Food security(FS) refers to having sufficient physical, social, and economic food access at all times. People living in rural, regional, and remote (RRR) locations often face distinctive challenges to FS. Existing solutions, that aim to enhance FS, themselves face challenges when addressing these issues. This paper outlines the application of an adapted Systemic Innovation Lab (SIL) approach to enhance the function of existing community and government-led, -run or -operated initiatives (programs, interventions) in RRR Western Australia. It examines which systems change (...) characteristics participating initiatives possess, to identify opportunities to support their transition to newer and more effective ways of addressing FS in their region. A six-stage SIL process was enacted, with four of the stages focused on identifying which systems change characteristics, across nine Focus Areas (FAs), the participating initiatives possessed. Data representing 148 initiatives were analysed to map the initiatives’ support of FS systems change in their region and identify the FAs systems change characteristics least possessed by initiatives. This delivered insights necessary to strengthen these characteristics and enhance participating initiatives’ capacity to better support RRR FS. Initiatives were least likely to possess systems change characteristics relating to two-way communication between government and community, which, if adopted, would support the achievement of holistic, effective, and sustainable outcomes for FS in RRR locations. (shrink)

Emergence develops a novel account of diachronic ontological emergence called transformational emergence and locates it in an established historical framework. The author shows how many problems affecting ontological emergence result from a dominant but inappropriate metaphysical tradition and provides a comprehensive assessment of current theories of emergence.

Generative AI is increasingly used as an epistemic tool to aid inquiry, broaden our knowledge and generally help us find things out. It is now embedded in internet search functions to condense information and answer user questions without further need to access websites or news articles. However, models based on generative AI come with inherent flaws which may inhibit their effectiveness as tools to aid responsible inquiry. While the risk of misinformation due to ‘hallucinations’ has been documented, this paper instead (...) focuses on the capacity for these models to present moral or political bias reflective of the preferences of the model designers and crowd worker labellers. This paper takes the novel approach of tracing the ethical issue of bias back to fundamental alignment problem within the process of Reinforced Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), a key step in training generative AI models. The potential for language models to be influenced by their designers, censored to certain topics, or trained to be more politically leaning one way or another has the capability of insidiously causing epistemic harm. By applying the concepts of bias of crowds to the training process of language models I show how they can impede effective epistemic inquiry and cause epistemic and moral harm. In doing so I present an argument showing that the ethics of AI language models cannot be removed from the socio-technical systems from which they are created. (shrink)

This chapter provides six arguments in favor of scientifically based ontology and against speculative ontology, a branch of analytic metaphysics. Parts of contemporary speculative ontology are untenable because they are factually false; intuitions are not domain-invariant; conceptual analysis is too closely tied to everyday experience; what counts as an acceptable philosophical idealization is left unarticulated; the world is not scale-invariant; and anthropocentric epistemology does not always minimize epistemic risk. Nevertheless, specifically philosophical arguments are necessary when making ontological claims and complete (...) deference to scientific consensus is unreasonable. The overall strategy is to recognize that different domains of reality require different methods of discovery and justification, and that a significant part of contemporary metaphysics is employing methods that are inappropriate to its goals. (shrink)

This paper begins with a recognition that questions of climate change, environmental degradation, and our relations to the natural world are increasingly significant and requiring of a response not only as philosophers of education but also as citizens of the planet. As such the paper explores five of the key journals in philosophy of education in order to identify the extent, range, and content of current discussions related to the environment. It then organizes and summaries the articles that were located (...) while seeking to identify the extent, possibilities, and limitations of current discussions relating to the environment in the philosophy of education community. The hope is that ultimately this work is an invitation to anyone, regardless of tradition, orientation, and expertise, to contribute to the expansion and deepening of both theory and practice in the face of this most serious of challenges. (shrink)

This article presents the results of an inductive, interpretive case study. We have adopted a narrative approach to the analysis of organizational processes in order to explore how individuals in a financial institution dealt with relatively novel issues of corporate social responsibility (CSR). The narratives that we reconstruct, which we label 'idealism and altruism', 'economics and expedience' and 'ignorance and cynicism' illustrate how people in the specific organizational context of a bank ('Credit Line') sought to cope with an attempt at (...) narrative imposition. In particular, our work exemplifies how people in organizations draw on shared discursive resources in order to make sense of themselves and their organizations. We illustrate how many people within the bank found it hard to integrate the normative case for CSR with their version of a narrative identity which had, and continued to be, centred on economic imperatives for new initiatives. Our article demonstrates both the value of the analysis of shared narratives, and represents an attempt to deal adequately with the polyphony of organizational voices, in case studies of CSR. (shrink)

The word ‘dignity’ may be used in a presentational sense, for example, one might say “she presents herself with dignity”, or in a social sense, for example, one might say “she fulfilled her duty with dignity, or honour.” However, in this paper I will not be using ‘dignity’ in either of these senses. Rather, the sense of dignity I will be concerned with is one that is related to ideas about the value or worth of a being. This latter sense (...) of dignity has a long history, and tends to be a concept that is thought to be applicable to human animals only, and more specifically to human persons—moral agents, capable of rationality, of directing their own lives, and of formulating... (shrink)

Although scientific models and simulations differ in numerous ways, they are similar in so far as they are posing essentially philosophical problems about the nature of representation. This collection is designed to bring together some of the best work on the nature of representation being done by both established senior philosophers of science and younger researchers. Most of the pieces, while appealing to existing traditions of scientific representation, explore new types of questions, such as: how understanding can be developed within (...) computational science; how the format of representations matters for their use, be it for the purpose of research or education; how the concepts of emergence and supervenience can be further analyzed by taking into account computational science; or how the emphasis upon tractability--a particularly important issue in computational science--sheds new light on the philosophical analysis of scientific reasoning. (shrink)

Aristotle’s philosophy of geometry is widely interpreted as a reaction against a Platonic realist conception of mathematics. Here I argue to the contrary that Aristotle is concerned primarily with the methodological question of how universal inferences are warranted by particular geometrical constructions. His answer hinges on the concept of abstraction, an operation of “taking away” certain features of material particulars that makes perspicuous universal relations among magnitudes. On my reading, abstraction is a diagrammatic procedure for Aristotle, and it is through (...) imagined variation of diagrams that one can universalize spatial inferences. In order to shift the discussion of Aristotle’s work on geometry from ontological to methodological questions, I argue in the first section that geometrical properties for Aristotle are necessary accidents of the particulars, canonically diagrams, in which they inhere. I then consider a line of research that shows how diagrams in ancient geometry are not illustrations of the textual proof but are in part constitutive of geometrical inference, an insight I claim can shed light on Aristotle’s philosophical project. Next I substantiate this assertion by giving an alternative interpretation of abstraction according to which it is a diagrammatic procedure that allows a part of a particular diagram to stand in for a universal. In the last section, I consider Aristotle’s account of mathematical cognition, arguing that there is evidence for the view that imagination is necessary both for the construction of figures, and for their presentation as abstractions subject to universal inference. (shrink)

This handbook provides both an overview of state-of-the-art scholarship in philosophy of science, as well as a guide to new directions in the discipline. Section I contains broad overviews of the main lines of research and the state of established knowledge in six principal areas of the discipline, including computational, physical, biological, psychological and social sciences, as well as general philosophy of science. Section II covers what are considered to be the traditional topics in the philosophy of science, such as (...) causation, probability, models, ethics and values, and explanation. Section III identifies new areas of investigation that show promise of becoming important areas of research, including the philosophy of astronomy and astrophysics, data, complexity theory, neuroscience, simulations, post-Kuhnian philosophy, post-empiricist epistemology, and emergence. Most chapters are accessible to scientifically educated non-philosophers as well as to professional philosophers, and the contributors - all leading researchers in their field -- bring diverse perspectives from the North American, European, and Australasian research communities. This volume is an essential resource for scholars and students. (shrink)

In Metaphysics M, Aristotle aims to refute the Platonic view that mathematical objects are substantially prior to sensible things. For Aristotle, mathematical objects are the abstracted attributes of sensible substances required for geometrical analysis and proof. Yet, despite this derivative status of the objects of mathematics, Aristotle insists that they are logically prior to individual substances. This paper examines the distinction between logical and substantial priority, arguing that it underwrites Aristotle’s conception of mathematical necessity and explanation.

This paper aims to provide a conceptual analysis of blood-sport as a concept. Through utilising a generalised notion of sport as well as the concept of fair-play, the objective will be to examine whether blood-sports are games and analyse to what extent, if any, blood-sports can be properly called ‘sports’. For the purposes of application and because of the sheer numbers of birds used in the sports-shooting industry, the paper will focus on a discussion of game-birding, but the findings will (...) apply to the practice of ‘blood-sport’ more generally. Work by Sam P. Morris (IJAP, 2014) argues that ‘fair-chase hunting’ can be classified as a game, as well as a sport, although Morris stresses that answers to questions concerning the sport status of hunting do not provide answers to questions regarding the ethics of blood-sports. The author of this paper agrees with Morris regarding the latter point, but pace Morris, she argues that it is doubtful that blood-sport is a game let alone a sport, and that even if one assumes for argument's sake that it is indeed a game, it cannot be properly classed as sport, and that a fair-chase code undermines itself in the context of so called ‘blood-sports’.Footnote1. (shrink)

This article seeks to address the problem of the ‘resource consumption bottleneck’ of creating legal semantic technologies manually. It describes a semantic role labeling based information extraction system to extract definitions and norms from legislation and represent them as structured norms in legal ontologies. The output is intended to help make laws more accessible, understandable, and searchable in a legal document management system.

If an act can always be made consistent with other acts by defining a rule that covers all of the observed cases, how can one know which rule one follows when one acts? This paper approaches this question through an analysis of one strand of thinking in Charles Sanders Peirce’s 1903 Harvard Lectures and in some entries that Peirce contributed to the Century Dictionary. Peirce argues for a strong form of “scholastic realism,” which insists on the “reality of thirdness” of (...) universals such as natural laws. The Harvard Lectures identify thirdness with Aristotelian “entelechy”—actuality or realization—and thus as a principle that is irreducible to any combination of power and act. When a being is in this state of realization, it signifies the universal. This paper argues that if natural things realize natural laws and persons realize reasons, then acts can be rationally determined by a single rule that one is following. (shrink)

Ordinary language treats reports of perceptual episodes as canonical justifications of beliefs. The challenge for empirically oriented epistemologists is to explain one's right to give credence to one's perceptual judgments. Traditionally, many empiricists have assumed that an epistemic subject is entitled only to some primitive judgments, so that judgments about kinds, modal properties, and dispositions are parasitic upon and less certain than those about the particulars given in perception. This paper contributes to an understanding of C.S. Peirce's alternative perceptual epistemology. (...) According to Peirce's model, perceptual experience must be conceived as including previously encountered content and... (shrink)

Aristotelian imagination is widely understood as a psychological power by which retained perceptual states recur in consciousness. According to this view, imagination is decaying sense, a part of the psyche that is parasitic on perceptual acts for its content. This paper disputes this reading and provides an alternative account of Aristotle’s concept of imagination. I argue that Aristotelian imagination is a power of the psyche that is both productive like intellect, and presentational like perception. Unlike perception and intellect, however, imagination (...) does not correctly discriminate among beings, and thus cannot be relied upon to give one knowledge of the world. When one accepts this alternative conception of Aristotelian imagination, it becomes clear how it can take on the peculiar epistemic function of allowing a particular serve as the vehicle of a universal thought. This paper argues that Aristotle’s explanation of valid judgments in geometry depends on the imagination to allow the perception of a particular diagram to give rise to the intellectual grasp of a general proposition. (shrink)

To generate coherent behaviour, the brain needs to attend selectively to the many objects that are present in the environment, but this poses several questions. How does the brain know which objects 'belong together'? How does the information from different senses get combined? How does this help to plan and carry out actions? The subject of attentional mechanisms has a long history in cognitive psychology, as it is the key to making sense of the visual world. However, new developments in (...) cognitive neuroscience, and greater understanding of how attention and action are integrated, have transformed the field. This book is the first to bring together leading researchers to discuss the convergence of experimental findings in the following areas: Visual selective attention Attention and perceptual integration Spatial representation and attention Visual attention and action Control of attention Attention, Space, and Action provides a unique combination of perspectives that will appeal to students and researchers from psychology, neuropsychology, neurophysiology, and neuroanatomy. (shrink)

An accessible overview of Humphrey's evolving views on consciousness -- particularly the topic of phenomenal consciousness -- from his early neurophysiology studies in the 1960's to his debates with philosophers today.

Descartes holds that, insofar as nature is a purposeless, unthinking, extended substance, there could be no final causes in physics. Descartes’ derivation of his three laws of motion from the perfections of God thus underwrites a rejection of Aristotle’s conception of natural self-motion and teleology. Aristotle derived his conception of the purposeful action of sublunar creatures from his notion that superlunar bodies are perfect, eternal, living beings, via the thesis that circular motion is more complete or perfect than rectilinear motion. (...) Descartes’ reduction of circular motion to rectilinear motion, achieved through his theological foundation of the laws of motion, thus marks a crucial break from Aristotle’s philosophy of nature. This paper argues that the shift from the Aristotelian conception of nature as self-moving and teleological to the Cartesian conception of nature as purposeless and inert, is not an empirical discovery but is rooted in differing conceptions of where perfection lies in nature. (shrink)

This paper addresses a solution due to Michael Fara to the Church/Fitch paradox of knowability. Fara’s solution has significant interest but the paradox can beresurrected within his approach by considering a slightly more complex sentence. The issue of what counts as an epistemological capability for enhanced agents is then discussed with some emphasis on the developmental heritage of agents and their ability to transcend conceptual frameworks.

This paper examines some possibilities for the laws of nature changing over time. This is done within the context of recent literature on transformational emergence. Transformational emergence is a diachronic account of emergence that does not require the invariance of fundamental objects, properties, and laws. The requirement that no new laws are introduced after the first instance of the universe seems to indicate that all the laws of the universe are present from the outset. By using a dispositional approach to (...) fundamental properties, this restriction can be avoided. An argument appealing to quantitative laws of nature is then used to show that such laws are not, contrary to dispositional essentialism, metaphysically necessary. Further arguments are given to support the possibility of change of laws across time rather than across worlds and why the identity conditions for properties are different in the two cases. The paper is framed by an analysis of John Stuart Mill’s reasons for imposing the invariance requirement on fundamental laws. (shrink)

Some philosophers hold that mathematics depends on idealising assumptions. While these thinkers typically emphasise the role of idealisation in set theory, Edmund Husserl argues that idealisation is constitutive of the early Greek geometry that is codified by Euclid. This paper takes up Husserl's idea by investigating three major developments of Greek geometry: Thalean analogical idealisation, Hippocratean dynamic idealisation, and Archimedean mechanical idealisation. I argue that these idealisations are not, as Husserl held, primarily a matter of ‘smoothing out’ sensory reality to (...) produce ideal, ‘perfect’ figures. Rather, Greek geometry depends on assuming some falsehoods – equidistance from a source of illumination, a perfectly unwavering hand, or a machine that weights abstract objects – in order to make complex problems tractable. Although these idealisations were rarely discussed explicitly in antiquity, they can be systematically reconstructed from our extant sources. (shrink)

While the causes of human-animal conflict are numerous, many are intertwined with food production systems and the wildlife trade. The emergence and spread of Covid-19 exemplify this. Indeed, the wildlife population in South Asian countries has seen an increase in the risk of both human and nonhuman death in recent months, and as the economy slows, the search for food and extra income will intensify, negatively impacting wildlife. This paper aims to address some of the ethical issues concerning our treatment (...) of nonhuman creatures and the environment in relation to the global food system and wildlife trade following the Covid-19 crisis. (shrink)

Cet article s’intéresse aux lieux d’accueil enfants-parents, précisant l’importance de la référence à la psychanalyse dans l’élaboration des formes particulières de transfert. La notion de dispositif permet d’élaborer cet accueil du public. La spécificité du dispositif est illustrée à travers une séquence d’accueil, notamment en ce qui concerne le transfert et les modes de disponibilité de l’adulte qui accueille. L’élaboration dans l’après-coup comme condition du dispositif est présentée comme nécessaire à l’accueil de la violence pulsionnelle. La rigueur clinique et métapsychologique (...) apparaît, finalement, comme condition pour cette pratique de « bordage » qui doit demeurer créative, suivant les modifications de la culture et la société dans laquelle elle se déploie. (shrink)

Ordinary language is saturated with causal concepts, with talk of tendencies, consequences, mechanisms, and a host of other thinly disguised causal terms. But ordinary language is no reliable guide to ontology, and for scientific purposes we must ask whether advanced sciences need to refer to causes in their theories and methods. Then, if we find that they do need to make such causal references, we must ask what the nature of the causal relation is and how we can discover instances (...) of it. Here we shall reverse that order of questioning, by first laying out some standard approaches to characterizing and discovering the causal relation, and then examining whether such relations are dispensable in certain parts of science. (shrink)

Preamble: Singers gathering on stage This is a paper for three voices. An attempt at a philosophic experience in the symphonic form. The first voice carries the tune and holds the shape of the paper as it focuses on Baudrillard and proposes that public education in Canada today is in fact a simulacra. The second voice has more room to roam, tracing some of the Western philosophical underpinnings of Baudrillard’s stages of the simulacra from Aristotle to Saussure’s centralization of human (...) language and out to the disappearance of the signified altogether. And the third voice, plays a parallel tune to the first two but focuses on the evolution of education for sustainable development. Eventually all three voices find harmonies around the challenges of their respective simulacrum and will, as a dramatic conclusion, seek to offer some important educational implications. We have employed, as seen above, different fonts for each voice and divided the paper along symphonic lines with each movement being accompanied by one stage of Baudrillard’s development of the simulacra. We encourage the reader to think of this paper as a philosophical score choosing to read each voice separately or all three together seeking resonances along the way. (shrink)

Aristotle Aristotle is a towering figure in ancient Greek philosophy, who made important contributions to logic, metaphysics, mathematics, physics, biology, botany, ethics, politics, agriculture, medicine, dance and theater. He was a student of Plato who in turn studied under Socrates. He was more empirically-minded than Plato or Socrates and is famous for … Continue reading Aristotle →.