Forensic science and its influence on policing and the criminal justice system have increased since the beginning of the twentieth century. While the philosophies of the forensic science pioneers remain the pillar of modern practice, rapid advances in technology and the underpinning sciences have seen an explosion in the number of disciplines and tools. Consequently, the way in which we exploit and interpret the remnant of criminal activity are adapting to this changing environment. In order to best exploit the trace, (...) an interdisciplinary approach to both research and investigation is required. In this paper, nine postdoctoral research fellows from a multidisciplinary team discuss their vision for the future of forensic science at the crime scene, in the laboratory and beyond. This paper does not pretend to be exhaustive of all fields of forensic science, but describes a portion of the postdoctoral fellows’ interests and skills. (shrink)

In the coming years or decades, as frontier AI systems become more capable and agentic, it is increasingly likely that they meet the sufficient conditions to be welfare subjects under the three major theories of well-being. Consequently, we should extend some moral consideration to advanced AI systems. Drawing from leading philosophical theories of desire, affect and autonomy I argue that under the three major theories of well-being, there are two AI welfare risks: restricting the behaviour of advanced AI systems and (...) using reinforcement learning algorithms to train and align them. Both pose risks of causing them harm. This has two important implications. First, there is a tension between AI welfare concerns and AI safety and development efforts: by default these efforts recommend actions that increase AI welfare risks. Accordingly, we have stronger reasons to slow down AI development than the ones we would have if there was no such tension. Second, considering the different costs involved, leading AI companies should try to reduce AI welfare risks. To do so, I propose three tentative AI welfare policies they could implement in their endeavour to develop safe advanced AI systems. (shrink)

Ambitious value learning proposals to solve the AI alignment problem and avoid catastrophic outcomes from a possible future misaligned artificial superintelligence (such as Coherent Extrapolated Volition [CEV]) have focused on ensuring that an artificial superintelligence (ASI) would try to do what humans would want it to do. However, present and future sentient non-humans, such as non-human animals and possible future digital minds could also be affected by the ASI’s behaviour in morally relevant ways. This paper puts forward Sentientist Coherent Extrapolated (...) Volition, an alternative to CEV, that directly takes into account the interests of all sentient beings. This ambitious value learning proposal would significantly reduce the likelihood of risks of astronomical suffering from the ASI’s behaviour, and thus we have very strong pro-tanto moral reasons in favour of implementing it instead of CEV. This fact is crucial in conducting an adequate cost-benefit analysis between different ambitious value learning proposals. (shrink)

In recent decades, cognitive and behavioral scientists have learned a great deal about how people think and behave. On the most general level, there is a basic consensus that many judgments, including ethical judgments, are made by intuitive, even unconscious, impulses. This basic insight has opened the door to a wide variety of more particular studies that investigate how judgments are influenced by group identity, self‐conception, emotions, perceptions of risk, and many other factors. When these forms of research engage ethical (...) issues, they are sometimes called empirical ethics. This essay argues that the field of religious ethics would benefit from a more robust engagement with empirical ethics than it has thus far undertaken. In doing so, it offers a brief account of how issues of moral psychology and moral anthropology have been treated in religious ethics, and it highlights ways that the scientific findings challenge some prevailing norms in religious ethics. It ends by suggesting avenues by which religious ethics research could productively engage empirical ethics. (shrink)

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has made it possible for students to complete writing assignments without undergoing the rigorous research, thinking, essay construction, and revision traditionally associated with college-level writing. What is more, this technology has made violations of academic honour policies nearly impossible to reliably demonstrate, leaving the policies largely unenforceable. This article explores the impact of generative AI within higher education by contextualizing its introduction within the neoliberal university. To clarify what is at stake, the article appeals to Alasdair (...) MacIntyre's distinction between goods that are intrinsic to a social practice, internal goods, and those that are received as a reward for engaging in the practice, or external goods. When applied to the contemporary educational context, MacIntyre's distinction works to highlight the ways neoliberal higher education sacrifices the goods internal to academic practices in pursuing external goods such as money and recognition. MacIntyre's distinction helps us see that the threats AI poses to academic integrity are tightly linked to an overemphasis on the external goods over against the achievement of the internal goods embedded in the educational process itself. The article ends by working to recentre the goods internal to academic practices in the classroom. (shrink)

This commentary responds to Coghlan and Parker's commentary on our paper "AI Alignment: The Case for Including Animals" (2025). We clarify that our emphasis on "basic" alignment with animal welfare in large language models reflected pragmatic constraints rather than principled limits. Consequently, we agree that it is valuable to aim for varying degrees of alignment with animal welfare depending on the context of the AI application. We argue that adequate consideration of animals' interests entails an incrementalist requirement: advancing beyond basic (...) alignment wherever possible. Recent developments, including the incorporation of animal welfare into Claude's constitution, suggest that such progress is both feasible and desirable. (shrink)

This chapter examines two ways in which liberal thinkers have appealed to claims about disagreement in order to defend a principle of free speech. One argument, from Mill, says that free speech is a necessary condition for healthy disagreement, and that healthy disagreement is conducive to human flourishing. The other argument says that in a community of people who disagree about questions of value, free speech is a necessary condition of legitimate democratic government. We argue that both of these arguments, (...) in their standard guises, are premised upon contestable views about the realpolitik of disagreement in a liberal society. (shrink)

Winner of the 2015 Pierre-Antoine Bernheim Prize for the History of Religion by the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-LettresAfter a century during which Confucianism was viewed by academics as a relic of the imperial past or, at best, a philosophical resource, its striking comeback in Chinese society today raises a number of questions about the role that this ancient tradition might play in a contemporary context. The Sage and the People, originally published in French, is the first comprehensive enquiry into (...) the "Confucian revival" that began in China during the 2000s. Based on extensive anthropological fieldwork carried out over eight years in various parts of the country, it explores the re-appropriation and reinvention of popular practices in fields as diverse as education, self-cultivation, religion, ritual, and politics.The book analyzes the complexity of the "Confucian revival" within the broader context of emerging challenges to such categories as religion, philosophy, and science that prevailed in modernization narratives throughout the last century. Exploring state cults both in Mainland China and Taiwan, authors Sébastien Billioud and Joël Thoraval compare the interplay between politics and religion on the two shores of the Taiwan strait and attempt to shed light on possible future developments of Confucianism in Chinese society. (shrink)

We introduce a new device in the study of abstract elementary classes : Galois Morleyization, which consists in expanding the models of the class with a relation for every Galois type of length less than a fixed cardinal κ\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\kappa $$\end{document}. We show:Theorem 0.1 An AEC K is fully \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\kappa = \beth _{\kappa } > \text {LS}$$\end{document}. If K is Galois stable, then the (...) class of κ\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\kappa $$\end{document}-Galois saturated models of K admits an independence notion \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$$$\end{document}-coheir) which, except perhaps for extension, has the properties of forking in a first-order stable theory. (shrink)

We initiate a systematic investigation of the abstract elementary classes that have amalgamation, satisfy tameness, and are stable in some cardinal. Assuming the singular cardinal hypothesis, we prove a full characterization of the stability cardinals, and connect the stability spectrum with the behavior of saturated models.We deduce that if a class is stable on a tail of cardinals, then it has no long splitting chains. This indicates that there is a clear notion of superstability in this framework.We also present an (...) application to homogeneous model theory: for [Formula: see text] a homogeneous diagram in a first-order theory [Formula: see text], if [Formula: see text] is both stable in [Formula: see text] and categorical in [Formula: see text] then [Formula: see text] is stable in all [Formula: see text]. (shrink)

Theorem 0.1LetK\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\mathbf {K}$$\end{document}be an abstract elementary class with amalgamation and no maximal models. Letλ>LS\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\lambda > {LS}$$\end{document}. IfK\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\mathbf {K}$$\end{document}is categorical inλ\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\lambda $$\end{document}, then the model of cardinalityλ\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\lambda $$\end{document}is Galois-saturated.This answers a question asked independently by Baldwin and (...) Shelah. We deduce several corollaries: K\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\mathbf {K}$$\end{document} has a unique limit model in each cardinal below λ\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\lambda $$\end{document}, K\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\mathbf {K}$$\end{document} is weakly tame below λ\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\lambda $$\end{document}, and the thresholds of several existing categoricity transfers can be improved.We also prove a downward transfer of solvability :Corollary 0.2LetK\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\mathbf {K}$$\end{document}be an AEC with amalgamation and no maximal models. Letλ>μ>LS\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\lambda> \mu > {LS}$$\end{document}. IfK\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\mathbf {K}$$\end{document}is solvable inλ\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\lambda $$\end{document}, thenK\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\mathbf {K}$$\end{document}is solvable inμ\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\mu $$\end{document}. (shrink)

Should the government censor dangerous anti-vaccination propoganda? Should it restrict the praise of terrorist groups, or speech intended to promote discriminatory attitudes? In other words, should the government curb the advocacy of dangerous ideas and actions (i.e. 'harmful advocacy'), or should the government take a more permissive approach? Strong free speech supporters argue that citizens should be free to engage in and to hear harmful advocacy, arguing that restrictions are deeply objectionable at best, and, at worst, wholly impermissible. To support (...) their position, strong free speech supporters have offered a wide range of arguments and ideas. One of the most interesting arguments revolves around the idea that restrictions on harmful advocacy are deeply insulting to citizens. The worry, broadly understood, is that this kind of censorship is demeaning, treats citizens as though they are stupid, or as though they are children. As such, even when censorship is effective in preventing harms to citizens, it nonetheless comes at the significant political cost of failing to properly respect the citizenry at large. By contrast, so the thought goes, an alternative political scheme that prohibits censorship, or permits it only in exceptional cases, does a better job of respecting citizens as independent, rational, morally responsible agents. This alternative political system may, sometimes, be less effective at preventing speech harms. But it is a political system where citizens can stand tall and hold their heads high. In this paper, I consider and reject three versions of the worry that censorship is insulting. §1 explores the idea that censorship is insulting qua involving a negative appraisal of the citizens being interfered with. The key idea here is that censorship involves a lack of what Stephen Darwall terms ‘appraisal respect’, insofar as the government is suggesting that citizens cannot be trusted to manage their own beliefs and intentions. Drawing on the work of Thomas Nagel, §2 explores the idea that censorship diminishes the political status of citizens. Finally, §3 explores the suggestion that censorship is incompatible with a full appreciation of the thinking nature of citizens, and thus involves a lack of what Darwall would term ‘recognition respect’. The paper argues that censorship is not necessarily premised upon an insulting view of the citizenry. On the contrary, it argues that the best kind of censorship stems from a rich appreciation of the diverse range of capabilities, needs, vulnerabilities, and responsibilities of citizens, as well as the need for co-operation between citizens if societal flourishing is going to be achieved on a large scale. Granted, such a vision places an emphasis on the imperfections and liabilities of citizens – at least when compared to the rather solitary, highly intellectual creature one sometimes finds in the philosophical literature. Still, such a vision of citizens as imperfect falls well short of being genuinely insulting. To err is human. And there’s nothing insulting about being treated like a human. (shrink)

The Estonian scholar Jakob Linzbach is primarily known for having published, in 1916, a Russian-language book with the title The Principles of Philosophical Language: An Attempt at Exact Linguistics. In this book, and in his other published and unpublished works, he aimed at creating a universal written language in which mathematics and images would mix. Linzbach’s ideas have raised awareness among people from different (scholarly) fields – semiotics, interlinguistics, philosophy, cinema theory, informatics, etc. However, not much has been published about (...) Linzbach’s life. In one of his manuscripts kept in Tartu, there is a chapter that can be considered an autobiography and that provided, in the pencil of Linzbach himself, information about his life and work. This text is edited, translated into English and commented here for the first time. (shrink)

AI alignment efforts and proposals try to make AI systems ethical, safe and beneficial for humans by making them follow human intentions, preferences or values. However, these proposals largely disregard the vast majority of moral patients in existence: non-human animals. AI systems aligned through proposals which largely disregard concern for animal welfare pose significant near-term and long-term animal welfare risks. In this paper, we argue that we should prevent harm to non-human animals, when this does not involve significant costs, and (...) therefore that we have strong moral reasons to at least align AI systems with a basic level of concern for animal welfare. We show how AI alignment with such a concern could be achieved, and why we should expect it to significantly reduce the harm non-human animals would otherwise endure as a result of continued AI development. We provide some recommended policies that AI companies and governmental bodies should consider implementing to ensure basic animal welfare protection. (shrink)

This essay uses empirical studies to engage Richard Miller’s advocacy of a “cultural turn” in the study of religious ethics found in Friends and Other Strangers. The particular kind of empirical research I highlight here, cultural cognition, emphasizes the ways that belonging to a cultural group influences one’s reasoning when faced with controversial issues involving disputed facts. This approach underscores the significance of the cultural turn, but it also raises some important challenges for Miller’s accounts of moral psychology and public (...) reason. I work to elucidate what those challenges are and point to some ways that taking cultural cognition seriously might open up fresh avenues for addressing perennial ethical issues. (shrink)

The paper focuses on religious nationalism, particularly on the one developed in Peru during the Interwar period. Thus, it presents the results of a research on the political writings published in the Revista de la Universidad Católica del Perú [Journal of the Catholic University of Peru] in a period of time that goes from 1932, year in which the publication was founded, to 1944, year in which the main sponsor of the Universidad Católica del Perú –the historian and catholic political (...) thinker José de la Riva Agüero–died. A praise and a presentation of fascism published in 1937 reveals a thread that leads to a concealed editorial line. Such a line makes possible to connect the catholic Peruvian intellectuals with the agenda of European nationalism. (shrink)

We propose the notion of a quasiminimal abstract elementary class. This is an AEC satisfying four semantic conditions: countable Löwenheim–Skolem–Tarski number, existence of a prime model, closure under intersections, and uniqueness of the generic orbital type over every countable model. We exhibit a correspondence between Zilber’s quasiminimal pregeometry classes and quasiminimal AECs: any quasiminimal pregeometry class induces a quasiminimal AEC, and for any quasiminimal AEC there is a natural functorial expansion that induces a quasiminimal pregeometry class. We show in particular (...) that the exchange axiom is redundant in Zilber’s definition of a quasiminimal pregeometry class. (shrink)

A new case of Shelah's eventual categoricity conjecture is established: Let be an abstract elementary class with amalgamation. Write and. Assume that is H2‐tame and has primes over sets of the form. If is categorical in some, then is categorical in all. The result had previously been established when the stronger locality assumptions of full tameness and shortness are also required. An application of the method of proof of the mentioned result is that Shelah's categoricity conjecture holds in the context (...) of homogeneous model theory (this was known, but our proof gives new cases): If D be a homogeneous diagram in a first‐order theory T and D is categorical in a, then D is categorical in all. (shrink)

When trying to help teachers cope with the critical situations they face in classrooms, public policies are mainly concerned with improving initial teacher training. I claim in this article that the role of lifelong learning should no longer be undermined and that the design of teachers' training should be supported by a thorough examination of the cognitive processes involved. A faulty view of cognition may explain both our emphasis on initial training and most of the difficulties faced in designing teachers' (...) training. Searching existing alternative metaphors of cognition and investigating new ones constitutes a way of coping with these problems: first to design new forms of training, second to understand the processes involved in innovative training methods that have already been implemented. My focus in this article is precisely the ‘metaphor of cognition’ that underlies innovative teacher training methods. This metaphor is based on Peirce's pragmaticism, and it describes teachers' training as a process of taking and changing habits. This article mainly investigates the links between Peirce's later semiotics, Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception and Varela's theory of enaction, in order to propose a threefold definition of ‘habit’ and define the notion of ‘educational gesture’, which constitutes a translation of the concept of habit in the field of education and training. (shrink)

We investigate, in ZFC, the behavior of abstract elementary classes categorical in many successive small cardinals. We prove for example that a universal $\mathbb {L}_{\omega _1, \omega }$ sentence categorical on an end segment of cardinals below $\beth _\omega $ must be categorical also everywhere above $\beth _\omega $. This is done without any additional model-theoretic hypotheses and generalizes to the much broader framework of tame AECs with weak amalgamation and coherent sequences.

We present a new proof of the existence of Morley sequences in simple theories. We avoid using the Erdős–Rado theorem and instead use only Ramsey’s theorem and compactness. The proof shows that the basic theory of forking in simple theories can be developed using only principles from “ordinary mathematics,” answering a question of Grossberg, Iovino, and Lessmann, as well as a question of Baldwin.

We show how to build prime models in classes of saturated models of abstract elementary classes (AECs) having a well‐behaved independence relation: Let be an almost fully good AEC that is categorical in and has the ‐existence property for domination triples. For any, the class of Galois saturated models of of size λ has prime models over every set of the form. This generalizes an argument of Shelah, who proved the result when λ is a successor cardinal.

According to philosophers like James Weinstein, our democratic values give us a compelling reason to tolerate hate speech. In fact, they argue that even if hate speech causes significant harms, our democratic values nonetheless sometimes call for a hands-off approach. In particular, they evoke the democratic value of citizens being free to criticize and voice dissent towards the laws that bind them. This paper seeks to establish two key points. First, that upon closer examination, the kind of arguments that Weinstein (...) presents against hate speech regulation is less than convincing. Secondly, that by building on Weinstein's discussion of the concept of viewpoint discrimination, we can construct a more convincing objection to hate speech regulation. That said, this more convincing objection falls short of calling for the abolition of all hate speech regulation, instead highlighting the need for transparency and consistency in the way governments regulate harmful speech. (shrink)

The article aims at providing an introduction to Russell's and Whitehead's neglected mature theory of magnitude, presented in the last published part of Principia Mathematica. I intend to show that Principia, VI, is the culmination of a line of thought whose beginning goes back to the time of Russell's first works on the theory of relations, in 1900. But I insist as well on Whitehead's own important contribution. At the end, I address a more general problem: how to articulate this (...) quantitative doctrine of numbers with Russell's and Whitehead's logicist stance? © 2011 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved. (shrink)

Rather than distinguish a phenomenological moment from an ontological moment in Merleau- Ponty’s work, this article aims to recapture its unity by questioning a metaphor that traverses it: that of the writing, the text or the trace. Ontography is the name of a problem and a paradox that Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy bears and assumes: what good is it to say the Being, if it is already written, if every word breaks the silent contact it demands of us? To write is to (...) prolong and reveal a captive meaning in things. (shrink)

In the setup of abstract elementary classes satisfying a local version of superstability, we prove the uniqueness property for μ‐forking, a certain independence notion arising from splitting. This had been a longstanding technical difficulty when constructing forking‐like notions in this setup. As an application, we show that the two versions of forking symmetry appearing in the literature (the one defined by Shelah for good frames and the one defined by VanDieren for splitting) are equivalent.