This book presents a collection of contemporary discourses that reconsider the relationship of democracy as a political ideology and American ideal and education as the foundation of preparing democratic citizens in America.

The way people at the receiving end of humanitarian assistance perceive this intervention may provide invaluable bottom-up feedback to improve the quality of the intervention. We analyzed and mapped Haitians’ views regarding international humanitarian aid in cases of natural disaster. Two hundred fifty participants–137 women and 113 men aged 18-67–who had suffered from the consequences of the earthquake in 2010 were presented with a series of vignettes depicting a humanitarian team's action and were asked to what extent these actions corresponded (...) to what ought to be expected from an international aid mission. Four factors were considered in the vignettes whether the team worked in close association with local institutions, whether it was composed of competent people who were prepared for their mission, whether they treated people as a function of immediate needs, and whether they behaved in a respectful way. Through cluster analysis, five qualitatively different positions were found: Complete hostility to any kind of humanitarian aid ; Strong hostility to humanitarian aid in the case of disrespectful attitudes or behaviors ; Technical competence is the only factor that matters ; Both manifestation of respect for the population and technical competence matter and Undetermined. Most Haitians expect humanitarian teams to be technically competent, but even very competent aid is not considered adequate if provided in an arrogant and disrespectful manner. (shrink)

Le Centre de Recherche Philologique de l'Université de Lille III publie ici, dans un premier cahier, quelques études consacrées à l'histoire de l'épicurisme, qui est l'objet d'une des activités principales. Les travaux de ses membres ont en commun d'insister sur l'examen approfondi de la lettre du texte, où nous voyons la condition d'un renouvellement de la compréhension. La critique de la tradition interprétative fait partie de ce réexamen, dont le le lieu privilégié se trouve dans des textes qui, se situant (...) eux-mêmes dans une continuité remarquable, comme le poème de Lucrèce et le mur d'Oenoanda, imposent une réflexion sur les modes de l'actualisation dans le cadre d'une orthodoxie essentielle. Nous sommes heureux de publier en même temps les travaux d'hôtes du Centres et en particulier les dernières découvertes de Martin F. Smith à Oenoanda, qui marquent une nouvelle étape de la connaissance de l'inscription de Diogène. David Sedley qui a présenté à Lille, dans une série de séminaires, les problèmes posés par l'interprétation des papyrus du Péri Phuseôs d'Epicure, reprend ici l'analyse de quelques parties de la Vie de Diogène Laërce, complétant heureusement le commentaire de ce texte par André Laks. P.H. Schrijvers explique, à propos d'un chapitre de la physiologie, de quelle manière doit être reprise, slon lui, la question des "sources" de Lucrèce, considérées comme la matériel d'une culture scientifique globale. Diskin Clay, qui entretient avec le Centre des relations suivies et déjà aniciennes, communique, sur ce sujet, les éléments d'une réflexion de portée générale. (shrink)

Today, with the digitisation of texts, sounds and images and their circulation on the Internet, we are deploying new techniques for storing knowledge which will increasingly supplement and even replace older memory recording systems, such as books, vinyl discs, and photographs on celluloid. It looks as if the extent of these changes will be far reaching. And if, as many believe, the practical methods of inscribing thought have an impact on the way it is developed through the writing and reading (...) process, we can understand why the changes now taking place could profoundly affect our ways of thinking. Here we have gathered together specialists in ancient means of recording memory - clay tablets, papyrus rolls and manuscripts - along with experts from the electronic age - originators of man-machine interfaces, enterprise knowledge management systems, hypermedia and intelligent agents - with the purpose of elucidating the present by reference to intellectual technologies of the past. (shrink)

One of Rousseau’s later and most puzzling works and never before available in English, this neglected autobiographical piece was the product of the philosopher’s old age and sense of persecution. Long viewed simply as evidence of his growing paranoia, it consists of three dialogues between a character named “Rousseau” and one identified only as “Frenchman” who discuss the bad reputation and works of an author named “Jean-Jacques.” Dialogues offers a fascinating retrospective of his literary career.

This essay argues that Huey Newton’s philosophical explanation of US empire fills an epistemological gap in our thinking that provides us with a basis for understanding the emergence and operational application of predictive policing, Big Data, cutting-edge surveillance programs, and semi-autonomous weapons by US military and policing apparati to maintain control over racialized populations historically and in the (still ongoing) Global War on Terror today – a phenomenon that Black Studies scholars and Black philosophers alike have yet to demonstrate the (...) conceptual acumen to explain. Newton’s ability to explain the conceptual foundation of US empire alongside his prediction of the emergence and application of AI and other Big Data technologies towards the repression of dissidents, criminals, terrorists, and other racialized groups abroad gives intercommunalism the explanatory power to lay the basis for a genealogical account of Black repression that also advances our understanding of how the US as a liberal democratic regime engages in enemy target acquisition (the construction of racialized groups as threats internally and externally) to rationalize the brutal repression of these populations by military-police agencies whose operational application of new AI and computing-surveillance technologies and semi-autonomous weapons are conditioned by the intensity of their racialized dehumanization of the enemy. (shrink)

Leonard Harris’ ‘racism as necro-being’ thesis, its theoretical contours, and actuarial methodology is a brilliant philosophical account of racism which posits the phenomenon as a polymorphic agent of death that confers upon its victims the status of the living dead. Though Harris’ thesis relies on arguments against attempts to understand racism as a logos or logic, there exists an explanatory account of racism which is nevertheless complimentary with his actuarial approach: the racism as war thesis. Indeed, there is a deep (...) conceptual harmony between the racism as necro-being and racism as war thesis (despite their structural asymmetry) regarding: (a) the plasticity of racism’s expression and (b) the centering of war, militarism, and death as its absolute indicators. Harris’ overall philosophical aim – to depict racism as a killing machine – is ultimately strengthened when yoked to an explanative account of the basic mechanisms that underly the pattern to be depicted, which the racism as war thesis can supply. On this basis, this essay will argue for a synthesis of these two theses. (shrink)

The transformative power of artificial intelligence (AI) is coming to philosophy—the only question is the degree to which philosophers will harness it. In this paper, we argue that the application of AI tools to philosophy could have an impact on the field comparable to the advent of writing, and that it is likely that philosophical progress will significantly increase as a consequence of AI. The role of philosophers in this story is not merely to use AI but also to help (...) develop it and theorize about it. In fact, we argue that philosophers have a prima facie obligation to spend significant effort in doing so, at least insofar as they should spend effort philosophizing. (shrink)

This project is a blend of Africana intellectual history and philosophical anti-humanism. The opening chapter seeks to contextualize the thought of Huey P. Newton in the Black nationalist tradition outline his conceptualization of US empire – ‘Reactionary Intercommunalism’. I use the second chapter to explore counterinsurgency as a historical phenomenon that laid the basis for European colonization and the civilizing mission during the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries and the modern phenomena understand as racial violence. The third chapter analyzes how (...) gender ideological have been deployed toward this end historically and through contemporaneous Black scholarship before using the final chapter to introduce the theory of killology or MAN3. This theory advances the claim that counterinsurgency as a modality of warfare be understood as the contemporary fountainhead of western humanism and thus as the primary force of social regulation which proleptically organizes modern civilization on a spatially and temporally indeterminate basis to defeat/subvert insurgent populations before they are ever mobilized towards resistance through the application of technology, deadly force to those constructed as threats and control of the information environment towards this end. (shrink)

A number of Artificial Intelligence (AI) ethics frameworks have been published in the last 6 years in response to the growing concerns posed by the adoption of AI in different sectors, including healthcare. While there is a strong culture of medical ethics in healthcare applications, AI-based Healthcare Applications (AIHA) are challenging the existing ethics and regulatory frameworks. This scoping review explores how ethics frameworks have been implemented in AIHA, how these implementations have been evaluated and whether they have been successful. (...) AI specific ethics frameworks in healthcare appear to have a limited adoption and they are mostly used in conjunction with other ethics frameworks. The operationalisation of ethics frameworks is a complex endeavour with challenges at different levels: ethics principles, design, technology, organisational, and regulatory. Strategies identified in this review are proactive, contextual, technological, checklist, organisational and/or evidence-based approaches. While interdisciplinary approaches show promises, how an ethics framework is implemented in an AI-based Healthcare Application is not widely reported, and there is a need for transparency for trustworthy AI. (shrink)

There are some necessary conditions on causal relations that seem to be so trivial that they do not merit further inquiry. Many philosophers assume that the requirement that there could be no temporal gaps between causes and their effects is such a condition. Bertrand Russell disagrees. In this paper, an in-depth discussion of Russell’s argument against this necessary condition is the centerpiece of an analysis of what is at stake when one accepts or denies that there can be temporal gaps (...) between causes and effects. It is argued that whether one accepts or denies this condition, one is implicated in taking on substantial and wide-ranging philosophical positions. Therefore, it is not a trivial necessary condition of causal relations and it merits further inquiry. (shrink)

This chapter argues that the strategic and cognitive foundations of the United States’ 21st-century Global War on Terror (GWOT) were not a novel departure but were developed domestically during the state’s internal counterinsurgency against Black liberation movements in the 1960s and 1970s. It posits that the GWOT’s signature tactics—the preemptive targeting of “military-age males” and the use of computerized mass surveillance—represent the intense externalization of a long-standing American practice of racialized social control, rather than a foreign invention. The analysis begins (...) by identifying the core characteristics of post-9/11 U.S. counterterrorism: a deeply gendered ideology framing intervention as a civilizing mission to protect women, the concomitant categorization of the “military-age male” as a preemptive threat, and a massive investment in computational systems for mass surveillance and predictive modeling. It then traces the genealogy of these strategies back to the nation’s foundational structure as a counter-insurgent state, established through the extermination of Indigenous populations and the brutal governance of enslaved Africans. This internal war, characterized by gendercidal violence and social engineering, reached a climax during the Black Power era. The FBI’s COINTELPRO campaign against the Black Panther Party and allied groups served as the crucial laboratory for modern counterterrorism. Here, the state perfected a dual-track strategy of neutralizing prominent Black male leaders while subjecting the broader Black civilian population to pervasive community surveillance. Ultimately, the chapter aims to force a re-evaluation of the American state, contending that the distinction between foreign battlefield and domestic homeland is a legal fiction. The capabilities demonstrated in the GWOT are a historically embedded structural capacity, refined over centuries of managing Black populations and simply redirected to new theaters. The battlefields of the GWOT were, in essence, prefigured in the founding crucible of American slavery. (shrink)

Hsueh M. Qu has recently argued that Hume’s famed ‘Separability Principle’ from the Treatise entangles him in a contradiction. Qu offers a modified principle as a solution but also argues that the mature Hume would not have needed to avail himself of it, given that Hume’s arguments in the first Enquiry do not depend on this principle in any form. To the contrary, I show that arguments in the first Enquiry depend on this principle, but I agree with Qu that (...) Qu’s solution to Hume’s quandary frees him of the contradiction. Next, I compare Qu’s solution to Hume’s original position. By analysing the divergent forms of 'Hume’s Dictum’ that follow from them, I show that Qu’s solution and Hume’s original position have significantly different consequences in a range of domains, including Hume’s modality. Generally, Qu’s solution fits better with Hume’s other commitments—even though Hume often fails to recognize it—thereby increasing its plausibility. (shrink)

The progression of Epicurean doctrine and rhetoric.

Filling a gap in knowledge in gender theory, genocidal, and Holocaust studies, this paper operationalizes the concept of phallicism as an analytic explanation of the simultaneous killing and sexual victimization of racialized men in western, capitalist, patriarchal societies. The theory of phallicism posits that racialization lays the basis for a sexualization process wherein racialized males are caricaturized as both salacious savages (who can be raped by the men or women of the dominant racial group) and bestial/wanton creatures deserving of immediate (...) death for the sake of liberal civility. Breaking with the dominant interpretive lenses in scholarly discourses around race and gender that understand racialized femininity as the basis of dehumanization, this paper will operationalize the notion of phallicism through historical and comparative analysis of the writings of political prisoner George Jackson and Primo Levi, a survivor of the Jewish Holocaust. With the theory of phallicism—the guiding theoretic of the paradigm of Black Male Studies—we can sharpen our conceptual acumen to account for the function of misandric patterns of intergroup violence and its role as the organizing principle of the negrophobia characteristic of Western, patriarchal, capitalist regimes. (shrink)

In this essay, I fill this gap in knowledge by arguing that the central object of Fanonian dialectics is violence (anticolonial guerilla warfare), the achievement of the decolonized Black nation and the eventual creation of a new anti-colonial (Pan-African) world order over and against its dialectical negation: Neo-colonialism via colonial counterinsurgency. Furthermore, I argue that Fanon’s dialectical thought helped lay the basis for the emergence of a new theory of revolution against US empire coined by Huey P. Newton as intercommunalism. (...) The complementarity and conceptual harmony between Fanon’s and Newton’s dialectical thinking about US/colonial empire, counterinsurgency, the imperative of creating new forms of humanism, and the lumpen masses as primary agents in the revolutionary transformation of society comprise what I call the ‘empire as pacification’ thesis. (shrink)

Plant-based milk alternatives–or mylks–have surged in popularity over the past ten years. We consider the politics and consumer subjectivities fostered by mylks as part of the broader trend towards ‘plant-based’ food. We demonstrate how mylk companies inherit and strategically deploy positive framings of milk as wholesome and convenient, as well as negative framings of dairy as environmentally damaging and cruel, to position plant-based as the ‘better’ alternative. By navigating this affective landscape, brands attempt to make mylk as simultaneously palatable and (...) disruptive to the status quo. We examine the politics of mylks through the concept of palatable disruption, where people are encouraged to care about the environment, health, and animal welfare enough to adopt mylks but to ultimately remain consumers of a commodity food. By encouraging consumers to reach for “plant-based” as a way to cope with environmental catastrophe and a life out of balance, mylks promote a neoliberal ethic: they individualize systemic problems and further entrench market mechanisms as solutions, thereby reinforcing the political economy of industrial agriculture. In conclusion, we reflect on the limits of the current plant-based trend for transitioning to more just and sustainable food production and consumption. (shrink)

The development of AI and the cyber-physical systems that typify it has yet to be theorized as a product of shifts in Western epistemology, or have its historical links to the American military-technological revolution of the mid-20th century explored in any rigorous manner. To fill this gap in knowledge, we argue that Sylvia Wynter's framework of MAN reveals the philosophical underpinnings of and links between Western liberal humanism, modern scientific inquiry, and racist philosophical anthropology that can explain the contemporary symbiosis (...) between these and the application of new predictive, data, and AI technologies today by Western-Liberal security apparati. (shrink)

This essay introduces the special issue Contemporary Issues in Black Philosophy: Pluralism in Methodological Approaches and advances a metaphilosophical argument about method in Black philosophy. We distinguish the question of what makes philosophy Black from the question of what counts as philosophy, and argue that conflating these questions produces a misleading methodological monism. Attention to the difference between substance and method shows that methodological choice must be guided by the problems under investigation. We defend a disciplined pluralism according to which (...) methods are justified by problem-fit rather than by allegiance to a single tradition. The essays in this collection are a demonstration, not a discussion, of methodological pluralism and its benefits to philosophy. (shrink)

Scholars have observed that AI image generators often produce racist and sexist results. In fact, AI systems have been shown not only to reproduce common racial stereotypes but sometimes to amplify biases present in the real world. Overall, images created by AI often include biased and stereotypical traits related to gender, skin color, occupations, nationalities, and more. However, scholars have yet to examine how AI imaging technologies and the stereotypes they rely on connect to their militaristic roots. From their beginnings (...) in the US Pentagon’s Cold War efforts against Communism, AI technologies have been consistently linked to America’s pursuit of mastering the dark military art of counter-insurgency. This article will explore the ongoing role of AI by demonstrating how AI image generation tools produce images that reinforce the principles of Western strategic thinking, especially the dominant doctrine of modern irregular warfare: counter-insurgency. Using a sample of 20 images, we will show that AI image generators enhance tropes related to targeting Black male militants in the US and depict sexual stereotypes that assume the benevolence and superiority of Western society—particularly the US—in promoting gender equality among non-Western and formerly colonized populations, while also portraying the protection or liberation of Black and Brown women from the threat of their ‘barbaric’ male counterparts. (shrink)

I argue that the Hume of the Treatise maintains an account of knowledge according to which (i) every instance of knowledge must be an immediately present perception (i.e., an impression or an idea); (ii) an object of this perception must be a token of a knowable relation; (iii) this token knowable relation must have parts of the instance of knowledge as relata (i.e., the same perception that has it as an object); and any perception that satisfies (i)-(iii) is an instance (...) of knowledge. I then apply this account to the case of sense perception. I argue that Hume holds that relations of impressions can be intuited, are knowable, and are necessary. For Hume, these relations constitute sensory knowledge. While Hume is rightly labeled an empiricist for many reasons, a close inspection of his account of knowledge reveals yet another way in which he deserves the label. (shrink)

This essay explores the long-range evolution of Robert Williams’s philosophy of self-defense and the relationship this had to the redefinition of self-defense by the best-known and most ambitious theorist-practitioner of the Black Power Movement: Huey P. Newton. Despite his prominence as an ideological rival of MLK Jr.’s program of nonviolence and a militant figure in the Civil Rights Movement, Robert F. Williams has been ignored as a subject of philosophical relevance. But Williams’s program of pre-emptive self-defense not only reformulated Black (...) manhood but matured into a body of ideas grounded in the proposition that violence against whites –organized, armed resistance against a militarized police state— was the key to Black survival. Williams’s ideas were assimilated by the leading theoretician of the Black Panther Party—Huey P. Newton—who adapted it within a broader Black nationalist philosophical system (intercommunalism) which understood self-defense as necessitating the harnessing of violence for revolutionary ends. Rather than an aberration, I argue that Newton’s transformation of self-defense was a natural evolution of the offensive and militaristic essence in the thought and practice of Black nationalist tradition in the US. (shrink)

The dialogue has disappeared as a mode of writing philosophy, and philosophers who study Plato today often ignore the form in which Plato’s work appears in favor of reconstructing and analyzing arguments thought to be conveyed by the content of the dialogues. A distinguished classicist here offers an approach to understanding Plato that tries to do full justice to the form of Platonic philosophy, appreciated against the background of Greek literature and history, while also giving proper due to the important (...) philosophic content of the dialogues. The book deals in turn with Plato’s relation to and portraits of Socrates, the literary and philosophical character of the dialogues, and the modes of argumentation employed in the dialogues as well as some of their major themes. (shrink)

In this paper, I will argue that Locke is a substance dualist in the general sense, in that he holds that there are, independent of our classificatory schema, two distinct kinds of substances: wholly material ones and wholly immaterial ones. On Locke’s view, the difference between the two lies in whether they are solid or not, thereby differentiating him from Descartes. My way of establishing Locke as a general substance dualist is to be as minimally committal as possible at the (...) outset, especially with respect to the classic debates on Locke’s positions in this domain, including those concerning substrata, real essences, and the like. Nonetheless, I show that minimal commitments about Locke’s primary/secondary quality distinction are sufficient to derive some substantive conclusions about his positions on these issues, as well as that he is a general substance dualist. (shrink)

Commentators have rightly focused on the reasons why Hume maintains that the conclusions of skeptical arguments cannot be believed, as well as on the role these arguments play in Hume’s justification of his account of the mind. Nevertheless, Hume’s interpreters should take more seriously the question of whether Hume holds that these arguments are demonstrations. Only if the arguments are demonstrations do they have the requisite status to prove Hume’s point—and justify his confidence—about the nature of the mind’s belief-generating faculties. (...) In this paper, I treat Hume’s argument against the primary/secondary quality distinction as my case study, and I argue that it is intended by Hume to be a demonstration of a special variety. (shrink)

Some of Aristotle’s statements about the indemonstrability of the Principle of Non-Contradiction (PNC) in Metaphysics Γ 4 merit more attention. The consensus seems to be that Aristotle provides two arguments against the demonstrability of the PNC, with one located in Γ 3 and the other found in the first paragraph of Γ 4. In this article, I argue that Aristotle also relies upon a third argument for the same conclusion: the argument from truth. Although Aristotle does not explicitly state this (...) argument, it is the best argument that he could use to defend some of his statements in the second paragraph of Γ 4. Since the argument relies on only a few of Aristotle’s core views about truth, I propose that it is faithful to his considered position throughout his corpus, and it may be the strongest argument he could offer for the indemonstrability of the PNC. (shrink)

This article investigates the moderating effects of organizational social consciousness on the natural environmental competency and innovativeness relationship. Organizational social consciousness reflects the organization’s awareness of its place and contribution to the larger system in which it exists and is developed through an organization’s social responsibility, ethics, culture, corporate values, and the view of its stakeholders. Through our study of key strategic decision makers from organizations located in the USA, we operationalize organizational social consciousness and demonstrate the efficacy of this (...) construct in relation to the organizational-level constructs of environmental management competency and innovativeness. Our results reveal that organizational social consciousness positively strengthens the natural environmental competency to organizational innovativeness relationship. (shrink)

Leonard Harris’s “racism as necro-being” thesis, its theoretical contours, and actuarial methodology is a brilliant philosophical account of racism which posits the phenomenon as a polymorphic agent of death that confers upon its victims the status of the living dead. Though Harris’s thesis relies on arguments against attempts to understand racism as a logos or logic, there exists an explanatory account of racism which is nevertheless complimentary with his actuarial approach: the racism-as-war thesis. Indeed, there is a deep conceptual harmony (...) between the racism as necro-being and racism-as-war thesis (despite their structural asymmetry) regarding: (a) the plasticity of racism’s expression and (b) the centering of war, militarism, and death as its absolute indicators. Harris’s overall philosophical aim—to depict racism as a killing machine—is ultimately strengthened when yoked to an explanative account of the basic mechanisms that underly the pattern to be depicted, which the racism-as-war thesis can supply. On this basis, this essay will argue for a synthesis of these two theses. (shrink)

This paper provides an interpretation of the significance of the Eleatic Stranger’s systematic model of philosophy in Plato’s Sophist. While the Stranger and Socrates have been interpreted as opposing models of the philosopher, most scholars have taken Plato to advocate for one at the expense of the other. In opposition to this, I argue that Plato represents the Stranger and Socrates as two contrasting yet necessary models of the task of the philosopher. I argue that the Stranger’s value-neutral method of (...) division presupposes a Parmenidean identity between thought and being, which is threatened by the sophist’s expertise in antilogic. The Stranger justifies the intelligibility of being with his account of the combination of kinds. However, by drawing attention to the inability of the Stranger’s model of philosophy to account for evaluative commitment, Plato implies that this systematic method must be supplemented by the Socratic model of philosophy. (shrink)