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10355.949738
Organ sale – for example, allowing or encouraging consenting
adults to become living kidney donors in return for money – has
been proposed as a possible solution to the seemingly chronic shortage
of organs for transplantation. Many people however regard this idea as
abhorrent and argue both that the practice would be unethical and that
it should be banned. This entry outlines some of the different
possible kinds of organ sale, briefly states the case in favour, and
then examines the main arguments against.
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38759.949809
This paper considers the mundane ways in which AI is being incorporated into scientific practice today, and particularly the extent to which AI is used to automate tasks perceived to be boring, “mere routine” and inconvenient to researchers. We label such uses as instances of “Convenience AI” — that is situations where AI is applied with the primary intention to increase speed and minimize human effort. We outline how attributions of convenience to AI applications involve three key characteristics: (i) an emphasis on speed and ease of action, (ii) a comparative element, as well as (iii) a subject-dependent and subjective quality. Using examples from medical science and development economics, we highlight epistemic benefits, complications, and drawbacks of Convenience AI along these three dimensions. While the pursuit of convenience through AI can save precious time and resources as well as give rise to novel forms of inquiry, our analysis underscores how the uncritical adoption of Convenience AI for the sake of shortcutting human labour may also weaken the evidential foundations of science and generate inertia in how research is planned, set-up and conducted, with potentially damaging implications for the knowledge being produced. Critically, we argue that the consistent association of Convenience AI with the goals of productivity, efficiency, and ease, as often promoted also by companies targeting the research market for AI applications, can lower critical scrutiny of research processes and shift focus away from appreciating their broader epistemic and social implications.
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155629.949822
A. I guess because I'm exploring the format in some of my own writing. Q. A. It's not ready to show to anyone. In fact the project is more notional than actual—a few notes in a plain text file, which I peek at from time to time. …
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211723.949828
Following the lead of heterogeneous and invariably brilliant thinkers as Thucydides, Arnold J. Toynbee, Winston Churchill, Carl Sagan, Philip K. Dick, and Niall Ferguson, I consider a virtual history – or an alternative Everettian branch of the universal wavefunction – in which the ancient materialism and atomism of Epicurus (and heliocentrism of Aristarchus, for good measure) have prevailed over the (Neo) Platonist-Aristotelian religious-military complex. Such a historical swerve (pun fully intended) would have removed the unhealthy obsession with mind-body dualism and dialectics, which crippled much of the European thought throughout the last millennium. It is at least open to serious questioning whether quasireligious totalitarian ideologies could have arisen and brought about so much death, suffering and pain in this virtual history as they did in our actual history.
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211782.949834
The Hard Problem of consciousness—explaining why and how physical processes are accompanied by subjective experience—remains one of the most challenging puzzles in modern thought. Rather than attempting to resolve this issue outright, in this paper I explore whether empirical science can be broadened to incorporate consciousness as a fundamental degree of freedom. Drawing on Russellian monism and revisiting the historical “relegation problem” (the systematic sidelining of consciousness by the scientific revolution), I propose an extension of quantum mechanics by augmenting the Hilbert space with a “consciousness dimension.” This framework provides a basis for reinterpreting psi phenomena (e.g., telepathy, precognition) as natural outcomes of quantum nonlocality and suggests that advanced non– human intelligence (NHI) technology might interface with a quantum–conscious substrate.
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241020.94984
The Aristotelian corpus (corpus aristotelicum) is the
collection of the extant works transmitted under the name of Aristotle
along with its organizational features, such as its ordering, internal
textual divisions (into books and chapters) and titles. It has evolved
over time: Aristotelian treatises have sometimes been lost and
sometimes recovered, “spurious” works now regarded as
inauthentic have joined the collection while scribes and scholars were
attempting to organize its massive amount of text in various ways. The
texts it includes are highly technical treatises that were not
originally intended for publication and first circulated within
Aristotle’s philosophical circle only, Aristotle distinguishes
them from his “exoteric” works (Pol.
1278b30; EE 1217b22,
1218b34) which were meant for a wider audience.
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241034.949846
The uses of the word “ideology” are so divergent as to
make it doubtful that there is any conceptual unity to the term. It
may refer to a comprehensive worldview, a legitimating discourse, a
partisan political doctrine, culture, false beliefs that help support
illegitimate power, beliefs that reinforce group identity, or
mystification. It is often used pejoratively, but just as often it is
a purely descriptive term. When authors criticize ideology, they may
be criticizing complicity with injustice, confirmation bias,
illusions, self-serving justifications, or dogmatism. When authors
identify ideology, they may locate it in forms of consciousness,
propositional attitudes, culture, institutions, discourses, social
conventions, or material rituals.
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292805.949851
As always, please ‘like’ this post via the heart below and restack it on notes if you get something out of it. It’s the best way to help others find my work. Of course, the very best way to support my work is with a paid subscription. …
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384827.949856
In current philosophy of science, extrapolation is seen as an inference from a study to a distinct target system of interest. The reliability of such an inference is generally thought to depend on the extent to which study and target are similar in relevant respects, which is especially problematic when they are heterogeneous. This paper argues that this understanding is underdeveloped when applied to extrapolation in ecology. Extrapolation in ecology is not always well characterized as an inference from a model to a distinct target but often includes inferences from small-scale experimental systems to large-scale processes in nature, i.e., inferences across spatiotemporal scales. For this reason, I introduce a distinction between compositional and spatiotemporal variability. Whereas the former describes differences in entities and causal factors between model and target, the latter refers to the variability of a system over space and time. The central claim of this paper is that our understanding of heterogeneity needs to be expanded to explicitly include spatiotemporal variability and its effects on extrapolation across spatiotemporal scales.
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395065.949863
I’ve been watching the TV series “The Handmaid’s Tale” lately. The series is an adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s novel of the same title. For the readers who have never heard about it, this dystopia takes place in the context of worldwide infertility where the United States of America has disappeared following a civil war. …
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475379.949868
In a reference letter for Feyerabend’s application to UC Berkeley, Carl Hempel writes that ‘Mr. Feyerabend combines a forceful and penetrating analytic mind with a remarkably thorough training and high competence in theoretical physics and mathematics’ (Collodel and Oberheim, unpublished, 80). Similarly, Rudolf Carnap says of Feyerabend that he ‘knows both the physics and the philosophy thoroughly, and he is particularly well versed in the fundamental logical and epistemological problems of physics’ (83). These remarks echo a sentiment widely accepted amongst Feyerabend’s colleagues that his knowledge of physics was at an extremely high level. Feyerabend’s acumen in physics goes back to his youth, when, at the age of 13, he was offered a position as an observer at the Swiss Institute for Solar Research after building his own telescope (Feyerabend 1995, 27). It is unsurprising, therefore, that physics played an important and long-lasting role in Feyerabend’s work.
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483187.949875
According to the model of exchange as mutual assistance, an exchange can be perceived as a joint activity for mutual benefit – and needn’t involve any self-directed motives at all. This essay pushes back against this new defence of market motives. The essay develops an alternative ideal of production as caring solidarity, in which production is a joint activity of caring about one another. Points of overlap and difference are developed in some detail. The essay concludes by discussing the implications for an economics of caring solidarity, with discussion of the limitations of various market socialist strategies.
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499821.949883
For Karl Marx, ideological forms of consciousness are false, but how and in what respects? Ideologies must include some beliefs in order to be false, even if not all the beliefs that are inferentially related in the ideology are false, and even if there are (causally) related attitudes in the ideology that are neither true nor false. “Ideological” beliefs, however, are not simply false; their falsity has the specific property of not being in the interests of the agents who accept the ideology. One can make two kinds of mistakes about interests. One can mistake what is in one’s intrinsic interest or one can mistake what is in one’s extrinsic interest (that is, the means required to realize one’s intrinsic interests). Marx is mostly, but not exclusively, focused on mistakes about extrinsic interests; this is important in understanding how “morality” (which is not a matter of beliefs, but attitudes) can be ideological for Marx. I illustrate this analysis with some of Marx’s paradigmatic examples of ideological mistakes and offer an account of Marx’s conception of “interests.”
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543841.949909
Attachment is deeply important to human life. When one person becomes ‘attached’ to another, their sense of security turns on their emotional, social, and physical engagement with that person. This kind of security-based attachment has been extensively studied in psychology. Yet attachment theory (in the specific sense studied by psychologists) has not received adequate attention in analytic theories of social justice. In this paper, we conceptualize attachment’s nature and value, addressing when and why attachments place justice-based claims on individuals and institutions, in an attempt to establish the centrality of attachment theory to liberal political philosophy. We first characterize security-based attachment and differentiate it from related phenomena (§1). We then explore its value, theorizing the connection between attachment, care, and companionship, drawing on the ethics of care (§2). We explain when and why security-based attachment generates claims of justice within liberal theory, noting some important difficulties (§3). Finally, we sketch some implications in three domains: the rights of those who have suffered pregnancy loss, the rights of grandparents vis-à-vis grandchildren, and the rights of attached friends to social and political recognition (§4).
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557877.949916
A critique is given of the attempt by Hettema and Kuipers to formalize the periodic table. In particular I dispute their notions of identifying a naïve periodic table with tables having a constant periodicity of eight elements and their views on the different conceptions of the atom by chemists and physicists. The views of Hettema and Kuipers on the reduction of the periodic system to atomic physics are also considered critically.
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557895.949923
Whereas most scientists are highly critical of constructivism and relativism in the context of scientific knowledge acquisition, the dominant school of chemical education researchers appears to support a variety of such positions. By reference to the views of Herron, Spencer, and Bodner, I claim that these authors are philosophically confused, and that they are presenting a damaging and anti-scientific message to other unsuspecting educators. Part of the problem, as I argue, is a failure to distinguish between pedagogical con - structivism regarding students' understanding of science, and constructivism about the way that scientific knowledge is acquired by expert scientists.
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615602.949929
Shannon Vallor’s The AI Mirror is a useful introduction to the various moral, social, and political problems raised by arti cial intelligence (AI). There are many things that can be said to be arti cially intelligent. Vallor’s focus is a machine that learns using algorithmic, statistical mathematics to ‘produce novel outputs of the same general kind as their training data (such as images, sounds and sentences)’ (p. 19). This sort of intelligence is analogous to the intelligent ability of humans who, upon provision of limited input information, successfully generalize to unreported cases. For example, in learning colour language, humans need only a few cases for them to generalize successfully about colours in non-identical situations.
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615638.949936
There are two broad approaches to the publication emergency. Revolutionaries advocate abandoning the current system anonymous pre-publication peer review and editing in favour of open access archives and post-publication crowd-sourced peer review (Heesen and Bright [2021]; Copeland and Marin [2024]; Arvan et al. [2025]). Reformers acknowledge the many problems with the current system, but focus their e orts on improving journals: taking them open access, making them non-pro t, or improving their day-to-day administration. Levy’s sympathies seem to be with the reformers. He focuses on problems within the current publication system, including intellectual charity in peer review, how to handle hoaxes, and what attitude writers should take towards the claims they make in print.
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626214.949942
Last week something world-shaking happened, something that could change the whole trajectory of humanity’s future. No, not that—we’ll get to that later. For now I’m talking about Anthropic’s “Emergent Misalignment” paper. …
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767047.949948
If Moby Dick overflows with boundless energy, the narration in Billy Budd, written at the other end of Melville’s life, is carefully controlled. But neither book can simply tell its tale; both are driven by a need to pause over each moment’s significance, psychological, political, and spiritual. …
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788662.949953
Motivational trade-off behaviours, where an organism behaves as if flexibly weighing up an opportunity for reward against a risk of injury, are often regarded as evidence that the organism has valenced experiences like pain. This type of evidence has been influential in shifting opinion regarding crabs and insects. Critics note that (i) the precise links between trade-offs and consciousness are not fully known; (ii) simple trade-offs are evinced by the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, mediated by a mechanism plausibly too simple to support conscious experience; (iii) pain can sometimes interfere with rather than support making trade-offs rationally. However, rather than undermining trade-off evidence in general, such cases show that the nature of the trade-off, and its underlying neural substrate, matter. We investigate precisely how.
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843242.94996
There is a genre of moral philosophy for which I have particular affection, in which a thinker subjects an aspect of ordinary life to rigorous scrutiny, revealing it to be more puzzling or more profound that is typically acknowledged. …
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961745.949966
The received view of scientific experimentation holds that science is characterized by experiment and experiment is characterized by active intervention on the system of interest. Although versions of this view are widely held, they have seldom been explicitly defended. The present essay reconstructs and defuses two arguments in defense of the received view: first, that intervention is necessary for uncovering causal structures, and second, that intervention conduces to better evidence. By examining a range of non-interventionist studies from across the sciences, I conclude that interventionist experiments are not, ceteris paribus, epistemically superior to non-interventionist studies and that the latter may thus be classified as experiment proper. My analysis explains why intervention remains valuable while at the same time elevating the status of some non-interventionist studies to that of experiment proper.
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1051974.949972
Violent video games (VVGs) are a source of serious and continuing controversy. They are not unique in this respect, though. Other entertainment products have been criticized on moral grounds, from pornography to heavy metal, horror films, and Harry Potter books. Some of these controversies have fizzled out over time and have come to be viewed as cases of moral panic. Others, including moral objections to VVGs, have persisted. The aim of this paper is to determine which, if any, of the concerns raised about VVGs are legitimate. We argue that common moral objections to VVGs are unsuccessful, but that a plausible critique can be developed that captures the insights of these objections while avoiding their pitfalls. Our view suggests that the moral badness of a game depends on how well its internal logic expresses or encourages the play‑ ers’ objectionable attitudes. This allows us to recognize that some games are morally worse than others—and that it can be morally wrong to design and play some VVGs—but that the moral badness of these games is not necessarily dependent on how violent they are.
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1077046.949978
There is an "under-representation problem” in philosophy departments and journals. Empirical data suggest that while we have seen some improvements since the 1990s, the rate of change has slowed down. Some posit that philosophy has disciplinary norms making it uniquely resistant to change (Antony and Cudd 2012; Dotson 2012; Hassoun et al. 2022). In this paper, we present results from an empirical case study of a philosophy department that achieved and maintained male-female gender parity among its faculty as early as 2014. Our analysis extends beyond matters of gender parity because that is only one, albeit important, dimension of inclusion. We build from the case study to reflect on strategies that may catalyze change.
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1077109.949984
McQueen, K. J. [2024]: ‘Steven French’s A Phenomenological Approach to Quantum Mechanics’, BJPS Review of Books, 2024 In A Phenomenological Approach to Quantum Mechanics, Steven French o ers what he says will be his nal words on two key issues that he has for decades been trying to get across to the philosophy of physics community, one historical and one theoretical.
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1077127.949991
The theoretical physicist Michio Kaku ([2014]) once stated that the brain is ‘the most complicated object in the known universe’. For decades, neuroscientists have been trying to disentangle the brain’s complexity in order to understand how it can support our behaviours and mental life. In his latest book, Luiz Pessoa wants us instead to embrace the entanglement of this intricate organ, not as a way to give up on our quest to understand its workings, but as a change in strategy to better comprehend its complexity.
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1077180.949997
Hans-Jörg Rheinberger’s latest book, Split and Splice, brings together and builds upon themes that are familiar from his previous works, in particular his highly in uential Toward a History of Epistemic Things ([1997]) and his Epistemology of the Concrete ([2010]). Characteristic of all of these books is Rheinberger’s skilful combination of a profound knowledge of the history of biology with careful attention to the details of experimental practices in microbiology, and an ambitious, often dazzling, overarching vision of how to analyse what he deems most exciting about the scienti c process, namely, that it can create novelty. It is this latter point, in particular, that sets his unique approach apart from much of contemporary history and philosophy of science in the Anglo-American tradition. Instead, his theoretical framework is deeply informed by the French tradition of historical epistemology, of which Bachelard and Canguilhem are particularly well-known gures. In addition, the book draws on a wealth of research from various other traditions and disciplines, often taking the accounts and observations of scientists as points of departure, combining them with concepts from philosophy, history, cultural studies, and STS, to weave together an evocative set of interlacing analyses of the scienti c process.
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1077214.950014
Lewens, T. [2024]: ‘Matteo Mameli’s Why Human Nature Matters and Marco J Nathan’s The Quest for Human Nature’, BJPS Review of Books, 2024 When philosophers of biology write about human nature, their goal is typically to see what sense can be made of the very idea that there might be a human nature, prior to the provision of details about what the exact features of such a nature might be. The great majority of the work done in this area over the past forty years or so falls into one of two genres. First, there are positive proposals for naturalistic analyses. They all aim to identify human nature with some set of biologically or psychologically salient patterns, processes, or properties. Second, there are equally naturalistic expressions of scepticism about human nature; ‘naturalistic’, because this type of work proposes that an up-to-date understanding of evolution and development leaves no room for any notion of human nature.
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1077252.950021
The book is structured into three parts. In the rst part (chapters 1–2), Chirimuuta gives a general philosophical framework with which to approach modelling perspectives in neuroscience. Part 2 (chapters 3–7) applies the framework to several detailed case studies from the history of neuroscience. Finally, part 3 (chapters 8–10) applies lessons from the rst parts to ongoing debates in both philosophy and neuroscience. In this review, I will begin by outlining the contributions in each of the three parts, with speci c focus on the strengths of the account. I will then give some criticisms of the meta-scienti c approach in the book. The goal here is not to criticize the book writ large, but instead to highlight potential debates within the generally productive stance that it lays out.