , that is, whenever such a sacrifice leads to ‘significant benefits for post-persons’. For this reason, (...) Agar believes, it would be morally wrong to allow any cognitive enhancement of people that might entail the risk of moral status enhancement.However, neither are there sufficient grounds to expect radically enhanced human beings to have a higher moral status than unenhanced human beings, nor would it, even if they did, be morally wrong to bring about their existence. We use moral status ascriptions mostly as a convenient shorthand to indicate a difference in capacities that strikes us as morally relevant. Rocks have zero moral status because they cannot feel or think, so we cannot hurt or kill them. Whatever we do to them, it does not affect them. Animals, on the other hand, …. (shrink)

Clinical and experimental evidence suggests that hippocampal damage causes more severe disruption of episodic memories if those memories were encoded in the recent rather than the more distant past. This decrease in sensitivity to damage over time might reflect the formation of multiple traces within the hippocampus itself, or the formation of additional associative links in entorhinal and association cortices. Physiological evidence also supports a two-stage model of the encoding process in which the initial encoding occurs during active waking and (...) deeper consolidation occurs via the formation of additional memory traces during quiet waking or slow-wave sleep. In this article I will describe the changes in cholinergic tone within the hippocampus in different stages of the sleep-wake cycle and will propose that these changes modulate different stages of memory formation. In particular, I will suggest that the high levels of acetylcholine that are present during active waking might set the appropriate dynamics for encoding new information in the hippocampus, by partially suppressing excitatory feedback connections and so facilitating encoding without interference from previously stored information. By contrast, the lower levels of acetylcholine that are present during quiet waking and slow-wave sleep might release this suppression and thereby allow a stronger spread of activity within the hippocampus itself and from the hippocampus to the entorhinal cortex, thus facilitating the process of consolidation of separate memory traces. (shrink)

In circulation, T cells are spherical with selectin enriched dynamic microvilli protruding from the surface. Following extravasation, these microvilli serve another role, continuously surveying their environment for antigen in the form of peptide‐MHC (pMHC) expressed on the surface of antigen presenting cells (APCs). Upon recognition of their cognate pMHC, the microvilli are initially stabilized and then flatten into F‐actin dependent microclusters as the T cell spreads over the APC. Within 1–5 min, clathrin is recruited by the ESCRT‐0 component Hrs to (...) mediate release of T cell receptor (TCR) loaded vesicles directly from the plasma membrane by clathrin and ESCRT‐mediated ectocytosis (CEME). After 5‐10 min, Hrs is displaced by the endocytic clathrin adaptor epsin‐1 to induce clathrin‐mediated trans‐endocytosis (CMTE) of TCR‐pMHC conjugates. Here we discuss some of the functional properties of the clathrin machinery which enables it to control these topologically opposite modes of membrane transfer at the immunological synapse, and how this might be regulated during T cell activation. (shrink)

Sequence learning is fundamental to a wide range of cognitive functions. Explaining how sequences—and the relations between the elements they comprise—are learned is a fundamental challenge to cognitive science. However, although hundreds of articles addressing this question are published each year, the actual learning mechanisms involved in the learning of sequences are rarely investigated. We present three experiments that seek to examine these mechanisms during a typing task. Experiments 1 and 2 tested learning during typing single letters on each trial. (...) Experiment 3 tested for “chunking” of these letters into “words.” The results of these experiments were used to examine the mechanisms that could best account for them, with a focus on two particular proposals: statistical transitional probability learning and discriminative error-driven learning. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that error-driven learning was a better predictor of response latencies than either n-gram frequencies or transitional probabilities. No evidence for chunking was found in Experiment 3, probably due to interspersing visual cues with the motor response. In addition, learning occurred across a greater distance in Experiment 1 than Experiment 2, suggesting that the greater predictability that comes with increased structure leads to greater learnability. These results shed new light on the mechanism responsible for sequence learning. Despite the widely held assumption that transitional probability learning is essential to this process, the present results suggest instead that the sequences are learned through a process of discriminative learning, involving prediction and feedback from prediction error. (shrink)

Accessibilism is a version of epistemic internalism on which justification is determined by what is accessible to the subject. I argue that misunderstandings of accessibilism have hinged on a failure to appreciate an ambiguity in the phrase ‘what is accessible to the subject’. I first show that this phrase may either refer to the very things accessible to the subject, or instead to the facts about which things are accessible to her. I then discuss Ralph Wedgwood’s (2002: 350-352) argument that (...) accessibilism absurdly implies that an infinite regress of facts, each more complex than the last, must be accessible to the subject. I show that this regress objection only threatens the ‘very things’ disambiguation of accessibilism, not the ‘facts about’ disambiguation. After this, I discuss the relationships between the motivations for accessibilism and these two disambiguations. We will see that these motivations appear to support each disambiguation. But I will argue this appearance depends on a mistake. Just as only the ‘facts about’ disambiguation escapes the regress objection, it is also the only disambiguation which enjoys genuine support from the motivations for accessibilism. For these reasons, I recommend that future discussions of accessibilism focus on the ‘facts about’ disambiguation. (shrink)

We are material beings in a material world, but we are also beings who have experiences and feelings. How can these subjective states be just a matter of matter? To defend materialism, philosophical materialists have formulated what is sometimes called "the phenomenal-concept strategy," which holds that we possess a range of special concepts for classifying the subjective aspects of our experiences. In Consciousness Revisited, the philosopher Michael Tye, until now a proponent of the the phenomenal-concept strategy, argues that the (...) strategy is mistaken. A rejection of phenomenal concepts leaves the materialist with the task of finding some other strategy for defending materialism. Tye points to four major puzzles of consciousness that arise: How is it possible for Mary, in the famous thought experiment, to make a discovery when she leaves her black-and-white room? In what does the explanatory gap consist and how can it be bridged? How can the hard problem of consciousness be solved? How are zombies possible? Tye presents solutions to these puzzles -- solutions that relieve the pressure on the materialist created by the failure of the phenomenal-concept strategy. In doing so, he discusses and makes new proposals on a wide range of issues, including the nature of perceptual content, the conditions necessary for consciousness of a given object, the proper understanding of change blindness, the nature of phenomenal character and our awareness of it, whether we have privileged access to our own experiences, and, if we do, in what such access consists. (shrink)

This essay is a reflection on our lived experience of being human, or of some prominent aspects of being human, in light of rising demands to use already existing and soon to be developed technologies to fundamentally change what we are. The aspects the essay focuses on are, first, our existential vulnerability and, second, our desire to live a life that, in some way or another, matters and is in that sense meaningful.

The rules -- Ten other civil things you can do -- A last word -- Key dates in the life of George Washington.

Disgust is often believed to have no special moral relevance. However, there are situations where disgust and similar feelings like revulsion, repugnance, or abhorrence function as the expression of a very strong moral disapproval that cannot fully be captured by argument. I call this kind of disgust moral disgust.Although it is always in principle possible to justify our moral disgust by explaining what it is in a given situation or action that disgusts us, the feeling of disgust often comes first (...) and either draws our attention to the fact that there is something wrong in the first place, or makes us aware that the kind of wrongness we are dealing with surpasses what can be accounted for by established moral theory. In both cases moral disgust serves an important purpose for an adequate moral evaluation of diverse situations and the actions from which they result. (shrink)

Michael Hauskeller discusses a famous thought-experiment that appears to show that we actually want far more then merely to feel happy.

Turning an anthropological eye toward cyberspace, Human No More explores how conditions of the online world shape identity, place, culture, and death within virtual communities. Online worlds have recently thrown into question the traditional anthropological conception of place-based ethnography. They break definitions, blur distinctions, and force us to rethink the notion of the "subject." Human No More asks how digital cultures can be integrated and how the ethnography of both the "unhuman" and the "digital" could lead to possible reconfiguring the (...) notion of the "human." This provocative and groundbreaking work challenges fundamental assumptions about the entire field of anthropology. Cross-disciplinary research from well-respected contributors makes this volume vital to the understanding of contemporary human interaction. It will be of interest not only to anthropologists but also to students and scholars of media, communication, popular culture, identity, and technology. (shrink)

1 Th. 5:17 tells us to pray without ceasing. Many have worried that praying without ceasing seems impossible. Most address the problem by giving an account of the true nature of prayer. Unexplored are strategies for dealing with the problem that are neutral on the nature of prayer, strategies consistent, for example, with the view that only petition is prayer. In this article, after clarifying the nature of the problem for praying without ceasing, I identify and explore the prospects of (...) five different strategies that are neutral in this sense. I also raise problems for each strategy. (shrink)

Genetic engineering is often looked upon with disfavour on the grounds that it involves "tampering with nature". Most philosophers do not take this notion seriously. However, some do. Those who do tend to understand nature in an Aristotelian sense, as the essence or form which is the final end or telos for the sake of which individual organisms live, and which also explains why they are as they are. But is this really a tenable idea? In order to secure its (...) usage in present day ethics, I will first analyze the contexts in which it is applied today, then discuss the notion of telos as it was employed by Aristotle himself, and finally debate its merits and defend it, as far as possible, against common objections. (shrink)

Famously, Bernard Williams has argued that although death is an evil if it occurs when we still have something to live for, we have no good reason to desire that our lives be radically extended because any such life would at some point reach a stage when we become indifferent to the world and ourselves. This is supposed to be so bad for us that it would be better if we died before that happens. Most critics have rejected Williams’ arguments (...) on the grounds that it is far from certain that we will run out of things to live for, and I don't contest these objections. Instead, I am trying to show that they do not affect the persuasiveness of Williams’ argument, which in my reading does not rely on the claim that we will inevitably run out of things to live for, but on the far less contentious claim that it is not unthinkable we will do so and the largely ignored claim that if that happens, we will have died too late. (shrink)

Abstract:A brief response to papers presented by Herman Saatkamp, Krzysztof Skowroński, Eric Weber, and John Stuhr on the occasion of John Lachs' retirement from Vanderbilt University.

Psychiatric diagnosis and prognosis is fraught with important philosophical and conceptual problems. This chapter focuses on some epistemological issues and moral issues that arise in contemporary psychiatric practice. It examines various clinical and actuarial techniques for psychiatric diagnosis, ordered very loosely in terms of how "structured" or "automated" they are. The chapter makes the case for assessing psychiatric treatments with controlled experiments, raises several epistemological dangers that arise from relying on uncontrolled investigations, and considers some of the unique methodological and (...) ethical issues that arise when trying to assess talk therapy. (shrink)

This article reconsiders Stiegler’s account of the emergence of the human species in light of research in the field of transgenerational epigenetics. Stiegler traces this emergence to the appearance of technical artefacts allowing for the intergenerational transmission of acquired memory that would otherwise die along with the organism. This is taken to constitute a rupture in the history of life. The argument that I develop critiques Stiegler’s account at two levels: On the empirical level I argue that emerging neo-Lamarckian developments (...) in the life sciences pose a challenge to the terms in which the specificity of the human is outlined and the notion of the rupture with life that its emergence constitutes. On the logico-transcendental level, I contend that in its account of the rupture, Stiegler’s narrative repeats the logic of the ‘dual origin’ that he ascribes to Rousseau and Leroi-Gourhan in their respective accounts of the origin of the genus Anthropos. (shrink)

-/- Sorgner (2009, 29) has argued that Bostrom (2005, 4) was wrong to maintain that there are only surface-level similarities between Nietzsche’s vision of the overman, or overhuman, and the transhumanist conception of the posthuman. Rather, he claims, the similarities are “significant” and can be found “on a fundamental level”. However, I think that Bostrom was in fact quite right to dismiss Nietzsche as a major inspiration for transhumanism. There may be some common ground, but there are also essential differences, (...) some of which I am going to point out in this brief reply. (shrink)

Some passages throughout Spinoza’s body of works suggest that an attribute in its absolute nature provides a sufficient condition for all of its modes, including the finite ones. Other passages suggest that an attribute in its absolute nature fails to provide a sufficient condition for its finite modes. My aim is to dispel this apparent tension. I argue that all finite modes are ultimately entailed by the absolute nature of their attribute. Furthermore, I explain how the Spinozistic positions that appear (...) incompatible with this view are in fact compatible. As I see it, we should read those passages where Spinoza says that no finite mode ultimately follows from the absolute nature of its attribute as saying merely that no finite mode ultimately follows in one-by-one fashion, independent of an infinite series of other modes, from the absolute nature of its attribute. (shrink)

I argue that Mill introduced the distinction between quality and quantity of pleasures in order to fend off the then common charge that utilitarianism is ‘a philosophy for swine’ and to accommodate the (still) widespread intuition that the life of a human is better, in the sense of being intrinsically more valuable, than the life of an animal. I argue that in this he fails because in order to do successfully he would have to show not only that the life (...) of a human is preferable to that of an animal on hedonistic grounds, but also that it is in some sense nobler or more dignified to be a human, which he cannot do without tacitly presupposing non-hedonistic standards of what it means to lead a good life. (shrink)

All large-scale telescope facilities are constructed within a geographical, social, historical, and political context that includes nested layers at the global, national, and local levels. However, discussions about the geographic siting of astronomy facilities, for example, the communities in which they are embedded or the interactions between the facility and its locale, are uncommon in social science studies of astronomy, and no extant review focused on this gap in the literature. In this literature review and discourse analysis, we explore the (...) ways in which research about astronomy facilities and their local communities has emerged, and the extent to which it focuses on the Global South. We find that literature addressing the social and policy aspects of astronomy facilities has an emphasis on the Global North. However, literature addressing host communities has an emphasis on the Global South. Broadly, the discourses related to host communities in the Global South have emerged from reflections on the controversies related to large-scale telescopes in Hawai’i, Chile, and South Africa. One common theme linking these discourses is that a focus on benefits at the national and international levels obscures a range of problematic power dynamics and outcomes at the local level. The notion of the Global South as an ‘empty space’ in which astronomical observation does not constitute impactful action amongst local communities, is challenged by discourses that centre local contexts, and challenged by discourses that employ conceptual frameworks with a focus on revealing power dynamics. (shrink)

This paper argues that the goal the proponents of radical life extension wish to attain is in fact unattainable, and that with regard to this goal, the whole project of conquering ageing and death is therefore likely to fail. What we seek to achieve is not the prolongation of life as such, but rather the prolongation of a healthy and youthful life. Yet even though it may one day be possible to prevent the body from ageing beyond a certain stage (...) , it may never be possible to arrest the ageing of the mind, which is what we desire most of all. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:714 BOOK REVIEWS learning; the Jesuits lean to the voluntarist. Possessed of a unitary academic model, he is really arguing for Aristotle's analogy of attribution. Apparently, no one of his 200 plus Jesuit contacts told him that Nastri prefer St. Thomas and his analogy of proper proportionality. The historian Daniel Boorstin spent 25 yeari!l writing his trilogy on The Americans. What emerges from this analysis? Boorstin points out that (...) Americans like ambiguity, that they function best amid flux; ambivalence becomes their proper medium. For this reason, I have accepted Nathaniel Hawthorne as our most central writer. He situates American questions within a landscape of chiaroscuro. The Jesuit experience in the United States belongs essentially to the same landscape. But today, as formerly, it remains a landscape of questions. McDonough, on the other hand, has too many certitudes, too many answers, too much high definition-what Henry Adams regards as "mere facts." Instead of illuminating the landscape from within, his study inevitably recedes into the larger ambiguity reserved for what Wallace Stevens has called, " Prologues to what is possible." Saint Paul University Ottawa, Ontario JOHN P. McINTYRE, S.J. The Dilemma of Freedom and Foreknowledge. By LINDA TRINKAUS ZAGZEBSKI. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. viii + 215 pp. $29.95. As a Christian and a philosopher, Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski wants to understand why it is reasonable to affirm that we remain free despite God's infallible knowledge of our future acts. Moreover, she is not content simply to demonstrate that this affirmation involves no logical con· tradiction, for "reasonable people expect more" (p. 33) than a merely negative result. Hence the author sets herself the more ambitious task of working toward a positive solution that would explain why the compatibility of divine foreknowledge and human freedom is plausible and not a bare logical possibility. The hook sorts out recent opinions on the subject and sketches an original position that she hopes will advance the discussion. Zagzehski begins by constructing the most formidable version of the dilemma. Assuming that God is infallible and essentially omniscient, that the past has a kind of necessity that the future lacks ("accidental necessity"), and that this necessity can he transferred (in some sense) from the antecedent to the consequent of a conditional proposition, the dilemma may he stated as follows: BOOK REVIEWS (1) Necessarily, God believes at time t 1 that I will do S at t 3 if and only if I do S at t 3. (2) It is accidentally necessary at t 2 that God believes at t 1 that I will do S at t 3. (3) If (1) and (2) are true, then it is accidentally necessary at t 2 that I do Sat t 3. (4) It follows that it is accidentally necessary at t 2 that I do S at t 3. (5) But if it is accidentally necessary at t 2 that I do S at t 3, I do not do S at t 3 freely. (6) Therefore, I do not do S at t 3 freely. 715 Much of the first chapter is devoted to establishing that this form of the dilemma is more resistant to solution than any other, especially the so-called problem of future truth. Zagzebski goes on to evaluate three broad approaches to solving the dilemma. In Chapter 2 she takes up the " timelessness " solution. Its proponents, among whom the author numbers Boethius, Thomas Aquinas, Eleonore Stump, and Norman Kretzmann, negate premise (2) of the foreknowledge dilemma by contending that God is not in time. Zagzebski considers this an acceptable negative solution to the dilemma and sees in it the potential to ground a more comprehensive, positive solution. Nonetheless, she refrains from subscribing wholeheartedly to the timelessness solution because it confronts one with a dilemma at least as perplexing as the one it solves. She puts the problem this way: like the past, eternity is fixed, for it is constituted by a state of affairs about which we cannot do anything; therefore my future acts are determined no less by God's timeless knowledge than by God's foreknowing them in a strictly temporal sense. In Chapter 3, Zagzebski considers... (shrink)

‘What’s wrong – fundamentally wrong – with the way animals are treated (…) isn’t the pain, the suffering, isn’t the deprivation. (…) The fundamental wrong is the system that allows us to view animals as our resources, here for us – to be eaten, or surgically manipulated, or exploited for sport or money.’\n\nTom Regan made this claim 20 years ago. What he maintains is basically that the fundamental wrong is not the suffering we inflict on animals but the way we (...) look at them. What we do to them, what we believe we are allowed to do to them, is dependent on how we perceive or conceptualize them. We not only treat them as resources but prior to this we already think of them as resources, and when we look at them, all we tend to see is resources. In our perception of them they exist not for themselves but ‘for us’. But obviously it can only be fundamentally wrong in a moral sense to view them that way if it is wrong in a factual sense, that is, if animals are in fact not ‘for us’. But is it wrong? (shrink)

The Many-Interacting-Worlds (MIW) approach to a quantum theory without wave functions proposed in [8] leads naturally to numerical integrators of the Schrödinger equation on comoving grids. As yet, little is known about concrete MIW models for more than one spatial dimension and/or more than one particle. In honour of Detlef Dürr, we report on a further development of the MIW approach to treat arbitrary degrees of freedom and provide a numerical proof of concept for ground states in 2d. The latter (...) is part of a systematic numerical study [22] that includes also 1d ground and excited states. With this step towards the treatment of higher degrees of freedom we hope to stimulate their further study. (shrink)

Michael Heidelberger's exhaustive exploration of Fechner's writings, in relation to current issues in the field, successfully reestablishes Fechner'...

Genetic engineering is still considered morally wrong by a large proportion of the public. Yet many scientists are puzzled about the public concern over a technology that, in their view, promises great benefits to humans and does not seem to cause more harm to animals than other practices which are rarely questioned. In this book, Michael Hauskeller takes public fears seriously and offers the idea of 'biological integrity' as a clarifying principle which can then be analyzed to show that (...) seemingly irrational public concerns about genetic engineering are not so irrational and that a philosophically sound justification of those concerns can indeed be given. (shrink)