The discourse around self-driving cars has been dominated by an emphasis on their potential to reduce the number of accidents. At the same time, proponents acknowledge that self-driving cars would inevitably be involved in fatal accidents where moral algorithms would decide the fate of those involved. This is a necessary trade-off, proponents suggest, in order to reap the benefits of this new technology. In this article, I engage this argument, demonstrating how an undue optimism and enthusiasm about this technology is (...) obscuring our ability to see what is at stake and explaining how moving beyond the dominant utilitarian framings around this technology opens up a space for both ethical inquiry and innovative design. I suggest that a genuine caring concern for the many lives lost in car accidents now and in the future—a concern that transcends false binary trade-offs and that recognizes the systemic biases and power structures that make certain groups more vulnerable than others—could serve as a starting point to rethink mobility, as it connects to the design of our cities, the well-being of our communities, and the future of our planet. (shrink)

As if 2020 were not a peculiar enough year, its fifth month has seen the relatively quiet publication of a preprint describing the most powerful Natural Language Processing (NLP) system to date, GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer-3), by Silicon Valley research firm OpenAI. Though the software implementation of GPT-3 is still in its initial Beta release phase, and its full capabilities are still unknown as of the time of this writing, it has been shown that this Artificial Intelligence can comprehend prompts (...) in natural language, on virtually any topic, and generate relevant, original text content that is indistinguishable from human writing. Moreover, access to these capabilities, in a limited yet worrisome enough extent, is available to the general public as of the time of this writing. This paper presents select examples of original content generated by the author using GPT-3. These examples illustrate some of the capabilities of GPT-3 in comprehending prompts in natural language and generating convincing content in response. We use these examples to raise specific, fundamental questions pertaining to the intellectual property of this content and the potential use of GPT-3 to facilitate plagiarism. Our goal is to instigate not just a sense of urgency, but of a present tardiness on the part of the academic community in addressing these questions. (shrink)

As if 2020 was not a peculiar enough year, its fifth month saw the relatively quiet publication of a preprint describing the most powerful natural language processing (NLP) system to date—GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer-3)—created by the Silicon Valley research firm OpenAI. Though the software implementation of GPT-3 is still in its initial beta release phase, and its full capabilities are still unknown as of the time of this writing, it has been shown that this artificial intelligence can comprehend prompts in (...) natural language, on virtually any topic, and generate relevant original text content that is indistinguishable from human writing. Moreover, access to these capabilities, in a limited yet worrisome enough extent, is available to the general public. This paper presents examples of original content generated by the author using GPT-3. These examples illustrate some of the capabilities of GPT-3 in comprehending prompts in natural language and generating convincing content in response. I use these examples to raise specific fundamental questions pertaining to the intellectual property of this content and the potential use of GPT-3 to facilitate plagiarism. The goal is to instigate a sense of urgency, as well as a sense of present tardiness on the part of the academic community in addressing these questions. (shrink)

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A bold work from the author of The Black Swan that challenges many of our long-held beliefs about risk and reward, politics and religion, finance and personal responsibility In his most provocative and practical book yet, one of the foremost thinkers of our time redefines what it means to understand the world, succeed in a profession, contribute to a fair and just society, detect nonsense, and influence others. Citing examples ranging from Hammurabi to Seneca, (...) Antaeus the Giant to Donald Trump, Nassim Nicholas Taleb shows how the willingness to accept one’s own risks is an essential attribute of heroes, saints, and flourishing people in all walks of life. As always both accessible and iconoclastic, Taleb challenges long-held beliefs about the values of those who spearhead military interventions, make financial investments, and propagate religious faiths. Among his insights: • For social justice, focus on symmetry and risk sharing. You cannot make profits and transfer the risks to others, as bankers and large corporations do. You cannot get rich without owning your own risk and paying for your own losses. Forcing skin in the game corrects this asymmetry better than thousands of laws and regulations. • Ethical rules aren’t universal. You’re part of a group larger than you, but it’s still smaller than humanity in general. • Minorities, not majorities, run the world. The world is not run by consensus but by stubborn minorities imposing their tastes and ethics on others. • You can be an intellectual yet still be an idiot. “Educated philistines” have been wrong on everything from Stalinism to Iraq to low-carb diets. • Beware of complicated solutions (that someone was paid to find). A simple barbell can build muscle better than expensive new machines. • True religion is commitment, not just faith. How much you believe in something is manifested only by what you’re willing to risk for it. The phrase “skin in the game” is one we have often heard but rarely stopped to truly dissect. It is the backbone of risk management, but it’s also an astonishingly rich worldview that, as Taleb shows in this book, applies to all aspects of our lives. As Taleb says, “The symmetry of skin in the game is a simple rule that’s necessary for fairness and justice, and the ultimate BS-buster,” and “Never trust anyone who doesn’t have skin in the game. Without it, fools and crooks will benefit, and their mistakes will never come back to haunt them.”. (shrink)

Several authors assume that evaluative conditioning (EC) relies on high-level propositional thinking. In contrast, the dual-process perspective proposes two processing pathways, one associative and the other propositional, contributing to EC. Dual-process theorists argue that attitudinal ambiguity resulting from these two pathways’ conflicting evaluations demonstrate the involvement of both automatic and controlled processes in EC. Previously, we suggested that amplitude variations of error-related negativity and error-positivity, two well-researched event-related potentials of performance monitoring, allow for the detection of attitudinal ambiguity at the (...) neural level. The present study utilises self-reported evaluation, categorisation performance, and neural correlates of performance monitoring to explore associative-propositional ambiguity during social attitude formation. Our results show that compared to associative-propositional harmony, attitudinal ambiguity correlates with more neutral subjective evaluations, longer response times, increased error commission, and diminished error-related negativity amplitudes. While our findings align with dual-process models, we aim to offer a propositional interpretation. We discuss dual-process theories in the context of evolutionary psychology, suggesting that associative processes may only represent a small piece of the EC puzzle. (shrink)

We examine a contribution L. Susan Stebbing made to the understanding of critical thinking and its relation to formal logic. Stebbing took expertise in formal logic to authorise logical intervention in public debate, specifically in assessing of the validity of everyday reasoning. She held, however, that formal logic is purely the study of logical form. Given the problems of ascertaining logical form in any particular instance, and that logical form does not always track informal validity, it is difficult to see (...) how she could justify her belief in logical interventionism. Her answer to this problem is the contribution we explore here. It involves the view that although the logician’s expertise is not sufficient to assess arguments made in everyday contexts on its own, it nevertheless plays a unique role in giving systematicity and direction to the critique of such arguments, in particular, in public debate. (shrink)

Background: Job satisfaction is largely associated with organizational aspects, including improved working environments, worker’s well-being and more effective performance. There are many definitions regarding job satisfaction in the existing scholarly literature: it can be expressed as a positive emotional state, a positive impact of job-related experiences on individuals, and employees’ perceptions regarding their jobs. Aims: No reliable scales in Arabic language to assess job satisfaction in the sports and physical education field exist.This study aimed to trans-culturally adapt and validate the (...) Pepe’s “Teacher Job Satisfaction Scale” 9 items (TJSS-9), creating the “Teacher of Physical Education Job Satisfaction Inventory” (TPEJSI) in Arabic language. This scale was administered to a Tunisian population of sports and physical education teachers and analyzed according to the Pepe’s theoretical model.. More in detail, this investigation systematically tested its factor structure, in terms of internal consistency/reliability, predictive validity, sensitivity and convergent validity. Methods: A total of 417 Tunisian teachers of sports and physical education participated voluntarily in this study. The sample comprised of 258 males and of 159 females. More in detail, 189 were teachers teaching in primary schools of physical education, 105 teaching in secondary schools, and 123 were university teachers. Both exploratory (EFA) and confirmatory (CFA) factor analyses were performed on random-split halves of the sample. Results: The three-dimensional alpha coefficients of the TPEJSI were all greater than 0.80: for satisfaction with colleagues, alpha was 0.865; for satisfaction with parents, alpha was 0.856 and for satisfaction with students alpha was 0.860. The CFA fit indices were satisfactory. Conclusions: Given the good EFA factor loadings, the CFA fit indices, the correlation matrix, the sensitivity analysis, the convergent validity and the excellent internal consistency, it can be concluded that the TPEJSI is a good psychometric tool that can be used to quantitatively assess the job satisfaction level among teachers of sports and physical education in the Arabic-speaking world. (shrink)

Ex ante predicted outcomes should be interpreted as counterfactuals (potential histories), with errors as the spread between outcomes. But error rates have error rates. We reapply measurements of uncertainty about the estimation errors of the estimation errors of an estimation treated as branching counterfactuals. Such recursions of epistemic uncertainty have markedly different distributial properties from conventional sampling error, and lead to fatter tails in the projections than in past realizations. Counterfactuals of error rates always lead to fat tails, regardless of (...) the probability distribution used. A mere .01% branching error rate about the STD (itself an error rate), and .01% branching error rate about that error rate, etc. (recursing all the way) results in explosive (and infinite) moments higher than 1. Missing any degree of regress leads to the underestimation of small probabilities and concave payoffs (a standard example of which is Fukushima). The paper states the conditions under which higher order rates of uncertainty (expressed in spreads of counterfactuals) alters the shapes the of final distribution and shows which a priori beliefs about conterfactuals are needed to accept the reliability of conventional probabilistic methods (thin tails or mildly fat tails). (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Classes of Uncertainty Our Argument Predicting Other People's Action Predicting One's Own Actions Predicting Group Action The Danger of Prediction References.

Knowledge and its desacralization --What is tradition? -- The rediscovery of the sacred : the revival of tradition -- Scientia sacra -- Man, pontifical and Promethean -- The cosmos as theophany -- Eternity and the temporal order -- Traditional art as fountain of knowledge and grace -- Principal knowledge and the multiplicity of sacred forms -- Knowledge of the sacred as deliverance.

This article offers a detailed and compact account of what might be called Kierkegaard’s Faust project, that is, the collection of notes, bibliographies and reflections on the mythical German necromancer that the young Kierkegaard registered in his various journals and notebooks from the years 1835 – 1837. As is well known, the young writer presumably intended to pen a book or essay about the universal idea represented by Faust. Additionally, I discuss Kierkegaard’s project within the context of the 1830s, the (...) reception of the Faustian myth among his Danish contemporaries such as J.L. Heiberg and H.L. Martensen, and the enthusiasm for Goethe that seized Copenhagen during those years. (shrink)

The authors of _The Modern Experience of the Religious_ explore the different ways in which religious experience is lived within the context of modernity, and how religious life responds to the challenges presented by our age.

La concepción dualista de Descartes expulsó lo incorpóreo de la materia y ha sido mal entendida durante siglos. Este artículo inicia reflexionando acerca de la importancia del materialismo para la ciencia. Enseguida, se examinan argumentos de la doctrina dualista relativos a la física, su materialismo y mecanicismo. Finalmente, se considera, desde la perspectiva de la unión, la biología humana, disciplina con características peculiares, dado que su objeto no es un ser meramente corpóreo, sino entremezclado.

This article offers a philosophical account of the so-called journal of Gilleleje. I would like to argue that in this text from 1835 one can trace the early philosophical musings of Kierkegaard on the existential question of the discovery of the self and the development of selfhood, one of the main motifs in the authorship of the Dane. Additionally, I discuss the literary trends of the 1830s in Golden Age Denmark, particularly the boom of the Danish short novel and Heiberg’s (...) admiration of Goethe, analyzing in what way this local context impacted Kierkegaard’s ideas in the journal of Gilleleje. (shrink)

In this article, I explore Johan Ludvig Heiberg’s diagnosis of the crisis of his age, Golden Age Denmark, in his treatise On the Significance of Philosophy, published in 1833. Althoughin recent times there is a renewed interest in the intellectual scene of Golden Age Denmark, in part due to the current relevancy of a thinker such as Søren Kierkegaard, it is a fact that one of its most important figures, J. L. Heiberg, has been more or less ignored by contemporary (...) scholars. Thus, in this article I try to shed light on his figure and thought, especially on his attempt to use Hegelian philosophy to solve the cultural crisis of his time. (shrink)

Resumen Entre 1834 y 1835, Kierkegaard, quien todavía era un estudiante de veintiún años en la Universidad de Copenhague, se interesó en la figura mítica y folclórica conocida como el “ladrón maestro”. Decidió entonces trabajar en un drama que girara alrededor de este personaje y su lucha en contra del orden establecido. Con eso en mente, este artículo tiene dos objetivos. El primero consiste en hacer una exposición general del denominado proyecto del ladrón maestro. Las notas de Kierkegaard sobre el (...) ladrón maestro han permanecido en una relativa oscuridad, de manera que este artículo busca presentarle al lector hispanohablante este trabajo poco conocido del pensador danés. El segundo objetivo es analizar la cuestión filosófica planteada en el proyecto del ladrón maestro, es decir, la cuestión sobre la relación del individuo rebelde y marginado con el orden establecido.In the years 1834 and1835, Kierkegaard, still a 21-year-old student at the University of Copenhagen, became interested in the mythical character known as the master-thief. He then decided to work on a drama about this character and his struggle against the established order. With this in mind, the paper has two main objectives. First, to offer a complete account of the so-called master-thief project. Kierkegaard’s notes on the master-thief have remained in a relative obscurity. This paper aims at exposing this little-known work of the Danish thinker to the Spanish-speaking reader. Second, to analyze the philosophical question raised in the master thief project, that is, the issue about the relationship of the rebel and marginalized individual with the established order. (shrink)

Resumen Entre 1834 y 1835, Kierkegaard, quien todavía era un estudiante de veintiún años en la Universidad de Copenhague, se interesó en la figura mítica y folclórica conocida como el “ladrón maestro”. Decidió entonces trabajar en un drama que girara alrededor de este personaje y su lucha en contra del orden establecido. Con eso en mente, este artículo tiene dos objetivos. El primero consiste en hacer una exposición general del denominado proyecto del ladrón maestro. Las notas de Kierkegaard sobre el (...) ladrón maestro han permanecido en una relativa oscuridad, de manera que este artículo busca presentarle al lector hispanohablante este trabajo poco conocido del pensador danés. El segundo objetivo es analizar la cuestión filosófica planteada en el proyecto del ladrón maestro, es decir, la cuestión sobre la relación del individuo rebelde y marginado con el orden establecido.In the years 1834 and1835, Kierkegaard, still a 21-year-old student at the University of Copenhagen, became interested in the mythical character known as the master-thief. He then decided to work on a drama about this character and his struggle against the established order. With this in mind, the paper has two main objectives. First, to offer a complete account of the so-called master-thief project. Kierkegaard’s notes on the master-thief have remained in a relative obscurity. This paper aims at exposing this little-known work of the Danish thinker to the Spanish-speaking reader. Second, to analyze the philosophical question raised in the master thief project, that is, the issue about the relationship of the rebel and marginalized individual with the established order. (shrink)

Resumen En el siguiente artículo se ofrece un análisis del denominado “diario de Gilleleje” del filósofo danés Soren Kierkegaard. Se intenta argumentar que en este escrito temprano de 1835 y de un carácter eminentemente literario es posible encontrar las reflexiones filosóficas incipientes de un joven Kierkegaard acerca de la cuestión existencial del descubrimiento del propio Yo y la construcción de la personalidad, uno de los temas fundamentales en la obra del escritor danés. El desarrollo del texto culmina con la exposición (...) de uno de los conceptos claves del pensamiento kierkegaardiano: la verdad subjetiva.In the following article I offer an analysis of the so-called “journal of Gilleleje” by Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. I would like to argue that in this early writing of 1836, a piece with a distinct literary tone, it ispossible to observe young Kierkegaard’sfirstphilosophi- cal insights on the existential question about the discovery of the self and the development of personhood, one of the key topics in the Dane's writings. The journal concludes with the exposition of a central concept in Kierkegaard’s thought: subjective truth. (shrink)

Interactive narratives have been used in a variety of applications, including video games, educational games, and training simulations. Maintaining engagement within such environments is an important problem, because it affects entertainment, motivation, and presence. Performance arts theorists have discussed and formalized many techniques that increase engagement and enhance dramatic content of art productions. While constructing a narrative manually, using these techniques, is acceptable for linear media, using this approach for interactive environments results in inflexible experiences due to the unpredictability of (...) users’ actions. Few researchers attempted to develop adaptive interactive narrative experiences. However, developing a quality interactive experience is largely an art process, and many of these adaptive techniques do not encode artistic principles. This paper presents a new interactive narrative architecture designed using a set of dramatic techniques that have been formulated based on several years of training in film and theatre. (shrink)

Interactive narratives have been used in a variety of applications, including video games, educational games, and training simulations. Maintaining engagement within such environments is an important problem, because it affects entertainment, motivation, and presence. Performance arts theorists have discussed and formalized many techniques that increase engagement and enhance dramatic content of art productions. While constructing a narrative manually, using these techniques, is acceptable for linear media, using this approach for interactive environments results in inflexible experiences due to the unpredictability of (...) users’ actions. Few researchers attempted to develop adaptive interactive narrative experiences. However, developing a quality interactive experience is largely an art process, and many of these adaptive techniques do not encode artistic principles. This paper presents a new interactive narrative architecture designed using a set of dramatic techniques that have been formulated based on several years of training in film and theatre. (shrink)

Interactive narratives have been used in a variety of applications, including video games, educational games, and training simulations. Maintaining engagement within such environments is an important problem, because it affects entertainment, motivation, and presence. Performance arts theorists have discussed and formalized many techniques that increase engagement and enhance dramatic content of art productions. While constructing a narrative manually, using these techniques, is acceptable for linear media, using this approach for interactive environments results in inflexible experiences due to the unpredictability of (...) users’ actions. Few researchers attempted to develop adaptive interactive narrative experiences. However, developing a quality interactive experience is largely an art process, and many of these adaptive techniques do not encode artistic principles. This paper presents a new interactive narrative architecture designed using a set of dramatic techniques that have been formulated based on several years of training in film and theatre. (shrink)

Nassim Noroozi proposes a juxtaposition of pedagogy with and a characterization of it as justice. The term pedagogical here is not limited to “the educational,” nor is pedagogy limited to the methods of teaching. At the same time, the term justice will not be framed in terms of liberal conceptual grounds. Noroozi defines pedagogy as an arrangement of meaning so that it becomes impossible not to see injustice. Noroozi argues that “pedagogy-as-justice” concerns itself with exposing injustice in transformative ways, (...) and as such it is an ethical undertaking. She explores how philosophizing for struggle is inherently pedagogical and, because of our perception of “the pedagogical,” how it is inherently transformative. Furthermore, she argues that seeing pedagogy as justice will consequentially deem “the arrangements of meanings to engage others in the issues pertaining to injustice” as equally important to writing or thinking about those struggles. To illustrate the above points, Noroozi analyzes a case of public philosophical engagement against war. By expanding on this case, she proposes some central attributes of pedagogy-as-justice, namely its preoccupation with grounding abstract and anonymous concepts in their contested historical realities; its commitment to wrestling with an “opacity of concepts” or with “dishonest reasonings” that end up promoting suffering and injustice; and its recognition of the precarities inherent in undertaking pedagogy-as-justice. Noroozi traces a genealogy of the concept of pedagogy-as-justice going back to Socratic public philosophical engagements. (shrink)

Dans un roman publié en 1983, Le Stade de Wimbledon, Daniele Del Giudice dresse le portrait d’un auteur qui n’a jamais publié. On pourrait penser que seule la fiction peut donner corps à une telle idée. Il n’en est rien, comme en témoigne, 30 ans plus tard, la parution en 2013 d’un livre du philosophe italien Marco Menin, spécialiste de Rousseau : Il libro mai scritto. La Morale sensitiva di Rousseau. Publié en italien, ce livre est traduit en français par (...) l’auteur lui-même et paraît aux édit... (shrink)

Dans un roman publié en 1983, Le Stade de Wimbledon, Daniele Del Giudice dresse le portrait d’un auteur qui n’a jamais publié. On pourrait penser que seule la fiction peut donner corps à une telle idée. Il n’en est rien, comme en témoigne, 30 ans plus tard, la parution en 2013 d’un livre du philosophe italien Marco Menin, spécialiste de Rousseau : Il libro mai scritto. La Morale sensitiva di Rousseau. Publié en italien, ce livre est traduit en français par (...) l’auteur lui-même et paraît aux édit... (shrink)

La puissance de la pensée de Rousseau ne se mesure pas seulement à la grandeur de ses livres, mais également à la fécondité des interprétations que ces derniers suscitent. Une pensée profondément philosophique ne fait pas qu’instituer un dialogue privé et privilégié entre un auteur et son lecteur, mais elle permet aussi d’ouvrir un espace discursif polyphonique qu’instaure toute une communauté de lecteurs et d’exégètes eux-mêmes en dialogue les uns avec les autres. Le livre du philosophe italien Francesco Boccolari, _Rousseau_ (...) _la voix passionnée, Force expressive et affections sociales dans_ _l’_Essai sur l’origine des langues traduit, de manière exemplaire, ce double héritage et constitue, de ce point de vue, un modèle du genre. À l’écoute des textes de Rousseau, Boccolari inscrit aussi sa réflexion dans la filiation de grands spécialistes du philosophe genevois, notamment Gabrielle Radica, dont il prolonge la réflexion (p. 123), Céline Spector (qui a co-dirigé son travail de doctorat a... (shrink)

La puissance de la pensée de Rousseau ne se mesure pas seulement à la grandeur de ses livres, mais également à la fécondité des interprétations que ces derniers suscitent. Une pensée profondément philosophique ne fait pas qu’instituer un dialogue privé et privilégié entre un auteur et son lecteur, mais elle permet aussi d’ouvrir un espace discursif polyphonique qu’instaure toute une communauté de lecteurs et d’exégètes eux-mêmes en dialogue les uns avec les autres. Le livre du philosophe ita...

La puissance de la pensée de Rousseau ne se mesure pas seulement à la grandeur de ses livres, mais également à la fécondité des interprétations que ces derniers suscitent. Une pensée profondément philosophique ne fait pas qu’instituer un dialogue privé et privilégié entre un auteur et son lecteur, mais elle permet aussi d’ouvrir un espace discursif polyphonique qu’instaure toute une communauté de lecteurs et d’exégètes eux-mêmes en dialogue les uns avec les autres. Le livre du philosophe ita...

In such civilizations the cosmological sciences integrate the diverse phenomena of Nature into conceptual schemes all of which reflect the revealed ...

Le dualisme métaphysique de Descartes a des conséquences importantes pour la physique qu’il a développée. Descartes cherchait à établir une connaissance quantitative et certaine du monde physique, et son dualisme en a retiré toute forme d’esprit ou de force. Néanmoins, « les forces» ne semblent pas totalement absentes de sa philosophie naturelle. Quelques auteurs contemporains estiment que Descartes, dans certains passages du Monde, et des Principes de la Philosophie, s’exprime comme si les forces décrites étaient des propriétés « réelles» des (...) corps. Par conséquent, dans cet article, je vais donner des arguments en faveur de la cohérence du dualisme cartésien, en utilisant une notion peu connue de « force» proposée par Descartes. (shrink)

En esta nota crítica (i) se hace una breve descripción de cada uno de los artículos que componen Orayen: de la forma lógica al significado, (ii) se señalan algunas cuestiones que no están claras en ellos o en las réplicas de Orayen y, (iii) en la medida de lo posible, se indica si los autores desarrollan ulteriormente los problemas abordados en sus artículos. The aim of this critical note is threefold: (i) it briefly describes and comments on each of the (...) articles of Orayen: de la forma lógica al significado; (ii) identifies some issues that may not be clear enough or not fully developed whether in the articles or even in Orayen's replies; (iii) as far as possible, it refers to further studies made by the authors themselves on the same, or quite related, subjects addressed by them in their papers. (shrink)

This thesis is an argument for the view that there are problems for Modal Reductionism, the thesis that modality can satisfactorily be defined in non-modal terms. -/- I proceed via a case study of David Lewis’s theory of concrete possible worlds. This theory is commonly regarded as the best and most influential candidate reductive theory of modality. Based on a detailed examination of its ontology, analysis and justification, I conclude that it does badly with respect to the following four minimal (...) conditions on a satisfactory reductive theory of modality: that it be (a) genuinely reductive, (b) materially adequate, (c) conceptually adequate and (d) that its justification provides good reason to think it true. -/- These problems for Lewis’s theory are not, I suggest, due to his idiosyncratic conception of possible worlds as concrete entities. Rather, because Lewis’s theory can be seen to represent an important class of structurally similar reductive theories of modality, the problems for Lewis’s theory generalise to problems for these other theories. This suggests that Modal Reductionism is unpromising. In the light of this, the alternative approach to understanding modality, Modal Primitivism, appears more attractive. (shrink)