The essays collected in this special issue of Critical Inquiry are devoted to reflection on the shifts in photographically based art practice, exhibition, and reception in recent years and to the changes brought about by these shifts in our understanding of photographic art. Although initiated in the 1960s, photography as a mainstream artistic practice has accelerated over the last two decades. No longer confined to specialist galleries, books, journals, and other distribution networks, contemporary art photographers are now regularly the subject (...) of major retrospectives in mainstream fine-art museums on the same terms as any other artist. One could cite, for example, Thomas Struth at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, Thomas Demand at the Museum of Modern Art, or Jeff Wall at Tate Modern and MoMA. Indeed, Wall's most recent museum show, at the time of writing, The Crooked Path at Bozar, Brussels, situated his photography in relation to the work of a range of contemporary photographers, painters, sculptors, performance artists, and filmmakers with whose work Wall considers his own to be in dialogue, irrespective of differences of media. All this goes to show that photographic art is no longer regarded as a subgenre apart. The situation in the United Kingdom is perhaps emblematic of both photography's increasing prominence and its increased centrality in the contemporary art world over recent years. Tate hosted its first ever photography survey, Cruel and Tender, as recently as 2003, and since then photography surveys have become a regular biannual staple of its exhibition programming, culminating in the appointment of Tate's first dedicated curator of photography in 2010. A major shift in the perception of photography as art is clearly well under way. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper seeks to share cross-border challenges in the ethical design, establishment, implementation, and evaluation of the performance of alliance...

First published in 1982. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This article reviews some of the definitions in circulation that reveal the varied perspectives and goals of the field of neuroethics. It discusses a brief taxonomy of neuroethical questions. It deals with two specific contentious issues, one clinical and one from social sciences and shows how neuroethicists can serve to inform and to protect. Neuroethicists need education that encompasses many domains. The study describes the academic grounding and qualifications that should be required and also considers the pivotal roles neuroethicists should (...) play. It contributes views that may help define the field of neuroethics and give structure and relevance to its activities. Finally, it concludes that neuroethicists are needed, now more than ever. (shrink)

Several philosophers have argued that intention is conceptually governed by a normative standard of correctness. Intention normativism is supposed to be the practical counterpart of belief normativism, which is widely discussed in the literature. In this paper, I discuss the extant formulations of the norm of intention and find all of them wanting. I then suggest and defend a new formulation of the norm of intention. I argue that the suggested formulation is immune to the problems that beset other candidates (...) for the norm of intention. (shrink)

This article examines how emerging technologies – particularly artificial intelligence – disrupt the moral and institutional foundations of contemporary military practice. While strategic documents from the United States, NATO, and other major actors anticipate profound institutional transformation driven by AI, their treatment of ethics largely confines itself to legal compliance and technical safeguards, leaving the ethical role of military leadership in managing disruptive change underexamined. Drawing on Seumas Miller’s distinction between social institutions that are merely instrumental to collective goods and (...) those whose defining ends are constitutive of such goods, the article argues that the military belongs to the latter category. Because the military’s core function – defending the sovereignty of a polity – is itself morally significant, technological disruption of its organizational structures simultaneously constitutes ethical disruption. The article thus reconceives change management during periods of technological transition as calling for a specific kind of military prudence, a practical wisdom exercised within and through the institution’s role-mediated ethical practices. By analyzing three concrete modes of techno-moral disruption, the article shows how AI may reshape ethical standards, redistribute professional knowledge, and alter organizational ethos, and why navigating these transformations responsibly is a central task of military virtue. (shrink)

People are minded creatures; we have thoughts, feelings and emotions. More intriguingly, we grasp our own mental states, and conduct the business of ascribing them to ourselves and others without instruction in formal psychology. How do we do this? And what are the dimensions of our grasp of the mental realm? In this book, Alvin I. Goldman explores these questions with the tools of philosophy, developmental psychology, social psychology and cognitive neuroscience. He refines an approach called simulation theory, which starts (...) from the familiar idea that we understand others by putting ourselves in their mental shoes. Can this intuitive idea be rendered precise in a philosophically respectable manner, without allowing simulation to collapse into theorizing? Given a suitable definition, do empirical results support the notion that minds literally create (or attempt to create) surrogates of other peoples mental states in the process of mindreading? Goldman amasses a surprising array of evidence from psychology and neuroscience that supports this hypothesis. (shrink)

This paper provides a contemporary introduction to issues in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science that are studied within the emerging field of digital minds research. We explore the potential for AI systems to have mental states. Questions that we address include whether AI systems can be phenomenally conscious and whether they can have propositional attitudes such as belief and desire. We also consider how digital minds might persist through time in a manner akin to how humans (...) have personal identity through time. Along the way, we highlight methodological issues raised by these questions and examine how these questions relate to traditional issues in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science. We conclude by highlighting issues in this area that are ripe for further investigation. (shrink)

This book explores a neglected philosophical question: How do groups of interacting minds relate to singular minds? Could several of us, by organizing ourselves the right way, constitute a single conscious mind that contains our minds as parts? And could each of us have been, all along, a group of mental parts in close cooperation? Scientific progress seems to be slowly revealing that all the different physical objects around us are, at root, just a matter of the (...) right parts put together in the right ways: How far could the same be true of minds? This book argues that we are too used to seeing the mind as an indivisible unity and that understanding our place in nature requires being willing to see minds as composite systems, simultaneously one conscious whole and many conscious parts. In thinking through the implications of such a shift of perspective, the book relates the question of mental combination to a range of different theories of the mind (in particular panpsychism, functionalism, and Neo-Lockeanism about personal identity) and identifies, clarifies, and addresses a wide array of philosophical objections (concerning personal identity, the unity of consciousness, the privacy of experience, and other issues) that have been raised against the idea of composite minds. The result is an account of the metaphysics of composition and consciousness that can illuminate many different debates in philosophy of mind, concerning split brains, collective intentionality, and the combination problem, among others. (shrink)

In the recent literature on concepts, two extreme positions concerning animal minds are predominant: the one that animals possess neither concepts nor beliefs, and the one that some animals possess concepts as well as beliefs. A characteristic feature of this controversy is the lack of consensus on the criteria for possessing a concept or having a belief. Addressing this deficit, we propose a new theory of concepts which takes recent case studies of complex animal behavior into account. The main (...) aim of the paper is to present an epistemic theory of concepts and to defend a detailed theory of criteria for having concepts. The distinction between nonconceptual, conceptual, and propositional representations is inherent to this theory. Accordingly, it can be reasonably argued that some animals, e.g., grey parrots and apes, operate on conceptual representations. (shrink)

This report presents findings from an expert survey on digital minds takeoff scenarios. The survey was conducted in early 2025 with 67 experts in digital minds research, AI research, philosophy, forecasting, and related fields. Participants provided probabilistic forecasts and qualitative reasoning on the development, characteristics, and societal impact of digital minds, that is, computer systems capable of subjective experience. Experts assigned high probability to digital minds being possible in principle (median 90%) and being created this century (...) (65% by 2100), with a non-negligible probability of emergence by 2030 (20%). Many anticipated rapid growth in digital mind welfare capacity, with collective welfare capacity potentially matching that of billions of humans within a decade after the creation of the first digital mind. Participants also expected widespread claims from digital minds regarding their consciousness and rights, and predicted substantial societal disagreement over their existence and moral interests. Views diverged on whether digital mind welfare will be net positive or negative. These findings provide evidence that bears on the extent to which preparing the world for the potential arrival of digital minds should be a priority across domains such as research and governance. However, these findings should be interpreted cautiously in light of the potential for systematic overrepresentation of experts who deem digital minds particularly likely or important. (shrink)

Why are we conscious? What does consciousness enable us to do that cannot be done by zombies in the dark? This paper argues that introspective consciousness probably co-evolved as a "spandrel" along with our more useful ability to represent the mental states of other people. The first part of the paper defines and motivates a conception of consciousness as a kind of "double vision" – the perception of how things seem to us as well as what they are – along (...) lines recently explored by Peter Carruthers. The second part explains the basic socioepistemic function of consciousness and suggests an evolutionary pathway to this cognitive capacity that begins with predators and prey. The third part discusses the relevance of these considerations to the traditional problem of other minds. (shrink)

Minds Without Fear is an intellectual and cultural history of India during the period of British occupation. It demonstrates that this was a period of renaissance in India in which philosophy--both in the public sphere and in the Indian universities--played a central role in the emergence of a distinctively Indian modernity. The book is also a history of Indian philosophy. It demonstrates how the development of a secular philosophical voice facilitated the construction of modern Indian society and the consolidation (...) of the nationalist movement. (shrink)

In Natural Minds Thomas Polger advocates, and defends, the philosophical theory that mind equals brain -- that sensations are brain processes -- and in doing so brings the mind-brain identity theory back into the philosophical debate about consciousness. The version of identity theory that Polger advocates holds that conscious processes, events, states, or properties are type- identical to biological processes, events, states, or properties -- a "tough-minded" account that maintains that minds are necessarily indentical to brains, a position (...) held by few current identity theorists. Polger's approach to what William James called the "great blooming buzzing confusion" of consciousness begins with the idea that we need to know more about brains in order to understand consciousness fully, but recognizes that biology alone cannot provide the entire explanation. Natural Minds takes on issues from philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and metaphysics, moving freely among them in its discussion.Polger begins by answering two major objections to identity theory -- Hilary Putnam's argument from multiple realizability (which discounts identity theory because creatures with brains unlike ours could also have mental states) and Saul Kripke's modal argument against mind-brain identity (based on the apparent contingency of the indentity statement). He then offers a detailed account of functionalism and functional realization, which offer the most serious obstacle to consideration of identity theory. Polger argues that identity theory can itself satisfy the kind of explanatory demands that are often believed to favor functionalism. (shrink)

What would it take for AI systems to have moral standing, and what kind of obligations might fall on us as a result? This paper summarizes contemporary debates related to these questions. Topics include: how different theories of the basis of moral standing might apply to AI systems; what kind of moral importance our treatment of AI systems might have if they have any moral standing at all; possible tensions between respecting the moral status of future AI systems and the (...) goal of achieving AI alignment; economic and political rights; the significance of empirical and moral uncertainty; and what practical measures, if any, should be implemented now to address the possibility that AI systems exhibiting morally significant mental states might appear within the not-too-distant future – assuming they are not already here. (shrink)

In the carefully argued central chapters of Adapting Minds, Buller scrutinizes several of evolutionary psychology's most highly publicized "...

Drawing on philosophy, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence, Simple Minds explores the construction of the mind from the matter of the brain.

In Dangerous Minds, Ronald Beiner traces the deeper philosophical roots of such far-right ideologues as Richard Spencer, Aleksandr Dugin, and Steve Bannon, to the writings of Nietzsche and Heidegger—and specifically to the aspects of their thought that express revulsion for the liberal-democratic view of life.

In this article, Lucas maintains the falseness of Mechanism - the attempt to explain minds as machines - by means of Incompleteness Theorem of Gödel. Gödel’s theorem shows that in any system consistent and adequate for simple arithmetic there are formulae which cannot be proved in the system but that human minds can recognize as true; Lucas points out in his turn that Gödel’s theorem applies to machines because a machine is the concrete instantiation of a formal system: (...) therefore, for every machine consistent and able of doing simple arithmetic, there is a formula that it can’t produce as true but that we can see to be true, and so human minds and machines have to be different. Lucas considers as well in this article some possible objections to his argument: for any Gödelian formula we could, for instance, construct a machine able to produce it or we could put the Gödelian formulae that we had proved as axioms of a further machine. However - as Lucas underlines - for every of such machines we could again formulate another Gödelian formula, the Gödelian formula of these machines, that they are not able to proof but that we can recognize as true. More general arguments, such as the possibility to escape Gödelian argument by suggesting that Gödel’s theorem applies to consistent systems while we could be inconsistent ones, are moreover refuted by Lucas by maintaining that our inconsistency corresponds to occasional malfunctioning of a machine and not to his normal inconsistency; indeed, a inconsistent machine is characterized by producing any statement, on the contrary human being are selective and not disposed to assert anything. (shrink)