Critical Notice: Thomas Sattig’s The Double Lives of Objects: An Essay in the Metaphysics of the ordinary world,Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015

This critical notice describes some of Thomas Sattig’s book The Double Lives of Objects: An Essay in the Metaphysics of the Ordinary World and raises several critical issues about it.     

Ethics and Technology ‘in the Making’: An Essay on the Challenge of Nanoethics

After reviewing portions of the 21st Century Nanotechnology Research and Development Act that call for examination of societal and ethical issues, this essay seeks to understand how nanoethics can play a role in nanotechnology development. What can and should nanoethics aim to achieve? The focus of the essay is on the challenges of examining ethical issues with regard to a technology that is still emerging, still ‘in the making.’ The literature of science and technology studies (STS) is used to understand the nanotechnology endeavor in a way that makes room for influence by nanoethics. The analysis emphasizes: the contingency of technology and the many actors involved in its development; a conception of technology as sociotechnical systems; and, the values infused (in a variety of ways) in technology. Nanoethicists can be among the many actors who shape the meaning and materiality of an emerging technology. Nevertheless, there are dangers that nanoethicists should try to avoid. The possibility of being co-opted from working along side nanotechnology engineers and scientists is one danger that is inseparable from trying to influence. Related but somewhat different is the danger of not asking about the worthiness of the nanotechnology enterprise as a social investment in the future.     

Critical Notice: Peter Ludlow’s Living Words: Meaning Underdetermination and he Dynamic Lexicon,Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014

A provocative view has it that word meanings are underdetermined and dynamic, frustrating traditional approaches to theorizing about meaning. Peter Ludlow’s Living Words provides some of the philosophical reasons and motivations for accepting one such view, develops some of its details, and explores some of its ramifications. We critically examine some of the arguments in Living Words, paying particular attention to some of Ludlow’s views about the meanings of predicates, preservation of bivalence and the T-schema, and methods of modulating meaning.     

An illustration of the Operation of Social Legitimation for ‘Winners’ and ‘Losers’: A Comparison of Accounts of University and Community–College Students in Hong Kong

The theory of self-evaluation suggests that self-evaluation plays a part in social legitimation. This paper seeks to provide a contextualized illustration by comparing accounts of university and community–college students in Hong Kong on their self-evaluation, attribution, and perceived fairness. As the theory suggests, university and community–college students evaluate themselves according to their respective winner and loser positions. But, against what the theory predicts, instead of making a purely internal attribution for their educational success/failure, both university and community–college students seem equally analytical offering a structural analysis of their success/failure. This illustration suggests that social legitimation could actually be mediated through critical, albeit ambivalent, evaluations of the self and the social system and a pragmatic acceptance of the status quo. This leads us to view self-evaluation as a process of social legitimation that deprives individuals of power for imaging a fair system or bringing changes to the existing one.     

‘The question in each and every thing’: Nietzsche and Weil on affirmation

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion - This paper identifies and offers commentary upon a previously un-remarked consonance between Nietzsche and Weil when it comes to the idea of a...     

Technology, Recommendation and Design: On Being a ‘Paternalistic’ Philosopher

Philosophers have talked to each other about moral issues concerning technology, but few of them have talked about issues of technology and the good life, and even fewer have talked about technology and the good life with the public in the form of recommendation. In effect, recommendations for various technologies are often left to technologists and gurus. Given the potential benefits of informing the public on their impacts on the good life, however, this is a curious state of affairs. In the present paper, I will examine why philosophers are seemingly reluctant to offer recommendations to the public. While there are many reasons for philosophers to refrain from offering recommendations, I shall focus on a specific normative reason. More specifically, it appears that, according to a particular definition, offering recommendations can be viewed as paternalistic, and therefore is prima facie wrong to do so. I will provide an argument to show that the worry about paternalism is unfounded, because a form of paternalism engendered by technology is inevitable. Given the inevitability of paternalism, I note that philosophers should accept the duty to offer recommendations to the public. I will then briefly turn to design ethics, which has reconceptualised the role of philosophers and, in my mind, fitted well with the inevitability of paternalism. Finally, I shall argue that design ethics has to be supplemented by the practice of recommendation if it is to sustain its objective.     

Freud’s Jaw and Other Lost Objects: Fractured Subjectivity in the Face of Cancer,by Lana Lin,Fordham University Press,New York, 2017, 224 pp.

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis -