Many philosophers have argued that agents must be irrational to lose out in a or . A number of different conclusions have been drawn from this claim. The has been one of the main arguments offered for the axioms of expected utility theory; it has been used to show that options cannot be incomparable or on a par; and it has been used to show that our past choices have normative significance for our subsequent choices. In this article, I argue (...) that the fact that someone loses out in a value pump provides no reason to believe that they are irrational. The VP is impotent. (shrink)

I describe in section 1 how cyclical preferences can arise. In section 2, I relate preference to judgments of choiceworthiness and distinguish between two kinds of preference cycles, vicious and benign. In section 3, I run through the standard money pump in order to show, in section 4, how this pump can be stopped by foresight, using backward induction. A new money pump that *cannot* be stopped by foresight is presented in section 5. This pump works even for agents with (...) benign cyclical preferences. What makes it work is persistency on the part of the would-be exploiter. In section 6, I compare this pump to a diachronic Dutch book that can be set up against someone whose probability assignments violate Reflection. Even in this case, the book only works if the bookie is assumed to be persistent. I use this comparison between preference cyclicity and violations of Reflection in order to question whether exploitability must be seen as a proof of irrationality. Finally, in section 7, I consider resolute choice as an alternative to the backward-induction procedure. While a resolute chooser cannot be exploited, I argue that resoluteness is not required by rationality. The argument is based on a suggestion that rationality, when it comes to actions, is a local rather than a global requirement. (shrink)

Agents who employ non-rational choice procedures are often vulnerable to exploitation, in the sense that a profit-seeking trader can offer them a harmful transaction which they will nevertheless accept. We examine the vulnerability of a procedure for deciding whether to buy a lottery: observe another agent who already bought it and buy the lottery if that agent’s experience was positive. We show that the exploitation of such agents can be embedded in an inter-temporal market mechanism, in the form of speculative (...) trade in an asset of no intrinsic value. (JEL: D84). (shrink)

In “The Irrelevance of the Diachronic Money-Pump Argument for Acyclicity,” The Journal of Philosophy CX, 8 (August 2013), 460-464, Johan E. Gustafsson contends that if Davidson, McKinsey and Suppes’ diachronic money-pump argument in their "Outlines of a Formal Theory of Value, I," Philosophy of Science 22 (1955), 140-160 is valid, so is the synchronic argument Gustafsson himself offers. He concludes that the latter renders irrelevant diachronic choice considerations in general, and the two best-known diachronic solutions to the money pump (...) problem in particular. I argue here that this reasoning is incorrect, and that Gustafsson’s synchronic argument is faulty on independent grounds. Specifically, it is based on a false analogy between the derivation of a synchronic ordinal ranking from a transitive series of pairwise comparisons, and the putative derivation of such a ranking from an intransitive series. The latter is not possible under the assumption of revealed preference theory, and is highly improbable even if that assumption is rejected. Moreover, Gustafsson’s argument raises issues of fidelity to the historical texts that must be addressed. I conclude that the money pump, and cyclical choice more generally, are necessarily diachronic; and therefore that the two best-known diachronic solutions to the money pump problem remain relevant. (shrink)

It is widely held that the possibility of value-incomparability between alternatives poses a serious threat to comparativism. Some comparativists have proposed to avoid this problem by supplementing the three traditional value relations with a fourth value relation, variously identified as "roughly equal" or "on a par", which is supposed to hold between alternatives that are incomparable by the three traditional value relations. However, in a recent article in this journal, Nien-he Hsieh has proposed that the comparisons (...) thought to require rough equality or parity could instead be understood in terms of the concept of "clumpiness". Against this suggestion, Martin Peterson has argued that the concept of clumpiness allows agents to be exploited in money-pumps, and thus that there is no way of linking clumpiness to rational choice. This would remove the central appeal of the concept. In this note, I show that Peterson’s argument fails to establish that the concept of clumpiness allows agents to be exploited in money-pumps. (shrink)

Intuitions are funny things. Intuitions would seem to be these fluid, temporary mental states that we form minute by minute. On the face of it, they would seem to have no real value. But, when we ask whether a particular theory is true, we usually turn to our intuitions. This is nowhere more prevalent than in moral theorizing. When we attempt to show that a particular moral theory is mistaken, we usually present cases that yield counterintuitive results for the (...) theory. For example, take the famous Trolley Car example. Suppose a trolley car is traveling down a steep street and is heading straight for a child. Suppose further that you have the means to push a button that will divert the trolley car to a different track thereby missing the child. But, if you push the button to save the one child, you will kill five other children standing on the other track to which the trolley car will be diverted. So the choice is do not push the button and let one child die, or push the button, saving, the one child, but killing five other children. What do you do? Such cases are common in moral theorizing and our intuitions concerning what we would do in such cases are usually taken as evidence for or against a moral theory. In the trolley car case, a utilitarian would say, ceteris paribus, you should not push the button diverting the trolley car. Since an action is morally right if and only if it produces more net good (say, pleasure), diverting the trolley car would result in more pain in the world and hence be the wrong action. But how do our intuitions evidentially fit into the case? Since our goal is to have a moral theory that coincides with our intuitions about cases, if our intuitions fit with the theory, then we have prima facie evidence for the theory. If our intuitions do not fit, then we have prima facie evidence against the theory. Concerning the trolley car case, if our intuitions are that we should not push the button, thus letting the single child die, then our intuitions count as evidence for the correctness of utilitarian moral theory. If we do not share the intuitions of the utilitarians, then it is said to count as evidence against the correctness of utilitarian moral theory. Thus, it is our intuitions that carry the evidential burden. Since most agents take their intuitions to have significant evidential weight, cases (such as the Trolley Car case) usually indicate something problematic with the theory in question. Yet, there has been considerable interest lately in the status of such a practice. This interest has in part surrounded the issue of whether the cases themselves pose a problem for moral theorizing. Such cases are sometimes called intuition pumps. These thought experiment-style cases are usually taken to elicit intuitions that count for or against a moral theory. But many have claimed that the reliance upon such intuition pumps in moral theorizing is unjustified. In this paper I will investigate this claim. First, I lay out what I take to be the problem of intuition pumps. In particular, the problem will surround (1) there always being the possibility of constructing new cases that “pump” people’s intuitions to the other side of a moral debate and (2) there being systematic and patterned disagreement as to what the “correct” intuitive response for a given case is. Next, I give an account of the structure and evidence-conferring status of intuitions. Then, given this account, I illustrate how we can and why we should appeal to the intuitions of experts to solve the problem of intuition pumps. Thus, I hope to show that the problem of intuition pumps is not a problem for moral theorizing. That is, the use of intuition pump-style cases in moral theorizing is prima facie justified. (shrink)

As part of current energy transitions in the Global North, households have begun adopting renewable energy technologies, such as heat pumps and solar power systems, in significant numbers. These changes give rise to the following question: how are technology and gender configured when new technologies enter everyday life? Based upon ethnographic fieldwork on interactions between households, technologies, and technicians and interviews with sales technicians, installers, and service mechanics, I demonstrate how both stable and fragile variants of renewable energy technologies (...) are enacted during prepurchase consultations and postpurchase installations, respectively. I employ science and technology studies scholarship, feminist ethics, and repair and maintenance studies—captured through the analytical lens of care—to analyze how technicians mobilize and tinker with gendered affection, knowledge, and action in households to effectuate adoption of renewable energy technologies. I clarify how, in this process, openings are created to configure both hegemonic and heterogeneous gender–technology relations. Finally, I advance discussion beyond gender issues by arguing that acknowledging the role of maintainability and the repair of user–technology relations in current energy transitions opens pathways not only for exploring gender in new and exciting ways in relation to technology but technician–user relationships as well. (shrink)

In recent years, a significant revolution has begun in social entrepreneurship, with public funding organizations and private investors beginning to pursue social purpose. At the heart of the revolution is the ambition of these entities to use innovation and entrepreneurship to sustain and scale impacts in support of social and environmental objectives. This article provides a framework that conceptualizes social innovation and finance as a multi-level and evolving complex system. Two trajectories of transformation, niche-regime and within-regime, are used to frame (...) a broad range of examples of impact entrepreneurship and social financing. Social finance is viewed as the key to release the ‘lock-in’ of social innovation, as it is able to gather and coordinate capital, resources, knowledge and ability. Using meta-analysis, the article explores the characteristics, dynamics and ecosystem of social innovation, impact entrepreneurship in China. The study maps the landscape of social finance in China and estimates there are untapped social finance opportunities worth from US$93 to US$208 billion. (shrink)

This paper develops transfinite extensions of transitivity and acyclicity in the context of population ethics. They are used to argue that it is better to add good lives, worse to add bad lives, and equally good to add neutral lives, where a life's value is understood as personal value. These conclusions rule out a number of theories of population ethics, feed into an argument for the repugnant conclusion, and allow us to reduce different-number comparisons to same-number ones. Challenges (...) to these arguments are addressed, including the issue of comparing existence and non-existence in terms of personal value, the possibility of minimal quanta of time and life, and the meaningfulness of measuring closeness between outcomes with different population sizes. An asymmetry is uncovered between transfinite cycles of worseness and betterness, supporting a version of the weak procreative asymmetry. Transfinite transitivity principles are also favourably compared to the better-known principles of continuity. (shrink)

The topic of this thesis is how we should treat tiny probabilities of vast value. This thesis consists of six independent papers. Chapter 1 discusses the idea that utilities are bounded. It shows that bounded decision theories prescribe prospects that are better for no one and worse for some if combined with an additive axiology. Chapter 2, in turn, points out that standard axiomatizations of Expected Utility Theory violate dominance in cases that involve possible states of zero probability. Chapters (...) 3–6 discuss the idea that we should ignore tiny probabilities in practical decision-making. Chapter 3 argues that discounting small probabilities solves the ‘Intrapersonal Addition Paradox’ and thus helps avoid the Repugnant Conclusion. Chapter 4 explores what the most plausible version of this view might look like and what problems the different versions have. Chapter 5 focuses on one type of problem, namely, money pumps. The Independence Money Pump, in particular, presents a difficult challenge for those who wish to discount small probabilities. Finally, Chapter 6 discusses the implications of discounting small probabilities for the value of the far future. (shrink)

This paper argues that, contrary to the claims of Alan Chalmers, Boyle understood his experimental work to be intimately related to his mechanical philosophy. Its central claim is that the mechanical philosophy has a heuristic structure that motivates and gives direction to Boyle's experimental programme. Boyle was able to delimit the scope of possible explanations of any phenomenon by positing both that all qualities are ultimately reducible to a select group of mechanical qualities and that all explanations of natural phenomena (...) are to be in terms of the operations of machines and are to appeal only to qualities that are already familiar. This is illustrated by his investigations into the Torricellian experiment. Boyle's explanation of the elevation of the mercurial cylinder by appeal to the spring of the air was an intermediate mechanical explanation. Boyle was convinced that the spring of the air was ultimately reducible to the mechanical qualities. This in turn had implications for his research into the cause of respiration. In a move that was both parsimonious and consistent with the broad requirements of the mechanical philosophy, Boyle was able to solve the problem of the cause of the inflow of air into the lungs by appeal to his research in pneumatics. This application of a mechanical explanation in pneumatics to physiology is just what one would expect if the mechanical philosophy was as universal as Boyle claimed it to be. Therefore, far from Boyle's experiments having a life of their own, they were clearly directed by and understood in terms of the mechanical philosophy.Keywords: Air-pump; Boyle; Chalmers; Experiment; Explanation; Mechanism. (shrink)

Corporate activities conducted under the banner of creating shared value (CSV) have gained popularity over the last decade, and some MNCs have espoused that CSV has entered the heart of their practices. There has, however, been criticism about the lack of a standard definition of CSV. The purpose of the current study was to develop a working definition of CSV by identifying distinctions between CSV and various conceptions of corporate social responsibility (CSR). We conducted 26 semi-structured interviews with managers (...) and stakeholder representatives of five multinational corporations (MNCs) and three small and medium enterprises (SMEs), all headquartered or rooted in Asia. These firms had received public recognition for their CSV engagement. We compared and contrasted interviewees’ conceptions and descriptions of CSV and traditional CSR (philanthropy) and mapped these against Carroll’s four-layer model of responsible corporate management. Interviewees tended to frame CSV as a sustainable business model that generates social and economic value simultaneously. Traditional CSR was characterized as “giving back” some of the surplus from economic returns. In addition, interviewees described examples of strategic CSR, which involved pump-priming interventions for empowering and enabling stakeholders of the CSV practices of the focal firm to participate in the associated wealth and well-being co-creation. Keywords: Corporate social responsibility, creating shared value, qualitative, Asia. (shrink)

Ethical reasoning of all types is anthropocentric, in that it is addressed to agents, but anthropocentric starting points vary in the preference they accord the human species. Realist claims about environmental values, utilitarian reasoning and rights-based reasoning all have difficulties in according ethical concern to certain all aspects of natural world. Obligation-based reasoning can provide quite strong if incomplete reasons to protect the natural world, including individual non-human animals. Although it cannot establish all the conclusions to which anti-speciesists aspire, it (...) may establish many of them with some clarity. (shrink)

A straightforward way to handle moral uncertainty is simply to follow the moral theory in which you have most credence. This approach is known as My Favourite Theory. In this paper, I argue that, in some cases, My Favourite Theory prescribes choices that are, sequentially, worse in expected moral value than the opposite choices according to each moral theory you have any credence in. In addition this, problem generalizes to other approaches that avoid intertheoretic comparisons of value, such (...) as My Favourite Option, the Borda Rule, Variance Normalization, and the Principle of Maximizing Expected Normalized Moral Value. (shrink)

One of the principles on how to act under moral uncertainty, My Favourite Theory, says roughly that a morally conscientious agent chooses an option that is permitted by the most credible moral theory. In defence of this principle, we argue that it prescribes consistent choices over time, without relying on intertheoretic comparisons of value, while its main rivals are either plagued by moral analogues of money pumps or in need of a method for making non-arbitrary intertheoretic comparisons. We (...) rebut the arguments that have been levelled against My Favourite Theory and offer some arguments against intertheoretic comparisons of value. (shrink)

This article argues for a new interpretation of the realist claim that politics is autonomous from morality and involves specific political values. First, this article defends an original normative source: functional normativity. Second, it advocates a substantive functional standard: political institutions ought to be assessed by their capacity to select and implement collective decisions. Drawing from the ‘etiological account’ in philosophy of biology, I will argue that functions yield normative standards, which are independent from morality. For example, a ‘good heart’ (...) is one that pumps blood well, and a good army is one that it is effective at exerting military force. I then interpret realism’s naturalistic conception of politics as an etiological function of social groups: namely making binding collective decisions under persistent disagreement. I conclude that political institutions should be evaluated realistically by how well they perform this task. Finally, I assess trade-offs between this functional political normativity and other moral values. I conclude that justice, fairness, freedom and equality remain obviously important concerns, but only once the basic political function is secured. (shrink)

Computationalism aspires to provide a comprehensive theory of life and mind. It fails in this task because it lacks the conceptual tools to address the problem of meaning. I argue that a meaningful perspective is enacted by an individual with a potential that is intrinsic to biological existence: death. Life matters to such an individual because it must constantly create the conditions of its own existence, which is unique and irreplaceable. For that individual to actively adapt, rather than to passively (...) disintegrate, expresses a value inherent in its way of life, which is the ultimate source of more refined forms of normativity. This response to the problem of meaning will not satisfy those searching for a functionalist or logical solution, but on this view such a solution will not be forthcoming. As an intuition pump for this alternative perspective I introduce two ancient foreign worldviews that assign a constitutive role to death. Then I trace the emergence of a similar conception of mortality from the cybernetics era to the ongoing development of enactive cognitive science. Finally, I analyze why orthodox computationalism has failed to grasp the role of mortality in this constitutive way. (shrink)

Performance Anxieties looks at the on-going debates over the value of psychoanalysis for feminist theory and politics--specifically concerning the social and psychical meanings of racialization. Beginning with an historicized return to Freud and the meaning of Jewishness in Freud's day, Ann Pellegrini indicates how "race" and racialization are not incidental features of psychoanalysis or of modern subjectivity, but are among the generative conditions of both. Performance Anxieties stages a series of playful encounters between elite and popular performance texts--Freud meets (...) Sarah Bernhardt meets Sandra Bernhard; Joan Riviere's masquerading women are refigured in relation to the hard female bodies in the film Pumping Iron II: The Women ; and the Terminator and Alien films. In re-reading psychoanalysis alongside other performance texts, Pellegrini unsettles relations between popular and elite, performance and performative. (shrink)

Some philosophers believe that two objects of value can be ‘roughly equal’, or ‘on a par’, or belong to the same ‘clump’ of value in a sense that is fundamentally different from that in which some objects are ‘better than’, ‘worse than’, or ‘equally as good as’ others. This article shows that if two objects are on a par, or belong to the same clump, then an agent accepting a few plausible premises can be exploited in a money-pump. (...) The central premise of the argument is that value is choice-guiding. If one object is more valuable than another, then it is not permitted to choose the less valuable object; and if two objects are equally valuable it is permitted to choose either of them; and if two objects are on a par or belong to the same clump it is also permitted to choose either of them. (shrink)

The concept of mental disorder is often defined by reference to the notion of mental dysfunction, which is in line with how the concept of disease in somatic medicine is often defined. However, the notions of mental function and dysfunction seem to suffer from some problems that do not affect models of physiological function. Functions in general have a teleological structure; they are effects of traits that are supposed to have a particular purpose, such that, for example, the heart serves (...) the goal of pumping blood. But can we single out mental functions in the same way? Can we identify mental functions scientifically, for instance, by applying evolutionary theory? Or are models of mental functions necessarily value-laden? I want to identify several philosophical problems regarding the notion of mental function and dysfunction and point out some possible solutions. As long as these questions remain unanswered, definitions of mental disorder that rest upon the concept of mental dysfunction will lack a secure foundation. (shrink)

Implanted medical devices—for example, cardiac defibrillators, deep brain stimulators, and insulin pumps—offer users the possibility of regaining some control over an increasingly unruly body, the opportunity to become part “cyborg” in service of addressing pressing health needs. We recognize the value and effectiveness of such devices, but call attention to what may be less clear to potential users—that their vulnerabilities may not entirely disappear but instead shift. We explore the kinds of shifting vulnerabilities experienced by people with Parkinson’s (...) disease (PD) who receive therapeutic deep brain stimulators to help control their tremors and other symptoms of PD. (shrink)

A cardinal κ is tall if for every ordinal θ there is an embedding j: V → M with critical point κ such that j > θ and Mκ ⊆ M. Every strong cardinal is tall and every strongly compact cardinal is tall, but measurable cardinals are not necessarily tall. It is relatively consistent, however, that the least measurable cardinal is tall. Nevertheless, the existence of a tall cardinal is equiconsistent with the existence of a strong cardinal. Any tall cardinal (...) κ can be made indestructible by a variety of forcing notions, including forcing that pumps up the value of 2κ as high as desired. (shrink)

I argue that any plausible decision theory for agents with incomplete preferences which obeys the Never Worse Principle will violate Transitivity. The Never Worse Principle says that if one option never does worse than another, you shouldn’t disprefer it. Transitivity says that if you prefer X to Y and you prefer Y to Z, then you should prefer X to Z. Violating Transitivity allows one to be money pumped. Although agents with incomplete preferences are already, in virtue of having incomplete (...) preferences, vulnerable to being money pumped, I argue that the money pump argument for Transitivity is more serious than the one for Completeness. (shrink)

Many abiotic and other signals are transduced in eukaryotic cells by changes in the level of free calcium via pumps, channels and stores. We suggest here that ion condensation should also be taken into account. Calcium, like other counterions, is condensed onto linear polymers at a critical value of the charge density. Such condensation resembles a phase transition and has a topological basis in that it is promoted by linear as opposed to spherical assemblies of charges. Condensed counterions (...) are delocalised and can diffuse in the so‐called near region along the polymers. It is generally admitted that cytoskeletal filaments, proteins colocalised with these filaments, protein filaments distinct from cytoskeletal filaments, and filamentous assemblies of other macromolecules, constitute an intracellular macromolecular network. Here we draw attention to the fact that this network has physicochemical characteristics that enable counterion condensation. We then propose a model in which the feedback relationships between the condensation/decondensation of calcium and the activation of calcium‐dependent kinases and phosphatases control the charge density of the filaments of the intracellular macromolecular network. We show how condensation might help mediate free levels of calcium both locally and globally. In this model, calcium condensation/decondensation on the macromolecular network creates coherent patterns of protein phosphorylation that integrate signals. This leads us to hypothesize that the process of ion condensation operates in signal transduction, that it can have an integrative role and that the macromolecular network serves as an integrative receptor. BioEssays 26:549–557, 2004. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

On the question of precisely what role common sense (or related datum like folk psychology, trust in pre-theoretic/intuitive judgments, etc.) should have in reigning in the possible excesses of our philosophical methods, the so-called ‘continental’ answer to this question, for the vast majority, would be “as little as possible”, whereas the analytic answer for the vast majority would be “a reasonably central one”. While this difference at the level of both rhetoric and meta-philosophy is sometimes – perhaps often – problematised (...) by the actual philosophical practices of representative philosophers of either tradition, I will argue that this norm (and its absence) nonetheless continues to play an important justificatory role in relation to the use of some rather different methodological practices. In particular, many analytic philosophers not only explicitly invoke the value of common sense, but they also implicitly value it via techniques like conceptual analysis that want to explicate folk psychology and/or lay bare what is already embedded in the linguistic norms of a given culture, the widespread use of thought experiments and the way they function as ‘intuition pumps’, as well as the general aim to achieve ‘reflective equilibrium’ between our intuitions and reflective judgments in epistemology and political philosophy. Such methods, I will argue, enshrine a conservative, or, more positively, a modest understanding of the philosophical project in that it is invested in cohering with both a given body of knowledge and common sense. These methods are notably less perspicuous in continental philosophy. To bring some of the reasons why this might be so to the fore, this paper considers Deleuze’s sustained attack on both good and common sense, which he argues are fundamental to the prevalence of a dogmatic image of thought. If Deleuze is right about this, and if the analytic tradition distils and perfects certain methods that are closely associated with this image of thought, then we have here a rather stark methodological contrast that calls for elaboration and evaluation. (shrink)

In our performance Entangled Speech, we connect the integration of microbial agency into a new complex ‘common good’ with the shared values of language. Drawing on a posthuman commons we aim for a hybrid language that not only processes formal symbols but also interacts with the microbes in the speaker’s mouth. We argue that the metaphors historically used to frame the relationship between microbiomes and speech cannot account for the co-creative material relationship between human speech and posthuman microbial, environmental and (...) biotechnological needs. In our performances, first we harvest sensitized microbes from a speaker’s mouth who had repeated those phonemes, which lead to a deviation of pH of saliva. This makes the microbes sensitive for the further processing: via a spectrogram, phonemes repetitively spoken by the audience drive pumps, which add pheromones to the microbes, the pheromones, which then are faded out. In the microbes, for some replication cycles, an ecological adaptation to the individual phonemes persists, which – in our definition – affirms some phonemes as ecological and others to be deleted, thereby changing the alphabetical order of the input word. Although parts of the process are digitally animated, the major parts develop in real time. We propose ‘microbial speech’ as a category beyond semantic meaning, with ecological qualities such as a transcorporeal mattering between words and the body. We aim at a language becoming a biological state in order to protect its own ecology. We propose a more entangled mode of microbes existing in common with language, affirming posthumanist transversal relations of all living and non-living matter. (shrink)

Hydromechanical continuously variable transmission is capable of bearing large torque and has wide transmission range, which is suitable for high-power tractors. Dynamic characteristics could influence the tractor life, especially in a high-power tractor. Wet clutch is the crucial component in the HMCVT, which could smooth and soft power transmission. Therefore, it is important to study the dynamic characteristics and implement the wet clutch test of HMCVT. In this paper, AMESim is used to establish virtual models of gearbox, pump-controlled hydraulic motor (...) system, and shifting hydraulic system. Then, a simulation study of tractor operation under working condition is carried out. The internal and external meshing forces of the planetary row are analyzed. Finally, the wet clutch engagement process of HMCVT in the high-power tractor is tested to verify the oil pressure. The simulation results show that the values of internal and external meshing force become larger as the throttle opening increases. At the moment of shifting change, the meshing forces of the planetary gear have great impact. The clutch test shows that the trend of the oil filling curve obtained from the bench test is similar to that obtained from the theoretical curve, which verifies the simulation results. (shrink)

In the epoch of Empire, the American economy is sustained by a global monetary circuit totally different front that of the imperialist period. Whilst the imperialist countries were constituted as « centres » of production, the contemporary US is no longer just a centre of absorption and evacuation of money which necessitates the existence of a financial pump to the outside. In becoming that pump, the Japanese economy became integral to the global market. The imperial monetary circuit also functions as (...) a mode of capture, particularly of value, that one can qualify as « financial » with regard to the classic « exploitation » of workers. This paper tries to demonstrate that ultimately the two modes of capture are nonetheless achieved by a single function of money. (shrink)

External pressure to determine the agenda of universities has systematically increased in the preceding decades. The content of university research and teaching is no longer established by the universities themselves but by the state, by patrons, by sponsors and by client. The authorities view universities as a means to advance regional competitiveness because they are capable of contributing to innovative technological development and because they form young people into creative and enterprising workers. Major companies see universities as centres to which (...) they can outsource research at relatively low cost. Students see universities as training centres that provide them with the competencies necessary to further their personal careers.But how do universities see themselves? Do they have their own vision of the kind of knowledge that ought to be developed and passed on? The days in which universities saw themselves unashamedly as Bildungscentra in which the elite enjoyed a humanist formation via critical confrontation with literature, art and science would appear to have passed.Universities have come to see themselves as players on a market. They have started to advertise their ‘products’ and ‘wares’, angling for students and research investments and pumping up their ‘public relations’ budgets to hitherto unknown levels. This market mentality explains the enormous fuss created by the appearance of the first university rankings.The lecture delivered by Ben Sowter during the 7th Ethical Forum that took place last year in Brussels continues to attract my attention.Sowter testified to the fact that the first report was put together in haste and was unprofessional. Everyone could see that it lacked cohesion, and even its creators presumed it was unlikely to cause a stir. Against every expectation, however, the commotion initiated by the report bordered on mass hysteria. Media attention and university interest was overwhelming. While later editions of the product demonstrated improvement, the scientific quality of such rankings continues to be the subject of discussion. One might ask, for example, what inspires universities to make such a fool of themselves why they are supposed to provide their students with a critical education and teach them to be careful when it comes to statistical research?The rankings case serves to illustrate that an uncritical belief in progress has found its way into our reflection on what universities ought to be today, couple with the idea that quality will find its way to the surface in a free market. Universities will improve, it is claimed, to the extent that they are able to perform better than other universities on the basis of all sorts of verifiable criteria.Mutual competition will force them to invest more and be more goal oriented. When this conviction is shared, it becomes more difficult to distinguish the language of the academic authorities from that of managers and politicians. It goes without saying that many an organisational technique and policy instrument that has proven itself of value in the business world has the potential to lead to thriftier and more streamlined universities, but the idea that competence based on verifiable criteria will lead to an improvement in qualitative output is a presupposition that can be called into question. It is not unequivocally clear that a university committed to a solicitous, honest and functional production and transfer of knowledge, attuned to the needs of society, will prosper.Our experience of the media suggests the contrary. In a commercial environment, the quality of news coverage, for example, appears to be under threat. The reasons for this also hold true for the universities. Ideas that are truthful and prudent ideas are vulnerable, costly, complex and difficult for the general public to distinguish from lies. Instant ideas are much more successful, cheaper and more attractive to the general public.Only specialists can see the difference, but the number of specialists is dwindling. The problems facing academics can be compared with those facing the other trades: those who take their professionalism seriously are never going to be rich. Doing so calls for enormous amount of time, energy and practice for relatively inconspicuous results. As is the case with a fully-fledged academic, the courage to take your professionalism seriously depends on the awareness that the end product is authentic. If academics are expected to achieve target figures, it won’t be long before this intrinsic motivation is exhausted to the point of extinction. If academics are forced to focus on quantity, all we can expect in the future will be researchers who can play it smart and skilled in pretending.The present edition of Ethical Perspectives contains two contributions on rankings that were initially presented during the 7th Ethical Forum: Patrick Loobuyck’s position and the conclusion offered by Philippe Van Parijs.The edition also contains a contribution on the question of consensus with respect to egalitarian liberal conviction that moral consensus no longer exists together with an article on moral disagreement. Ethics is a broad discipline in which more wide-ranging reflection is interspersed with particular discussions on often very concrete practices.Per Sandin’s introduction to the “ethics of firefighting” is an excellent example of just such a discussion. (shrink)

In this paper, we propose some ways in which teaching thought experiments in an ethics classroom may result in marginalizing or excluding students underrepresented in philosophy. Although thought experiments are designed to strip away details and pump intuitions, we argue that they may reinforce assumptions and stereotypes. As examples, we discuss several well-known thought experiments that may typically be included in undergraduate ethics courses, such as Bernard Williams’s Gauguin and Derek Parfit’s The Young Girl’s Child. We analyze the potential (...) class='Hi'>value and dangers or teaching these thought experiments. We conclude with some practical suggestions for how to teach thought experiments in ways that encourage students to expand their moral imaginations and think critically about their own assumptions and the assumptions built into thought experiments. (shrink)

Place mouse over image continent. 2.1 (2012): 36–39. From an ethical and political perspective, people and property can hardly be separated. Indeed, the modern political subject – that is, the individual, the person, the self, the autonomous actor, the rational self-interest maximizer, etc. – has taken shape in and through the elaboration, institutionalization, and enactment of that which rightfully belongs to it. This thread can be traced back perhaps most directly to Locke’s notion that the origin of the political state (...) occurs when people rise above the state of nature by ceding the power to prosecute offenses. The rule of law begins then with a defense of the right to property. People become subjects by adhering to the social contract, which they do by deferring the defense of their own property to the state. In this light, the response of the United States federal government to the financial crisis of 2008 appears to many as a breach of the social contract. The chant “banks got bailed out, we got sold out” states the claim plainly. Why exactly did some subjects (e.g., the banks) have their property defended by the state (i.e., through the variety of programs including TARP, the discount window at the US Federal Reserve, etc.), when other subjects (e.g., homeowners) found themselves without protection of their property rights, forced to default on mortgage debts and face dispossession? Even if the rhetoric about “too big to fail” can be believed, and the collapse of the financial system would lead to negative consequences for people who had little or no connection to the activities that brought it about, such consequences need not call into question the notion that everyone stands equally before the law. To occupy, then, appears as a form of civil disobedience, an intentional, retaliatory breach of the social contract by those who feel that they have lost the support of the state to which they ceded their power as sovereign agents. The visible and the invisible The violation of property rights of people who have recognition, protection and power under the law destabilizes their very status as citizens and tests the limit of democracy. Does the financial system force the dematerialized victimization of individuals? Do people become numbers, or worse still, percentages of unemployed, tranches of defaulted mortgages and foreclosures? Are they perhaps instead disenfranchised prospectively from the privileged position occupied by virtual entities and actors such as those involved in the derivatives markets, always already exiled back into the physical, visible realm? The line of conflict appears to be drawn between invisibility/absence/deferral and visibility/presence/realization. The demonstrators occupy an excess property of those subjects, namely, the banks and financial elite, who did receive recognition and protection under the law. By domesticating this excess property, rendering its invisibility visible within the political economy, the protesters raise a new form of threat to the hegemonic order. To occupy, then, involves a rejection of the order under which the “99%” have been subjected to erasure. The occupation seeks creatively to establish a new means of communication and law for its subjects. In the face of an existing power structure that is increasingly disenfranchising the majority of people while consolidating nodes of power and influence, the “occupation”, or the work of the Occupy movement, involves seizing a space that refuses the rules of the existing, allegedly corrupt sovereign state. This refusal of governance extends even to include a steadfast refusal to articulate a strategy, to formulate a list of demands, to converse with the sovereign power on the grounds of its own conventions, to put forth a leader, to resolve the ambiguity of the movement into a discreet identity, face, or voice. Do these tactics provide a resolution to the problem that was its genesis? Not in such a direct and easily resolved manner, but it remains difficult to imagine a direct and simple resolution to the problematic of the breach of the social contract. The ambiguity of the situation has generated significant interest within the broader populace, though many people sympathetic to the cause appear to be frustrated because the movement has not simply put forward a short list of concrete demands, or even a set of leaders and spokespeople, much less a resolution. And yet, this lack of coherence appears as a resolution of a problem generic to protest movements in the past, where individual leaders can be removed or discredited, and lists of demands can be co-opted by others holding more political power. Meanwhile, the ambiguity has compelled imitations on a global scale, with the Occupy Wall Street participants consciously taking actions that can be replicated by anyone anywhere without significant cost. These actions have taken place not in a peripheral location such as a parking lot in New Jersey, but instead close to the centers of power and governance, adjacent to Wall Street, close to the White House, on college campuses, etc. This spontaneous archipelago of protests becomes an irritant, a negation of the accepted order of protests, but when the protesters themselves move outside of their encampments, they are escorted by the police, constantly monitored and maintained so that a permanent state of paranoid persecution takes hold. To occupy, occupying, occupation – these actions involve a variable degree of danger – are you willing to step into a different space, where the rule of law is unclear and evolving? Are you presenting yourself as a representative of the majority, the 99%? Who has a sense of belonging to the 99%? This previously invisible population becomes a focal point of political power, garners increasing public support, infects the public dialogue. The government recognizes this population by forcing it from the occupied space, removing the element of possession of property. It is at this point of conflict, in the struggle to hold the physical property, where the greatest friction and violence occurs. Scaling the rule of law While occupied, the property calls for a redress of grievances, a restoration of the rule of law. The Occupy movement does not select and put forward individuals or leaders, it puts forward places – the occupied property represents the point of conflict, not the individual. And it is this very property that the government then tries to reclaim. The movement remains faceless, anonymous, uncounted, or rather counted only as a mass, the self-labeled mass of 99%. These spaces are like refugee camps or favelas, but constructed to unite the political life and private life of the protesters. This objective is presented as a tactical necessity, as all other means of protest and communication have failed, leaving only the option of seizing, holding, occupying a property. But to what end, exactly? Can anyone deliberately return to the prior social contract, embrace, affirm, and govern in strict accordance with the earlier relationship to property, following the logic of Locke’s arguments? In this respect, the contemporary crisis indicates a new, transitional phase in the way that property operates, or rather, in the balance between real and virtual value. The roots of the crisis lay in the massive overvaluation of property caused by lax lending practices, as more people were encouraged to borrow more money, which drove up the prices of property. At the same time, these individual properties, these mortgages for homes actual families lived in and worked to support, were bundled into securities that could be bought, sold, and speculated on. The reduction of a physical house or piece of real estate to an almost incalculably small element in an investment vehicle appears as a scaling of the hedge that radically diminishes the value of any individually owned property. Moreover, a number of recently-innovated financial products allow investors to hedge in new ways, to deliberately spread risk around a portfolio in hopes of bringing returns even when the individual mortgage defaults. At the level of the ‘free’ market, these virtual negative valuations are designed to balance the physical positive valuation, though many of the biggest lenders are now being investigated for controlling both sides of this valuation, the positive and the negative, to facilitate both the creation and failure of the investments and to profit from both. The ability to benefit from both the negative and positive value of an investment is a result of a technologically enabled capacity to operate within a complex field. These layered and scaled investment vehicles and the simultaneous negation of their value together represent a commingling of the virtual and physical existence that is both complex and multiple. The valuation of a virtual property has tremendous power to change the valuation of the physical - either injecting it with or depriving it of funds, pumping in or draining life and energy. This situation has roots of its own – the notion of property advanced e.g., throughout the enclosure movement in Britain was, from the outset, an imposition of virtuality (i.e., the concept of law, the institutions associated with ownership, etc.) on the physical reality of land. 1 The difference today is that technological trading platforms combined with innovations within the financial services industry have enabled the reduction of each individual property receiving or losing value in scale to an almost atomic level. In turn, the number of properties held simultaneously and valued as a massive, multiple wholes – i.e., the derivatives market in mortgage-backed securities – is a new phenomenon made possible through the application of similar technologies and institutional structures. And those actors who can trade in these layers of complexity can then profit from the new phase of disassociation of the virtual and the physical – unconcerned with and operating at such a virtual distance from the individual residing physically on a particular piece of real estate that they no longer feel the tug of the physical tying them back to the physical, operating literally as in a video game, in a virtually distanced world. What can or should be done about this situation? Answers lie outside the scope of this current essay, but merit consideration in the near future… NOTE 1) Hernando de Soto has emphasized this dimension by empirically demonstrating its non-existence in many countries in The Mystery of Capital. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Gaining a Heart But Missing MyselfLeilani R. GrahamI gathered it in my hands as it fell from my hair-brush, too saturated to hold anymore. It felt as if I were inside a movie and waiting for someone to yell “Cut!” but no call came. It continued to fall, feather-like onto the ground, individual strands glinting in the light of the bathroom window. My hair, nearly all of it, was (...) gone.Between the time of my heart transplant and the moment my hair began to fall out, I arguably had suffered enough. Transplant brought four open-heart surgeries, ten days on ECMO, an intra-aortic balloon pump, delirium, necrotizing pneumonia, and so much muscular atrophy that I had to re-learn how to walk. CPR, broken ribs, and the scar of a tricuspid clip from a botched biopsy: it was not the miracle I was hoping for.The internal trauma had certainly taken its toll. I no longer knew how I really felt, thanks to copious pain meds that altered my mind and body. Each limb was foreign as I re-acclimated to how one grabs hold of a cup, signs their name, touches their legs. Externally, I was a mess: covered in deep purple bruises across my torso from the diabetes treatments, dead skin pooling in unwashed pores, my ankles swollen and indiscernible from my legs. But lacking a good mirror (or the desire to find one), I still felt like “myself” during my forty-five day hospital stay. I could feel my cheekbones protruding from thinning skin, saw through unfocused eyes from the tempestuous blood sugars, and my hair sat in a rat’s nest atop my head; but I was still me.Arriving home, I felt like a newborn being brought into the real world for the first time. I needed help with everything—showers, sitting up, putting on shoes, even going to the bathroom. At age twenty-four, I felt I had regressed to the point of no return as I relied on others to do the simplest tasks. In addition, I was quarantined inside for three months, due to the risk of obtaining a fungal infection from the outside. Caged, and alone in my body, I a trapped and wounded tiger: angry, hurting, and scared. [End Page 109]When I had been prepared for transplant—and I use “prepared” loosely because the information packet I was handed was insulting at best—I knew to expect the scars. I had no issue with that, having been cut open at my throat and chest for previous surgeries. I knew to expect a 12-inch line from neck to navel: the most evident sign I would now carry that I was disabled.What I did not expect were the bullet holes— the sealed entrances of thick chest tubes that now dotted my lower torso. I did not anticipate the bruises on my arms and groin from arterial pokes. I felt violated as if I had walked into some kind of abduction and was rolled out, beaten, bruised, and, worst, touched.But it wasn’t the physical trauma that hurt the most. It was that no one seemed surprised.Immediately after transplant, the team’s focus is purely on survival. Survive the 30 days post-surgery. Survive the year. Metrics, uncomfortably tied to transplant center success statistics, funding, and clout have little to do with the patients themselves. What did I care to only survive a year? I wanted years. I wanted decades. It felt I wanted more than anyone was willing to pay attention to.The conversation was narrowed to high-risk issues: infection, rejection, or other life-threatening conditions. While this makes sense on a clinical level, what constitutes a major event for a clinician may not be of the same emotional value to the patient. In my case, I was less occupied by how the steroids were working and more obsessed with their side effects, such as how much weight I was rapidly gaining. I walked into the clinic one day with the beginnings of stretch marks and a week later had claw-like ripples down my sides. My mood swings were explosive... (shrink)

ABSTRACT At some point between 1684 and 1698 a Dartmouth tradesman started to perform experiments with the power of steam in his workshop. In the course of this investigation Thomas Newcomen discovered how to cause a partial vacuum by rapid condensation under a piston and incorporated this prime mover within an engine that was consistently reliable and proved commercially viable for draining mines. Consensus is that his initial apparatus was partly derived from an air pump, however historians have debated how (...) this isolated ironmonger could have garnered sufficient theoretical understanding to pursue such a line of enquiry, let alone the know-how to make suitable devices and mechanisms. Just how remote was Newcomen from London ‘science’? This paper examines his relational connections, identifying potential links with Denis Papin, Robert Hooke and an authority on mine pumps, Christopher Kirkby. The case of Newcomen illustrates the proliferation of modern ideas and values through relational networks, and, most importantly, the know-how to innovate. (shrink)

In this essay we review a number of values and conflicts involved in human nutrition in order to clarify the sources of resistance to accepting a pump-fed patient on the part of nursing home nurses. The case illustrates the complexities of our feelings and values in the area of intrusion showing the need for continued reflection upon and revision of our intuitive reactions. The case also displays conflict resolution.

continent. 2.2 (2012): 155–158 Michel Serres. Biogea . Trans. Randolph Burks. Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing. 2012. 200 pp. | ISBN 9781937561086 | $22.95 Conveying to potential readers the significance of a book puts me at risk of glad handing. It’s not in my interest to laud the undeserving, especially on the pages of this journal. This is not a sales pitch, but rather an affirmation of a necessary work on very troubled terms: human, earth, nature, and the problematic world we made. (...) It is this world that aspirates the silence (so to speak), and therefore the subject which, along with the development of the “made world” exports the excess augmentation of the cosmically missing, this silence of the natural, et cetera. Had we learned from Locke that lesson of “labor,” to consume what we need… but perhaps we need more than what matters? Serres’ Biogea has several functions on this manner, if it is indeed a book to be consumed. First, readers searching for novelistic entertainment have a place to dwell. Biogea deserves a place in your back pocket; biographical generosity and poetic fluidity should satisfy most textual fetishes. For lay philosophers who want to refresh their acumen, Biogea deserves a place on the book shelf, one already reads a sorely needed postmodern tune-up here. Serres’ style is clearly French; he leaves few cheese crumbs on his words, rather preciseness and breathing in the work give way to a sweeping manner that breaks the narrative line of sight. A circular narrative and anachronistic fragmentation of terms allows an abyssal atmosphere to swell, if only to pump into the book the externality of its broader text. Biogea aspires to a higher standard and the book, at times, is thinking this negentropic problem too. Univocal, the publisher, has crafted a book appropriate for the hands to hold and the translations are an achievement of an otherwise difficult writer to translate. Terms are the conditions of a broader text. It is important to note that Serres’ content is as much a thinking of terminal ports. There is a regard for the transportation technology of the written word. For me, this is the mark of genius, a craftiness that tells of a book device that I may trust. Serres is an accomplished thinker and a necessary voice to check the putative trendiness of anti-postmodernist and market-driven theory of endless cultural liquidation. Offering interventions on subjectivity as an open system we are given a chance to affirm the human, not merely to discard it, but to engage its poetic image emotion, the calibratory silent sense of the analogic world; the terms on which we base our efforts. 1 The human is the center of its own negation, constantly mediating it. Something deeper at stake appears in the work then, and it is quite obvious from the onset. Certainly, a book is an intensification of possible text and those who brought this actual book into existence have captured a rarity in regards to the subject matter and artistic accomplishment. I mentioned terms as conditions, so let us understand Biogea as bio-yea, a yes to bios . An affirmation of living and accepting presence for all of its defiance of images, words, and things temporal. Therefore Serres’ existence and its existants plays parts; out of linearity and still like a porous bone pumping blood it manufactures into the fleshy life it becomes. Starting from a man named silence chaos emerges, or the man “Old Taciturn” takes up a journey anticipating a great flood. In other words, a development akin to the one in Genesis. In dealing with this ancestral occupation, fusing Genesis with contemporary philosophical terms, Serres initiates this anachronistic fragmentation under the forming subjectivity of his own autobiography. This mutation in the open system is precisely one of Serres’ terms. There an abyss is at work, stated, but also measured by heels on the ground—the abyss dispatching earthen tensions, that which plays our tunes, that which we abide by and recognize in volcanoes, rivers, oceans, earthquakes and weaponry in the battles of the world. Set in later stages of the book, such tensions are harnessed through scientific principles in an attempt to unify the terms of natural force if only to terminate the world. Thus the elevation of the earth into the world is clearly set forth. Here already, and few pages in, a resonance is set forth under appellations such as the river Garonne, a subjectivity as much as it is inhuman, the river is the inhuman that makes us human. I get the sense that Serres is taking up a challenge issued by Wallace Stevens; namely, that the great poems of heaven and hell have been written, but that only the poem of the earth has resisted composition. 2 On this level we cannot avoid the killing factor of silence, given that our cognition blocks its pure, radical obliteration. Thus a silence of attunement to the earth is in a novel dialectic of the rithmic and rhythm. A technological world, a triumph of termination is set forth. If a text imposes its will given the reader who authorizes it, it is made to convey or convect a presupposition to a reader or its inhabitant(s). Text is therefore both, in-content, contenting, contentedness, and in reading it, a way to navigate self-destruction (dis-content). Here then would one note that the “inhuman” reveals itself, “an aperiodic rhythm of lovers and beloved…the sea as our friend…but as our enemy…maternal vivifying sea.” The sea is an open book, or vaginal birth canal, where the engagement of text comes forth: “…woman sea, open vulva.” One sees like the sea, but only after it, when the uninhabitable truth of inhabiting it switches the polarity of the sailors soul: “I was seeing like the sea” (9-11). In other words, we are invited to embrace the nonsense of the visible. At this point I am taken to Jean-François Lyotard’s work The Inhuman , specifically the first entry on negentropy that would be congruent with Serres’ thematic. 3 The human being exports, deports, or transplants its relation through text, through the system— and this is its sense or relation to silence, to music. Unaware of Serres’ proximity to this work, the concept of gender interrelation as regards a solar catastrophe runs clear. It would be, on this basis, that Serres references his peers, the other texts that, as mentioned above, are discarded in philosophy today. For students of philosophy what we have here is perhaps a gift, a needed project. If silence and death are at work, there is a political valence to deal with, and here, much like the domain of the text and the dominion of the reader, we confront the world of natural, fluid violence. The anti-postmodernist critique is in part based on a weak idea that the loss of ideology, of a world vision, motivates the “correlationist” project. 4 Serres seems to offer another way to view this when he notes that whereas persons “sometimes kill,” it is clearly “the collective” that “always kills” (17). What is the collective today, if not an organizing function we never see yet acts in its favor in the name of truth? One feels a sense of enigma here, if only to link to what Stevens remarked of communism as a “grubby faith,” providing this applies for capitalism as well, namely any ideology of progress overly interested in absolutes. Here we get the sense that the inhuman, silence, this type of killing, always killing, could not be matched by human-made, political dynamos. Or that if it comes to an equilibrium, a catastrophe is never too far from us to read with our heels. We are left to note that the forces of nature presuppose and permeate political systems, the more these systems obtain force, the more the system takes upon itself the proper name of nature that motivates its dissemination, albeit falsely. This note, that in an age of ecocide and technological captivity (sustainability and transparency) political regimes won’t grow our soul-learning ears any larger than our tongues, stands clear to us. The promise of technological desubjectification is here pushed aside. Regarding politics, Serres illustrates this fact: Where did this corpse come from? Who was it? Who killed it? I don’t know. I won’t try to find out. I refuse to get vengeance for it. And I only see Garonne. For our victims, today, are the rivers, too. Their waters have irrigated my life, enchanted my thought, invigorated my body; I’ve known them to be threatening, untamable, as dangerous as the sea when it rages. Yes, murderous. They decided to control their courses; dams, sometimes senseless, destroying sites and valleys, reduced entire populations to servile displacements; programs for the irrigation of thirsty farmland, often beneficial of course, completed their drying up.(22) Serres enters into his idea concerning the captivity of language from the natural into a world system: For thousands of years, we have been licking things with our tongues, covering and daubing them so as to appropriate things for ourselves. If language boils down to a convention, this convention took place between the speakers without consulting the thing named, become as a result the property of those who covered it in this way with their drawn or voiced productions. Malfeasance analyzes these acts of appropriation. Thus every inert object, every living thing as well, sleeps under the covers of signs, a little in the way that, today, a thousand posters shouting messages and ugly riots of color drown, with their filthy flood, the landscapes, or better, exclude them from perception because the meaning, almost nil, of this false language and these base images forms an irresistible source of attraction to our neurons and eyes. This appropriation covers the world’s beauty with ugliness. (38-39) Technological concealment coming to bear, we begin to get a sense of another commentary on the condition of sensing, driving home the necessity of a text dealing with such subject matter to be what its terms insist. Thus toward new openings: The new opening. As low beneath our feet as you like, the Biogea opens us to another space, high enough for us to be able to acquire a wisdom there, that of redeveloping this same place differently from our fathers, this place that’s still politically cut up by old hatreds, beneath the flood of tears and blood that we call history. Without this soft place, spiritually very old, but newly conceived in this way, without the juridical construction of a common good, opposed to our filthy ownership, I don’t see how our planet, hard, will survive. Hardness that depends on a softness, material belonging that depends on this temporary rented location (51). Serres enters into a summit on the content and the structure of his work. Archimedes is brought in with the concept of three volcanoes. Meaning fire, but as well earth, water, air. For it was Archimedes’ war machines that sought to lift the earth, thus bringing in the question of principles of science: “can a principle be invented while controlling its consequences?” (66-7). May the earth be put in a sentence, terminated by terminology, appellations, gone wild? By means of these element-dominating laws, this old physicist began to tear nature away from the ancient myths; by a strange return, today we’re plunging our successes back into the anxieties and terrors from which that ancient physics was born. Yes, our new history of science and technology is plunging, today, as though in a loop, into the fundamental human myths from which Empedocles’ first laws came. A major progression and a regression on the nether side of the origins. Consequently, the contemporary time requires that we try to return to that unity in which the principles of hate and love are at the same time human, living, inert and global. We will never attain a deontology of our knowledge and actions without thinking the subjective, the objective, the collective, and the cognitive all together simultaneously. Here, hate and love are the result of these four components.(71) Working then on the concept of fire-starting mirrors to the atomic annihilation of the Second War, Serres works into the subjectivity in question on the matter of rhythm—say rithmic— precisely at that point: Knowledge is changing today. The all-political is dying; the monarchy of the sciences said to be hard is coming to a close. The science of the things of the world will have to communicate just as much as the things of the world do, which do it much better than humans do, who don’t always want to do it. Let’s celebrate two changes this morning. The first one strikes a new blow to our narcissism. No, knowledge and the world don’t resemble our analytical enjoyments of refined cutting up, of endless debates and of exclusions full of hate. They, on the contrary, form a bloc and a sum, alliance and alloys. Uniting the fields of knowledge among themselves the way the things are connected among themselves, the second newness puts into place sets united by interlacing, webs and simplexes that combine with the things of the world, themselves combined, the combined knowledge that understands them.(130-1) Biogea closes on its opening flood thematic, approaching the initial telos of Genesis. Here the trees are brought into a position with atmosphere, the opaque abyssal reservoir, the tomb of the sun, sea in the polarity of the earthen heaven and hell. The poem of the earth then is silent but deadly, indeed, as funny as that phrase is, mainly a tomb gas. The meaning of the living and the non-meaning of things converge in the muteness of the world; this meaning and non-meaning plunge there and come out, the ultimate eddy. Mundus patet: through a fissure, through an opening, a fault, a cleft come noises, calls as small as these apertures. I’m listening, attentive, I’m translating, I’m advancing in the scaled-down meaning and science. Mundus patet: should the world open greatly, it will launch me into its silence. The totality remains silent. Knowledge expanded in elation. White origin of meaning, fountain of joy. (198) Final Remarks One test of a review is the long term trajectory the referee thinks the book will have. I see Serres’ text lending greatly into the vision of Biogea . In fact, in the vision of the novel inquiries of Stephen Jay Gould’s work there is something to be thought on the level of the individual and the species; namely, that humanity and its uniqueness is in its deferral, its thinking and naming, a thinking surrounded by silence that filters into everything, that pulls us through the world, the kinetic pulse we recognize, and all of that we cleave away in the base philosophical maxim of difference itself. Unique individuals are spatial creatures: we dwell, and we ought to get good at it. Yet this is an imaginative space that, if you are crazy enough to believe it, de-term-ine the conditions of its own terms. That is why we are not merely creating spaces on the acceleration of time, or so this ignoramus thinks, to accidentally transcend. Imagination already has this insatiable silence that we drink up and fail to manifest. Space is timeless. The imagination itself, shared by humans for themselves, their objects, and the species as a whole, is a non-defined space of relation; a whole human trajectory as part of nature, and part of worlds that are the other side of thinking nature, the consequence of it, at least our attempt to do so. Our survival is based on our deliberation, our caution, our natural deconstructive sense toward this silence that is already part of the song, sung, singing of this century without end. Good books will let us inhabit this space and recognize a form of life. Serres’ text moves toward dwelling, as noted, in masterful and accessible ways. The pitched battles are the falling replays of anemic and dead politics. As soon as we realize there is humanity, we may be able to enjoy the end of it, our inhuman capability of listening to silence. NOTES 1. See Michel Serres. The Parasite . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2007. 2. Wallace Stevens, “Imagination as Value” [ca. 1945], in Collected Poetry and Prose . New York: The Library of America. 1997. 724-39. 3. Jean-François Lyotard. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time . Trans. Geoffrey Bennington & Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 1992. 4. See the introduction: Quentin Melliassoux. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency . Trans. Ray Brassier. New York: Continuum. 2008. EDITOR'S NOTE: This review was updated on August 8, 2012. Substantial edits include block quotes from the book under review as well as the inclusion of comments from the author. (shrink)

Since market scoring rules have become popular as a form of market maker, it seems worth reviewing just what such mechanisms are intended to do. The main function performed by most market makers is to serve as an intermediary between people who prefer to trade at different times. Traders who have the same favorite times to trade can show up together to an ordinary continuous double auction, and then make and accept offers to trade. But when traders have different favorite (...) times, a market maker can help them by first making offers that some of them will accept, and then later making opposite offers which others will accept. By adjusting prices in his favor, a market maker can even profit from providing this service. By making offers, however, a market maker opens himself up to the risk of losing to informed traders who know more than he about asset values. It is a complex and difficult task to choose the price and duration of offers in order to profit the most from intermediary trades while suffering the least from informed trades. This task requires subtle judgments about the relative fraction of informed and intermediary trades at different times, prices, quantities, and trading histories. No simple algorithm could reasonably claim to do this task optimally. Very active markets have little need for market makers, as anyone can trade at anytime. In markets with large but sporadic trades, a human will likely find it profitable to apply their considerable intelligence to the complex task of market making. The question is what to do for smaller less-active markets, which cannot afford such human attention. Trading may simply not happen there if no intermediary can be found to make such markets. A computer program with less than human intelligence that attempts to make markets runs the risk of being out-smarted by human traders. Humans might even figure out how to turn that program into a money pump, giving up cash each time it is run through some cycle of trades.. (shrink)

A critique of a kind of 'moral realism' that is in fact a rather thinly disguised version of global historicist idealism. If you don't like the idea that facts are hard and values are soft, you can pump up the values to make them as hard as the facts or soften down the facts to make them as soggy as the values. Lovibond prefers the latter strategy. After some critical remarks about Lovibond's book (including its implicit authoritarianism) I conclude with (...) some equally critical remarks about McDowell's blurb. Unusually for a review and for a first publication, this has actually been cited in the literature, for instance in the second edition of Platts' *Ways of Meaning*. (shrink)