Hegel and the Ethics of Brandom’s Metaphysics

In order to develop his pragmatist and inferentialist framework, Robert Brandom appropriates, reconstructs and revises key themes in German Idealism such as the self-legislation of norms, the social institution of concepts and facts, a norm-oriented account of being and the critique of representationalist accounts of meaning and truth. However, these themes have an essential ethical dimension, one that Brandom has not explicitly acknowledged. For Hegel, the determination of norms and facts and the institution of normative statuses take place in the context of Sittlichkeit (‘ethical life’). By engaging with some of the more ontologically and ethically substantive points raised by Hegel, I argue that, from a Hegelian perspective, Brandom’s project regarding the social determination of truth and meaning cannot be divorced from ethics, specifically, the ethical dimension of social recognition. Furthermore, I argue that, in real situations (as opposed to ideal ones), claims to normative authority cannot be considered independently from the legitimacy of those claims, a legitimacy that Brandom is unable to reasonably explain. Finally, I argue that a Hegelian solution to the problems facing Brandom’s framework calls into question the unity of reason that is at the core of Brandom’s normative pragmatics and inferential semantics

Identity and identification in Azouz Begag’s Le Gone du Chaâba and Béni ou le paradis privé

"Man is human only to the extent to which he tries to impose his existence on another man in order to be recognised by him [...] It is on that other being, on recognition by that other being, that his own human worth and reality depend." (Fanon 216-17)The dependence of one’s “human worth and reality” on mutual recognition, highlighted by Frantz Fanon in his seminal text Black Skin White Masks, first published in 1952, plays a central role in the construction of identity in Azouz Begag’s first two novels, Le Gone du Chaâba and Béni ou le paradis privé, published in 1986 and 1989 respectively. Using contemporary post-colonial criticism to carry out a close reading of these two texts, this article will take into account the memory of the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962), which marked Algeria’s independence from French colonial rule, and its connection to France’s current attitude towards ethnic difference. Subsequently, the effect of these factors on considerations of contemporary Franco-Algerian selfhood will be examined, and the analysis will go on to demonstrate how an Algerian presence in France, forty-eight years after the end of the Algerian War, continues to come into conflict with the French Republic’s constitutional definition of nationhood, which favours unity of the nation by uniformity rather than an embracing of multiple identities

Review of John McMillan, The Methods of Bioethics: An Essay in Meta-Bioethics

Although McMillan recognizes that moral theory has its place, he suggests that by setting bioethics up as a discipline whose predominant issues are to do with theory, not only are students insulated from the broadness of its scope and the diversity of its methods, but the subject comes across as largely inaccessible to those without some formal train- ing in normative ethics and of limited practical signifi- cance to those dealing with concrete issues

Heidegger Uncovered.

This paper analyses Mark A. Wrathall’s interpretation of Heidegger’s idea of alêtheia (Unverborgenheit) and its relation to the opening up of the world, the disclosure of being, and the uncovering of entities. It also assesses whether Wrathall’s interpretation of Heidegger is able to do the work necessary to justify the former’s criticisms of contemporary conceptions of the nature of truth, language, and history

Getting Obligations Right: Autonomy and Shared Decision Making

Shared Decision Making (‘SDM’) is one of the most significant developments in Western health care practices in recent years. Whereas traditional models of care operate on the basis of the physician as the primary medical decision maker, SDM requires patients to be supported to consider options in order to achieve informed preferences by mutually sharing the best available evidence. According to its proponents, SDM is the right way to interpret the clinician-patient relationship because it fulfils the ethical imperative of respecting patient autonomy. However, there is no consensus about how decisions in SDM contexts relate to the principle of respect for autonomy. In response, I demonstrate that in order to make decisions about what treatment they will or will not receive, patients will be required to meet different conditions depending on the approach proponents of SDM take to understanding personal autonomy. Due to the fact that different conceptions of autonomy yield different obligations, I argue that if physicians and patients satisfied all the conditions described in standard accounts of SDM, then SDM would undermine patient autonomy

Automatically Annotating the MIR Flickr Dataset: Experimental Protocols, Openly Available Data and Semantic Spaces

The availability of a large, freely redistributable set of high-quality annotated images is critical to allowing researchers in the area of automatic annotation, generic object recognition and concept detection to compare results. The recent introduction of the MIR Flickr dataset allows researchers such access. A dataset by itself is not enough, and a set of repeatable guidelines for performing evaluations that are comparable is required. In many cases it also is useful to compare the machine-learning components of different automatic annotation techniques using a common set of image features. This paper seeks to provide a solid, repeatable methodology and protocol for performing evaluations of automatic annotation software using the MIR Flickr dataset together with freely available tools for measuring performance in a controlled manner. This protocol is demonstrated through a set of experiments using a “semantic space” auto-annotator previously developed by the authors, in combination with a set of visual term features for the images that has been made publicly available for download. The paper also discusses how much training data is required to train the semantic space annotator with the MIR Flickr dataset. It is the hope of the authors that researchers will adopt this methodology and produce results from their own annotators that can be directly compared to those presented in this work

Semantic Retrieval and Automatic Annotation: Linear Transformations, Correlation and Semantic Spaces

This paper proposes a new technique for auto-annotation and semantic retrieval based upon the idea of linearly mapping an image feature space to a keyword space. The new technique is compared to several related techniques, and a number of salient points about each of the techniques are discussed and contrasted. The paper also discusses how these techniques might actually scale to a real-world retrieval problem, and demonstrates this though a case study of a semantic retrieval technique being used on a real-world data-set (with a mix of annotated and unannotated images) from a picture library