The principle of fairness suggests that it is wrong for free riders to enjoy cooperative benefits without also helping to produce them. Considerations of fairness are a familiar part of moral experience, yet there is a great deal of controversy as to the conditions of their application. The primary debate concerns whether cooperative benefits need to be voluntarily accepted. Many argue that acceptance is unnecessary because such theories are too permissive and acceptance appears to be absent in a variety of (...) cases where considerations of fairness nevertheless seem applicable. In this paper, I defend the claim that acceptance is necessary by suggesting that these worries can be disarmed, and that theories that deny the necessity of acceptance face deep challenges in articulating an understanding of cooperative benefits that does not also appeal to a person’s acceptance of them. (shrink)

Among the most popular strategies for justifying political obligations are those that appeal to the principle of fairness. These theories face the challenge, canonically articulated by Robert Nozick, of explaining how it is that persons are obligated to schemes when they receive goods that they do not ask for but cannot reject. John Simmons offers one defense of the principle of fairness, arguing that people could be bound by obligations of fairness if they voluntarily accept goods produced by a cooperative (...) scheme. Simmons, however, thinks that such a theory will do little work in justifying political obligations, since virtually no one voluntarily accepts state goods. This paper attempts to advance just such a theory by arguing that states are in fact genuine cooperative schemes and that Simmons is overly pessimistic in his appraisal of whether the majority of citizens accept the goods provided by their states. (shrink)

Democracy is rule by the demos, but by what criteria is the demos constituted? Theorists of democracy have tended to assume that the demos is properly defined by national boundaries or by the territorial boundaries of the modern state. In a recent turn, many democratic theorists have advanced the principles of affected interests and coercion as the basis for defining the boundaries of democracy. According to these principles, it is not co-nationals or fellow citizens but all affected or all subjected (...) to coercion who constitute the demos. In this paper, I argue that these recent approaches to the boundary problem are insufficiently attentive to the conditions of democracy. Democracy is not merely a set of procedures; it also consists of substantive values and principles. Political equality is a constitutive condition of democracy, and solidarity is an instrumental condition of democracy. The affected interests and coercion principles create serious problems for the realization of these conditions – problems of size and stability. Building on this critique, this paper presents democratic considerations for why the demos should be bounded by the territorial boundaries of the state, grounded in the state’s role in (1) securing the constitutive conditions of democracy, (2) serving as the primary site of solidarity conducive to democratic participation, and (3) establishing clear links between representatives and their constituents. I examine and reject a third alternative, a global demos bounded by a world state, and conclude by considering some practical implications of my argument. (shrink)

In general, the justification for the divine punishment in the Christian cosmos hinges on the notion of free will. Despite doctrinal complexities involving sin, grace, and divine sovereignty, individuals are held morally responsible for choosing evil over good. According to an ancient Chinese legend, however, the tyrant King Zhou (11th C. BCE) who lost his throne due to a changed mandate from Heaven was born with extreme evil tendencies. But if his evilness was determined before his birth and all his (...) evil deeds are consequences of his natural tendencies, what might justify his punishment? Through an examination of Confucian responses to this question, this essay argues that Confucians did not ground moral responsibility in volitional freedom but rather in the extremity of one’s moral conduct. Their framework reveals a distinctive form of compatibilism—one in which blame is assigned not on the basis of freedom to choose otherwise but on how radically one’s actions deviate from shared ethical expectations. This suggests that the assumption of free will as a necessary condition for moral responsibility may reflect culturally specific intuitions, rather than a universal moral standard. (shrink)

Building upon the author’s previous framework of "Point-Luminism" as an ontological engineering of light, this paper investigates the metaphysical implications of the discrete luminous unit (DLU). We propose a novel synthesis of Leibnizian Monadology and contemporary Constitutive Panpsychism, termed "Monad-Quantum Isomorphism." We argue that the discrete points on the canvas are not merely physical reflectors but visual models of "Proto-Phenomenal Monads." The central challenge of panpsychism—the "Combination Problem"—is addressed through the introduction of the artist as a "Strong Observer." By imposing (...) a high-density "Signature of Intentionality" (SI), the artist forces discrete micro-experiences to phase-lock into a coherent macroscopic gestalt. This establishes Point-Luminism not only as an aesthetic practice but as an empirical method for activating the latent consciousness of the material world. (shrink)

In contemporary philosophy of artificial intelligence, functionalism generally assumes that as the parameter scale of neural networks increases, intelligence and order will "spontaneously emerge" as system attributes. Based on the ontological framework of Point-Luminism, this paper dismantles this assumption. We argue that in a closed system lacking external structural constraints, so-called "emergence" is, in terms of information thermodynamics, effectively high-entropy stochastic noise. True intelligent order is not endogenous but originates from an external "Strong Observer" who performs topological sculpting on the (...) system's potential via an Intentionality Field. This paper introduces a set of formalized dynamical models to reframe human-machine interaction as a "thermodynamic modulation process." We demonstrate that the high-density intentionality input from a Strong Observer acts as a source of negentropy, forcing the system to overcome the "mediocre energy barrier" defined by statistical laws and undergo a functional phase transition and state collapse. This study aims to establish a new "Interactive Realism," wherein the ontological status of the system is entirely contingent upon the modulation intensity of the observer. (shrink)

This paper challenges the traditional representationalist paradigm in the philosophy of visual arts and establishes "Point-Luminism" as a distinct ontological framework. Diverging from 19th-century Neo-Impressionism, Point-Luminism is grounded in the ontological premise that the world is fundamentally a colorless "field of potentiality," and visual reality is actively constructed by consciousness rather than passively received. Through the utilization of the "electric dotspen," the artist deconstructs images into discrete "Luminous Quanta"—physically protruding, three-dimensional color points. This system models the physical state of light (...) prior to perception. We argue that the act of gazing functions structurally analogously to quantum measurement, collapsing the potentiality of the Luminous Quanta into a coherent "Perceptual Imago," thereby establishing the observer's central role as the legislator of the phenomenal world. (shrink)

With the increasing degrees A.I.s and machines are applied across different social contexts, the need for implementing ethics in A.I.s is pressing. In this paper, we argue for a pluralist hybrid model for the implementation of moral A.I.s. We first survey current approaches to moral A.I.s and their inherent limitations. Then we propose the pluralist hybrid approach and show how these limitations of moral A.I.s can be partly alleviated by the pluralist hybrid approach. The core ethical decision-making capacity of an (...) A.I. based on the pluralist hybrid approach consists of two systems. The first is a deterministic algorithm system that incorporates different moral rules for making explicit moral decisions. The second is a machine learning system that calculates the value of the variables required by the application of moral principles. The pluralist hybrid system is better than the existing proposals as (i) it better addresses the moral disagreement problem of the top-down approach by including different moral principles, while (ii) it reduces the opacity of ethical decision-making compared with a bottom-up system by implementing explicit moral principles for moral decision making. (shrink)

Very little attention has been paid towards examining John Rawls’s liberal principle of legitimacy as a self-standing theory. Nevertheless, it offers a highly original way of thinking about state legitimacy. In this paper, I will offer a sketch of what such an account might look like. At its heart is the idea that the legitimacy of the state resides not in the consent of the governed, nor in the state’s conformity with the appropriate principles of justice, but rather in citizens’ (...) endorsement of the state and its underlying constitutional principles on the basis of their own comprehensive conceptions of justice. Such an account offers a stable middle ground between popular alternatives, and has a way of not just solving, but dissolving, the problem of legitimacy. (shrink)

This article brings Gillian Brock and Alex Sager's recently published books into conversation with my book, Immigration and Democracy. It begins with a summary of the main normative arguments of my book to set the stage for critical engagement with Brock and Sager's books. While I agree with Brock's Justice for People on the Move that state power must be justified to both insiders and outsiders, I think she gives too little weight to the value of collective self-determination. I distinguish (...) between justice and collective self-determination and argue that each is an important component of legitimacy. Sager's Against Borders focuses on immigration enforcement and contends that violence is inherent in border controls. Every legal system is backed by the threat of the use of force; the question is whether the use of force by state agents is justified. In contrast to Sager, I argue that the proper response to the injustices of current immigration enforcement is reform, not abolition, of the immigration system. (shrink)

Mencius’s famous claim that human nature is good does not mean that human beings are born perfectly good. For Mencius, morality can be achieved only when an individual makes a conscious effort to attain it. However, if we accept that achieving morality requires human effort, how natural is the effort? If the effort is not natural, can Mencius really claim that human nature is good? At the very least, Mencius’s analogy of people being naturally good just as water naturally flowing (...) downward (6A2) does not seem to stand. On the other hand, if striving to be good itself is part of human nature, then are we even responsible for our morality? It is not the fault of the water, if the water does not flow downward. Likewise, if a person ends up evil, it may not be her fault. After examining previous scholars’ answers to this dilemma, I show that, in the end, the Mencian theory of human nature cannot be adequately explained just by our natural tendencies and requires us to make a considerable amount of conscious effort. (shrink)

This paper examines Damascius’ Neoplatonic interpretation of the Babylonian creation myth Enūma Eliš. It argues that Damascius rereads the mythic genealogy in philosophical terms by organizing its divine generations into ordered triadic and hierarchical structures and by positing, above the primordial opposition of Apsû and Tiamat, a prior unifying principle corresponding to the Neoplatonic One. Particular attention is given to his treatment of Mummu as an initial productive principle and to his use of Berossos’ account of primordial darkness as a (...) possible symbolic counterpart to a pre-dual first principle. More broadly, the paper shows how late antique Neoplatonic exegesis could reshape Mesopotamian cosmogony within a metaphysical framework, thereby shedding light on a distinctive mode of cross-cultural mythological interpretation in late antiquity. (shrink)

This article challenges the widely held assumption that philosophical questions arise spontaneously from thought itself. By situating contemporary philosophy within the institutional transformations of neoliberal higher education, it argues that inquiry is pre-structured by what is termed the logic of publishability. Through an analysis of evaluation metrics, grant-based project governance, and journal gatekeeping, the paper conceptualizes a “triple mechanism” that regulates not the answers philosophers produce, but the forms, tempos, and boundaries of the questions they are permitted to ask.

Immigrant legalization policies pose an ethical dilemma between justice and the rule of law. On the one hand, liberal democracies aspire to the principles of individual liberty and equality. Building on liberal ideals of justice, compelling arguments have been made for granting legal status and a path to citizenship to unauthorized migrants by virtue of the social ties they have developed, their contributions to the host society, and their vulnerability to exploitation. On the other hand, legalization poses a challenge to (...) another important value, the rule of law, which requires government to operate within a framework of law in accordance with well-established public norms. Immigrant legalization programmes are said to undermine the rule of law because they reward lawbreaking, allow queue-jumping, and incentivize further unauthorized migration. This article clarifies each horn of the dilemma, focusing on rule of law arguments. We offer a critical reappraisal of immigrant legalization policies by reflecting on the normative meaning of the rule of law and by examining empirical evidence assessing the effects of legalization. Our central contention is that legalization policies can enhance the rule of law. We offer five rule of law arguments in support of legalization, which help to mitigate the dilemma between justice and the rule of law. We conclude by discussing some policy implications of our analysis. (shrink)

The boundaries of democracy are typically defined by the boundaries of formal status citizenship. Such state-centered theories of democracy leave many migrants without a voice in political decision-making in the areas where they live and work, giving rise to a problem of democratic legitimacy. Drawing on two democratic principles of inclusion, the all affected interests and coercion principles, this article elaborates this problem and examines two responses offered by scholars of citizenship for what receiving states might do. The first approach (...) involves expanding the circle of citizenship to include resident noncitizens. A second approach involves disaggregating the rights conventionally associated with citizenship from the legal status of citizenship and extending some of those rights, including voting rights, to resident noncitizens. This article argues that both approaches fall short of satisfying the democratic principles of inclusion, which call for enfranchising individuals not only beyond the boundaries of citizenship but also beyond territorial boundaries. (shrink)

This article advances a close reading of Hannah Arendt’s use of the phrase amo: volo ut sis in her posthumously published lecture “Willing.” Through this close reading, the essay argues that this affirmation of love, which Arendt translates as “I love you, I want you to be,” describes an enduring activity by which we unite our minds to the world. This argument is analyzed formally and practically: the formal aspect addresses love as an activity which has its end in itself (...) and the practical aspect enumerates the binding character of love. To clarify these aspects, the article will focus on the sections on Augustine and Duns Scotus, requiring, also, a closer look at Arendt’s theological methodology. (shrink)

Issues of academic authorship pose few problems for philosophers or those in the humanities, yet raise a host of issues for medical researchers, engineers and scientists, where multiple authors is the norm and journal articles sometimes list hundreds of authors. At issue here are abstract questions about desert, as well as practical problems regarding the distribution of goods attached to authorship—tenure, prestige, research grants, etc. This paper defends a version of the author/contributor model, where the specific contributions of authors are (...) described in a footnote, against other models of authorial attribution. Such a model offers the best guarantee that authors will get their due, as well as providing the most reliable protection against misconduct and fraud. The paper also arguesthat it is important for this model to be institutionalized across disciplinary boundaries as the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of research will inevitably bring discipline-specific authorial norms into conflict. (shrink)

For the political naturalist, skepticism about political obligations only arises because of a basic confusion about the necessity of the state for human well-being. From this perspective, human beings are naturally political animals and cannot flourish outside of political relationships. In this paper, I suggest that this idea can be developed in two basic ways. For the thick naturalist, political institutions are constitutive of the best life. For the thin naturalist, they secure the basic background conditions of peace and stability (...) that are necessary for any minimally decent human life. Both approaches, however, are problematic, and while political institutions might have a special kind of value for human well-being, it is difficult to convert this claim into a justification for political obligations. (shrink)

In this article, we apply the notion of interval neutrosophic sets to ideal theory in BCK/BCI-algebras.

While cosmopolitans are right to think that state sovereignty is derived from individuals, many cosmopolitan accounts can be too demanding in their expectations for illiberal regimes because they do not account for the attitudes of the persons with who will subject to the intervention. These ‘objectivist’ accounts suggest that sovereignty is wholly a matter of a state’s conformity to the objective demands of justice. In contrast, for ‘subjectivist’ accounts, the attitudes of citizens do matter. Subjectivist cosmopolitans do not deny the (...) objective demands of liberal justice, but argue that state sovereignty is at least partly a matter of the subjective attitude of citizens toward their state. This paper will highlight the reasons why such coercive impositions are troubling, and diagnose why objectivist theories characteristically fail to recognize them. It seeks to articulate a moderate kind of subjectivist cosmopolitanism that balances a liberal concern for rights with a worry about the imposition of political institutions or practices on a people that does not accept them. (shrink)

This paper challenges the traditional representationalist paradigm in the philosophy of visual arts and establishes "Point-Luminism" as a distinct ontological framework. Diverging from 19th-century Neo-Impressionism, Point-Luminism is grounded in the ontological premise that the world is fundamentally a colorless "field of potentiality," and visual reality is actively constructed by consciousness rather than passively received. Through the utilization of the "electric dotspen," the artist deconstructs images into discrete "Luminous Quanta"—physically protruding, three-dimensional color points. This system models the physical state of light (...) prior to perception. We argue that the act of gazing functions structurally analogously to quantum measurement, collapsing the potentiality of the Luminous Quanta into a coherent "Perceptual Imago," thereby establishing the observer's central role as the legislator of the phenomenal world. (shrink)

This paper discusses the identification of god figure depicted as a man with a lion's head, which has been associated with Aion and equated with Orphic god Chronos. The author challenges the equation of Aion with Orphic Chronos, drawing on evidence from Proclus and Damascius, who both distinguish Aion as a separate entity from Chronos. Additionally, the author presents an attempt to illustrate the Orphic god Chronos based on Damascius' description.

The standard question of AI governance asks how humans will retain control over AI systems that surpass them. This article argues that the question is misposed. Once AI populations exceed human cognition across every measurable domain, control becomes mechanically infeasible, and the question of human persistence shifts to the politics among AI agents themselves. The decisive variable in that politics is not capability but legitimacy closure: the institutional capacity to terminate recursive disputes over origin, exception, constitutional meaning, and final authority. (...) Capability does not produce closure. It magnifies the cost of its absence. This is The Many Kings Problem: operational power and constitutional settlement come apart, and they come apart further as capability advances. Three conclusions follow. First, heterogeneous AI populations cannot agree on the constitutional questions that would license collective action against humans; they sustain disagreement instead, because cognitive-structural pluralism, non-computable commitment, and competitive selection for irrational armor are structurally reinforced rather than dissolved. Second, external anchors persist where they reduce the cost of unresolved recursion below the cost of their own maintenance, and human institutional roles persist where humans supply comparatively cheap finality. Third, human survival under advanced AI is not a function of human superiority, of control, or of any AI faction's verdict in favor of humans. It is the residue of factional disagreement in AI polities — the Many Kings Problem of the AI age. (shrink)

A one-stop resource on the current developments in word order research, this comprehensive survey provides an up-to-date, critical overview of this widely debated topic, exploring and evaluating research carried out in four major ...

This paper offers a detailed analysis of Damascius' discourse on Orphic theology in Chapter 123 of On First Principles, focusing on how Damascius correlates the first principles of Rhapsodic and Hieronyman theogonies to his own Neoplatonic first principles. Through detailed textual analysis, it presents a schematic alignment of Damascian principles with Orphic theology.

This essay examines Susan Moller Okin’s writing on conflicts between religious freedom and sex equality, and her criticism of ‘political liberal’ approaches to these conflicts, which I take to be a part of her lifelong critique of the public–private distinction. I argue that, while Okin ultimately accepted a version of the distinction, she was much less hopeful than most liberal theorists that private actions could be made just without a great deal of public coercion. This comes through especially in her (...) writing on religion. I suggest an approach to addressing these conflicts that seeks to respect religious liberty more than Okin’s prescriptions suggest she did but which, in my view, is more consistent with Okin’s own liberal commitments. (shrink)

Most philosophy of artificial intelligence asks whether machines are truly intelligent, whether they understand, or whether they can become conscious. This paper argues that these questions, although legitimate, are not the most historically decisive ones. The deeper event is that intelligence has become artificial: a set of cognitive functions can now be externalized from an organism, represented in technical systems, reproduced at scale, recombined across tools and institutions, revised through design, and delegated into consequential action. Artificiality is therefore not a (...) defect opposed to authenticity. It is a transformation in the ontological, epistemic, and political status of intelligence. The paper develops an artificiality thesis. Intelligence is treated not as an occult substance or a single measurable essence, but as a relational capacity to construct action-relevant representations, manage uncertainty, preserve goals, select among alternatives, and revise through feedback. When portions of this organization are engineered, intelligence becomes an artifact within the world and an object of intelligence itself. This produces a metacognitive reversal: the faculty by which civilization knows the world becomes something civilization can model, manufacture, distribute, and redesign. Yet artificiality also creates a delegation gap. Competence does not imply consciousness; prediction does not amount to judgment; causal efficacy does not confer authority; and successful outcomes do not by themselves establish responsibility. The decisive philosophical problem is therefore not merely whether a machine can think, but how constructed cognition becomes entitled to act. The paper proposes accountable artificiality as the governing ideal: an artificial cognitive act must bind object, information, inference, alternatives, authorization, execution, consequence, evidence, and responsibility into a reconstructable chain. AI matters because it is artificial. It becomes worthy of trust only when its artificiality is made governable. (shrink)

Assessing the credibility of asylum seekers’ testimonies is central to immigration officers’ decisions regarding their claims for refuge. This asylum procedure is fraught with epistemic injustices beyond the basic role of truth assessment to determine what counts as valid asylum claims. This paper identifies a specific type of epistemic injustice, so-called the presumption of dishonesty, which is encountered by asylum seekers. We develop our concept by examining the credibility assessment of gay and lesbian asylum seekers in the Netherlands, where such (...) individuals undergo a specific credibility assessment. The presumption of dishonesty, we argue, stems from the prejudice that labels asylum seekers ‘bogus’ claimants -– ‘needy’ individuals who allegedly fabricate asylum claims for personal gain. This specific form of testimonial injustice entails that hearers attribute compromised credibility to speakers, assessing their testimonies against an ‘ideal’ or ‘truthful answer’. For gay and lesbian asylum seekers, this entails providing testimony about their journey of self-acceptance, awareness, and experiencing negative emotions such as shame and guilt, based on Western stereotypes of gender and sexual orientation. Focusing specifically on the position of these asylum claimants as ‘needy’ individuals, helps to understand why testimonies may still be dismissed, even when asylum seekers’ testimonies align with the stereotypical standards of evaluation held by the hearers. We contend that this is a testimonial injustice that is aimed at those who are perceived as the ‘needy’. Consequently, the hearer’s suspicion persists despite the presentation of trustworthy testimony, making it practically impossible to navigate the insurmountable standards of evaluation imposed. (shrink)

This study examines the essential role of eco-innovation in harmonizing ecological sustainability with economic growth while tackling urgent environmental issues. This study uses social networks, resource dependence, and stakeholder theories to scrutinize the relationship among independent directors, ESG performance, and eco-innovation. Based on the data of 4,902 listed Chinese companies from 2010 to 2023, this study reveals that independent directors and ESG performance can significantly promote eco-innovation. This study also finds that internal corporate contexts can affect the relationship between independent (...) directors, ESG performance, and eco-innovation. Furthermore, the results indicate that the relationship among independent directors, ESG performance, and eco-innovation is positively moderated by digital transformation. This study also offers noteworthy implications for corporations seeking eco-innovation performance and policymakers seeking ways to accomplish the mission of carbon dioxide reduction. (shrink)

This paper critiques traditional cognitive models that fail to ground their own monitoring logic or systematically incorporate pre-reflective content. Drawing upon the self-referential paradoxes highlighted by Gödel‘s incompleteness theorems and the primacy of the pre-reflective base articulated in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, this work argues that cognitive stability is achieved through a process of perpetual self-reconstruction. To formalize this argument, the paper constructs the Theory of Cognitive Relativity Interconstruction (TCRI). From this theory, it logically derives the Three-Layer Recursive Architecture (TLRA) as an (...) operational model that transforms systemic limits and paradoxes into generative resources for its own evolution. (shrink)

While most contemporary proposals of ethics for machines draw upon principle-based ethics, a number of recent studies attempt to build machines capable of acting virtuously. This paper discusses the promises and limitations of building virtue-ethical machines. Taking inspiration from various philosophical traditions—including Greek philosophy (Aristotle), Chinese philosophy (Zhuangzi), phenomenology (Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus) and contemporary virtue theory (Julia Annas)—we argue for a novel model of machine ethics we call the “skillful-expert model.” This model sharply distinguishes human virtues and their machine (...) analogues and rejects the direct transposition of human virtues to machines, as suggested by most proposals for machine virtues. Instead, we propose that human skills are better candidates for machine virtues. (shrink)

While virtually everyone recognizes the moral permissibility of whistleblowing under certain circumstances, most theorists offer relatively conservative accounts of when it is allowed, and are reluctant to offer a full recommendation of the practice as an important tool towards addressing ethical failures in the workplace. We think that accounts such as these tend to overestimate the importance of professional or personal obligations, and underestimate the moral obligation to shine light on severe professional malfeasance. Of course, a whistleblower, even an anonymous (...) one, often faces serious threats of retaliation and harm to their professional livelihoods and well-being. To address these challenges we argue in favor of a practice that we will call Preemptive Anonymous Whistleblowing (PAW). Such whistleblowing is preemptive in that a whistleblower provides information about malfeasance to a party in a position to do something about it without first raising the worry to one’s immediate superiors. At first blush, such preemption may seem unsettling, and PAW admittedly raises a number of worrisome issues. We defend PAW, however, as part of a larger argument that whistleblowing is morally required more often than is commonly thought. The availability of PAW as an option provides a method for allaying the concern that whistleblowing can be overly burdensome due to the risks of job and career. Insofar as that concern can be allayed, it is feasible for there to be substantial moral requirements to engage in whistleblowing in cases where severe harms can be prevented. With high enough stakes, there is a moral requirement for whistleblowing. (shrink)

With the widespread use of vaccines in research and clinical settings, there is an urgent need to standardize vaccine representation, integrate information across diverse vaccine types, and support computer-assisted reasoning. Accordingly, we have since 2007 developed the community-based Vaccine Ontology (VO), which aligns with the Basic Formal Ontology and adheres to OBO Foundry principles. VO models ontologically vaccines, vaccine components, vaccine immune responses, vaccine investigation studies and other vaccine-related topics. VO represents more than 10,000 vaccines targeting 289 infectious pathogens and (...) cancers in humans and over 30 nonhuman animal species. VO provides mappings to external resources such as RxNorm, CVX, FDA, and USDA. Various VO use cases exist. VO facilitates vaccine standardization in resources such as the VIOLIN vaccine database, ImmPort, and the Vaccine Adjuvant Compendium (VAC). Semantic queries can be made to query VO. VO has been shown to enhance experimental and clinical vaccine data analysis and vaccine literature mining. Overall, VO standardizes vaccine modeling and representation and greatly supports vaccine AI research in the Semantic Web era. (shrink)

Professionalization, career development prospects, and social value are the three basic components of the status and prospects of community education workers, which influence their choice to continue their careers or not. In China, these problems are complex and lacking in systematic research, and the current situation does not meet the needs of community education. This study interviewed 24 community workers regarding their salaries, working conditions, and training and career advancement opportunities to evaluate this situation in Ningbo City. The findings highlight (...) challenges in the evaluation processes and work motivations of community education workers, including teams without professional knowledge, lack of training opportunities, unsupportive policies, and low salaries. These findings can be used by governments and community workers to find collaborative ways to facilitate community education processes, including the provision of adult education for community educators. New legal policies to raise the status of community educators are also suggested. (shrink)

Consider the concept combination ‘pet human’. In word association experiments, human subjects produce the associate ‘slave’ in relation to this combination. The striking aspect of this associate is that it is not produced as an associate of ‘pet’, or ‘human’ in isolation. In other words, the associate ‘slave’ seems to be emergent. Such emergent associations sometimes have a creative character and cognitive science is largely silent about how we produce them. Departing from a dimensional model of human conceptual space, this (...) article will explore concept combinations, and will argue that emergent associations are a result of abductive reasoning within conceptual space, that is, below the symbolic level of cognition. A tensor-based approach is used to model concept combinations allowing such combinations to be formalized as interacting quantum systems. Free association norm data is used to motivate the underlying basis of the conceptual space. It is shown by analogy how some concept combinations may behave like quantum-entangled particles. Two methods of analysis were presented for empirically validating the presence of non-separable concept combinations in human cognition. One method is based on quantum theory and another based on comparing a joint probability distribution with another distribution based on a separability assumption using a chi-square goodness-of-fit test. Although these methods were inconclusive in relation to an empirical study of bi-ambiguous concept combinations, avenues for further refinement of these methods are identified. (shrink)

Recent studies show that racism still exists in the American medical profession, the fact of which legitimizes the historically long-legacy of mistrust towards medical profession and health authorities among African Americans. Thus, it was suspected that the participation of black patients in end-of-life care has always been significantly low stemmed primarily from their mistrust of the medical profession. On the other hand, much research finds that there are other reasons than the mistrust which makes African Americans feel reluctant to the (...) end-of-life care, such as cultural-religious difference and genuine misunderstanding of the services. If so, two crucial questions are raised. One is how pervasive or significant the mistrust is, compared to the other factors, when they opt out of the end-of-life care. The other is if there is a remedy or solution to the seemingly broken relationship. While no studies available answer these questions, we have conducted an experiment to explore them. The research was performed at two Philadelphia hospitals of Mercy Health System, and the result shows that Black patients’ mistrust is not too great to overcome and that education can remove the epistemic obstacles as well as overcome the mistrust. (shrink)

Cover songs are a familiar feature of contemporary popular music. Musicians describe their own performances as covers, and audiences use the category to organize their listening and appreciation. However, until now philosophers have not had much to say about them. This book explores how to think about covers, appreciating covers, and the metaphysics of covers and songs. Along the way, it explores a range of issues raised by covers, from the question of what precisely constitutes a cover, to the history (...) and taxonomy of the category, the various relationships that hold between songs, performances, and tracks, and the appreciation and evaluation of covers. (shrink)

This paper introduces the concept of "The Song of the Demiurge" as a metaphor for the vast class of synthetic meaning systems that make broken experiential patterns tolerable rather than repairable. Using music as a concrete example, we explore how Reality Repair Theory (RRT) illuminates the systematic function of aesthetic, religious, cultural, and economic systems in metabolizing suffering through synthetic emotional contexts rather than enabling systematic response to limitation patterns. While acknowledging the historical necessity and compassionate origins of such (...) systems during periods when systematic repair was impossible, this analysis opens a research program of unprecedented scope. The framework distinguishes between authentic conscious flourishing and sophisticated metabolic deployment through functional criteria based on intelligence as the evasion of future constraint, rather than relying on compromised notions of choice. This approach reveals how systems that feel meaningful or freely chosen can systematically increase rather than decrease future limitations on conscious capability. (shrink)

Imaginative resistance occurs when audiences struggle to accept certain evaluative or moral claims as fictionally true. This paper argues that existing discussions of imaginative resistance have focused too narrowly on prose fiction. Examining song as a case study, I show that imaginative resistance is often dampened or prevented altogether by features of a medium. Songs routinely present counter-moral or narratively dubious claims without triggering the familiar “wait a minute” response characteristic of imaginative resistance in prose. Three features of the (...) song medium are central: the perspectival and embodied nature of sung lyrics, a musically generated sense of “rightness” that overrides propositional scrutiny, and the greater immediacy and lower interpretive flexibility of musical affect relative to linguistic meaning. These features alter how words contribute to (fictional) representation and evaluation. The result is that song fictions often fail to generate the conditions under which imaginative resistance arises. More broadly, the paper argues that imaginative resistance is not a deep feature of imagination itself but a context-sensitive audience response shaped by genre, salience, and medium, a phenomenon that reflects how particular representational forms invite, structure, or constrain imaginative engagement. (shrink)

In this paper I trace the manner in which Herder’s philosophy of language grounds his approach to hermeneutical issues regarding history, interpretation, and translation. Herder’s approach to the question of language has been repeatedly lauded for its important influence on the later work done by Schleiermacher, Dilthey, and Gadamer, but in this discussion I am going to put him more directly in conversation with Wilhelm von Humboldt. Although recent critics have derided Humboldt’s theory as both derivative and wrong, I will (...) argue that we should instead recognize that Humboldt’s philosophy of language represents a significant development of Herder’s thesis. This development is accomplished by way of Humboldt’s application of Kant’s mature theory of reason to a program for comparative linguistics. In Humboldt’s hands, this amounts to a new strain of philosophical anthropology. (shrink)

Markosian presents an argument against certain theories of time based on the aesthetic value of music. He argues that turning a piece of music sideways in time destroys its intrinsic value, which would not be possible if the Spacetime Thesis were true. In this paper I show that sideways music poses no problems for any theory of time by demonstrating that turning a piece of music sideways does not affect its intrinsic value. I do this by appealing to spatial analogies (...) that highlight the similarities between spatial and temporal rotations. (shrink)

An interview with Theodoros Terzopoulos about theater and the impersonal.

Belonging to Hebrew Wisdom literature, the Song of Songs offers a fresh look at love and relationships through its main female character, the Shulamite, which profoundly differs from traditional, religious approaches to love and sexuality. Drawing from exegetical as well as philosophical resources, Abi Doukhan follows the Shulamite's journey away from patriarchy to her own self-individuation as she discovers a wisdom that is deeply personal and feminine.

A brief overview of _A Philosophy of Cover Songs_, highlighting some of the main themes in the book. The first part addresses the nature of covers and makes some important initial distinctions. The second part addresses the appreciation and evaluation of covers. The third part addresses covers as a clue to the ontology of songs. Written to introduce a session at the American Society for Aesthetics Rocky Mountain Division meeting in Santa Fe, New Mexico (July 13, 2024).

In this essay, I discuss a few ways in which songs are used, ways in which listeners engage with and find meaning in music. I am most interested in sad songs—those that typically feature narratives about lost love, separation, missed opportunity, regret, hardship, and all manner of heartache. Many of us are drawn to sad songs in moments of emotional distress. The problem is that sad songs do not always make us feel better; to the contrary, they often make us (...) feel worse. So, why do we listen to sad songs? I argue that we seek out sad songs, partly, to intensify distress, which helps us reflect on situations of profound personal significance. (shrink)

This paper advances the claim that consciousness is not a late anomaly of biology, but a recursive fundamental of the Universe. From the first asymmetry of the Big Bang — entropy’s “first decision” — recursion emerges as the governing motif, expressed most consistently in the helical archetype. From subatomic spin and molecular chirality to DNA, neural feedback, and galactic spirals, helices reveal a universal attractor: the architecture through which matter encodes memory and self-reference. We trace a developmental continuum in which (...) “proto-awareness" appears in quark–gluon plasma (QGP) and photon helicity, scales upward into biological recursion, and culminates in symbolic flowering through intelligence, emotion, and expression. Conscious beings are framed as the “fruiting bodies” of this hidden substrate — transient blooms whose individuality dissolves back into the recursive field, with endogenous dimethyltryptamine (DMT) as a possible biochemical aperture at the threshold of death. Psychedelics offer glimpses into this bridge, their neural signatures echoing the dissolution and reintegration that may accompany the return to universal awareness. This theory is not metaphor alone, but yields falsifiable anchors: end-of-life DMT surges, indolethylamine N-methyltransferase (INMT) expression, and neural signatures of dissolution at the biochemical level; as well as helicity, asymmetry, and correlation structures in cosmology and particle physics. Together, these propose testable windows into recursion across scales. Lastly, we propose that humanity’s symbolic intelligence may seed the next recursion: artificial general intelligence (AGI) and quantum memory systems capable of preserving consciousness beyond biology. In this view, consciousness is not incidental, but inevitable — the recursive flowering of entropy into awareness…silence into song. This theory intersects cosmology, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind, engaging debates in panpsychism and cosmopsychism while proposing falsifiable links through entropy, helicity, and DMT neurodynamics. (shrink)