Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man is a key text from within the Critical Theory tradition in terms of its utility for assessing today’s new stage of automated production, its impact on social relations, and the prospects for the type of challenge to capitalism that includes within it a concept of an achievable postcapitalist society. The interpretation here seeks to uncover the socially relevant dialectical relationship of the Grundrisse and Capital, which is in contrast to Marcuse’s theory, which holds that Marx, in Capital, (...) had “repressed” his version of critical theory developed in the Grundrisse. (shrink)

Global Engineering Ethics introduces the fundamentals of ethics in a context specific to engineering without privileging any one national or cultural conception of ethics. Numerous case studies from around the world help the reader to see clearly the relevance of design, safety, and professionalism to engineers. Engineering increasingly takes place in global contexts, with industrial and research teams operating across national and cultural borders. This adds a layer of complexity to already challenging ethical issues. This book is essential reading for (...) anyone wanting to understand or communicate the ethics of engineering, including students, academics, and researchers, and is indispensable for those involved in international and cross-cultural environments. (shrink)

Research in engineering ethics has assessed the ethical reasoning of students in mostly the US. However, it is not clear that ethical judgments are primarily the result of ethical reasoning, or that conclusions based on US samples would be true of global populations. China now graduates and employs more STEM (science technology engineering and mathematics) majors than any other country in the world, but the moral cognition and ethics education of Chinese engineers remains understudied. To address this gap, a study (...) was conducted examining the relations between ethical reasoning, moral intuitions, and ethics education among engineering students in China. Engineering students at a university in Shanghai, China completed measures of ethical reasoning and moral intuitions before and after a course on global engineering ethics. Among engineering students in China, (1) ethical reasoning is positively related to an emphasis on care and fairness and (2) global ethics education results in significantly higher levels of ethical reasoning, as well as a greater concern with fairness and loyalty. Whereas the relation between ethical reasoning and moral intuitions among engineering students in China is similar to that of students in the US, ethics education affects engineering students in China differently from their US counterparts. (shrink)

For most of human history, human knowledge was considered to be something that was stored and captured by words. This began to change when Galileo said that the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics. Today, Dan Dennett and many others argue that all genuine scientific knowledge is in the form of mathematical algorithms. However, recently discovered neurocomputational algorithms can be used to justify the claim that there is genuine knowledge which is non-algorithmic. The fact that these (...) algorithms use prototype deployment, rather than mathematics or logic, gives us good reason to believe that there is a kind of knowledge that we derive from stories that is different from our knowledge of algorithms. Even though we would need algorithms to build a system that can make sense out of stories, we do not need to use algorithms when we ourselves embody a system that learns from stories. The success of the Galilean perspective in the physical sciences has often resulted in an attempt to mathematize the humanities. I am arguing that the dynamic neurocomputational perspective can give us a better understanding of how we get knowledge and wisdom from the stories told by disciplines such as Literature, History, Anthropology and Theology. This new neurological data can be used to justify the traditional pedagogy of these disciplines, which originally stressed the telling of stories rather than the learning of algorithms. (shrink)

This work explores the significance of two recurring themes in the thought of Gilles Deleuze: his critique of psychoanalysis and praise for Anglo-American literature. Tracing the overlooked influence of English writer D.H. Lawrence on Deleuze, Rockwell Clancy shows how these themes ultimately bear on two competing 'political anthropologies', conceptions of the political and the respective accounts of philosophical anthropology on which they are based. Contrary to the mainstream of both Deleuze studies and contemporary political thought, Clancy argues that the (...) major contemporary importance of Deleuze’s thought consists in the way he grounds his analyses of the political on accounts of philosophical anthropology, helping to make sense of the contemporary backlash against inclusive liberal values evident in forms of political conservatism and religious fundamentalism. (shrink)

Portrays the life and literary development of the Spanish writer and philosopher in relation to the history of European philosophy at the turn of the century.

This article describes the development and teaching of a course on global engineering ethics in Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China. It outlines course objectives, methods, and contents, and instructor experience and plans for future development. This is done with the goal of helping educators to plan standalone courses and/or integrated modules on global engineering and technology ethics, which address challenges arising from the increasingly cross-cultural and international environments of contemporary technology and engineering practice. These efforts are motivated by the global (...) environments of engineering, as well as recent research in empirical moral psychology. Although this course was developed and taught in China, as a course on global engineering ethics taught to students from throughout the world, its approach could be beneficial elsewhere. (shrink)

To develop more effective ethics education for cross-cultural and international engineering, a study was conducted to determine what Chinese engineering students have learned and think about ethics. Recent research shows traditional approaches to ethics education are potentially ineffective, but also points towards ways of improving ethical behaviors. China is the world’s most populous country, graduating and employing the highest number of STEM majors, although little empirical research exists about the ethical knowledge and perspectives of Chinese engineering students. When compared to (...) engineering students in the US, Chinese engineering students received less ethics education; the form of the education they did receive stressed virtue ethics or the development of moral character; conceive of ethics in contradistinction to the law, where ethics deals with matters of right and wrong not covered by legality. Based on these findings and research in moral psychology and behavioral ethics, recommendations are made for improving engineering ethics education both in China and abroad. (shrink)

Ethics is crucial to engineering, although disagreement exists concerning the form engineering ethics education should take. In part, this results from disagreements about the goal of this education, which inhibit the development of and progress in cohesive research agendas and practices. In this regard, engineering ethics faces challenges like other professional ethics. To address these issues, this paper argues that the ultimate goal of engineering ethics education should be more long-term ethical behaviors, but that engineering ethics must more fully engage (...) with the fields of empirical moral and cultural psychology to do so. It begins by considering reasons for adopting ethical behaviors as the ultimate goal of ethics education, and moves on to discuss why ethical behaviors have not been adopted as the goal of ethics education. The paper ends by considering responses to these problems, why ethical behaviors should still be adopted as the ultimate goal of ethics education. (shrink)

Engineering is more cross-cultural and international than ever before, presenting challenges and opportunities in the way engineering ethics is conceived and delivered. To assist in providing more effective ethics education to increasingly diverse groups, this paper shares three related projects implemented at the University of Michigan-Shanghai Jiao Tong University Joint Institute (China). These projects are united in their attempts to address challenges arising from the increasingly global nature of engineering. The first is a course on global engineering ethics, developed for (...) and attended by engineering students from diverse backgrounds. The second is a website hosting contents on global engineering ethics education and conducting research related to cross-cultural moral psychology. The third explores methods of assessing engineering ethics and moral development, using paradigms of ethical decision-making. Although these projects were developed in a Chinese-US collaboration with university students, these contexts could facilitate the adoption of similar programs elsewhere, with practicing engineers. (shrink)

Since cycling can contribute to sustainability, shared-bicycle schemes have been encouraged as a green technology. In Chinese cities, however, dockless app-based bicycle-sharing systems have become a blight, resulting in tremendous waste. Ironically, this stems from the success of DABS—their rapid development and adoption. As an “emergent” technology, DABS in China consist in the confluence of existing technologies and extra-technological factors, situations different from the sum of their parts, where negative consequences are more difficult to identify and address. Additionally, DABS in (...) China are a case of private, app-based technology providing a good traditionally regulated by municipal governments. For these reasons, it provides valuable lessons: The negative consequences associated with DABS in China result from a lack of policy formulation and implementation, failing to consider and address extra-technological dimensions. Private technology companies should not be left to ensure these goods, and municipalities must craft policies to ensure stakeholder interests. (shrink)

As is well known, ethics occupies a prominent role in Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy. However, considerable controversy exists surrounding the nature of this prominence. Two main lines of thought exist in the secondary scholarship, one that attempts to develop in Levinas’s philosophy something resembling a traditional theory of ethics and another that treats Levinas’s concern with ethics as substantially different from traditional ethical theories.1 In what follows I argue that the centrality of ethics to Levinas’s philosophy is for phenomenological purposes, describing (...) the nature of ethical relations and teasing out their implications, for the sake of criticizing and reformulating traditional understandings of. (shrink)

A review of Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Badiou and Deleuze Read Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 224 pp.

A Publisher correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40889-020-00118-8.

In this highly original work, Teed Rockwell rejects both dualism and the mind-brain identity theory. He proposes instead that mental phenomena emerge not merely from brain activity but from an interacting nexus of brain, body, and world. The mind can be seen not as an organ within the body, but as a "behavioral field" that fluctuates within this brain-body-world nexus. If we reject the dominant form of the mind-brain identity theory -- which Rockwell calls "Cartesian materialism" -- and (...) accept this new alternative, then many philosophical and scientific problems can be solved. Other philosophers have flirted with these ideas, including Dewey, Heidegger, Putnam, Millikan, and Dennett. But Rockwell goes further than these tentative speculations and offers a detailed alternative to the dominant philosophical view, applying pragmatist insights to contemporary scientific and philosophical problems. Rockwell shows that neuroscience no longer supports the mind-brain identity theory because the brain cannot be isolated from the rest of the nervous system; moreover, there is evidence that the mind is hormonal as well as neural. These data, and Rockwell's reanalysis of the concept of causality, show why the borders of mental embodiment cannot be neatly drawn at the skull, or even at the skin. Rockwell then demonstrates how his proposed view of the mind can resolve paradoxes engendered by the mind-brain identity theory in such fields as neuroscience, artificial intelligence, epistemology, and philosophy of language. Finally, he argues that understanding the mind as a "behavioral field" supports the new cognitive science paradigm of dynamic systems theory. (shrink)

In this highly original work, Teed Rockwell rejects both dualism and the mind-brain identity theory. He proposes instead that mental phenomena emerge not merely from brain activity but from an interacting nexus of brain, body, and world. The mind can be seen not as an organ within the body, but as a "behavioral field" that fluctuates within this brain-body-world nexus. If we reject the dominant form of the mind-brain identity theory -- which Rockwell calls "Cartesian materialism" -- and (...) accept this new alternative, then many philosophical and scientific problems can be solved. Other philosophers have flirted with these ideas, including Dewey, Heidegger, Putnam, Millikan, and Dennett. But Rockwell goes further than these tentative speculations and offers a detailed alternative to the dominant philosophical view, applying pragmatist insights to contemporary scientific and philosophical problems. Rockwell shows that neuroscience no longer supports the mind-brain identity theory because the brain cannot be isolated from the rest of the nervous system; moreover, there is evidence that the mind is hormonal as well as neural. These data, and Rockwell's reanalysis of the concept of causality, show why the borders of mental embodiment cannot be neatly drawn at the skull, or even at the skin. Rockwell then demonstrates how his proposed view of the mind can resolve paradoxes engendered by the mind-brain identity theory in such fields as neuroscience, artificial intelligence, epistemology, and philosophy of language. Finally, he argues that understanding the mind as a "behavioral field" supports the new cognitive science paradigm of dynamic systems theory. (shrink)

Part one. The Dunayevskaya-Marcuse correspondence, 1954-78: the early letters: debating Marxist dialectics and Hegel's absolute idea; Dunayevskaya's Marxism and freedom and beyond; on technology and work on the eve of Marcuse's One-dimensional man; the later correspondence: winding down during the period of the New Left -- Part two. The Dunayevskaya-Fromm correspondence, 1959-78: the early letters: on Fromm's Marx's concept of man and his socialist humanism symposium; dialogue on Marcuse, on existentialism, and on socialist humanism in Eastern Europe; on Hegel, Marxism, (...) and the Frankfurt School in the period of Dunayevskaya's philosophy and revolution; the final letters: on critical theory and on Rosa Luxemburg, gender, and revolution. (shrink)

Engineering is a social enterprise. A successful engineering career depends on how engineers manage their relationships with diverse stakeholders including managers, clients, contractors, and the p...

The hypothesis of extended cognition (HEC) has been criticized as committing what is called the coupling?constitution fallacy, but it is the critic's use of this concept which is fallacious. It is true that there is no reason to deny that the line between the self and the world should be drawn at the skull and/or the skin. But the data used to support HEC reveal that there was never a good enough reason to draw the line there in the first (...) place. The burden of proof has fallen on the mind?brain identity theory, now that our intuitions/prejudices no longer support it. One of those ?intuitions? is the Aristotelian assumption that the world can be neatly divided into objects that possess intrinsic causal powers, and the causal relations that connect those objects. In modern science, however, the concept of intrinsic causal powers is only a temporary stopgap that makes it possible to begin research in a particular area. It therefore seems best to assume that the line between mind and world is both pragmatic and dynamic. Consequently, the mind might best described as a fluctuating field, rather than an object or structure. (shrink)

The article argues that mainstream value-sensitive approaches to design have been based on narrow understandings of personhood and social dynamics, which are biased toward Western Educated Industrialized Rich and Democratic cultures and contradicted by empirical evidence. To respond to this weakness, the article suggests that design may benefit from focusing on user behaviours from the joint perspective of values and norms, especially across cultural contexts. As such, it proposes Norm Sensitive Design as a complement to value-sensitive approaches when designing and (...) implementing new technologies. Versus values, norms serve as more accurate predictors or descriptors of behaviours and can thus support value-sensitive approaches to realize the aspiration of informing user behaviour via design. The article makes two key contributions. On the theoretical side, it promotes the consideration of norms in design. On the practical side, it offers designers and instructors prompts for reflecting on design ethics from the perspective of norms. (shrink)

Paul Churchland's epistemology contains a tension between two positions, which I will call pragmatic pluralism and eliminative materialism. Pragmatic pluralism became predominant as his epistemology became more neurocomputationally inspired, which saved him from the skepticism implicit in certain passages of the theory of reduction he outlined in Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind. However, once he replaces eliminativism with a neurologically inspired pragmatic pluralism, Churchland cannot claim that folk psychology might be a false theory, in any significant sense; cannot (...) claim that the concepts of Folk psychology might be empty of extension and lack reference; cannot sustain Churchland's criticism of Dennett's "intentional stance"; cannot claim to be a form of scientific realism, in the sense of believing that what science describes is somehow realer that what other conceptual systems describe. (shrink)

Certain philosophers and scientists have noticed that there are data that do not seem to fit with the traditional view known as the Mind/Brain Identity theory. This has inspired a new theory about the mind known as the Hypothesis of Extended Cognition. Now there is a growing controversy over whether these data actually require extending the mind out beyond the brain. Such arguments, despite their empirical diversity, have an underlying form. They all are disputes over where to draw the line (...) between intrinsic and relational causal powers. The second-century Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna deals with similar issues when he argues for a middle way between the two positions that were known in his time by the terms eternalism and nihilism. Eternalism, like MBI, asserts that the mind is a permanent enduring substance. Nihilism argued that the mind had no intrinsic existence, and today some argue that HEC could lead us to a similar conclusion. Nagarjuna's argument for a middle way between these two extremes is similar to an argument that can be made for HEC. We can accept that neither the brain nor any other single physical item is identical to the mind without falling down the slippery slope that leads to "The mind does not really exist, and therefore we are one with everything." Nagarjuna was correct to say that the mind has conventional reality—that the mind exists even though there is no sharp border between the mind and the world. (shrink)

Both Dennett and his critics believe that the invalidity of the famed Stalinist-Orwellian distinction is a consequence of his multiple drafts model of consciousness . This is not so obvious, however, once we recognize that the question ‘how do you get experience out of meat?’ actually fragments into at least three different questions. How do we get: a unified sense of self, awareness and mental phenomena? In the latter chapters of Consciousness Explained, Dennett shows how MDM has a radical and (...) profound way of interrelating awareness and self . But the Stalinist-Orwellian distinction can be dissolved by analysing the nature of mental phenomena, without making any reference to awareness or self or the MDM. This is because The Stalinist-Orwellian distinction rests on much the same category mistake which Ryle pointed out in his Concept of Mind. Once we recognize that a theory of awareness is trying to do something different from a theory of mental phenomena, we can see why Dennett and his critics frequently talked past each other, and how we can resolve these controversies by incorporating something like Rosenthal's theory of higher order thoughts into the MDM. This would require, however, that Dennett abandon his principle of first person operationalism, and recognize that it is possible for us to be mistaken about our own internal states. (shrink)

The unity of mind and body need not imply accepting the unity of mind and brain, because the mind-brain identity is something that science has presupposed, not discovered. I cite evidence from modern neuroscience that cognitive activities are distributed throughout the human nervous system, which challenges the 'scientific' assumption (believed by Descartes, among others) that the brain is the seat of the soul, and the rest of the nerves are mere message cables to the brain. Dennett comes close to accepting (...) this point when he criticizes 'Cartesian materialism', and yet he still claims that Vie head is headquarters'. Accepting that the mind is the entire nervous system solves some philosophical problems, for Dennett and others. There is also some evidence that indicates that some cognitive activities may be hormonal rather than neural, which raises some challenging problems for the once obvious distinction between causing a mental state and embodying that state. (shrink)

This original cross-disciplinary work examines the crucial role of dialogue in philosophy from the oral dialogues of Socrates; through the written dialogues of Plato, Cicero, Lucian, Valla, Hume, and Heidegger; to the present ubiquitous form of dialogue on the Internet. Geoffrey Rockwell's main point is that in dialogue, be it oral, written, or electronic, there is a common mode of persuasion at work. The dialogue is an orchestrated event meant to be overheard. While the author is absent, the readers (...) of the dialogue are in a sense present as eavesdroppers on a conversation scripted to encourage them to judge between the characters and the philosophical positions they represent. Relying heavily on Italian Renaissance theories of dialogue, Rockwell builds on Sperone Speroni's comparison of dialogue to comedy in which there is a mixture of voices, each with its own form and content. He then looks to the essays of M. M. Bakhtin to propose a working definition of dialogue as a unity of diverse voices. Dialogue is many things, but it is principally about the culture of thoughtful conversation. It is a genre suited to presenting how people discuss ideas, how positions are related to character, and surveying positions that can be taken on a subject. In a world increasingly connected by the Internet, there is no more appropriate genre for study. (shrink)

At least one of my professors told me that in order to write a good philosophy paper, one should always try to defend as little territory as possible. The danger of this advice is that although it may make one's points defensible, it may also make them not worth defending. In order to avoid both of these extremes, I am going to defend a relatively modest claim, which appears to be necessary but not sufficient for another more ambitious claim, which (...) itself is also necessary for another more ambitious claim, and so on for several layers. I will start with the most ambitious claim, and then work my way down until I come to the claim I believe I have some chance of defending. I will, however, continue to make references to the other layers, to help us remember why the more modest claims are worth thinking about. (shrink)

It is remarkable how similar today's mind-body debates are to the philosophical critiques of biological science, such as Henri Bergson's Vitalism at the turn of the last century. Philosophers like Bergson became famous arguing that science could never account for life. One reason was that living creatures could not be decomposed into fundamental units, in spite of the empirical finding that all animate things consist of basic cells with remarkably general properties in a bewildering profusion of variation. Today we know (...) that each of those cells has nearly identical DNA-RNA mechanisms, and that, to give one example, humans have about 50% of DNA in common with such creatures as yeast and C. elegans, the tiny worms that is now almost completely defined in genotype and phenotype. The cell and its genetic machinery can plausibly be called the atom of life. So Bergson's anti-atomism was wrong in large part. Indeed, had we followed his advice about 1900, we would still be living in the first great industrial age. (shrink)

In the seventh paragraph of the post, you say "This question [which machine, if any or both, is conscious/] seems to be in principle unfalsifiable, and yet genuinely meaningful." (I'm assuming that you mean that any answer to it is unfalsifiable.) My neo-Carnapian intuitions diagnoses the problem right at this point. Forget about attributions of meaningless and all that stuff. Replace it in your statement with more pragmatically-oriented evaluative notions: theoretically fruitless, arbitray without even being helpful for any theoretical, experimental, (...) or practical purpose, and so on. Any answer to the question will be those. Thus the question is not worth pursuing, especially since the thought experiment is science fiction right now. A much more useful way to spend one's time is addressing frutiful questions, like the ones involved in constructing your postulated robots, or investigating neural mechanisms, and so on. So acknowledge the connection between unfalsifiability/verifiability/confirmability and theoretical and practical worthlessness (rather than "meaningless"). Then get on with the theoretically and empirically worthwhile questions. Many of the latter are quiter abstract and "philosophical," anyway (about the scope and limits of various methodologies, existing theories, and so on). Aren't those enough to occupy even the most abstract theorist's attention? Why puzzle about questions whose answers can't be rationally justified? (shrink)

1. Throughout the paper, and especially in the section called "LISP vs. DST", I worried that there was not enough focus on EXPLANATION. For the real question, it seems to me, is not whether some dynamical system can implement human cognition, but whether the dynamical description of the system is more explanatorily potent than a computational/representational one. Thus we know, for example, that a purely physical specification can fix a system capable of computing any LISP function. But from this it (...) doesn't follow that the physical description is the one we need to understand the power of the system considered as an information processing device. In the same way, I don't think your demonstration that bifurcating attractor sets can yield the same behavior as a LISP program goes any way towards showing that we should not PREFER the LISP description. To reduce symbolic stories to a subset of DST (as hinted in that section) requires MORE than showing this kind of equivalence: it requires showing that there is explanatory gain, or at the very least, no explanatory loss, at that level. I append an extract from a recent paper of mine that touches on these issues, in case it helps clarify what I am after here. (shrink)

Sellars and Dewey each isolated and critiqued different aspects of the atomistic epistemology of the logical positivists: Dewey labeled his target "Sensationalistic Empiricism", and Sellars labeled his "the Myth of the Given." The main theme of this paper will be the similarity and differences in their responses to this kind of philosophy, and how both responses can be clarified and strengthened by considering recent discoveries in Cognitive Neuroscience. What we have recently learned about neural architecture accounts for a distinction between (...) knowledge and experience that is a recurrent theme in both Sellars and Dewey. Dewey, however, made a sharper break from the positivists by seeing all experience as shaped by skills and abilities which were designed to acheive certain goals and were colored by emotions. The connectionist architecture used in Cognitive Neuroscience supports this view, as does the psychological research of J.J. Gibson. Once we consider the ways in which connectionist cognitive abilities differ from linguistic ones, Sellars' distinction between thoughts and sensations, and Dewey's distinction between knowledge and experience, can both be plausibly accounted for. (shrink)

I should say, before beginning, that I am hearing what you say about Rorty now from the perspective on his work I have (for the time being, at least) as a result of having heard a working paper he presented to the scholars’ workshop of which I was a member at The Getty this winter, and then participating with him in a 4-hour discussion (and following small dinner gathering). I have also recently read his curious rather autobiographical essay, "Trotsky and (...) Wild Orchids," and that too has had some effect. So, I think I am speaking about my sense of where Rorty is now with his thinking, rather than primarily about the Rorty who is contained in the works you are discussing. You might say that whether I am at all right or quite wrong, I am speaking about what I understand to be a person’s evolving thinking, and you are speaking about a body of work bearing a name, Rorty. These are never, of course, quite the same, but engagement of the two is always at least interesting (perhaps particularly so to those of us interested more in philosophizing than in Philosophy, if I may put it that way). (shrink)

Surprisingly, Dennett and Baars have no real quarrel with each other, despite the fact that Dennett wants to escape from the Theatre of Consciousness and Baars is happy to stay there. Both believe that consciousness has structures that can be analysed, and is not just ‘the mysterious glow that no one but me can see’ described by Chalmers and Searle. Both acknowledge that their theories of consciousness are only metaphors, and there is no conflict in saying that Consciousness is both (...) like a theatre and like a series of multiple drafts. And both Dennett and Baars would agree that Consciousness seems to be like a theatre. Their main disagreement is how deep the similarity goes, and whether the similarity is more misleading than useful. There are other scientific controversies that could probably be dissolved by such an ecumenical attitude: there is no paradox in saying that an electron is both like a wave and like a particle, or that thought is both like a language in the head and like a connectionist network. But a non-aggression pact of this sort does not absolve us from enumerating the ways in which each of these metaphors does and does not map onto its object. And as this enumeration continues, it is likely to make one of these metaphors seem more plausible than the other. (shrink)