The Strange Situation procedure was developed by Ainsworth two decades agoas a means of assessing the security of infant-parent attachment. Users of the procedureclaim that it provides a way of determining whether the infant has developed species-appropriate adaptive behavior as a result of rearing in an evolutionary appropriate context, characterized by a sensitively responsive parent. Only when the parent behaves in the sensitive, species-appropriate fashion is the baby said to behave in the adaptive or secure fashion. Furthermore, when (...) infants are observed repeatedly in the Strange Situation,the pattern of behavior is said to be highly similar, and this pattern is said to predict the infants' future behavior in a diverse array of contexts. After an exhaustive review of the literature, it is shown that these popular claims are empirically unsupported in their strong form, and that the interpretations in terms of biological adaptationare misguided. There is little reliable evidence about the specific dimensions of parental behavior that affect Strange Situation behavior, although there does appear to be some relationship between these constructs. Temporal stability in security of attachment ishigh only when there is stability in family and caretaking circumstances. Likewise, patterns of Strange Situation behavior only have substantial predictive validity in similarly stable families. Implications for future research and theorizing — particularly as they relate to the use of evolutionary biology in psychological theory — are discussed. (shrink)

The era of AI-based decision-making fast approaches, and anxiety is mounting about when, and why, we should keep “humans in the loop” (“HITL”). Thus far, commentary has focused primarily on two questions: whether, and when, keeping humans involved will improve the results of decision-making (making them safer or more accurate), and whether, and when, non-accuracy-related values—legitimacy, dignity, and so forth—are vindicated by the inclusion of humans in decision-making. Here, we take up a related but distinct question, which has eluded the (...) scholarship thus far: does it matter if humans appear to be in the loop of decision-making, independent from whether they actually are? In other words, what is stake in the disjunction between whether humans in fact have ultimate authority over decision-making versus whether humans merely seem, from the outside, to have such authority? Our argument proceeds in four parts. First, we build our formal model, enriching the HITL question to include not only whether humans are actually in the loop of decision-making, but also whether they appear to be so. Second, we describe situations in which the actuality and appearance of HITL align: those that seem to involve human judgment and actually do, and those that seem automated and actually are. Third, we explore instances of misalignment: situations in which systems that seem to involve human judgment actually do not, and situations in which systems that hold themselves out as automated actually rely on humans operating “behind the curtain.” Fourth, we examine the normative issues that result from HITL misalignment, arguing that it challenges individual decision-making about automated systems and complicates collective governance of automation. (shrink)

This book explores and explains the reasons why the idea of universal history, a form of teleological history which holds that all peoples are travelling along the same path and destined to end at the same point, persists in political thought. Prominent in Western political thought since the middle of the eighteenth century, the idea of universal history holds that all peoples can be situated in the narrative of history on a continuum between a start and an end point, between (...) the savage state of nature and civilized modernity. Despite various critiques, the underlying teleological principle still prevails in much contemporary thinking and policy planning, including post-conflict peace-building and development theory and practice. Anathema to contemporary ideals of pluralism and multiculturalism, universal history means that not everyone gets to write their own story, only a privileged few. For the rest, history and future are taken out of their hands, subsumed and assimilated into other people's narrative. (shrink)

In this paper, I will consider a unique case where changing one’s character is part of a process of moral betterment when facing oppression. By engaging with the Dutch-Jewish intellectual and Holocaust victim Etty Hillesum, I will highlight the situated dimension of moral betterment as a practice that is driven by the pressure of concurrent events. I will claim that moral betterment does not just come out of an internal will to change for the better. Instead, I will argue that (...) “bearing real suffering” (Hillesum 1996: 220) is what makes compassion a potential source of moral betterment. This is possible because in compassion, one experiences emotional friction between weakness and strength in facing the suffering caused by oppression. (shrink)

Position papers on artificial intelligence (AI) ethics are often framed as attempts to work out technical and regulatory strategies for attaining what is commonly called trustworthy AI. In such papers, the technical and regulatory strategies are frequently analyzed in detail, but the concept of trustworthy AI is not. As a result, it remains unclear. This paper lays out a variety of possible interpretations of the concept and concludes that none of them is appropriate. The central problem is that, by framing (...) the ethics of AI in terms of trustworthiness, we reinforce unjustified anthropocentric assumptions that stand in the way of clear analysis. Furthermore, even if we insist on a purely epistemic interpretation of the concept, according to which trustworthiness just means measurable reliability, it turns out that the analysis will, nevertheless, suffer from a subtle form of anthropocentrism. The paper goes on to develop the concept of strange error, which serves both to sharpen the initial diagnosis of the inadequacy of trustworthy AI and to articulate the novel epistemological situation created by the use of AI. The paper concludes with a discussion of how strange error puts pressure on standard practices of assessing moral culpability, particularly in the context of medicine. (shrink)

Over the past five centuries, those who translate the Greek New Testament for English readers have increasingly found it appropriate to do so without recourse to a human soul. This is not simply a case of linguistic slippage, but the consequence of sustained exploration of the social‐historical milieu within which the New Testament writers lived and wrote. This chapter explains three areas of inquiry. First, the significance of historical inquiry for situating the New Testament materials more securely within their first‐century (...) milieu as a prophylactic against colonizing New Testament perspectives, in this case, with foreign assumptions about theological anthropology. Second, the significance of sociocultural forms of inquiry, including medical anthropology and social psychology, for shaping our understanding of humanity in the New Testament world. Third, a rereading of New Testament texts that served previously as taken‐for‐granted illustrations of the New Testament's anthropological dualism. (shrink)

Our different senses put us in contact with the same world. In this paper, I use unusual objects and situations to bring out structural dissimilarities in the way our senses relate to the same world of material objects. In the first part, I briefly discuss the perceptual presence of spatial and material things. Using uncommon objects allows me to treat this issue without any need to invoke what it is like to have visual experiences. What comes to the fore in (...) these analyses, however, seems less obvious in experiences of the other senses. Therefore, in the second part, I propose a strategy, invoking unusual situations, to weed out the multisensory associations that enrich our normal relation to objects, in order to get a better grip on the perceptual correlate of the different senses. Although the actual correlates of the senses may not be material objects in each case, I explain why they are nonetheless occurrences in a spatial and material world. (shrink)

Baylis, Tomlinson, and Hoffmaster each raise a number of critiques in response to Bliton's manuscript. In response, we focus on three themes we believe run through each of their critiques. The first is the ambiguity between the role of ethics consultation within an institution and the role of the actual ethics consultant in a particular situation, as well as the resulting confusion when these roles are conflated. We explore this theme by revisiting the question of What's going on? in (...) clinical ethics consultations. Moving from those issues associated with the role of the ethics consultant to those associated with the role of inquiry within the practice of ethics consultation, we then take up the serious challenge that Bliton seems shackled by the assumptions and institutional dispositions embedded in the medical culture in which he is working. This reveals the second theme, namely that there is a risk of co-optation when acting in a role that derives its legitimacy from institutional sources. Finally, we focus on an even more problematic implication stemming from the first two, namely that the focus on institutional power as the crucial factor for determining ethical significance has the effect of distorting, and perhaps obscuring, other forms of relational, interpersonal, and moral meaning. (shrink)

The multiple-choice video game Life is Strange was described by its French developers as a metaphor for the inner conflicts experienced by a teenager in trying to become an adult. In psychological work with adolescents, there is a stark similarity between what they experience and some concepts of existentialist philosophy. Sartre’s script for the movie Les Jeux Sont Faits (literally “games are made”) uses the same narrative strategy as Life is Strange—the capacity for the main characters to travel (...) back in time to change their own existence—in order to stimulate philosophical, ethical, and political thinking and also to effectively simulate existential “limit situations.” This article is a dialogue between Sartre’s views and Life is Strange in order to examine to what extent questions such as what is freedom? what is choice? what is autonomy and responsibility? can be interpreted anew in hybrid digital–human—“anthrobotic”—environments. (shrink)

The multiple-choice video game Life is Strange was described by its French developers as a metaphor for the inner conflicts experienced by a teenager in trying to become an adult. In psychological work with adolescents, there is a stark similarity between what they experience and some concepts of existentialist philosophy. Sartre’s script for the movie Les Jeux Sont Faits (literally ‘‘games are made’’) uses the same narrative strategy as Life is Strange—the capacity for the main characters to travel (...) back in time to change their own existence—in order to stimulate philosophical, ethical, and political thinking and also to effectively simulate existential ‘‘limit situations.’’ This article is a dialogue between Sartre’s views and Life is Strange in order to examine to what extent questions such as what is freedom? what is choice? what is autonomy and responsibility? can be interpreted anew in hybrid digital–human—‘‘anthrobotic’’—environments. (shrink)

Hauerwas's refusal to translate the argument displayed in "With the Grain of the Universe" (his recent Gifford Lectures) into language that "anyone" can understand is itself part of the argument. Consequently, readers will not understand what Hauerwas is up to until they have attained fluency in the peculiar language that has epitomized three decades of Hauerwas's scholarship. Such fluency is not easily gained. Nevertheless, in this review essay, I situate Hauerwas's baffling language against the backdrop of his corpus to show (...) at least this much: "With the Grain of the Universe" transforms natural theology into "witness." In the end, my essay may demonstrate what many have feared, that Hauerwas is, in fact, a Christian apologist-though of a very ancient sort. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 30.4 (2000) 15-37 [Access article in PDF] Kant's Strange LightRomanticism, Periodicity, and the Catachresis of Genius Orrin N. C. Wang We might say that in deconstruction history is always posed as a question, at once urgent, ubiquitous, and insoluble, whereas ideological demystification conceives of its relation to history as an answer, a solution, to its critical hermeneutic. Certainly, this critical truism has special force in Romantic studies, (...) a field very much shaped by the complex relation between deconstruction and ideological critique over the last twenty-five years. But it could just as well be said that the full implications of this relation are especially clarified by the field of Romantic studies, not least because its object of study replays the tensions between these two modes of inquiry. Studying Romanticism means knowing it as a historical period but also knowing it as a figure that stands for something else: an aesthetic practice, a form of consciousness, a political aspiration, an ideology, the possibility of historicity itself. That as a figure Romanticism can be either transhistorical or tied to its historical identity makes its situation all the more complicated and compelling. Romanticism especially dramatizes the interlocking relation between period identity and trope, and the investment of literary studies in that dynamic. Romanticism is the period metaphor that both stabilizes and disrupts the very concept of period metaphors.1 The deconstruction and demystification of Romanticism is very much about the deconstruction and demystification of history, its existence as either question or calculation, trope or immanent being.But even as Romanticism asserts its special relation to history it must also confront an opposite trajectory, how its meaning is best understood through a constellation of other, larger historical identities, such as the Enlightenment and modernity itself. At present the potential disciplinary reorganization of Romanticism into the long eighteenth century is the most vivid academic expression of the question, where does the historical specificity of Romanticism reside, within itself or something larger, or both?Sorting this issue out is certainly a historical proposition, but as Romanticism's special relation to history reminds us, it is also, in Paul de Man's sense, rhetorical. Which is to say, Romanticism's relation to history is, paradoxically, not special-or, more precisely, it is a trope for something pervasive among all the period fields of literary studies, insofar as they remain particular and distinct from one another. This includes those historical entities that might subsume or entangle with Romanticism itself, that would enact historicity by absorbing a field so intent on both the enabling and worrying of historical thought. Approached tropologically, the relation of Romanticism to these larger historical periods is not simply about events and formations that constitute [End Page 15] the boundaries of historical identities. It is also about best identifying and clarifying the workings of figure that create the intelligence of such periodicity.Such labor, what de Man designated innocently enough by the term "reading," calls for its own crossing of a particular set of boundaries. A philosophical text, generated by the entanglement between Romanticism and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, might contain sections exemplary in their recording of the interstice between trope and historical periodization. Immanuel Kant's short meditation on genius in the third Critique is, like the rest of his book, about the limits and possibilities of the judging subject; his words on genius are also specifically about the artistically creative subject. In resolving the contradictions between aesthetic judgment and creation, Kant transforms the solar light of human genius into the historical genius of the Enlightenment, which is very much the linguistic genius of Romanticism. This all occurs in a register not of consciousness or of historical truth, but of something else before either's constative realization.Kant's text is especially telling in its reflexive expression of this situation, so much so that it helps illuminate the sharp distinction between deconstruction and ideological demystification. For if deconstruction always poses history as the pressure of an insoluble, omnipresent question, it does so through figure, before truth. In contrast, ideological demystification, with... (shrink)

This paper examines Plato’s Sophist with particular attention to the cast of characters and the most curious and complicated dramatic situation in which Plato places this dialogue: the dramatic proximity of surrounding dialogues and the impending trial, conviction, and death of Socrates. I use these considerations as a propaedeutic to the raising of questions about how these features of the dialogue might affect our interpretation of the actual positions espoused in the Sophist. One clear effect of these considerations will (...) be to destabilize the commonly held view that in this dialogue Plato is “replacing” Socrates and Socratic aporia and questioning with the more didactic, formalistic, and doctrinal conception of philosophy espoused by the Eleatic Stranger. (shrink)

Alfred Schutz identified two different approaches to the problem of intersubjectivity. The first is the transcendental, which maintains the primacy of subjectivity, and identifies the problem of the other as a transcendental problem. For example, in Husserl’s phenomenological idealism, all meaning is relative to a transcendental constituting subject. Hence the “problem of intersubjectivity” is to show how the other comes to be constituted, comes to be meant as a sense. The difficulty with such an approach is that if the other (...) is a meaning relative to and analogous to the constituting subject, the transcendence and irreducibility of the other to consciousness seem to be undermined. Transcendental idealism never reaches the “other” because the other is precisely what I do not constitute, but can only encounter. The recognition of the inadequacy of the transcendental approach leads to a second, namely, the other is encountered on the basis and background of the natural attitude and/or life-world. When the transcendental approach is abandoned, the “problem of the other” turns into a series of descriptions of either encounters or social situations. Ontology is replaced by critical theory of society. In either case, an ontology of intersubjectivity seems to be excluded. (shrink)

Researching two different work settings, police work and hospice care, the authors experienced a strange sense of discomfort in their bodies during their fieldwork when investigating professional training and work situations, especially in encounters with citizens and patients. In some of those situations, the authors withdrew physically or mentally from the situation without wanting to do so, feeling emotionally affected by the uncertainty of the situations, not fully grasping the meaning of what was going on. In a (...) class='Hi'>strange way they felt awkwardly detached from their research activities and their bodily involvement in their fieldwork. In this article, the authors seek to explore the meaning of awkwardness embedded in some kinds of ethical dilemma. Through a phenomenological analysis based on the concept of intentionality of the body and a model of inner dilemmas, they reach a renewed understanding on the phenomenon of awkwardness as a natural way for researchers to respond to challenging fieldwork situations. Finally, they propose and unfold mutual interviewing and cooperative analysis as methods of investigating researcher's subjectivity in facing such situations. (shrink)

L’observation de la littérature théologique de notre époque permet de constater une floraison assez dense de titres sur saint Thomas. La chose est d’autant plus étonnante qu’aux lendemains immédiats de Vatican II, Karl Rahner s’inquiétait de « l’étrange silence » des théologiens au sujet du Maître d’Aquin. Comme il se doit dans un article de bilan, J.-P. Torrell commence par dresser un tableau des éditions, biographies et traductions dont S. Thomas a bénéficié depuis 1974, année de célébration du septième centenaire (...) de sa mort. Après quoi, dans une seconde partie, il donne les « Orientations » dans lesquelles s’engagent aujourd’hui les études thomistes, insistant davantage sur la production théologique plutôt que sur la production philosophique, étant donné l’abondance et la complexité de cette dernière, tenant compte pour cela des productions américaines et allemandes autant que des productions francophones.A look at present day theological literature shows a fairly dense flowering of works on Saint Thomas. This is all the more astonishing as, just after Vatican II, Karl Rahner was uneasy about “the strange silence” of theologians concerning Master Aquinas. As expected in an overview, J.-P. Torrell begins by giving a list of publications, biographies, and translations on St. Thomas since 1974, the year of the celebration of the seventh centenary of his death. In the second part, he presents the “Orientations” of Thomistic studies today, insisting more on the theological production rather than the philosophical. Given the abundance and complexity of the latter, he takes into account American and German works, as well as French. (shrink)

In recent years, the claim of the unrepresentability of the Shoah has stirred vivid debates, especially following the strong positions taken by the French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann and author of Shoah (1986). This claim of unrepresentability, it can be shown, draws part of its attraction from the fact that it oscillates undecidedly between a claim of logical impossibility (“the Shoah can’t be represented”) and a normative demand (“the Shoah shouldn’t be represented”). This essay analyzes the argumentative structure of the advocates (...) of the unrepresentability and shows why the often made connection to Kant is flawed. Although his Critique of the Power of Judgment affirms indeed that the prohibition of representation is the “perhaps most sublime passage in the Jewish Law”, turning the prohibition of representation into a supposedly Kantian claim does not hold grounds. The essay reconstructs the political framework of the debate, situates the Kantian passage in its precise philosophical context and then successively assesses the main arguments put forward by Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière and Georges Didi-Huberman in their critique of Lanzmann’s categorical imperative. While showing why the rhetoric of the “unrepresentable” bear troubling structural analogies to what they want to fight (i.e. the politics of erasure, which always also include the erasure of the traces of erasure), a certain notion of the “unrepresentable” is rescued nevertheless at the end of the essay. Representation, so it is argued by returning to a Kantian distinction, is not a matter of Kanon, but a matter of Organon, which then puts the debate about the Sublime (which took place between Lyotard and Rancière in the 90’s) into a new perspective. (shrink)

This article—mainly referring to the situation in Germany—consists of three parts. In a first section the current presence of neurosciences in the public discourse will be described in order to illuminate the background which is relevant for contemporary educational thinking. The prefix ‘neuro-’ is ubiquitous today and therefore concepts like ‘neuropedagogy’ or ‘neurodidactics’ seem to be in the mainstream of modern thinking. In the second part of the article the perspective changes from the public discourse to the disciplinary discourse; (...) a brief excursus into developmental psychiatry, neuropsychology and modern psychoanalysis will be made in order to demonstrate how the results of neuroscientific research are integrated in their theoretical frameworks. These three disciplines have no difficulty in integrating neuroscientific findings because each of them possesses a systematic core composed of ‘native concepts’. In contrast to them, educational theory has much more difficulty with such integration, as will be shown in the third part of the essay. On the one hand, neuroscientific thinking seems to be able to dominate education rather easily and without great resistance, especially in the fields of early childhood education, instruction and learning—mainly by simplifying educational processes and by reducing the complexity of the educational task to a mere ‘relationship problem’. On the other hand, this attraction of neuroscience in education might be understood as the reflection of a theoretical deficit in educational theory itself, with the significance of affect and emotion not receiving proper attention. (shrink)

In an article recently published in this journal, I raised a puzzle about the control of genetic information, suggesting a situation in which it might turn out that we have a duty to remain in ignorance about at least some aspects of our own genome. In this article, I propose a way that would make sense of how the puzzle arises, and offer a way to resolve it and similar puzzles in future: in essence, we would consider genetic information (...) to be something the distribution of which may be more or less just. We would not know in advance what a just distribution would be, though, and in some cases there might still be a justice-based reason to deny a person genetic information about himself. However, others might also have justice-based claims to be able to access that information. This suggests that there is a possible world in which one person is entitled to at least some genetic information about another, while that other person—to whom the information refers—is not, and that this world would be just. (shrink)

This paper examines the political and ethical problems which arise in the course of undertaking participatory research in developing countries. It argues that, rather than supplanting relationships of power within the knowledge creating process, most participatory research actually strengthens them. Instead a more complete form of dialogic research is required, which will involve struggles within our academies as well as in those other organisations in which our research is situated.

This paper examines the political and ethical problems which arise in the course of undertaking participatory research in developing countries. It argues that, rather than supplanting relationships of power within the knowledge creating process, most participatory research actually strengthens them. Instead a more complete form of dialogic research is required, which will involve struggles within our academies as well as in those other organisations in which our research is situated.

Stoicism is now widely recognised as one of the most important philosophical schools of ancient Greece and Rome. But how did it influence Western thought after Greek and Roman antiquity? The question is a difficult one to answer because the most important Stoic texts have been lost since the end of the classical period, though not before early Christian thinkers had borrowed their ideas and applied them to discussions ranging from dialectic to moral theology. Later philosophers became familiar with Stoic (...) teachings only indirectly, often without knowing that an idea came from the Stoics. The contributors recruited for this volume, first published in 2004, include some of the leading international scholars of Stoicism as well as experts in later periods of philosophy. They trace the impact of Stoicism and Stoic ideas from late antiquity through the medieval and modern periods. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that there are significant ethical problems with nonmedical sex selection, and that prohibitive legislation is justified. The central argument put forward is that nonmedical sex selection is a sexist practice which promotes socially restrictive conceptions of sex, gender and family. Several steps are taken to justify this position: background information on technology and legislation is provided, the neoliberal position that is supportive of nonmedical sex selection is described, and preliminary reasons for rejecting (...) this approach are given. A detailed description of how a harm/benefit based analysis contributes to the argument against nonmedical sex selection, and how it successfully counters most criticism, is provided. The paper concludes by suggesting that virtue ethics further strengthens the moral argument against nonmedical sex selection. (shrink)