Noah Rosenberg et al.'s 2002 article “Genetic Structure of Human Populations” reported that multivariate genomic analysis of a large cell line panel yielded reproducible groupings (clusters) suggestive of individuals' geographical origins. The paper has been repeatedly cited as evidence that traditional notions of race have a biological basis, a claim its authors do not make. Critics of this misinterpretation have often suggested that it follows from interpreters' personal biases skewing the reception of an objective piece of scientific writing. I contend, (...) however, that the article itself to some degree facilitates this misrepresentation. I analyze in detail several verbal and visual features of the original article that may predispose aspects of its racial interpretation; and, tracing the arguments of one philosopher and one popular science writer, I show how these features are absorbed, transformed into arguments for a biological basis of race, and re-attributed to the original. The essay demonstrates how even slight ambiguities can enable the misappropriation of scientific writing, unintentionally undermining the authors' stated circumspection on the relationship between cluster and race. (shrink)

The release of genetically engineered organisms into the shared environment raises scientific, ethical, and societal issues. Using some form of democratic deliberation to provide the public with a voice on the policies that govern these technologies is important, but there has not been enough attention to how we should connect public deliberation to the existing regulatory process. Drawing on lessons from previous public deliberative efforts by U.S. federal agencies, we identify several practical issues that will need to be addressed if (...) relevant federal agencies are to undertake public deliberative activities to inform decision‐making about gene editing in the wild. We argue that, while agencies may have institutional capacity to undertake public deliberative activities, there may not be sufficient political support for them to do so. Advocates of public deliberation need to make a stronger case to Congress about why federal agencies should be encouraged and supported to conduct public deliberations. (shrink)

Why do racist oppression and capitalist exploitation often seem so inescapable and intractable? To describe and explain adequately the persistence of racist ideology, to specify its role in the maintenance of racial capitalism, and to imagine the conditions of its abolition, we must understand racist ideology as a form of false consciousness. False consciousness gets things “right” at the level of appearance, but it mistakes that appearance for a “deep” or essential truth. This chapter articulates a novel, positive account of (...) first-order false consciousness, which occurs in the case of false beliefs about the world that are sustained and superficially justified by objective social arrangements, and of second-order false consciousness, which occurs in the case of false beliefs about how one has come to hold the beliefs that one does. To dismantle racist ideology requires political movements that craft theoretical interventions highlighting the inessentiality and contingency of despised racial groups’ oppressed status, as well as practical interventions aimed at directly undermining the oppressive conditions that are reflected in racist beliefs about the “naturalness” or “appropriateness” of these groups’ degraded status. (shrink)

I present a new perspective on the meaning of indistinguishability of classical particles. This leads to a solution to the problem in statistical mechanics of justifying the inclusion of a factor N! in a probability distribution over the phase space of N indistinguishable classical particles.

In my time at The Hastings Center, the projects I've worked on have intersected in fascinating ways, but one through line has impressed me as especially important: centering the experiences and needs of people and communities most affected by the issue at hand.

The development of technologies for gene editing in the wild has the potential to generate tremendous benefit, but also raises important concerns. Using some form of public deliberation to inform decisions about the use of these technologies is appealing, but public deliberation about them will tend to fall back on various forms of heuristics to account for limited personal experience with these technologies. Deliberations are likely to involve narrative reasoning—or reasoning embedded within stories. These are used to help people discuss (...) risks, processes, and fears that are otherwise difficult to convey. In this article, we identify three forms of collective narrative that are particularly relevant to debates about modifying genes in the wild. Our purpose is not to privilege any particular narrative, but to encourage people involved in deliberations to make these narratives transparent. Doing so can help guard against the way some narratives—referred to here as “crafted narratives”—may be manipulated by powerful elites and concentrated economic interests for their own strategic ends. (shrink)

Marxism is a materialist theory that centers economic life in its analysis of the human social world. This materialist orientation manifests in explanations that take economic class to play a fundamental causal role in determining the emergence, character, and development of race-and sex-based oppression—indeed, of all forms of identity-based oppression within class societies. To say that labor is mediated by class in a class-based society is to say that, in such societies, the class-based division of that activity which produces and (...) reproduces the human species is the definite form in which labor appears, and that the human life which is the product of that self-making activity bears its stamp. Marxism’s emphasis on economic factors as central in the constitution and development of human life has been seized upon as evidence of its alleged “class reductionism”—its supposed tendency to think of all aspects of human life as direct and simple expressions of a class relation. No such thing follows; quite the opposite, a correct understanding of the relationships among capitalism, racism, and sexism only further highlights how central the struggle against each is to the struggles against any of the others. (shrink)

Behavioral evidence for the COVIS dual‐process model of category learning has been widely reported in over a hundred publications (Ashby & Valentin, ). It is generally accepted that the validity of such evidence depends on the accurate identification of individual participants' categorization strategies, a task that usually falls to Decision Bound analysis (Maddox & Ashby, ). Here, we examine the accuracy of this analysis in a series of model‐recovery simulations. In Simulation 1, over a third of simulated participants using an (...) Explicit (conjunctive) strategy were misidentified as using a Procedural strategy. In Simulation 2, nearly all simulated participants using a Procedural strategy were misidentified as using an Explicit strategy. In Simulation 3, we re‐examined a recently reported COVIS‐supporting dissociation (Smith et al., ) and found that these misidentification errors permit an alternative, single‐process, explanation of the results. Implications for due process in the future evaluation of dual‐process theories, including recommendations for future practice, are discussed. (shrink)

The sudden appearance in the fossil record of the major animal phyla apparently records a phase of unparalleled, rapid evolution at the base of the Cambrian period, 545 Myr ago. This has become known as the Cambrian evolutionary ‘explosion’, and has fuelled speculation about unique evolutionary processes operating at that time. The acceptance of the palaeontological evidence as a true reflection of the evolutionary narrative has been criticised in two ways: from a reappraisal of the phylogenetic relationships of the early (...) fossils, and from predicitions of molecular divergence times, based on six appropriate metazoan genes. Phylogenetic analysis of the arthropods implies an earlier, Precambrian history for most clades, and hence an extensive period of cladogenesis unrecorded by fossils. A similar argument can be applied to molluscs, lophophorates and deuterostomes. Molecular evidence implies divergence between clades to at least 1000 Myr ago. The apparent paradox between the sudden appearance of recognisable metazoans and their extended evolutionary history might be explained by a sudden Cambrian increase in body size, which was accompanied by skeletisation. A new paradigm suggests that the ‘explosion’ in the record may have been decoupled from the evolutionary innovation. (shrink)

As will be argued in what follows, the central question of the death penalty is the question of time. That question begins, in the present case, with the time of a writing that attempts to address what we call current events, particularly an academic writing—as distinct, for example, from journalistic writing—whose rhythms of composition and publication obey particular protocols and render problematic the specifics of what we call political intervention, the relevance or efficacy of which is normally determined by a (...) certain “punctuality.” Hence Zola’s “J’accuse,” a paradigm within the genre of public intellectual intervention, published in L’Aurore on 13 January 1898. I do not know how to resolve the tension .. (shrink)

In _The Gift of Death_, Jacques Derrida's most sustained consideration of religion to date, he continues to explore questions introduced in _Given Time_ about the limits of the rational and responsible that one reaches in granting or accepting death, whether by sacrifice, murder, execution, or suicide. Derrida analyzes Patocka's _Heretical Essays on the History of Philosophy_ and develops and compares his ideas to the works of Heidegger, Levinas, and Kierkegaard. A major work, _The Gift of Death_ resonates with much of (...) Derrida's earlier writing and will be of interest to scholars in anthropology, philosophy, and literary criticism, along with scholars of ethics and religion. "_The Gift of Death_ is Derrida's long-awaited deconstruction of the foundations of the project of a philosophical ethics, and it will long be regarded as one of the most significant of his many writings."—_Choice_ "An important contribution to the critical study of ethics that commends itself to philosophers, social scientists, scholars of relgion... [and those] made curious by the controversy that so often attends Derrida."—_Booklist _ "Derrida stares death in the face in this dense but rewarding inquiry.... Provocative."—_Publishers Weekly_. (shrink)

This essay considers together two recent posthumous publications by Derrida: Geschlecht III, and La vie la mort, both of which raise questions concerning translation. In Geschlecht III that is first of all the problem of how to translate the German word, how Heidegger’s reading of Trakl profits from, or loses in its translation, and how Derrida’s reading of Heidegger either does or does not translate Heidegger’s own interpretive practice. Reference to La vie la mort enables analysis of Benjamin’s concept of (...) translation as a form of life that is “not limited to organic corporeality,” and consequently allows me to understand how Derrida’s thinking, very different from that of either Benjamin or Heidegger, takes us way back to something like originary inorganic lifedeath. (shrink)

Summary For Thomas Edison, experiencing a failure did not mean that he had failed. Through an examination of the process that led to his invention of the carbon microphone, I argue that his positive approach to failure contributed both to his success as an inventor and to the functional success of his inventions. Edison's laboratory notebooks and legal testimony reveal that his seemingly erratic approach and reliance on trial and error methods in fact had a consistent direction and a rational (...) basis, well suited to the under-determined problems he faced. The outcome of this process, the carbon microphone, contributed significantly to the commercial success of the telephone and remains in use today. Thomas Hughes has observed that nineteenth century inventors made use of the unexpected behaviour of their inventions as sources of novel phenomena to exploit in new inventions. This paper identifies other ways in which Edison made use of failure and proposes that, paradoxically, the success of technological artefacts can be determined by the thoroughness with which failure is pursued in their creation. It also notes a parallel between Edison's instrumentalizing of failure and the way in which recent philosophers of science have proposed that scientists should make use of error. (shrink)

The dorsal turn -- Facades of the other : Heidegger, Althusser, Levinas -- No one home : Homer, Joyce, Broch -- A line drawn in the ocean : Exodus, Freud, Rimbaud -- Friendship in torsion : Schmitt, Derrida -- Revolutions in the darkroom : Balázs, Benjamin, Sade -- The controversy of dissidence : Nietzsche.

The notion of a ‘machinery of death’ not only underwrites abolitionist discourse but also informs what Derrida's Death Penalty refers to as an anesthesial drive that can be traced back at least as far as Guillotin. I read it here as a symptom of a more complex relation to the technological that functions across the line dividing life from death, and which is concentrated in the question of the instant that capital punishment requires. Further indications of such a relation include (...) the forms of automatic machinism that regulate, on one hand, the generalisable certainty that death occurs, and on the other, the discursive contagion that the death penalty generates. But it can be analysed most productively in the way in which the putative instantaneity of an execution reveals how life is severed from, but also perhaps tethered to death by means of a machinery of time; how that machinery of time ‘abandons’ its indifference in order to decide the moment of death by execution, and at the same time, by contriving an instant at which death takes over from life, produces the uncanny result of having life and death meet on the same knife-edge. (shrink)

Deconstruction and the Visual Arts brings together a series of new essays by scholars of aesthetics, art history and criticism, film, television and architecture. Working with the ideas of French philosopher Jacques Derrida, the essays explore the full range of his analyses. They are modelled on the variety of critical approaches that he has encouraged, from critiques of the foundations of our thinking and disciplinary demarcation, to creative and experimental readings of visual 'texts'. Representing some of the most innovative thinking (...) in the various arts disciplines, these contributions offer important challenges to existing disciplinary orthodoxies. Also included in this volume is a long interview with Derrida, published here for the first time. (shrink)

Philosothons are events in which students practise Community of Philosophical Inquiry, usually with awards being made using three criteria: critical thinking, creative thinking and collaboration. This seems to generate a tension. On the one hand it recognises collaboration as a valued trait; on the other hand, the element of competition may seem antithetical to collaboration. There are various possible considerations relevant to this apparent problem. We can pose them as seven questions. One, do the awards really recognise the best performers? (...) Two, do the students and teachers see the awards as fair and reasonable? Three, do the awards recognise cooperation as a valuable contribution? Four, do Philosothons generate enthusiasm and goodwill? Five, might awards motivate students to try harder to do well? Six, if competition is normal in society, does it follow that it is justified as part of the Philosothon? Seven, do awards have a role in bringing the event to a climax? In this article, we will develop and evaluate the arguments suggested by these questions. Our conclusion is that the competitive element in the Philosothon is not antithetical to the collaborative ideal of philosophy. (shrink)

1. WechselwirkungSuppose that A is standing at a bar with his friend B and tells B, “I’ll give you a dollar to fight the man on the side of you”. B, naturally, answers: “Are you crazy? Even if I win, I’ll probably tear my clothes, or mess them up. A dollar wouldn’t even cover the dry-cleaning bill.” B is very sensible.But then C starts to pick up B’s change on the bar—about a dollar’s worth. “You can’t do that,” B assures (...) him, emphatically. C says, “Who says?” “Oh yeah?”s get traded, then shoulders pushed in rotation—and before you know it, B is fighting for a dollar after all.But now, B will assure us, the money does not matter, it’s the principle of the thing. What principle? “That no one can steal from me, no matter what the amount.” But the man picking up the change thought it was his; no principle about stealing existed in his mind. “Well, I don’t want the idea to get around that anyone can take things from me.” So C is suffering proleptically for all the people who might feel tempted to engage in C-like activities . But what if C’s calamity does not get around to all the bars? What, that is, if future Cs do not know about the educational improvements B has effected on C’s nose? “They might not know, but I would.” B, it appears, can have no pride in himself unless he fights over one-dollar misunderstandings. (shrink)

This study modelled associations between gender, ruminative cognitive style, alcohol use, and the time course of negative affect over the course of 43,111 random assessments in the natural environment. Participants completed 49 days of experience sampling over 1.3 years. The data indicated that rumination at baseline was positively associated with alcohol dependence symptoms at baseline as well as higher negative affect over the course of the study. Consistent with negative reinforcement models, drinking served to decrease the persistence of negative affect (...) from moment to moment. However, this ameliorative effect of drinking was evident only among women, suggesting an increased risk for negative reinforcement driven drinking behaviour. In addition, rumination appeared to counteract the desired effects of alcohol on mood among women. This suggests that women who ruminate more may be motivated to consume larger amounts of alcohol to achieve the desired effects. Overall, the results indicate that ruminative cognitive style and the persistence of negative affect from moment to moment may reflect an individual vulnerability for the development of alcohol use disorder especially among women. (shrink)

Some argue the common practice of inferring multiple processes or systems from a dissociation is flawed. One proposed solution is state-trace analysis, which involves plotting, across two or more conditions of interest, performance measured by either two dependent variables, or two conditions of the same dependent measure. The resulting analysis is considered to provide evidence that either a single process underlies performance or there is evidence for more than one process. This article reports simulations using the simple recurrent network in (...) which changes to the learning rate produced state-trace plots with multiple functions. We also report simulations using a single-layer error-correcting network that generate plots with a single function. We argue that the presence of different functions on a state-trace plot does not necessarily support a dual-system account, at least as typically defined ; it can also indicate variation in a single parameter within theories generally considered to be single-system accounts. (shrink)

The sequence of nucleotide bases occurring in an organism’s DNA is often regarded as a codescript for its construction. However, information in a DNA sequence can only be regarded as a codescript relative to an operational biochemical machine, which the information constrains in such a way as to direct the process of construction. In reality, any biochemical machine for which a DNA codescript is efficacious is itself produced through the mechanical interpretation of an identical or very similar codescript. In these (...) terms the origin of life can be described as a bootstrap process involving the simultaneous accumulation of genetic information and the generation of a machine that interprets it as instructions for its own construction. This problem is discussed within the theoretical frameworks of thermodynamics, informatics and self-reproducing automata, paying special attention to the physico-chemical origin of genetic coding and the conditions, both thermodynamic and informatic, that a system must fulfil in order for it to sustain semiosis. The origin of life is equated with biosemiosis. (shrink)

The literary genesis of Einbahnstraße by Walter Benjamin represents a very special case of the use of the procedures of surrealism in the philosophical-literary production of the author. The process of evolution of thinking that ended up in the writing of this piece is unveiled throughout the present analysis. This is a sign of both waiver and restart; the opening for a new productive dimension in the career of one of the most important —and misunderstood— philosophers of the 20th century. (...) More than enlightening a small master piece of philosophy from a literary perspective, or analyzing a small master piece of literature from the philosophy, what is being problematized here is the division, cultivated or figured throughout the years, between both disciplines. This work is intended to recover what is insoluble from the philosophical-literary labor of Walter Benjamin, besides tracing a possible reconfiguration for an interdisciplinary field of work to come up and contribute in the understanding of the problem called The Retreat of Metaphor by Jacques Derrida. (shrink)

As unstintingly irreligious as he was, Karl Marx was not an atheist. He was a staunch opponent of supernatural belief, yet neither did he embrace agnosticism as the position of claiming no answer to the question whether or not God exists. Rather, Marx argued that it was incoherent and pointless even to pose that very question. His irreligion is best understood not primarily as an ontological stance on the existence or nonexistence of God, but rather as part and parcel of (...) a philosophical worldview radically committed to sweeping such questions aside, to centering the human perspective ontologically and epistemologically, to overthrowing “all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, forsaken, despicable being,” and to taking as its core principle that “man is the highest being for man.” A “religious worldview” for Marx includes not only the plainly divine, but any perspective that subordinates the value of human beings to a superior entity, operating externally to human beings and imperviously to their influence. I begin by explaining the relationship between Marx's historical materialism and his position on the existence of God. It may seem obvious how irreligion would follow from a philosophical materialist stance. I show that Marx's historical materialist irreligion, however, warrants a closer and more nuanced assessment than we might at first realize. I go on to discuss why Marx's historical materialism leads him to regard questions about the existence of God as fundamentally misguided. I then unpack the meanings of Marx's infamous statement that religion is “the opium of the people.” I conclude with a discussion of Marx's pronouncement that “the criticism of religion ends with the teaching that man is the highest being for man,” a teaching that separates mere atheism from radical irreligion. (shrink)

Unique in all of literature, the Confessions combines frank and profound psychological insight into Augustine's formative years along with sophisticated and beguiling reflections on some of the most important issues in philosophy and theology. The essays contained in this volume, by some of the most distinguished recent and contemporary thinkers in the field, insightfully explore Augustinian themes not only with an eye to historical accuracy but also to gauge the philosophical acumen of Augustine's reflections.

We argue for an example of based on Diamond and Carey's (1986) work on expertise and recognition, which is not made use of in The Origin of Concepts. This mechanism for perceptual learning seems to have all the necessary characteristics in that it is innate, domain-specific (requires stimulus sets possessing a certain structure), and demonstrably affects categorisation in a way that strongly suggests it will influence concept formation as well.