Teaching the Ethics/Technology Interface

Author(s):  
Albert R. Jonsen

The problem that I will discuss in this essay is marvellously illustrated in the title given to me by the editors. The word “interface” is itself part of the jargon of technology, the technospeak needed by those who develop, use, and discuss functions, things, and relationships that had not existed previously in the human world. They must make up new words to describe new realities (and, unfortunately, allow new and ugly words to obscure old ones). An “interface” presumably describes the way in which one electronic system contacts another so that the first energizes the second. In the old world of human experience, an “interface” is impossible. The face of one human being is visible to another; two faces, smiling or frowning at each other, communicate. The mind behind one face can interpret the movements of another. Never does one human face interpenetrate or merge with another.

2013 ◽  
Vol 18 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 405-434 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guido Giglioni

Francis Bacon’s elusive notion of experience can be better understood when we relate it to his views on matter, motion, appetite and intellect, and bring to the fore its broader philosophical implications. Bacon’s theory of knowledge is embedded in a programme of disciplinary redefinition, outlined in the Advancement of Learning and De augmentis scientiarum. Among all disciplines, prima philosophia (and not metaphysica) plays a key foundational role, based on the idea of both a physical parallelism between the human intellect and nature (psycho-physical parallelism) and a theological parallelism between nature and God (physico-theological parallelism). Failure to assess Bacon’s distinctive position concerning the way in which the mind mirrors both the natural and the divine world, that is to say, the meaning of “reality,” has resulted in notoriously jejune discussions on Baconian empiricism, monotonously driven by epistemological concerns. As a result, the standard view on Bacon’s empiricism is as epistemologically comforting as it is imaginary, an “idol” in a genuinely Baconian sense. In this article, Bacon’s notion of experience will be discussed by examining those steps that he considered to be the crucial initial stages in the formation of human experience, stages described as a process of experiential literacy (experientia literata) or, in emblematic terms, as a hunting expedition led by the mythological figure of Pan (venatio Panis). I argue that a well-rounded analysis of Bacon’s experientia literata needs to take into account the complementary notion of the “spelling-book of nature” (abecedarium naturae), that is, the original code of the primordial motions of matter. By getting acquainted with the first rudiments of experience through its spelling-book (on both an individual and a cosmological level), one learns to read the book of nature and, most of all, to write new pages in it.



Phonology ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 459-463
Author(s):  
Janet Pierrehumbert

The functionalist viewpoint in linguistics can take different forms. A caricature of functionalist thinking is the notion that the structure of language is optimised, or nearly so, for its function as a means of human communication. This notion has met with widespread scepticism because of its lack of predictiveness in the face of typological variation. Either it leads to the prediction that all languages are en route to some single ‘Utopian’ (even if they have not quite achieved it) or it leads one to posit so many contradictory functional goods that the nature of possible languages is not effectively restricted. A second, and far more sophisticated, understanding of functionalism is the claim that there are regular relations between the way language is represented in the mind and the way that it is processed during speech production and perception. These relations arise because language is acquired from experiences of use, and because even in adults patterns of use affect cognitive representations. The effects of individual instances of language use are local, incremental and context-dependent. Language use and competence in a language are thus two aspects of a single system. Multiple system configurations are possible for the same reason that multiple ecosystems are possible; like the products of biological evolution, human languages are merely good enough, and not globally or absolutely optimised. This understanding of linguistic functionalism has proved fruitful for at least two decades and is now coming into its own. Its rise constitutes part of the rise of scientific research on complex systems and emergent structures generally, in areas ranging from geophysics and granular media to population biology.


Philosophy ◽  
1985 ◽  
Vol 60 (234) ◽  
pp. 477-493 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Cockburn

‘Only of a living human being and what resembles (behaves like) a living human being can one say: it has sensations; it sees; is blind; hears, is deaf; is conscious or unconscious’.1 ‘The human body is the best picture of the human soul’. Anyone who believes that Wittgenstein's remarks here embody important truths has quite a bit of explaining to do. What needs to be explained is why it is that enormous numbers of people, people who have never had the chance to be corrupted by reading Descartes or Dennett, are willing, with only the slightest prompting, to speak in ways which appear to conflict dramatically with Wittgenstein's thought. Many people appear to find no difficulty at all in the idea that we could ascribe thoughts, sensations, emotions and so on to things which in no way resemble or behave like a living human being—for example to disembodied ‘minds’ or ‘souls’ or disembodied brains floating in tanks. And with a little more pressing many will agree that it is never to the living human being that these states are, strictly speaking, correctly ascribed; but, rather, to one part of the living human being—the brain, for example. Now if this incredibly widespread tendency is the expression of confusion then we need an explanation of its existence. We need this partly because without it it will be difficult to undermine the tendency; and partly because we might expect that such a widespread tendency is a distortion of some truth.


2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-206
Author(s):  
María de las Nieves Ibáñez Ibáñez

The first half of the 20th century has witnessed tragic episodes in Europe where the topic understood as humanity has being closed down. This article addresses the way literature, or the best of it —written by the survivors at the Nazi death camps, French camps, those who, broken and in front of everyone’s eyes, experienced the progress of evil, like Victor Klemperer— in the light of the difficulty to depict the horror and the decline of the human being, takes charge of genres close to the real —the report or the chronicle, the diary, the essay— and it opposes to horror the necessity of stating an unrealistic human experience in order to, ultimately, prevent it from happening again. As examples we can mention: Primo Levy in Auschwitz Trilogy; Max Aub in French Camp; Victor Klemperer in Diaries; Jean Améry in Beyond Guilt and Atonement.


2019 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
James Phillips

Sternberg’s films are famous for their close-ups of the female face. This Introduction discusses the way in which Dietrich’s face functions in his early sound films. Whereas silent cinema charged the human face with carrying the plot or at least with taking up the narrative slack between intertitles, sound film with its additional resources for expounding the narrative opens a space for a face that is inscrutable. Sternberg’s films release the face for spectacle without thereby surrendering it to the gaze of the moviegoer: in its independence of the enclosed world of a narrative, Dietrich’s face is in a position to look out and back at the spectator. Contrasting Morocco with An American Tragedy (in which Dietrich does not appear), the Introduction argues that there is thus an image of autonomy that Sternberg and Dietrich construct and that contributes an (often overlooked) ethical dimension to their cinema of spectacle.


2014 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Arif Nuh Safri

Religion certainly is present in every human being, because it is an natural tendency. The presence of God in every human being is a necessity. Nevertheless, religious expression and Godliness will always vary. The concept of religiosity and Godliness will differ between the chaplain, students, scholars, with criminals, thieves, pickpockets, prostitutes and transvestites. Each one is identical to the role and experience of its own. Therefore, awareness of the differences in the identification of religion and God, should make man more flexibility to appreciate other people's religiosity and Godliness, although others are emerging from marginal groups, or the offender is considered a sin, so that everyone is aware of and comfortable with undergoing road religion and the way the Lord each believed. Through this article, the author will present a descriptive pattern diversity ekspreif shemale Shemale on Mondays and Thursdays at Pesantren al-Fatah Yogyakarta. At least, the courage to hold these institutions, has become proof of the existence of transgender religious expression on the face of this earth, once negated that should not be considered pious people who claim to be religious and atheist.


Author(s):  
Ronald Hoinski ◽  
Ronald Polansky

David Hoinski and Ronald Polansky’s “The Modern Aristotle: Michael Polanyi’s Search for Truth against Nihilism” shows how the general tendencies of contemporary philosophy of science disclose a return to the Aristotelian emphasis on both the formation of dispositions to know and the role of the mind in theoretical science. Focusing on a comparison of Michael Polanyi and Aristotle, Hoinski and Polansky investigate to what degree Aristotelian thought retains its purchase on reality in the face of the changes wrought by modern science. Polanyi’s approach relies on several Aristotelian assumptions, including the naturalness of the human desire to know, the institutional and personal basis for the accumulation of knowledge, and the endorsement of realism against objectivism. Hoinski and Polansky emphasize the promise of Polanyi’s neo-Aristotelian framework, which argues that science is won through reflection on reality.


2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Jenness

This paper explores the way American intellectuals depicted Sigmund Freud during the peak of popularity and prestige of psychoanalysis in the US, roughly the decade and a half following World War II. These intellectuals insisted upon the unassailability of Freud's mind and personality. He was depicted as unsusceptible to any external force or influence, a trait which was thought to account for Freud's admirable comportment as a scientist, colleague and human being. This post-war image of Freud was shaped in part by the Cold War anxiety that modern individuality was imperilled by totalitarian forces, which could only be resisted by the most rugged of selves. It was also shaped by the unique situation of the intellectuals themselves, who were eager to position themselves, like the Freud they imagined, as steadfastly independent and critical thinkers who would, through the very clarity of their thought, lead America to a more robust democracy.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (11) ◽  
pp. 267-1-267-8
Author(s):  
Mitchell J.P. van Zuijlen ◽  
Sylvia C. Pont ◽  
Maarten W.A. Wijntjes

The human face is a popular motif in art and depictions of faces can be found throughout history in nearly every culture. Artists have mastered the depiction of faces after employing careful experimentation using the relatively limited means of paints and oils. Many of the results of these experimentations are now available to the scientific domain due to the digitization of large art collections. In this paper we study the depiction of the face throughout history. We used an automated facial detection network to detect a set of 11,659 faces in 15,534 predominately western artworks, from 6 international, digitized art galleries. We analyzed the pose and color of these faces and related those to changes over time and gender differences. We find a number of previously known conventions, such as the convention of depicting the left cheek for females and vice versa for males, as well as unknown conventions, such as the convention of females to be depicted looking slightly down. Our set of faces will be released to the scientific community for further study.


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