Creativity and Imagination in the Practice of Philosophy

This paper argues that the exercise of the imagination requires us 1) to attempt to describe features of a certain practice that appear, at first blush, natural and obvious; 2) to understand that that which appears natural and obvious could be otherwise; and 3) to be open to the introduction of changes to that which appears natural and obvious. Imagination, in this sense, is quite different to creativity. The latter works on the basis of the introduction of variations to settled phenomena. This exercise of creativity is important, but ultimately, it contributes principally to the stability and identity of a community and reinforces its most firmly established features. Imagination, on the other hand, is more difficult, for it strikes at the very heart of that which is settled. Changes to that which is settled may not only be resisted, but may also be violently opposed. And yet, it is precisely the very ability and willingness to be open to such changes that may be of the most ethical and political significance. These differences between creativity and imagination are illustrated in the context of the practice of philosophy

Concerted Practices and the Presence of Obligations: Joint Action in Competition Law and Social Philosophy

This paper considers whether, and if so how, the modelling of joint action in social philosophy - principally in the work of Margaret Gilbert and Michael Bratman - might assist in understanding and applying the concept of concerted practices in European competition law. More specifically, the paper focuses on a well-known difficulty in the application of that concept, namely, distinguishing between concerted practice and rational or intelligent adaptation in oligopolistic markets. The paper argues that although Bratman's model of joint action is more psychologically plausible and phenomenologically resonant, its less demanding character also makes it less useful than Gilbert's in our understanding of the legal concept of concerted practice and in dealing with the above difficulty. The paper proceeds in two parts: first, a discussion of the concept of concerted practices in European competition law; and second, a discussion of Gilbert and Bratman's models of joint action, including a comparative assessment of their ability to provide an evidentiary target and an evidentiary platform for concerted practice

Jurisprudential Inquiries between Discourse and Tradition: Towards the Incompleteness of Theoretical Pictures

This thesis offers an alternative history of theoretical pictures of law and legal work. It argues that these theoretical pictures can be understood as giving primacy to either the explanatory paradigm of discourse on the one hand, or to the explanatory paradigm of tradition on the other. Broadly speaking, discourse-oriented explanations of law and legal work tend to focus on the nature, function and status of normative requirements themselves. Tradition-oriented explanations, on the other hand, tend to focus on the long-term acquisition and transmission, in specific contexts, of common ways of seeing and doing. The first part of the thesis is composed of five sections. The first four are dedicated to revealing the basic features of the above-mentioned explanatory orientations, i.e., law-as-discourse (IA1), legal-work-as-discourse (IA2), law-astradition (IB1), and legal-work-as-tradition (IB2). The fifth section (IC) uses these basic features to read five distinct works in legal theory as oscillating between the two explanatory paradigms. The second part of the thesis argues that to the extent that we recognise that jurisprudential inquiries are oriented towards either the explanatory paradigm of discourse or that of tradition, we are on our way to recognising the incompleteness of theoretical pictures of law and legal work. This second part offers three further arguments, which are designed to encourage the adoption of an attitude that acknowledges the incompleteness of the results of one’s inquiries. First, it is shown that truth can be the aim of an inquiry, but that this is not incompatible with incompleteness understood from the first person post factum perspective (IIA). Second, it is argued that the results of one’s inquiry are not complete because an inquiry only ever appears complete to one when (and only when) one does not problematise its central terms (IIB). Third, and finally, it is argued that the highly intensive mode of self-reflection engaged in by theorists practicing the examined life may lead to certain limitations in the construction of theoretical pictures (IIC)

[Disability] justice dictated by the surfeit of love:Simone Weil in Nigeria

How is Nigeria’s failure to fulfil its obligations as a signatory of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities to be appreciated or even resolved? Answers to this are sought through a seminal criticism of human rights, namely, Simone Weil’s 1942 essay Human Personality. Weil questioned the ability of human rights concepts to cause the powerful to develop the emotional dispositions of empathy for those who suffer. Weil’s insights provide a convincing explanation that the indifference of Nigerian authorities towards the Convention may be accounted for by the weakness of human rights discourse to foster human capacity for empathy and care for those who suffer. Weil’s criticisms will serve as a point of departure for a particular way to circumvent this inadequacy of human rights discourse to achieve disability justice in Nigeria through other means. I argue that Weil, through her concept of attention, grappled with and offers a consciousness of suffering and vulnerability that is not only uncommon to existing juridical human rights approaches, but is achievable through the active participation in the very forms of suffering and vulnerability in which amelioration is sought. To provide empirical content to this argument, I turn to a short-lived initiative of the Nigerian disability movement, which if ethico-politically refined and widely applied, can supply an action-theoretical grounding for and be combined with Weil’s work to elevate agitations for disability justice above human rights to the realm of human obligations

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe