As the coronavirus pandemic continues apace in the United States, the dizzying amount of data being generated, analyzed and consumed about the virus has led to calls to proclaim this the first ‘data-driven pandemic’. But at the same time, it seems that this plethora of data has not meant a better grasp on the reality of the pandemic and its effects. Even as we have the potential to digitally track and trace nearly every single individual who has contracted the virus, (...) we have no idea exactly how many people have had the virus, been hospitalized, or died because of it, largely due to a confluence of factors, particularly active obfuscation and mismanagement by public authorities and misinformation spread through social media and right-wing media channels. But beyond these dynamics, there also lies the less nefarious ways that the everyday, subjective practices of data collection, analysis and visualization have the potential to themselves produce these very same dynamics where data is at once valorized and ignored, preeminent and completely useless. That is, the pandemic has revealed only the general inadequacy of our data infrastructures and assemblages to solving pressing social issues, but also the more general shift towards a ‘post-truth’ disposition in contemporary social life. But, as this paper argues, it would be a mistake to see the centrality of data as being somehow the opposite from the larger post-truth apparatus, as the two are instead fundamentally intertwined and co-produced. (shrink)

Neil Sinhababu :89–98, 2017) has recently argued against the fine-tuning argument for God. They claim that the question of the universe’s fine-tuning ought not be ‘why is the universe so hospitable to life?’ but rather ‘why is the universe so hospitable to morally valuable minds?’ and that, moreover, the universe isn’t so hospitable. For it is metaphysically possible that psychophysical laws be substantially more permissive than they in fact are, allowing for the realisation of morally valuable consciousness by exceptionally simple (...) physical states and systems, rather than the complex states of brains. I reply that Sinhababu’s argument rests upon unsupported claims and that we have reason to doubt that an omnibenevolent God would make the psychophysical laws more permissive than they in fact are. (shrink)

Patients with end-stage renal disease experience significant mortality and morbidity, including cognitive decline. Advance care planning has been emphasized as a responsibility and priority of physicians caring for patients with chronic kidney disease in order to align with patient values before decision-making capacity is lost and to avoid suffering. This emphasis has proven ineffective, as illustrated in the case of a patient treated in our hospital. Is this ineffectiveness a consequence of failure in the courtroom or the clinic? Through (...) our own experience we affirm what has been written before: that legal precedent favors intensive treatment in virtually all cases without ‘clear and convincing evidence’ of a patient’s previously declared wishes to the contrary. Equally clear is that more than 20 years of support in the clinical literature suggesting advance care planning early in the course of disease can address challenges in the legal system for those lacking capacity. However, many physicians fail t... (shrink)

This article examines the current use of Jesus language in a convenience sample of twenty-five mission statements from Roman Catholic hospitals and health care systems in the United States. Only twelve statements specifically use the words “Jesus” or “Christ” in their mission statements. The author advocates the use of explicit Jesus language and modeling. While the witness of Jesus in the Gospel healing narratives is not the only corrective to current abuses in the health care delivery system, it is foundational (...) to the integrity of Roman Catholic health care identity and mission. An analysis of Gospel healing narratives is used to illustrate the prophetic dimension of Jesus' wisdom, word, and witness. (shrink)

AbstractMichel Foucault is well known as a theorist of power who provided forceful critiques of institutions of confinement such as the psychiatric asylum and the prison. Although the invention of factory farms and industrial slaughterhouses, like prisons and psychiatric hospitals, can be considered emblematic moments in a history of modernity, and although the modern farm is an institution of confinement comparable to the prison, Foucault never addressed these institutions, the politics of animal agriculture, or power relationships between humans and other (...) animals more generally. The few times that Foucault discussed animality or human–animal relations, animals and animality remained metaphors for humans and human experiences. Despite Foucault's failure to analyze human–nonhuman animal relations, a significant body of Critical Animal Studies literature has mobilized Foucault's work over the last decade. In particular, a number of scholars have taken up Foucault's writings to consider how relations between humans and nonhuman animals in agriculture might be conceptualized as instances of sovereign power, biopower, disciplinary power, and pastoral power, as well as why we may not think that these are power relations at all. This essay provides an overview of Foucault's accounts of power and of the Foucauldian scholarship that applies these accounts to human–nonhuman animal relations in animal agriculture. (shrink)

Restrictive visitation policies produce inequities in healthcare that have meaningful consequences for patients’ health and well-being. There is a surplus of existing literature exploring the consequences of reduced visitation in the setting of pediatric patients lacking decision-making capacity, but relatively little scholarship addressing visitation restriction for less vulnerable adults possessing capacity. Here, we present the case of a patient who suffered serious complications of childbirth, during the delivery of her healthy newborn, leading to prolonged hospitalization. During her treatment course, she (...) was subsequently denied visitation with her newborn, who had been discharged from the hospital, and this had detrimental effects on her recovery. Hospital policies restricting visitation during the COVID-19 pandemic were intended to reduce the risk of disease exposure for both patients and staff, despite conflicting evidence demonstrating this benefit. In contrast, they often have negative effects on patient stress, mood, and physical recovery. The sequelae of this US-based case study argue the need for more holistic hospital visitation policies, placing a specific lens on adult patients receiving a visitation from their newborn children. (shrink)

Aims: To assess patient receipt of written information. To ensure patients understand the written information about a resuscitation policy and to determine whether they disapproved of or had concerns about the policy. Methods: All admissions to four wards of the hospital were approached for an interview. A set questionnaire was asked by one of 2 interviewers. Results: 72% of 572 admissions were interviewed. Refusal accounted for only 2 of the people not interviewed. 11% were unable to advocate for themselves (...) by reason of mental incompetence, inability to communicate or impairment secondary to their illness. Of the 401 interviewed only 49% recalled receiving the patient information booklet. Few patients (17%) recalled reading the information in the patient information booklet. They were all then given the paragraph about the hospital’s resuscitation policy. 352 were asked their understanding and only 61% demonstrated that they understood the paragraph. 91% of all 401 patients approved of the hospital having the option of DNR orders. 31% of people however had concerns related to DNR orders. These are discussed. Conclusions: Many acutely unwell patients are unable to advocate for themselves. Written information is a poor method of communicating with patients. There was limited receipt of the information and many misunderstood the paragraph about the hospitals resuscitation policy. There was a wide range of patient thoughts and concerns expressed. (shrink)

Many health care organizations made public commitments to become antiracist in the wake of George Floyd's murder. These actions raise questions about the appropriateness of health care's engagement in racial justice and social justice movements generally. We argue that health care organizations can be usefully thought of as having two roles: a functional role to care for the sick and a meta‐role as an organizational citizen. Fulfilling the role of citizen may require participating in the pursuit of social justice, including (...) efforts to achieve racial equity. The demands of these two roles will need to be balanced, but the role of organizational citizen has been largely ignored and merits serious attention. (shrink)

Over the last two decades the practice of applied philosophy has undergone re­surgence. It is now common for philosophers to sit on ethics committees in hospitals, or to provide ethical advice to businesses, and many universities and colleges now offer courses in practical philosophy. Despite this, practical philosophy is subject to increasing criticism, with persons charging that (1) it is philosophically shallow, and (2) it has little to offer persons grappling with concrete ethical problems, either because (a) its techniques or (...) too removed from such problems, or (b) because ethical theory is too abstract. In this paper I develop responses to these criticisms, and offer suggestions as to how practical philosophy should be developed. (shrink)

Policies promoted and adopted for allocating ventilators during the COVID-19 pandemic have often prioritised healthcare workers or other essential workers. While the need for such policies has so far been largely averted, renewed stress on health systems from continuing surges, as well as the experience of allocating another scarce resource—vaccination—counsel revisiting the justifications for such prioritisation. Prioritising healthcare workers may have intuitive appeal, but the ethical justifications for doing so and the potential harms that could follow require careful analysis. Ethical (...) justifications commonly offered for healthcare worker prioritisation for ventilators rest on two social value criteria: instrumental value, also known as the ‘multiplier effect’, which may preserve the ability of healthcare workers to help others, and reciprocity, which rewards past usefulness or sacrifice. We argue that these justifications are insufficient to over-ride the common moral commitment to value each person’s life equally. Institutional policies prioritising healthcare workers over other patients also violate other ethical norms of the healthcare professions, including the commitment to put patients first. Furthermore, policy decisions to prioritise healthcare workers for ventilators could engender or deepen existing distrust of the clinicians, hospitals and health systems where those policies exist, even if they are never invoked. (shrink)

The papers in this special thematic issue of HEC Forum critically and carefully explore key issues at the intersection of patient privacy and commodification. For example, should hospitals be required to secure a person’s consent to any possible uses to which his discarded body parts might be put after his treatment or should it only be concerned with securing his informed consent to his treatment? Should a hospital be required to raise the possibility of the commodification of such body (...) parts, or should it only be required to address this issue if the patient asks about it? Should persons be paid to engage in medical research, or should they only be compensated for their time, on the grounds, perhaps, that such payment would be coercive or exploitative, for it might move some persons to agree to participate in research who otherwise would not have done? This number of HEC Forum illustrates the widespread implications of these issues upon which healthcare ethics committees are called to deliberate. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Response to Chloë TaylorLadelle McWhorterAs Chloë Taylor notes, Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America puts forth a genealogy of race and racism. It also contains fragments of genealogies of intelligence, disability, family values, and a few other concepts and practices that were hugely influential in the twentieth century and have been since. In addition, it presents a certain conception and experience of abnormality and of sexuality in relation (...) to all of the above. But the book does not present a theory of racism or of sexual oppression or of both together. There are important differences between theorizing and the practice of genealogy, at least in the way that I understand the two, and that difference makes a difference in the book’s structure and aims.When I began my graduate education in the early 1980s, feminists were producing compelling critiques of regimes of knowledge and techniques of knowledge production that claimed legitimacy through detachment, dispassionate observation, and objectivity.1 Theory was a not infrequent target of those feminist critiques. Theory (from the Greek theoria, as Heidegger reminds us) is about seeing (not, for example, touching or feeling), and theorizing is typically about representing with accuracy and thoroughness what non-theorists see only incompletely, if at all. Theory, therefore, seeks to correct distortions as it captures reality under concepts.2 Theory also aims to be unitary and exclusive. And theories compete with each other; no matter how many theories there are, only one can possibly be true.By contrast, genealogy is not detached or dispassionate; on the contrary, one takes up genealogy precisely because one feels a need to change something—including something in or about oneself. One takes up genealogy, Michel Foucault maintains, in order to “free thought from what it silently [End Page 216] thinks,” to “enable it to think differently,”3 to get free of oneself as one has been constituted in a certain milieu. Genealogy is concerned with accuracy of representation, therefore, to the extent that detail, facts, and logical plausibility make a narrative more compelling, more moving, more potent—to that extent, and no further; it does not employ scholarly observation and insight to get at “the truth.” A good genealogy constructs a new way of seeing and experiencing that may well disturb a given regime of truth and may make possible the generation of new truths or perhaps new habits of thought and action, but it does not purport to be final or exclusive. It problematizes habitual practices and ways of seeing and, thus, it opens toward indefinite possibilities. My book is genealogical; it promotes no theories. I emphasize this, because I want to insist on the book’s hospitability to the extension of its analyses beyond its covers and to its own (self-)overcoming.Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America presents some genealogies, then, but it is not only a collection of genealogies. It is explicitly framed by a set of contemporary political and ethical contingencies, some of which it identifies as problems, and it considers what to do in response to them. Its genealogies are undertaken and constructed in the context of grappling with those questions, a featured one of which is this: Can we find enough common ground to make common cause between antiracism and anti-heterosexism activists?In the course of tracing a genealogy of twentieth-century racism, I found quite a bit of common ground between racial minorities and nonhetero-sexual people in the United States. So, in addition to my genealogies, I offered some (admittedly perhaps heavy-handed) advice to antiracism and anti-heterosexism activists, namely: Not only is there ground for common cause, but you ignore this ground at your peril, because there is not a lot of other ground for you to stand on; if you do not acknowledge this common history and the strong connections among the forces that oppress your group and those that oppress these other groups, you will have to deny much of your own history and obscure many of the sources of your own oppression. I did not issue the same advice to disability activists or environmentalists, although they might do well to consider it too. I singled... (shrink)

This classic, provocative introduction to classical metaphysical questions focuses on appreciating the problems, rather than attempting to proffer answers.

Matthew Taylor | : Contrary to critics and advocates of contractarianism alike, I argue that mutual advantage contractarianism entails rights and protections for animals. In section one I outline the criteria that must be met in order for an individual to qualify for moral rights on the contractarian view. I then introduce an alternative form of ‘rights,’ which I call ‘protectorate status,’ from which an individual can receive protections indirectly. In section two I suggest guidelines for assigning animal rights (...) based on two ways of categorizing animals. On the basis of the categorization according to benefit derived, I argue that animals used for companionship, security, hunting assistance, transportation, entertainment, medical service, nourishment, or clothing will tend to qualify for basic rights against starvation, predation, and disease. On the basis of the categorization according to species, I argue that, on top of the basic rights above, dogs tend to qualify for rights against abuse, and against frivolous medical experimentation, as well as further negotiated rights. Cows have the basic rights against starvation, predation, and disease, but squirrels and bears have no rights. In section three I argue that some animals qualify for protectorate status, which would establish various protections for different animals, but would also generally prohibit cruelty towards animals. | : Contrairement à certains critiques ou défenseurs du contractualisme, j’affirme que le contractualisme à avantages réciproques peut assurer droits et protections aux animaux. Dans la première section, je décris les critères que, d’un point de vue contractualiste, un individu doit satisfaire pour pouvoir bénéficier de droits moraux. J’introduis ensuite une autre forme de « droits », que j’appelle « protectorat », qui permet à un individu de bénéficier indirectement de certaines protections. Dans la deuxième section, je propose des directives pour accorder des droits aux animaux en fonction d’un double mode de catégorisation. La première catégorisation serait établie d’après les avantages procurés par l’animal; ainsi les animaux de compagnie, de garde, de chasse, de transport, de divertissement, ou assurant des services de santé, d’alimentation ou d’habillement devraient se voir accorder des droits fondamentaux contre la famine, la prédation et la maladie. Selon la seconde catégorisation, établie d’après l’espèce, les chiens devraient bénéficier de droits les protégeant des mauvais traitements et des expérimentations médicales inutiles, ainsi que d’autres droits négociés. Les vaches jouissent ainsi des droits fondamentaux qui les protègent de la famine, de la prédation et de la maladie, mais les écureuils et les ours n’ont pas de droits. Dans la troisième section, j’explique que certains animaux devraient bénéficier d’un statut de protectorat, qui accorderait des protections diverses à différents animaux, mais qui défendrait de façon générale toute cruauté envers les animaux. (shrink)

The main object of this paper is to provide the logical machinery needed for a viable basis for talking of the ‘consequences’, the ‘content’, or of ‘equivalences’ between inconsistent sets of premisses.With reference to its maximal consistent subsets (m.c.s.), two kinds of ‘consequences’ of a propositional set S are defined. A proposition P is a weak consequence (W-consequence) of S if it is a logical consequence of at least one m.c.s. of S, and P is an inevitable consequence (I-consequence) of (...) S if it is a logical consequence of all the m.c.s. of S. The set of W-consequences of a set S it determines (up to logical equivalence) its m.c.s. (This enables us to define a normal form for every set such that any two sets having the same W-consequences have the same normal form.) The W-consequences and I-consequences will not do to define the ‘content’ of a set S. The first is too broad, may include propositions mutually inconsistent, the second is too narrow. A via media between these concepts is accordingly defined: P is a P-consequence of S, where P is some preference criterion yielding some of the m.c.s. of S as preferred to others, and P is a consequence of all of the P-preferred m.c.s. of S. The bulk of the paper is devoted to discussion of various preference criteria, and also surveys the application of this machinery in diverse contexts - for example, in connection with the processing of mutually inconsistent reports. (shrink)

Socrates provides an argument at the end of the Apology that he believes gives hope that death is a blessing. This argument, grounded on the claim that death is one of two things, has been the subject of much derision and some recent defense. In this essay, I build on the work of other sympathetic commentators to show that Socrates' argument, when taken in context, not only makes good sense, but unifies Socrates' speech into a cohesive exhortation toward virtue.

'Most of us are still groping for answers about what makes life worth living, or what confers meaning on individual lives', writes Charles Taylor in Sources of the Self. 'This is an essentially modern predicament.' Charles Taylor's latest book sets out to define the modern identity by tracing its genesis, analysing the writings of such thinkers as Augustine, Descartes, Montaigne, Luther, and many others. This then serves as a starting point for a renewed understanding of modernity. Taylor (...) argues that modern subjectivity has its roots in ideas of human good, and is in fact the result of our long efforts to define and attain the good. The modern turn inwards is far from being a disastrous rejection of rationality, as its critics contend, but has at its heart what Taylor calls the affirmation of ordinary life. He concludes that the modern identity, and its attendant rejection of an objective order of reason, is far richer in moral sources that its detractors allow. Sources of the Self provides a decisive defence of the modern order and a sharp rebuff to its critics. (shrink)

Contemporary conversations about religion and culture are framed by two reductive definitions of secularity. In one, multiple faiths and nonfaiths coexist free from a dominant belief in God. In the other, we deny the sacred altogether and exclude religion from rational thought and behavior. But is there a third way for those who wish to rediscover the sacred in a skeptical society? What kind of faith, if any, can be proclaimed after the ravages of the Holocaust and the many religion-based (...) terrors since? Richard Kearney explores these questions with a host of philosophers known for their inclusive, forward-thinking work on the intersection of secularism, politics, and religion. An interreligious dialogue that refuses to paper over religious difference, these conversations locate the sacred within secular society and affirm a positive role for religion in human reflection and action. Drawing on his own philosophical formulations, literary analysis, and personal interreligious experiences, Kearney develops through these engagements a basic gesture of hospitality for approaching the question of God. His work facilitates a fresh encounter with our best-known voices in continental philosophy and their views on issues of importance to all spiritually minded individuals and skeptics: how to reconcile God's goodness with human evil, how to believe in both God and natural science, how to talk about God without indulging in fundamentalist rhetoric, and how to balance God's sovereignty with God's love. (shrink)

The study of the meanings of temporal expressions in natural language can proceed in two ways. The first consists of borrowing an ontological theory concerning how time “really” is, and then showing how temporal expressions are interpreted in this model. Let us call this the physicalist approach. The other approach is to start off by studying the temporal presuppositions employed in the language, and defining a model as the structure which satisfies these conditions. This approach we shall call the analytist (...) approach. The two approaches share their goal, which is to provide a temporal model for natural language. However, they are driven by different motivations. The physicalist approach is ontology-driven. It views time as part of reality, and its structure as independent of linguistic considerations. It attempts to interpret the language in this model, possibly by adding assumptions about the language. The analytist approach, on the other hand, is language driven. It assumes that language “mirrors” reality to the extent in which it is describable in the language, and tries to define a temporal model based only on linguisticconsiderations. A theory is “complete”, in a sense, if it combines both approaches and its (analytist) language- driven model can be constructed in a (physicalist) ontology-driven structure. (shrink)

The ideal of publicity plays an important role in contemporary legal and political philosophy. Yet, to date, it has not been brought to bear on the question of voting method choice. This paper aims to fix this. I argue that voting method publicity is a well-motivated requirement which reveals tradeoffs inherent to democracy between procedural and epistemic equality. I further explore the implications of voting method publicity to the normative status of plurality voting and its possible alternatives.

In the fall of 2005, Mark C. Taylor, the controversial public intellectual and widely respected scholar, suddenly fell critically ill. For two days a team of forty doctors, many of whom thought he would not live, fought to save him. Taylor would eventually recover, but only to face a new threat: surgery for cancer. "These experiences have changed me in ways I am still struggling to understand," Taylor writes in this absorbing memoir. "After the past year, I (...) am persuaded that I have done enough fieldwork to write a book that combines philosophical and theological reflection with autobiographical narrative. Writing is not only possible but actually seems necessary." _Field Notes from Elsewhere_ is Taylor's unforgettable, inverted journey from death to life. Each of his memoir's fifty-two chapters and accompanying photographs recounts a morning-to-evening experience with sickness and convalescence, mingling humor and hope with a deep exploration of human frailty and, conversely, resilience. When we confront the end of life, Taylor explains, the axis of the lived world shifts, and everything must be reevaluated. As Taylor sorts through his remembrances, much that once seemed familiar becomes strange, paradoxical, and contradictory. He reads his experience with and against ghosts from his past, recasting the meaning of mortality, sacrifice, solitude, and abandonment, along with a host of other issues, in light of modern ways of dying. "You never come back from elsewhere," Taylor concludes, "because elsewhere always comes back with you.". (shrink)

In this paper I argue against a sharp separation of semantics from pragmatics. While it may be useful to consider semantics independently of pragmatics, in some cases this strategy may lead us astray. First, I make a methodological point. Competing semantic analyses are often presented as supported by competing semantic intuitions of native speakers. Functional considerations are pragmatic considerations which should affect our choice of semantics. These are inferences from the linguistic goals the speakers actually achieve to the meanings their (...) expressions must therefore have. Second, there are linguistic expressions whose semantic meaning is a function of their pragmatic uses. I consider two examples. First, the logicians' debate over the universal analysis of conditionals in natural language. The participants in the debate all ignore conditional forms other than the assertoric and subjunctive. In particular they ignore the conditional speech-act reading. The meaning of the conditional is related to its function: to restrict the commitment of a given speech-act to special conditions. A functional proof of the existence of such conditionals is given, thus showing that the different semantics account only for part of the relevant facts. The second example concerns vague terms. I claim that one of their main uses is to help us identify objects by reference not to their absolute properties but relative to their background. This function cannot be performed by the use of non-vague terms. Vague terms are context dependent and may in some contexts be used non-vaguely and refer to distinct objects in the discourse domain. In a way, what these terms end up denoting is a function of the use of predicates to partition a given domain. (shrink)

Although taking place mainly in the private sector, the French arms industry is a very tightly controlled activity, and decision making on arms exports are made within a genera! framework which takes info account the chief aspects of France global policy.Mercantile considerations are not the main factor in French arms exports. Actually, France has used very counsciously and systematically its arms exports to further its global policy, especially its ambition to build Europe around itself.However, the effective contribution of these arms (...) exports to the attainment of France main goals has been rather dubious and volatile. (shrink)

We consider question-answer dialogues between participants who may disagree with each other. The main problems are: (a) How different speech-acts affect the information in the dialogue; and (b) How to represent what was said in a dialogue, so that we can summarize it even when it involves disagreements (i.e., inconsistencies).We use a fully-typed many-sorted language L with a possible-worlds semantics. L contains nominals representing short answers. The speech-acts are uniformly represented in a dialogue language DL by focus structures, consisting of (...) a mood operator, a topic component and a focus component. Each stage of the dialogue is associated with a set of information functions (g-functions), which are partial functions taking a topic component (representing a question raised) to a set of propositions determined by the corresponding focus component (to the set of answers given to it). (shrink)

A number of liberal and libertarian philosophers make the moral case for laissez-faire polycentricity—a political order centered around voluntary association. Some of these philosophers further present epistemic arguments in favor of polycentric forms of organization. Initially, one might think that the epistemic arguments reinforce the moral ones, resulting in a philosophically robust case for laissez-faire polycentricity. This paper argues against this conclusion. Through examining the intersection between epistemic considerations and institutional arrangements, I show that the epistemic arguments point away from (...) laissez-faire polycentricity and toward alternative forms of polycentric order. (shrink)

This is a major and comprehensive study of the philosophy of Hegel, his place in the history of ideas, and his continuing relevance and importance. Professor Taylor relates Hegel to the earlier history of philosophy and, more particularly, to the central intellectual and spiritual issues of his own time. He engages with Hegel sympathetically, on Hegel's own terms and, as the subject demands, in detail. This important book is now reissued with a fresh new cover.

In this article I respond to the constructive criticisms of my views in Markets with Limits that have been developed by Amy E. White, Roderick T. Long, and Julian Koplin. I also outline how Jason Brennan and Peter Jaworski have surreptitiously altered their position in the second edition of their book Markets Without Limits—alterations that they appear to have made in response to my criticisms. First, they have changed the view that they attribute to those they identify as anti-commodification theorists (...) in response to my claim that none of them hold the position that they attribute to them. Second, they have altered their definition of what constitutes a “semiotic” objection to markets. I argue that none of these changes successfully address my initial criticisms. By contrast, I believe that the revisions that I make to my views in response to the objections of White and Long address their concerns, and I concur with Koplin’s development of my views in the context of the use of AI. (shrink)

This 2003 book offers an interpretation of Heidegger's major work, Being and Time. Unlike those who view Heidegger as an idealist, Taylor Carman argues that Heidegger is best understood as a realist. Amongst the distinctive features of the book are an interpretation explicitly oriented within a Kantian framework and an analysis of Dasein in relation to recent theories of intentionality, notably those of Dennett and Searle. Rigorous, jargon-free and deftly argued this book will be necessary reading for all serious (...) students of Heidegger. (shrink)

Recent develops in AI technology have led to increasingly sophisticated forms of video manipulation. One such form has been the advent of deepfakes. Deepfakes are AI-generated videos that typically depict people doing and saying things they never did. In this paper, I demonstrate that there is a close structural relationship between deepfakes and more traditional fake barn cases in epistemology. Specifically, I argue that deepfakes generate an analogous degree of epistemic risk to that which is found in traditional cases. Given (...) that barn cases have posed a long-standing challenge for virtue-theoretic accounts of knowledge, I consider whether a similar challenge extends to deepfakes. In doing so, I consider how Duncan Pritchard’s recent anti-risk virtue epistemology meets the challenge. While Pritchard’s account avoids problems in traditional barn cases, I claim that it leads to local scepticism about knowledge from online videos in the case of deepfakes. I end by considering how two alternative virtue-theoretic approaches might vindicate our epistemic dependence on videos in an increasingly digital world. (shrink)

Interpretation, in the sense relevant to hermeneutics, is an attempt to make clear, to make sense of an object of study. This object must, therefore, be a text or a text-analogue, which in some way is confused, incomplete, cloudy, seemingly contradictory--in one way or another, unclear. The interpretation aims to bring to light an underlying coherence or sense.

In recent years, a number of philosophers have turned their attention to developments in Artificial Intelligence, and in particular to deepfakes. A deepfake is a portmanteau of ‘deep learning' and ‘fake', and for the most part they are videos which depict people doing and saying things they never did. As a result, much of the emerging literature on deepfakes has turned on questions of trust, harms, and information-sharing. In this paper, I add to the emerging concerns around deepfakes by drawing (...) on resources from vice epistemology. As deepfakes become more sophisticated, I claim, they will develop to be a source of online epistemic corruption. More specifically, they will encourage consumers of digital online media to cultivate and manifest various epistemic vices. My immediate focus in this paper is on their propensity to encourage the development of what I call ‘intellectual cynicism'. After sketching a rough account of this epistemic vice, I go on to suggest that we can partially offset such cynicism – and fears around deceptive online media more generally – by encouraging the development what I term a trained ‘digital sensibility'. This, I contend, involves a calibrated sensitivity to the epistemic merits of online content. (shrink)

Grace and Freedom in a Secular Age offers a concise exposition of key ideas - contingency, otherness, freedom, vulnerability and mutuality - that inform the work of the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, especially concerning the dynamics of religious belief and religious denial in what he calls a "a secular age." The book integrates discussion of Immanuel Kant and Susan Neiman in particular and seeks to show how Taylor's work can be fruitfully engaged by theologians.