My purpose in this article is twofold. I wish to discuss the rift between Jewish feminists and Christian feminists and their Goddess peers, aiming to grapple with points of dispute, alienation and disparity. I equally aspire to find shared grounds; even where agreement is impossible, to raise a greater insight into Judaism beyond irreducible divides, and enhance mutual understanding and respect. By mutual respect I mean that not only shared grounds should build bridges; bridges should be built where homologous identity (...) is missing. While leaving a space for disagreements, irreducible edges and differences; it is when divides are irreducible that mutual respect is most needed, though most difficult to find. Bridges over both shared and unshared grounds are the future of relations, as awareness of differences and open contention can widen reciprocal understanding of our separate worlds. (shrink)

While life thrives on all that is particular, private and personal, arbitrary atrocity conspires to establish itself on the power to destroy it. Conversely, art of atrocity finds its vocation in concentrating on the particular, by magnifying minute details. Individualizing the anonymous victim, ‘art of atrocity' 1 protests the conspiracy of dehumanization that lies with destruction of life.

Hypocrites invite moral opprobrium, and charges of hypocrisy are a significant and widespread feature of our moral lives. Yet it remains unclear what hypocrites have in common, or what is distinctively bad about them. We propose that hypocrites are persons who have undermined their claim to moral authority. Since this self-undermining can occur in a number of ways, our account construes hypocrisy as multiply realizable. As we explain, a person’s moral authority refers to a kind of standing that they occupy (...) within a particular moral community. This status is both socially important and normatively precarious. Hence, moral agents are right to be vigilant when it comes to hypocrisy, and are often justified in their outrage when they detect it. We further argue that our view can preserve what is attractive in rival accounts, while avoiding their associated problems. (shrink)

Computers are used to make decisions in an increasing number of domains. There is widespread agreement that some of these uses are ethically problematic. Far less clear is where ethical problems arise, and what might be done about them. This paper expands and defends the Ethical Gravity Thesis: ethical problems that arise at higher levels of analysis of an automated decision-making system are inherited by lower levels of analysis. Particular instantiations of systems can add new problems, but not ameliorate more (...) general ones. We defend this thesis by adapting Marr’s famous 1982 framework for understanding information-processing systems. We show how this framework allows one to situate ethical problems at the appropriate level of abstraction, which in turn can be used to target appropriate interventions. (shrink)

Protests and counter-protests seek to draw and direct attention and concern with confronting images and slogans. In recent years, as protests and counter-protests have partially migrated to the digital space, such images and slogans have also gone online. Two main ways in which these images and slogans are translated to the online space is through the use of emoji and hashtags. Despite sustained academic interest in online protests, hashtag activism and the use of emoji across social media platforms, little is (...) known about the specific functional role that emoji and hashtags play in online social movements. In an effort to fill this gap, the current paper studies both hashtags and emoji in the context of the Twitter discourse around the Black Lives Matter movement. (shrink)

The present moment in human history is marked by the ever-accelerating movement across the world of materials, peoples and information, creating various problems and, of course, opportunities as well--especially, the movement of the people, which makes multiculturalism a major issue. Differences between the immigrants and the receiving society create conflict. One solution would be found in the legal provision for the equality of rights for all the members of society, including cultural minorities, but if the legal solution alone is considered (...) effective, there would be waste of resources accumulated in cultures as enabling agents of amenable human life. But multiple cultures in a single society easily become a source of conflict, as another culture encroaching upon one’s own culture is often felt as a threatening challenge to one’s identity, as identity is constructed in the subjective process of culture. It implies the master-and-slave struggle between two subjectivities. Cultural subjectivities, personal or collective, could be induced to constitute a complex system of federated subjectivities. Even such a system would not, however, completely eliminate tension and conflict. Intervention by an ethic universally conceived on the minimal basis would meet the urgent need to prevent escalation of conflict, but it would ultimately prepare a common ground for the development of a global culture incorporating multiple cultures as historically inherited resources for enrichment of human life. Ethical awareness is what reveals the otherness of the other and also the ontological ground of human life on earth ; as ethics and epistemology coincide, a human reason would emerge as the ground of a new global culture, and the world would hopefully become a single Lebensraum for entire humanity. (shrink)

ABSTRACT. May scientists rely on substantive, a priori presuppositions? Quinean naturalists say "no," but Michael Friedman and others claim that such a view cannot be squared with the actual history of science. To make his case, Friedman offers Newton's universal law of gravitation and Einstein's theory of relativity as examples of admired theories that both employ presuppositions (usually of a mathematical nature), presuppositions that do not face empirical evidence directly. In fact, Friedman claims that the use of such presuppositions is (...) a hallmark of "science as we know it." But what should we say about the special sciences, which typically do not rely on the abstruse formalisms one finds in the exact sciences? I identify a type of a priori presupposition that plays an especially striking role in the development of empirical psychology. These are ontological presuppositions about the type of object a given science purports to study. I show how such presuppositions can be both a priori and rational by investigating their role in an early flap over psychology's contested status as a natural science. The flap focused on one of the field's earliest textbooks, William James's Principles of Psychology. The work was attacked precisely for its reliance on a priori presuppositions about what James had called the "mental state," psychology's (alleged) proper object. I argue that the specific presuppositions James packed into his definition of the "mental state" were not directly responsible to empirical evidence, and so in that sense were a priori; but the presuppositions were rational in that they were crafted to help overcome philosophical objections (championed by neo-Hegelians) to the very idea that there can be a genuine science of mind. Thus, my case study gives an example of substantive, a priori presuppositions being put to use—to rational use—in the special sciences. In addition to evaluating James's use of presuppositions, my paper also offers historical reflections on two different strands of pragmatist philosophy of science. One strand, tracing back through Quine to C. S. Peirce, is more naturalistic, eschewing the use of a priori elements in science. The other strand, tracing back through Kuhn and C. I. Lewis to James, is more friendly to such presuppositions, and to that extent bears affinity with the positivist tradition Friedman occupies. (shrink)

Consciousness supervenes on activity; computation supervenes on structure. Because of this, some argue, conscious states cannot supervene on computational ones. If true, this would present serious difficulties for computationalist analyses of consciousness (or, indeed, of any domain with properties that supervene on actual activity). I argue that the computationalist can avoid the Superfluous Structure Problem (SSP) by moving to a dispositional theory of implementation. On a dispositional theory, the activity of computation depends entirely on changes in the intrinsic properties of (...) implementing material. As extraneous structure is not required for computation, a system can implement a program running on some but not all possible inputs. Dispositional computationalism thus permits episodes of computational activity that correspond to potential episodes of conscious awareness. The SSP cannot be motivated against this account, and so computationalism may be preserved. (shrink)

I discuss the characters Don Quixote and Sancho Panza and their relationship in order to understand better the place of idealistictheory and realistic practice in business ethics. The realism of Sancho Panza is required to make the idealism of Don Quixote effective.Indeed, the interaction and development of these characters can serve as a model for both the effective communication between andblending of the idealistic moral theoretician and the practical businessperson. Specifically, I argue that a quixotified Sancho Panza,as a combination of (...) theoretical idealism and practical realism, is necessary for managerial statesmanship. I first consider the positionthat this concept is unrealistic. In the final section, however, I show that a number of leadership and business theorists believe thatmanagerial statesmanship requires a quixotified Sancho Panza. I also consider the question, what helps to make a quixotic vision forbusiness ethical, and what is its content? (shrink)

Cet article présente le concept de transversalité comme une possible clé d’interprétation des phénomènes culturels et sociaux de la postmodernité.

We present a novel generative model for natural language tree structures in which semantic (lexical dependency) and syntactic (PCFG) structures are scored with separate models. This factorization provides conceptual simplicity, straightforward opportunities for separately improving the component models, and a level of performance comparable to similar, non-factored models. Most importantly, unlike other modern parsing models, the factored model admits an extremely effective A* parsing algorithm, which enables efficient, exact inference.

In the early eighteenth century, chemistry became the main academic locus where, in Francis Bacon's words, Experimenta lucifera were performed alongside Experimenta fructifera and where natural philosophy was coupled with natural history and 'experimental history' in the Baconian and Boyleian sense of an inventory and exploration of the extant operations of the arts and crafts. The Dutch social and political system and the institutional setting of the university of Leiden endorsed this empiricist, utilitarian orientation toward the sciences, which was forcefully (...) propagated by one of the university's most famous representatives in the first half of the eighteenth century, the professor of medicine, botany and chemistry Herman Boerhaave. Recent historical investigations on Boerhaave's chemistry have provided important insights into Boerhaave's religious background, his theoretical and philosophical goals, and his pedagogical agenda. But comparatively little attention has been paid to the chemical experiments presented in Boerhaave's famous chemical textbook, the Elementa chemiae, and to the question of how these experiments relate not only to experimental philosophy but also to experimental history and natural history, and to contemporary utilitarianism. I argue in this essay that Boerhaave shared a strong commitment to Baconian utilitarianism and empiricism with many other European chemists around the middle of the eighteenth century, in particular to what Bacon designated 'experimental history' and I will provide evidence for this claim through a careful analysis of Boerhaave's plant-chemical experiments presented in the Elementa chemiae. (shrink)

The paper examines differences of styles of experimentation in the history of science. It presents arguments for a historization of our historial and philosophical notion of "experimentation," which question the common view that "experimental philosophy" was the only style of experimentation in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It argues, in particular, that "experimental history" and technological inquiry were accepted styles of academic experimentation at the time. These arguments are corroborated by a careful analysis of a case study, which is (...) embedded in a comparative historical overview. (shrink)

Infinitism in Epistemology. This article provides an overview of infinitism in epistemology. Infinitism is a family of views in epistemology about the structure of knowledge and epistemic justification. It contrasts naturally with coherentism and foundationalism. All three views agree that knowledge or justification requires an appropriately structured chain of reasons. What form may such a […].

In their “The Prevalence of Mind-Body Dualism in Early China,” Slingerland and Chudek use a statistical analysis of the early Chinese corpus to argue for Weak Folk Dualism (WFD). We raise three methodological objections to their analysis. First, the change over time that they find is largely driven by genre. Second, the operationalization of WFD is potentially misleading. And, third, dating the texts they use is extremely controversial. We conclude with some positive remarks.

ZUSAMMENFASSUNGDer Artikel erläutert vier Thesen, in denen der Beitrag der theologischen Anthropologie zum interdisziplinären Gespräch über die Sozialnatur des Menschen bestimmt wird. Die Theologie kann zu diesem Gespräch beitragen, indem sie nicht die biologische Unterscheidung von Mensch und Tier in den Vordergrund rückt, sondern die ethische Differenz von Menschlichkeit und Unmenschlichkeit zur Leitdifferenz ihrer Beschreibungsperspektive macht. Sie bringt ihre Sichtweise konstruktiv in das interdisziplinäre Gespräch ein, indem sie eine Phänomenologie und Grammatik des zwischenmenschlichen Verhältnisses entwirft, welche die Differenz von humanem (...) und inhumanem Zusammenleben von Menschen durch das Indexwort ›Gott‹ explizit macht.SUMMARYThe article presents four arguments concerning the contribution of theological anthropology to an interdisciplinary dialogue on the sociality of human nature. It defends the view that theology shall not employ the biological difference of man and animal to describe social humanity. Rather, it can challenge interdisciplinary dialogue with the social sciences by focusing on the ethical non-indifference of social humanity and inhumanity. Thus, theology has to conceptualize a phenomenology of interpersonal relationships which faces the possible neglect of inhumanity and offers a grammar of sociality making the difference of humanity and inhumanity explicit by using the index word ›God‹. (shrink)

Unsupervised grammar induction systems commonly judge potential constituents on the basis of their effects on the likelihood of the data. Linguistic justifications of constituency, on the other hand, rely on notions such as substitutability and varying external contexts. We describe two systems for distributional grammar induction which operate on such principles, using part-of-speech tags as the contextual features. The advantages and disadvantages of these systems are examined, including precision/recall trade-offs, error analysis, and extensibility.