Philosophy Research Collection
Permanent URI for this collection
The UCD School of Philosophy is the largest teaching and research centre for Philosophy in Ireland, and is recognized as one of the top ten schools in the English Speaking World for graduate studies in Twentieth Century Continental Philosophy (The Philosophical Gourmet report). Our interests cover the broad areas of Contemporary European (Continental) Philosophy, Analytic Philosophy, Classical Philosophy and its contemporary manifestations.
For more information, please see our official webpage.
Browse
Recent Submissions
1 - 5 of 188
- PublicationPerception and Reality(2014-03-13)Taken at face value, the picture of reality suggested by modern science seems radically opposed to the world as we perceive it through our senses. Indeed, it is not uncommon to hear scientists and others claim that much of our perceptual experience is a kind of pervasive illusion rather than a faithful presentation of various aspects of reality. On this view, familiar properties such as colours and solidity, to take just two examples, do not belong to external objects, but are fictions generated by the brain that we mistakenly ascribe to the world around us. Contrary to this view, I argue that properties like colour and solidity are as much a part of the fabric of reality as gravity and electrons, and that our scientific and common-sense world views are not as opposed to one another as it might first appear.
12 - PublicationVirtue and Artificial Moral Intelligence(2020-04-09)As AI decision-making plays an increasing role in our daily lives, and makes more and more important contributions to how we manage our most vital interests, the question of to what extent algorithms can be made sensitive to the full scope of our moral concerns is of ever greater concern. My proposal is that we can identify a scale along which we can place the suitability of an AI system for virtue judgments, meaning appropriately evaluating instances of virtue (or vice). To do so, I harness the notion of a developmental pathway, where virtue theorists describe the acquisition of virtue as a task involving movement along a number of stages of increasing sensitivity to and autonomous control over the facets that go into virtuous action. This prominently includes not just behavioral capacities (i.e. a carpenter building a table, an AI succeeding at a sorting task) but also psychological capacities, such as perception, imagination, foresight, and so on. We need to have multiple levels of evaluation in order to make sense of virtue judgments: that of how the action in question fares in this particular case, and how the disposition that this action is an instance of fares in the larger context of the agent’s life. We need appropriate interpretation of the subject matter of our judgments (not just as arrays of formal symbols, but mapped onto tangible situations) in order to appropriately judge the relationship between an individual action and the disposition which it is an instance of, since we need a sensible understanding of how having concrete disposition of character is of substantial import on concrete actions of the respective kind, something that involves more than formal relationships but rather an appreciation of the referents of the numbers and relations that go into machine learning.
5 - PublicationBodily feelings and felt inclinations(Springer, 2021-01-12)The paper defends a version of the perceptual account of bodily feelings, according to which having a feeling is feeling something about one’s body. But it rejects the idea, familiar in the work of William James, that what one feels when one has a feeling is something biological about one’s body. Instead it argues that to have a bodily feeling is to feel an apparent bodily indication of something – a bodily appearance. Being aware of what one’s body is apparently indicating to one is being aware of something about one’s body, but the focus of attention is on what is apparently being indicated, which is not something about one’s body. This is one way of making sense of the idea in contemporary phenomenology that the body is conspicuous in feelings that do not take the body as an object of awareness. Bodily inclinations are apparent indications of what one is going to do, and it is argued that feeling one’s bodily inclinations constitutes an important class of bodily feelings – e.g. feeling like crying or feeling like being sick. Such inclinations are often felt through a process of resisting them. Bodily inclinations also have some intentionality, albeit quite limited, and this goes some way towards explaining Peter Goldie’s concept of feelings towards.
Scopus© Citations 1 12 - PublicationTechnology-Mediated Communication As Co-Production Between Humans and Machines(2020-09-02)As the use of technology-mediated communication becomes more sophisticated and comprehensive, there is a corresponding worry that its output is less that of a human agent using mute tools to deliver their own words, and more of a genuine collaboration between human and machine, with an accompanying loosening of our grip on exactly who or what is responsible for the content of the communication. Here I argue that we need not shy away from understanding such communication as co-produced by humans and machines, and how we can keep hold of ascriptions of responsibility for the content of the communication in the way we would for the communication from other collaborations. My proposal is to analyse technology-mediated communication as the product of an collective entity with sufficient internal structure to allow it to act in a coordinated and directed fashion. This combines and gives a novel application to recent work on algorithmic decision-making and collective responsibility, that being Kirsten Martin’s work on the ethical import of algorithmic decision-making within organisations, and Stephanie Collins’s work on group agency and group responsibility. We accordingly should not evaluate the products of such technology-mediated communication in terms of what either the humans or machines are capable of and responsive to, but what those people and resources united by this decision-making process is capable of and responsive to as a collective. I give special attention to how this agential group should be understood as handling the issue that the currently most popular tools for algorithmic decision-making treats its subject-matter as uninterpreted (in terms of arrays of numerical values, rather than the concrete objects that these values are drawn from and meant to represent), whereas communication necessarily must be interpreted for it to have referents and to be meaningful.
8 - PublicationHow to Express Implicit Attitudes(Oxford University Press, 2024-01)I argue that what speakers mean or express can be determined by their implicit or unconscious states, rather than explicit or conscious states. Further, on this basis, I show that the sincerity conditions for utterances can also be fixed by implicit states. This is a surprising result, which goes against common assumptions about speech acts and sincerity. Roughly, I argue that the result is implied by two plausible and independent theories of the metaphysics of speaker meaning and, further, that this is a robust basis on which to make an inference, with a fair degree of confidence, about the relationship between expression and implicit attitudes.
7